Quotes About Indochina

If there is anything that makes my blood boil it is to see our allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal.

The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

Diffie was one of a legion of bright young men who, were it not for the Vietnam War, would probably not have considered the idea of military-funded basic research. But it seemed like a reasonable compromise when facing the equally dismal alternatives of being shipped to Indochina, fleeing to Canada, or going to jail.

The constitutional Presidency—as events so apparently disparate as the Indochina War and the Watergate affair showed—has become the imperial Presidency.

But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun.

But privately, the ongoing struggle in Indochina filled him with dread. "I feel just like I grabbed a big juicy worm," he told an aide, "with a right sharp hook in the middle of it." The president had opposed the coup that overthrew and murdered Ngo Dinh Diem, fearing it would make a bad situation worse. It had.

France turned a deaf ear to the demands, but Ho had succeeded in attracting great publicity in progressive French circles to the situation in Indochina.

In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia.

The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 "The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclear weapons even in a local situation

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

The U.S. imperialists supply armaments to their henchmen to massacre the Indochinese peoples. They dump their goods in Indochina to prevent the development of local handicrafts. Their pornographic culture depraves the youth in areas placed under their control. They follow the policy of buying up, deluding and dividing our people. They strive to turn some bad elements into U.S. agents that they use for the conquest of our country.

Reviewing the record of American intervention in Indochina in the Pentagon Papers, one cannot fail to be struck by the continuity of basic assumptions from one administration to the next. Never has there been the slightest deviation from the principle that a noncommunist regime must be imposed and defended, regardless of popular sentiment.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

Within days of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire.

Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.'s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.

He couldn't comprehend the story of French civilians spitting on their wounded soldiers when they returned from the Indochina War. He thought Lartéguy must have made that up. Such a thing certainly could not happen in America.

if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.