The Vietnam War was a horrific war rooted in U.S. government lies that resulted in the deaths of some two million Vietnamese civilians.

As young men facing the draft in the 1960s learned about the conflict, they began protesting the war in massive numbers, and a critical literature developed that framed the war in the larger context of U.S. history. Many soldiers also turned against the war and joined the antiwar movement.

Unfortunately, this academic year, students at many colleges will not be learning the truth about the Vietnam War. Instead, they will be taught a distorted history that purports to present a Vietnamese viewpoint but actually presents the viewpoint of the defeated South Vietnam government that had been installed by the U.S. and was hated by most of its own population.

A central mythology promoted by self-fashioned “revisionist” historians is that South Vietnam was a fledgling independent country ruled by devoted nationalists and that the Vietnam War was not the result of external aggression by the U.S. but was a civil war that started because of internal divisions.

Furthermore, many claim that the U.S. went into Vietnam with an honorable goal: saving South Vietnam from North Vietnamese communist aggression backed by China and the Soviet Union.

The problem with this assessment is that a large majority of Vietnamese did not accept the division of northern and southern Vietnam as legitimate and saw Vietnam as one country. The Soviet and Chinese role in the Vietnam War also paled in comparison to the U.S.[1]

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