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WHY APRIL 30TH SHOULD BE A NATIONAL HOLIDAY  
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Michael Moore
April 30, 2025
michaelmoore.com
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_ Fifty years ago today, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam defeated the
United States of America. We have never admitted our guilt in our
Southeast Asian genocide, never apologized, never shown a speck of
remorse, never made any reparations _

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Demonstrate at Arlington National
Cemetery, 1971,

 

Fifty years ago today, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam defeated the United
States of America.  

It’s called “The Vietnam War” — but the Vietnamese call it,
more accurately, “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 southeast Asians in Cambodia and Laos and
beyond. Nearly 4 MILLION MURDERED by the United States! (For
context, that’s about two-thirds the number of Jews that the Germans
killed 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, _never_ apologized, _never_ shown a speck
of remorse, _never_ made any reparations (and no, I don’t count
the Nike factories). 

And we have continued our policy of invasion and funding and arming
genocide to this day. We funded and armed the slaughters in Central
America well into the 1980s. We armed the Iraqis in their war with
Iran. Then we spent over two decades bombing and eventually invading
Iraq and slaughtering their people — while also losing a
two-decade-long war with Afghanistan. 

We do not tell our children, nor teach our students,
the _real_ truth of the atrocities we’ve conducted, from our first
mass genocide of the Native Peoples of the Americas committed by our
White Christian European ancestors, to currently the billions of our
taxpayer dollars and tons of American bombs plus scores of fighter
jets and other weapons of mass destruction being given to the
Netanyahu regime in Israel to massacre tens of thousands of
Palestinian civilians. And for the two million Palestinians still
barely alive in Gaza, we now support a horrific plan to starve them to
death, their homes now nearly all reduced to rubble (92% of Gaza has
been flattened, according to the UN), with virtually no access to
drinking water or medicine, and nearly every hospital, every school
and every university bombed to smithereens. It will take years to
discover under all the rubble what the real numbers of the dead are.
And this doesn’t even take into account the daily attacks on the 3+
million Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.  

WE, you and I, are the backers of all this misery. Joe Biden
bankrolled it. It cost him and Kamala Harris the election. Nearly a
third — 29%
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of the millions of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but
who _DIDN’T VOTE FOR HARRIS IN 2024_ cited their top reason as the
Biden/Harris administration’s support for and funding of the war on
Gaza. (This was more than those who cited the economy or immigration
as their main reason). The media will not report it this way
(_“It’s the price of eggs!”_), just as no media today on this
50th anniversary will state the simple truth that we, the mighty USA,
were DEFEATED in Vietnam by one of the poorest countries on Earth, a
country which did not possess a single aircraft carrier, no
destroyers, no B-52-style bombers — not even one goddamn attack
helicopter! They did not have tank divisions, nor a single canister of
napalm, no amphibious assault vehicles, not even one pathetic military
Jeep that wasn’t a Soviet tin-can knock-off with maybe three wheels
on it. They had _nothing_ but the will of their own people to be
free of the freedom-loving Americans.  

They kicked the ass of a military superpower — and sent 60,000 of
our young men home to us in wooden boxes (nine of them from my high
school, two on my street) and hundreds of thousands more who returned
without arms, legs, eyes or the mental capacity to live life to its
fullest, forever affected, their souls crushed, their nightmares
never-ending. All of them destroyed by a lie their own government told
them about North Vietnam “attacking” us and the millions of
Americans who at first believed the lie. This past November 5th showed
just how easy it still is for an American president, a man who lies on
an hourly basis, to get millions of his fellow citizens to fall for
it. 

That is why we need to make this day, April 30th, a national holiday.
Usually, national holidays are used to celebrate victories and
commemorate triumphs, like signing the Declaration of Independence or
saving all the Indians from starving to death during winter (not true)
or whatever Thanksgiving is all about. So why would we create a
holiday to commemorate our _defeat_ in Vietnam?

I think we need to do this for our children’s sake, for our
grandchildren, for the sake of our future if there still is one for
us. We should take just one day every year and participate in a
national day of reckoning, recollection, reflection, and
truth-telling, where together we actively seek forgiveness, make
reparations and further our understanding of just how it happened and
how easy it is for the wealthy and the political elites and the media
to back such horror, and then to get the majority of the country to go
along with it… at least at first. And how quickly after it’s over
we decide that we never have to talk about it again. That we can learn
nothing from it, and change nothing after it. 

The best way to honor the loss from this tragic war is to commit to
never doing it again — and that has to start by realizing we are
doing it again _right now_. EVERY BOMB WE SEND TO NETANHAYU IS PROOF
THAT WE DIDN'T LEARN A SINGLE LESSON. 

I encourage every one of you — whether you’ve seen it before or
have never seen it — to watch the Oscar-winning Peter Davis
documentary HEARTS & MINDS tonight or this coming weekend. It is the
most powerful nonfiction film I have ever seen. You can watch it with
any Max subscription or on the Criterion Channel. You can rent it on
Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime.

Here is a short clip from from the film, featuring Daniel Ellsberg,
who revealed the true scope of the war when he leaked the _Pentagon
Papers_ to the New York Times, showing how the U.S. government was
lying about the war: 

ELLSBERG: “THE QUESTION USED TO BE: ‘MIGHT IT BE POSSIBLE THAT WE
WERE ON THE WRONG SIDE IN THE VIETNAMESE WAR?’ BUT WE
WEREN’T _ON_ THE WRONG SIDE. WE _ARE_ THE WRONG SIDE.” 

And we _were_ the wrong side again in Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Gaza.
How did we get here? We got here because we’ve _always_ been here.
Start in 1492 and go forward. 

Remember that. 

Teach our children this truth about us. About our history. Give them
this knowledge and with it comes the opportunity for us to change and
make different choices for our future. To be a different people. A
peaceful people. The Germans did it. The Japanese, too.

Today is a tragic and solemn day. And it should be a national
holiday. 

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Vietnam’s largest military cemetery of war dead in Quang Tri
province. The lens of the camera is not wide enough to capture the
vastness of this sacred place.

Images by Steven Clevenger/Corbis via Getty Images; and HOANG DINH NAM
/ AFP via Getty Images

* Vietnam War
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* Genocide
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* 50th anniversary
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