Not defeat
Something Amerika v2.0 is even better at than defeat: betrayal.
The rest of it.
We had won. Nixon and Kissinger’s Paris Peace Accords forced the North to recognize South Vietnam’s sovereignty. America promised air power and supplies if they violated it. The ARVN was finally ready to defend itself.
Then Watergate. Democrats won huge majorities in 1974. They slashed aid by over 75%, banned any U.S. response to Soviet rearmament of the North, and watched as the Communists violated every agreement.
No bullets. No gas. No tires for their Jeeps.
South Vietnam collapsed—not from lack of courage, but abandonment by the same Democrats that sent our sons to die there a decade earlier.
What followed wasn’t peace. It was hell.
The Domino Theory wasn’t wrong. Cambodia and Laos fell. Pol Pot—praised by the American left as “Cambodia’s George Washington”—murdered 1/3 of his own people.
A million sent to re-education camps in Vietnam. Half a million murdered. Two million boat people fled; nearly half a million drowned.
I was eight, standing in a church hall in Arkansas, looking up at a South Vietnamese flag on a refugee’s lapel. I just wept and said “I’m sorry” over and over.
We should all still be sorry.
Oh, some of us are, definitely. Then again, all too many of us are not, and won’t ever be.
There’s more of it yet, every last word of it a must-read. The full essay is perusable ici. There’s an eternally-relevant lesson to be learned here, which we have until fall of 2028 to get wise to, no later.
(Via Ed)