ASA 002 - A01
Response #5: Prof. Hamamoto's Empire of Death
A Personal Attack
Honestly, I could barely read this chapter. Every other sentence made me want to retch, and the other half made me want to punch someone. I was disgusted and angry, and even now -- twenty-four hours after processing it -- I'm still horrified that those unspeakable things actually transpired. There's two particular reasons I've identified as to why I feel so troubled by Professor Hamamoto's words about the targeting of Asian, specifically Southeast Asians.
First, he speaks of the wartime murders in Vietnam and the surrounding Southeast Asian countries. My parents were both in Vietnam during the Second Indo-China War, and I know they could have been killed at any point by bombings or raids ordered by Nixon or McNamara or any other high official. But to think that their lives could have ended for by the hand of some soldier high off of power, domination, and a superiority complex both sickens and enrages me, because that's how so many of my kin died. For no reason at all, by people who had no business there.
The second reason is that many of those murders happened to Southeast Asians here, in the United States, and I could have been one of those victims, or one of my siblings, or many of my friends. What's frightening though, is that the possibility has not disappeared nearly forty years after the fall of Saigon. In fact, it has been passed down through families by fathers or brothers who have seen war and committed acts of murder. I am not safe here from the bloodshed my parents saw, and for many of us, the war still continues.
My question now is, how do we keep this cycle from repeating? how do we keep the imperial blowback effect after the Vietnam conflict from happening again after the conflicts in the Middle east?
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