Saigon Execution, the famous 1968 photo of the killing by Eddie Adams–depicting a calm Loan firing a bullet into a handcuffed Lốp’s head –helped change public opinion about the conflict.
Outside of radical hotbeds like UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Americans were learning that their government was lying to them.
The US was not, in fact, winning the war, and Americans were not, in fact, the good guys.
Much like conservatives rallied around Lt. William Calley in response to the murder of civilians at My Lai, there’s always been some pro-war revisionism about Adams’ photo.
The complaints are familiar: “Lốp was a Viet Cong guerrilla, and he had just killed people,” which is true. “If the press and the protesters had just stayed quiet, the US would have won,” is, of course, debatable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this photo since Renee Good, the Minneapolis mother, was gunned down in broad daylight by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
The encounter was captured on video and seen by millions on social media. Good does nothing to antagonise Jonathan Ross, an Iraq war vet. Yet he kills her anyway, with a shot to the head.
Minneapolis has been under siege by federal forces for a number of reasons, and it’s hard not to intuit what they might be. Retribution against the Trump regime’s political enemies, like Democratic Governor Tim Walz, a whipped-up racist frenzy against the city’s large Somali population and lingering anger against the uprising against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. It’s all there.
To put the acuteness of the ICE occupation into perspective, consider what Jeffrey St. Clair, the editorial director of Counterpunch said on Facebook: “Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents [0].13% of the population of the United States.”
At a certain point, the rhetoric against Good claimed that the shooting was self-defence, as she tried to drive her car into an agent.
The video shows that this claim is preposterous.
However, the reason so many on the right cling to it is not that they necessarily believe it, but because it gives them cover to justify the use of lethal and arbitrary force against innocent civilians.
More worryingly, social media posts are full of defences of the officer that don’t mention such a rationale. They just want the US government to do what other totalitarian governments do.
Here’s an example: At the far-right Washington Examiner, a writer admits that Good might not have done anything, but her “death is a cautionary tale on the dangers of the left-wing cult of ideology”.
Federal prosecutors have already resigned as the Trump Administration pushes to investigate Good, while clearing her murderer of homicide charges.
What the US government is making abundantly clear is that it is not simply going after so-called “illegal immigrants”, but anyone who stands in the way of its ethnic cleansing of migrants.
It would be bad enough if undocumented people were being hunted, but the reality is far worse. US citizens, overwhelmingly minorities and legal immigrants, have been targeted and mistreated, too.
Natural-born citizens who rise up against ICE are looked at like the traitorous Hutus protecting Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide.
As usual, all the far-right stereotypes apply. A fundraiser for the ICE agent who killed Good initially made a jab at Minneapolis’s liberal mayor Jacob Frey for being Jewish–a nod to the Antisemitic conspiracy theory that mass non-white immigration, meant to dilute white Christian identity in the West, is a Jewish plot.
“Don’t mourn, organise,” the martyred American labour militant Joe Hill told us. Easier said than done. It’s hard for any of us not to be shaken when we think of Good’s widow and children–that could have been any of us.
Renée Good is not the first innocent person to be killed by a federal agent, and she will not be the last.
Bảy Lốp was just one of countless victims of American and South Vietnamese terror during the Vietnam War, but his fate, as a result of Adams’s quick camera work, changed history.
Good’s murder happened at a similar moment. Some polling shows that more Americans are turning against ICE.
That’s because the “us vs. them” war mentality that animated the pro-war right from Vietnam to Iraq has come home. Conservatives view civilian casualties Stateside as natural to an ideological war.
That’s the message when Trump supporters, from the grassroots to Washington, celebrate Good’s murder. She was gay and got in the way. It may have been an accident, but she deserved it anyway.
This is why it’s important to remember Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution, and how it helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. Perhaps Good’s murder can inspire the same.
Without a doubt, public anger is building against Donald Trump and his war against immigrants. Murders like this are like that, especially as they cross the line from racial to gender violence.
Whether the Republicans can be voted out of office, as public opinion helped inspire the withdrawal from Vietnam, is another story. Donald Trump’s violence portends a harsher pushback.
Americans are going to have to step up and produce far more coverage of his regime’s brutality if that’s ever going to succeed.
Photograph courtesy of Eddie Adams. Saigon Execution is a CC0 image.
