...My mother would often exclaim that the United States was "worse than Hitler." Admittedly, in my home many things were alleged to be "worse than Hitler," including on occasion my siblings and me, or "worse than Auschwitz," including my mother's cooking. I'm not sure whether my mother meant literally the comparison between the U.S. and Hitler or she was simply straining to convey the magnitude of the Vietnam War's criminality. Having internalized my mother's indignation I became nearly insufferable whenever the subject of Vietnam would come up. After forcing my high school economics class to listen to passages from a book graphically depicting U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, I remember my shock and disgust that nobody else was physically wrenched. To this day I still cringe at the memory of publicly breaking down at a college teach-in on the war. In retrospect I regret my holier-than-thou posture but, if it's any mitigation, the war did profoundly affect me. I couldn't comprehend how people compartmentalized the carnage and went on with business as usual: at this very moment, I thought, Vietnamese are being murdered. It was only many years later after reading Noam Chomsky that I learned it was possible to unite exacting scholarly rigor with scathing moral outrage; that an intelligent argument didn't have to be an intellectualizing one.

It was no mystery from whence my mother's impassioned response sprang. The devastating firepower of the Americans, on the one hand, and the utter defenselessness of the Vietnamese, on the other; the indifference or, at any rate, scandalously incommensurate response, of the rest of humanity to the ongoing genocide: it was the Nazi holocaust all over again...