The Liberation of Saigon / The End of the War.
international |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press 
Saturday April 30, 2005 10:45
by .:.
War does not end any one day, it carries on in memory & will only end when it is no longer taught.
Today Vietnam marks the anniversary of the end of the war it fought against various coaltion forces led and dominated by the USA.
It was a very long, bloody, complicated and nasty war.
An awful lot of people died, civilians, solidiers, Vietnamese and others.
Of all ideologies.
The war scarred that land, and overspilt into the neighbouring states. A generation of Americans went to war as conscripts, and many of those who returned are still living, as veterans and victims of Hell brought to earth.
There are hundreds of sites on the Vietnam war, its causes, its origins, et cetera- And there are many books and no doubt you have seen a movie. Vietnam remembrance is big business, as so too will be in its time Iraq remembrance.
There are no sites with all the victims names listed, because they will never be known.
At the end of the mall in Washington towards the river the names of the US soldiers who died are carved into a wall, not too far from the names of the US soldiers who died in the Korean war and a bronze statue of FD Roosevelt sits in between.
In Saigon a USAF plane was left in the park where it had crashed as a memorial to the war. It has long rusted, and tourists who have now returned to Vietnam cut little bits of metal out of its hull to take home as souvenirs.
some links (though I am not that happy to provide them. This morning I looked at the kids in Ireland with the laptop learning about media in the dolphin's barn workshop, and then at other youngsters in Paris preparing posters for Mayday calling attention to the journalists Florence Aubenas, of Libération, and her guide the iraqi Hussein Hanoun, they were kidnapped on Jan 5 of this year )
The Garden & the future:-
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=69626
picture of kids preparing for Mayday in Paris in the comment to
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/174350
How the BBC reported it in English, for then there was no RTE presence-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/hi/news_update/newsid_3853000/3853853.stm
how the Vietnamese are toning down the military display so as not to harm U$ investment hopes-
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5738284&cKey=1114842924000