I went to the YouTube link and found the complete lyrics and ran them through Google Translate:
It's interesting that the artist mentions The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. As I recall, John Lennon returned his MBE due to Britain's involvement in Vietnam and Biafra. A lot of good protest songs came out of that decade.
One of my closest friends during the 80s and 90s was a Vietnam Veteran. He was a Seabee (Construction Battalion in the Navy) and saw a lot of combat. He was quite the war hawk, actually, rather religious, socially conservative. He was a pretty good guy - very honest, decent, and scrupulous. He told me that he had been wounded and was recovering at a military hospital, when he had a dream where he was back with his unit in a firefight, and in the dream, he was shot and fell in the mud, feeling like he was near death. Then he found out later that his unit had been in a firefight and the situation and circumstances were exactly like in his dream - except he wasn't there when it happened. Most of the guys in his unit were killed. He believed that if he had been there, he would have been killed too.
I had great respect for him.
As for the war itself, there was a lot of vocal opposition, but there were also quite a few voices of support from people who honestly believed it was an honorable fight against Soviet expansionism. That's the thing - if you can rile up the masses into believing that they're dealing with Evil Incarnate, that practically gives the stewards of the state apparatus a virtual blank check to do whatever they want. The National Security Act, the creation of the CIA, NSA, with Hoover's FBI getting more and more powerful. I think the public tolerated it largely because the economy was getting better, the standard of living was improving, and people were able to get more trinkets and cool gadgets, like television. All the more reason to support a vigilant, militaristic government prepared and ready to defend our national interests - even if it's all the way across the sea in Southeast Asia. Or maybe closer to home, in Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, or wherever any communists or any of their supposed "fellow travelers" might crop up.
I don't take war or the scourges of the state lightly. Looking back, I know that some people try to come to terms and ask: What was it all for? What was it all about? When it comes to ulterior motives and possible conspiracy theories, I tend to be mostly agnostic about those things.
Another way of looking at it might be to question whether it was evil, in and of itself, to wage an ideological cold war on a global scale (and it still has lasting effects felt today), or was it just the way our side fought it?
Or (as some apologists might argue) was the enemy so irredeemably and intractably evil that we had no other choice but to be just as evil as they were? That's usually the standard line: "We don't want to go to war, we know it's bad, but the enemy gives us no other choice." Some of us roll our eyes and question the sincerity of those who express such sentiments, but then again, maybe they really do believe it. Regardless, I don't think it excuses anyone from having to answer for their own actions and their own crimes, including Kissinger.
I guess I just don't look at politics or history in that way. I'm not a lawyer, so I have no intention of prosecuting anyone or putting them on trial - even if they have committed crimes. I tend to look more at causes and effects and the ideological motives at work.
I suppose the biggest frustration of all is that, as a country, we never really seemed to learn anything from our own history. Not just that Kissinger, Nixon, McCarthy, Rockefeller, et al. were such horrible people, but the fact that we, the people, got suckered and hornswoggled by fear and paranoia. The people may not have known what the government and military were doing at the time, but they probably didn't want to know anyway. All they wanted to know was that their government was keeping them safe and protected from the communists.
It's really not that much different nowadays, except that the fall of the Soviet Union made it so that communism is not viewed as serious of an ideological threat as it once was. Russia and China have reverted more into nationalistic states, ostensibly abandoning any kind of internationalist agenda. We may have won the Cold War, but the seeds for further instability were planted in the aftermath. Even in the U.S., our government right now is in an absolute shambles - and people are looking forward to the next election with fear and trepidation.
