Triumph and disillusion: Vietnam 1975
Just over forty years ago, on 30 April 1975, the Vietnam war ended. The Stalinist National Liberation Front swept into Saigon, and the US Embassy was hurriedly evacuated by helicopter from its roof. Two and a half weeks earlier, on 12 April 1975, the Cambodian Stalinists had triumphed, seizing the capital, Phnom Penh. For the previous ten years or more, big demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam had been a major route by which tens of thousands of young people came into revolutionary socialist politics. The demonstrators not only denounced the corruption and authoritarianism of the...