DISINFO: US left behind non-white soldiers in Vietnam

DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

Tags:

Racism

DISINFO: US left behind non-white soldiers in Vietnam

SUMMARY

In the last hours of their presence in Vietnam, after they dumped 14 million tons of bombs on it, the entire effort of the American state was to save the white “wasps” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). They not only abandoned their Vietnamese allies, but even abandoned their coloured soldiers and hundreds of their non-white employees. There were thousands of their agents who gathered in front of the embassy, and the order issued by the American state was decisive and clear: save the white-skinned gentlemen.

RESPONSE

A conspiracy theory provided with no evidence, consisting of disinformation around the treatment of African-American soldiers in Vietnam published simultaneously with the US racial justice protest sparked by the death of George Floyd. The article's title " George Floyd's "layers" and the symphony of a dying America" also uses a narrative around the imminent collapse of the US, which is consistent with the recurrent pro-Kremlin narrative about the imminent collapse of the US and the West more generally. While the evacuation out of Vietnam was frantic, there is no evidence to suggest that the US military was deliberately implementing a policy of evacuating only the white soldiers. Racial issues in the US military were certainly prominent during the Vietnam war, however the situation was a lot more complex and nuanced than Katehon suggests. For example, in an interview with People magazine in 1987, Wallace Terry, a black journalist who reported on the Vietnam war from the ground and wrote a book and produced a film about black soldiers in Vietnam, recalled the words of Martin Luther King Jr. to describe the situation of black soldiers in Vietnam: “In his famous 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial he said he had a dream that one day the sons of former slaves and sons of slave owners would sit at the same table. That dream came true in only one place, the front lines of Vietnam.” At the same time, Terry's account includes many incidents of racial discrimination. However there is no evidence to the claim that the US military was pursuing a deliberate policy of abandoning non-white soldiers in the battlefield.

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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