Vietnam at 50: America's Unrepentant Arrogance

The Vietnam War, whose 50th anniversary we now mark with barely a whisper of accountability, remains a searing indictment of the American empire. It was not merely a war of Cold War miscalculation-as official histories would have us believe-but a brutal, deliberate campaign of domination, justified through intellectual cowardice and cloaked in ideological alibis. What began as a nationalist movement by the Vietnamese to free themselves from colonial yokes-first French, then Japanese-was quickly re-branded by the West as a communist threat. The United States, in an unholy marriage of paranoia and hubris, chose to crush this desire for sovereignty under the heel of firepower.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

It all began there: their arrogance, miscalculation, oversimplification, and the chronic inability to conscientiously accept that protecting the rights of others and respecting their will is not an act of benevolence, but a prerequisite for securing peace at home. This is the true crisis that has plagued the United States throughout its history—a moral affliction that has morphed into a habitual performance of impunity, a praxis of political nihilism. It has become almost diabolical in its predictability.

The leader becomes everything—even, as Trump jested, the Pope: 'Why don’t I become Pope?’ he smirked shortly after completing the first hundred days of his extraordinary second term in office, while the world mourned the death of Pope Francis, a man of towering moral stature. The flippant remark reveals not just the moral decay of a singular figure but the hollowness of a system where ethics are memes and policy is scripted like late-night satire. American power, once cloaked in lofty rhetoric, now feeds off spectacle. Everything—joy, tragedy, and farce—is commodified, and all is delivered by a single man in high-definition absurdity.

It was in the thick of such ideological exhaustion that I met Daniel Ellsberg, who passed away in 2023, in Stockholm during a stark winter in 2014. The air was sharp, but his gaze was sharper. This was the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing a war that had long abandoned morality for optics. He listened with the solemnity of someone who had borne witness to institutionalized deception, and replied with the deliberateness of a man who understood its cost. After our conversation, as we were stepping out, Lonnie Snowden, the father of Edward Snowden, appeared, introduced to me by Daniel.