Abstract
The judgements the West makes about the perfidious behaviour of its enemies can only be taken seriously if the same moral standards are first applied to its foreign policy. Instead, double standards tend to prevail. The Vietnam war was the worst crime of the second half of the twentieth century; however, terms such as “the invasion of South Vietnam,” “aggression,” “occupation” or “crimes against humanity” rarely enter mainstream discussion about US and Australian intervention in Indochina from the 1950s to the 1970s. It is assumed that the motives of the West were pure and honourable, even if the prosecution of the war was faulty or mistaken. Remarkably, the champions of the war in Australia are still defending the crimes of the West over four decades after it ended.
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- 1.
Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of War 1940–1975 (Unwin, London 1986), p. 200.
- 2.
Gabriel Kolko, Century of War (New Press, New York 1994), p. 431.
- 3.
Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (Routledge, London 1997), pp. 1–2.
- 4.
Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (Routledge, London 1997), p. 2.
- 5.
On the tunnels of Cu Chi, see Tom Mangold & John Penycate, The Tunnels Of Cu Chi (Cassel, London 1985).
- 6.
Gerard Henderson, ‘Breakfast’, ABC Radio National—Friday 29 April 2005; Greg Sheridan, ‘Blinded by six myths’, The Weekend Australian, 30 April 2005—http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/brkfast/stories/s1356069.htm
- 7.
Gabriel Kolko, ‘Lessons From A Total Defeat For the US: The End of the Vietnam War 30 Years Ago’, Counterpunch 30 April–1 May 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko04292005.html
- 8.
Michael Jeffery, ‘South Vietnam stance was right for the region’, The Australian, 24 June 2003. For more comprehensive analyses of Australia’s role in the Vietnam war, see Peter King (ed), Australia’s Vietnam (Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1983); Gregory Pemberton, All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam (Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1987); Mark Dapin, Australia’s Vietnam: Myth vs History (NewSouth, Sydney 2019); Brian Toohey, Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State (Melbourne University Press, Carlton 2019), ch. 51. On the massacres in Indonesia there are numerous accounts. The most recent comprehensive study is Geoffrey B. Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 (Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018).
- 9.
Editorial, The Weekend Australian, 30 April 2005.
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Burchill, S. (2020). The Vietnam War: Morality and History. In: Misunderstanding International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1936-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1936-9_8
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