By MICHAEL MOORE*
The filmmaker recalls the invasion of Vietnam and the need for Americans to apologize for this genocidal war and others promoted or supported by Americans, such as the genocide against the Palestinians.
1.
Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam defeated the United States of America.[I]
We call this war the “Vietnam War.” But the Vietnamese more accurately call it the “American War.” Because it was the Americans who invaded Vietnam eleven years earlier to kill and dominate its people.
In those 11 years, we slaughtered two million Vietnamese and perhaps another two million people in Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Laos and beyond. That’s about four million human beings murdered by the United States! (For context, that’s about two-thirds of the number of Jews killed by the Germans in the Holocaust during World War II.)
Unlike the Germans, we, collectively, as a nation, have never paid for these crimes against humanity. We have never admitted our guilt in this genocide, we have never apologized, we have never shown an ounce of remorse, we have never made reparations (and no, I do not consider Nike factories as reparations).
And we continue our policy of invading, financing and weaponizing genocide to this day. We financed and weaponized the massacres in Central America until the 1980s. We armed the Iraqis in their war against Iran. Then we spent more than two decades bombing and eventually invading Iraq and massacring its people – while also losing a two-decade war in Afghanistan.
We do not tell our children, nor teach our students, the real truth about the atrocities we have committed, from the first mass genocide of the native peoples of the Americas by our white, Christian European ancestors, to the billions of dollars of our tax dollars and tons of American bombs, fighter jets and other weapons of mass destruction delivered to Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime in Israel to massacre tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
And for the two million Palestinians still surviving in Gaza, we are now supporting a horrific plan to starve them to death, with their homes reduced almost entirely to rubble (92 percent of Gaza has been destroyed, according to the UN), no access to clean water or medicine, and almost all hospitals, schools and universities bombed to the ground. It will take years to discover the true death toll from beneath the rubble. And that’s before we even count the daily attacks on the more than three million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
We, the American people, you and I, are the ones who are paying for all this suffering. Joe Biden paid for it. And it cost him and Kamala Harris the election. Almost a third – 29% – of the millions who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 cited the Biden/Harris administration’s support and funding for the war in Gaza as their main reason (a higher percentage than those who cited the economy or immigration as their main reason).
The media won’t report it that way (“It’s food inflation!” they’ll say),[ii] just as no media today, on this 50th anniversary, will tell the simple truth: we, the mighty United States of America, were defeated in Vietnam by one of the poorest countries on Earth, a country that did not possess a single aircraft carrier, not a single destroyer, no B-52-style bombers – not even a damn attack helicopter!
They had no tank divisions, not a single barrel of napalm, no amphibious assault vehicle, not even a rickety military jeep that wasn't a tin Soviet copy with maybe three wheels. They had nothing but the will of their people to free themselves from the Americans, the self-proclaimed "freedom lovers."
2.
They defeated a military superpower – and sent 60.000 of our young people home in wooden coffins (nine of them from my school, two from my street) and hundreds of thousands who returned without arms, legs, eyes or the mental capacity to live fully, forever scarred, their souls destroyed, their nightmares endless.
All of them ruined by a lie their own government told them about North Vietnam “attacking us” — and by the millions of Americans who believed that lie. Last November 5 showed how easy it still is for an American president, a man who lies all the time, to make millions of his fellow citizens believe lies.
That's why we need to make this day, April 30th, a national holiday. Typically, national holidays are used to celebrate victories and commemorate triumphs, like the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the historic event of "saving all the Indians from starvation during the winter" (not true), or whatever Thanksgiving (Thanksgiving) mean. So why would we create a holiday to commemorate our defeat in Vietnam?
I believe we need to do this for our children, for our grandchildren, for the sake of our future—if there is one left for us. We should dedicate a single day a year to a national day of reflection, remembrance, and truth, where together we will actively seek forgiveness, make amends, and deepen our understanding of how this happened and how easy it is for the wealthy, the political elites, and the media to support such horror—and then convince the majority of the country to go along with it… at least at first. And how, as soon as it’s over, we decide we never need to talk about it again. That we can learn nothing from it and change nothing afterward.
The best way to honor the losses of this tragic war is to commit ourselves to never repeating it – and that must begin with the realization that we are doing it again now. Every bomb we send to Benjamin Netanyahu is proof that we have learned nothing.
I encourage all of you – whether you’ve seen it or never seen it – to watch the Oscar-winning documentary, Hearts & Minds, by Peter Davis. It is the most powerful non-fiction film I have ever seen. It can be accessed on several platforms streaming and also in theYoutube.
Here is an excerpt from the film, starring Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the true scope of the war by leaking the Pentagon Papers protocols for New York Times, showing how the government of US lied about the war: Daniel Ellsberg: “The question used to be, 'Could it be possible that we were on the wrong side of the Vietnam War?' But we weren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.”[iii]
And we were on the wrong side again in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Gaza. How did we get here? We got here because we've always been here. This story began in 1492 and has never stopped.
Remember this.
Teach our daughters and sons this truth about us. About our history. Give them this knowledge and, with it, the opportunity to change and make different choices for our future. To be a different people. A peaceful people. The Germans did this. The Japanese did it too.
Today is a tragic and solemn day. And it should be a national holiday.
Michael Moore is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He has directed, among others, films Bowling for Columbine
Translation: Sergio Braga.
Originally published on newsletter from the author.
Translator's notes
[I] The photo that illustrates this article was taken by Japanese photographer Kyoichi Sawada (from United Press International), and is titled “American Soldiers Dragging Viet Cong.” The photo won the World Press Photo of the Year and was nominated for the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for photography. Sawada was killed in action in Cambodia in 1970.
[ii] In the original: (“It's the price of eggs!”). In this paragraph, Moore also references the surveys published by the institute Yugov and disclosed by Public Policy Institute for Middle East Understanding in January 2025. Link: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling.
[iii] As explained by Moore, this is an excerpt from a speech by the recently deceased American activist and dissident Daniel Ellsberg, included in the film. Hearts and Minds, which won several awards for best documentary in 1974. Several versions of the documentary are available on YouTube. About Daniel Ellsberg, see the informative entry on Wikipedia: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
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