Vietnam has been asking for reparations for the use of chemical weapons against its civilian population for thirty years. And now the US is beginning to talk about doing something? The use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War is among the most shameful episodes in American military history. Nixon is dead, but Kissinger ought to be tried for war crimes. We should have begun cleaning up this mess twenty-five years ago. Instead, we as a country indulged the fantasies of the black flag cult & demonized Vietnam & the Vietnamese in countless racist films, speeches, & newspaper articles. Who knows, while we’re cleaning up all that dioxin-laced soil, maybe we’ll discover a few fragments of bone or a belt buckle to be sent off for forensic analysis in order to feed the POW / MIA cult’s insatiable hunger for relics.
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