One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?

Noam Chomsky, “Media Control” (via siegfriedandfreud)

Three or four million Asians killed by the US — and three Southeast Asian countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) shattered for several generations — is nothing to US Americans, not even worth a footnote. In World War II, 20 million Chinese were killed, many in concentration camps every bit as brutal as those in Germany, subject to human experimentation for developing chemical and biological weapons, yet I guarantee you that most US Americans have no idea this happened in a war in which the US and China were ostensibly fighting as allies and indeed the Chinese land war was every bit as critical to securing Japan’s surrender as the US naval campaign. Any German who believes that only 300,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust is rightly condemned as a history-denying racist, and for me the same logic applies to US Americans.

(via zuky)