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July 22, 2020
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Page 13
O PINION
An Immoral War that Wasn’t Ours
Spike Lee’s Da 5
Bloods set me off
b y o scar h b layton
I get an ache in my heart every time
someone who learns that I am a Vietnam
veteran, says “Thank you for your service.”
Even before I returned to the United
States from my combat tour in Vietnam, I
had decided that we were fighting an un-
just war. More than 50 years later, watching
Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” set off my in-
ternal alarm bells, warning against African
Americans blindly participating in U.S. for-
eign policy.
Lee’s latest movie is an excellent com-
mentary on some of the complexities of the
Vietnam war for African Americans, which
he boils down to a single line spoken by a
central character: “We fought in an immoral
war that wasn’t ours… for rights that wasn’t
ours.”
I am a big fan of Spike Lee, and Da 5
Bloods is among his best work, but the film
points out how Black folk were victims of
America’s foreign policy while understating
our complicity in it. I do not fault Lee for
this because this war was too broad in its
social and political ramifications to fit into a
single movie. But it omits two lessons Black
folk should have learned from this painful
bloodbath.
First, the American War in Vietnam was
an attempt to maintain white supremacy in
Southeast Asia. U.S. involvement in that
part of the world did not ramp up until after
the Vietnamese had forced out their former
colonial masters – the French.
Having abandoned Vietnam to Japanese
invaders during World War II, France re-
turned at the end of that war and demanded
– with an outrageous sense of entitlement
bourne of white supremacy – that it be al-
lowed to continue its rule. The bloodied
and proud Vietnamese, who had engineered
their own resistance to the Japanese, were
having none of it.
After the Vietnamese rid themselves
of the French in 1954 at the cost of many
more lives, the United States – in its role
as the Chicken Little of anti-communism
– raised the alarm that the sky was falling.
Self-proclaimed “foreign policy experts”
in the United States warned that Southeast
Asian countries would fall like dominos if
communists were allowed to gain control
of all of Vietnam. North Korea had secure-
ly established itself as a communist nation
a decade earlier and foreign policy advisors
in Washington reasoned that preventing the
spread of communism was in America’s na-
tional interest.
When we make a critical examination of
Vietnam today, we see a trading partner of
the United States and a respected member
of the global community. We see economic
and social progress under a communist gov-
ernment that exposes the lies of American
demagogues who, foaming-at-the-mouth,
protested the rise of communism.
In the late 1950s and early 1960, with
Blacks being murdered with impunity and
denied basic constitutional rights in Amer-
ica, the U.S. government chose instead to
focus on the “rights” of people half a world
away. But “freedom” was not what Wash-
ington was seeking to establish in Southeast
Asia; it was “compliance.” The U. S. want-
ed to bend that part of the world to its will –
a world order based upon white supremacy.
If one ignores the rhetoric and examines
America’s actions towards Africa, Asia and
South America, the evidence is clear that
white supremacy has driven U.S. foreign pol-
Letter to the Editor
I share and support the outrage ex-
pressed by recent Portland demonstrations,
but I am urgently moved to implore dem-
onstrators to follow a discipline of non-vi-
olence. A first and foremost obligation
of non-violent discipline is to prevent,
control, and oppose activities that violate
non-violent discipline.
While the spontaneity of early demon-
strations may have made non-violent disci-
pline difficult, continuing violence is now
increasingly troubling. The persistent violent
outbursts, captured so well by social media
and the press are inciting a backlash among
deeply racist and right-wing elements and are
weakening and dividing supporters.
The violence we are witnessing on the
streets at night – however apologized and
icy throughout its post-World War II history.
Secondly, African Americans have been
complicit in U.S. aggressions towards peo-
ple of color around the world. Handicapped
by the blindfold of anti-communist rhetoric,
Black folk have too often been enablers in
America’s efforts to keep whiteness perched
upon its global pedestal. Even those of us
who knew that Washington’s anti-Commu-
nist zeal made no sense, particularly as it
related to Africa and South America, did not
make the connection between U.S. foreign
policy and white supremacy.
It was not the rise of communism that
these demagogues feared; it was the loss
of white privilege around the world. In the
1960s, the newly emergent African nations
were being successfully oppressed by a net-
work of political, economic and military re-
sources that put a lid on any threat to white
supremacy from the “Dark Continent.” But
with the rise of the People’s Republic of
China and the defeat of the French in Viet-
nam, the white supremacy lid was coming
off of Asia.
Revisiting the American War in Vietnam,
we see one aspect of America’s attempt to
maintain global domination by white su-
premacy and we see our complicity in this
effort. It is not enough for Black folk to
plead innocence as draftees just trying to
make it back to the “World” alive. We must
own our part in the oppression of others.
Attempts to deny our complicity in
spreading misery around the globe in sup-
port of white supremacy is not unlike Con-
federate sympathizers refusing to acknowl-
edge that the underlying cause of the Civil
War was the preservation of slavery, not the
noble South.
As Confederate statues finally come tum-
bling down, African Americans are asking,
“Why has it taken so long? There was no just
cause. There was no noble South.” By that
same measure, we must ask ourselves, “What
was the true cause and where was the nobility
of America’s involvement in Vietnam?”
Not only must we ask ourselves these
questions about Vietnam, we must continue
to ask these types of questions about all of
America’s foreign policies.
Oscar H. Blayton is a former Marine
Corps combat pilot and human rights activ-
ist who practices law in Virginia.
Violence Hurts Cause
justified – does nothing positive for the pur-
poses of the demonstrations and is wholly
contradictory to any standard of non-violent
discipline. It’s time for a conversation on
methods and discipline of demonstration.
If the purpose is to maximize disruption, as
some have said, we won’t have much con-
versation. But if the purpose has anything
to do with winning hearts and minds, let’s
talk. We should all talk.
The violence must stop. But the first
ones who should stop the violence are the
demonstrators themselves.
Non-violence cannot be passive by-
stander to violence.
Ross Danielson, northeast Portland
resident, and alumnus of Clarksdale, Mis-
sissippi Jail, April 1963