We reached Hô Chi Minh city, in Vietnam, only to find out that here, it was still called Saigon by everyone! Strange how Saigon sounds so old world and colonial in my ears.

Pretty much the first thing we did is head to the museum of the Vietnam war. This war did not only deeply wound Vietnam, it also influenced my own childhood, as it ended just a couple of years after my birth and the Americans produced so many post traumatic movies on the subject.

Still I only had American produced clichés about it in my head, so the museum was very valuable.

First I learned that the French, barely liberated from the German occupation, still thought it was a good idea to go and re-conquer their old colony of Indochina!

Of course this was heavily sponsored by American money, weapons and military advice, since the Americans always manage to get someone else to fight for them. They only move in last resort.

After 10 years of failing to reconquer anything, the French loose the battle of Dien Bien Phu and finally give up, signing the Geneva treaty which (once again) acknowledges the independence of Vietnam.

The next day, the Americans violate the treaty and put in place a pro-American government in Saigon to force the Vietnamese people to fight themselves against their communist brothers. Again they stay behind and provide plenty of money and weapons.

10 more years of this mess leads to nothing but piles of corpses, so they finally decide to move in person! They progressively bring in hundreds of thousands of elite soldiers, and billions of dollars of the most modern military equipment. Nothing works and they’re still defeated by the Vietnamese peasants!

As they grow more and more frustrated, the conflict turns into absolute butchery, accumulating crimes of war, mass bombing, mass massacres, chemical warfare with dioxine and napalm causing damage for many generations to come, and land mines that still kill farmers to this day !

In 1975 when they finally gave up and signed the Paris treaty, they again violated it the next day and resumed funding their pro-American government to continue the war for them!

As I was reading about these atrocities committed by the self appointed leaders of the « free world” in which equality of rights and freedom of thought is a most natural and inalienable right, I kept wondering: what are they fighting for?

The soldiers certainly had no idea why they were fighting, except for some bullshit freedom propaganda. And that alone was enough to deprive them of their humanity. But the rulers who ordered all of this, why were they so afraid of communism so far away from their country? Are these millions of deaths really only to enable selling Coca Cola to the free world?

Since then, America profusely apologised for their wrongdoings in Vietnam. “We owe it to future generations to let them know our mistakes so it never happens again” they would say. Yet, they’ve been doing this over and over again around the world; placing dictators and murderers, or creating wars to ensure their economical interests.

At the dawn of a potential third world war it’s worth pondering why we’re again supporting and funding and arming a pro-American government in Ukraine and pushing people into a terrible conflict in which they have nothing to gain and everything to loose.