Remembering The Real Vietnam War

From John Pilger, a man who reported it:

Only 10 years after the Vietnam war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States found that a third of Americans could not remember which side their government had supported... Amnesia ensures that, while the relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly acknowledged, the deaths of up to 5 million Vietnamese are consigned to oblivion.

...the "democratic" regime in the south was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be "president" and a fake government was put in place. "The CIA," he wrote, "was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media]."

Phony elections were arranged, hailed in the West as "free and fair," with American officials fabricating "an 83 percent turnout despite Vietcong terror."

Pilger's essay revolves around an English textbook's selective use of language to teach new generations about these events. "How many more innocent people have to die," he asks, "before those who filter the past and the present wake up to their moral responsibility to protect our memory and the lives of human beings?"