What we call the Vietnam War, they call the American War. That makes sense to me. Afterall, at various times they have fought the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French again, and the Americans. Talk about one battle after another! They well deserve the relative peace they've enjoyed since we stopped fucking with them.
"Call it American Genocide, call it anything you want, but don't dare use that sacred word 'Holocaust'". Threats were made. "You'll never work in this town again!"
But I was adamant—more than three million Vietnamese died in the American War on Vietnam. It was a holocaust by any measure. Sadly, there have been too many holocausts in human history. The Middle Passage was a long running holocaust. The virtual annihilation of the indigenous population of North America was the first American holocaust.
Neither threats or inducements achieved their desired results. The title remains. But, in the back and forth, it became clear to me that they represented a movement to privatize the word "holocaust." In their view, it should always be capitalized, even when not beginning a sentence, or in a title. There was only one Holocaust, and if the Nazis murdered Roma, Sinti, Soviet POWS, ethnic Poles, political dissidents, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, and people with disabilities in those same camps, that was immaterial.
Their point is that not only should the American holocaust against the native population, or what I document as the American holocaust against the Vietnamese, be denied, but that any other holocaust, save one, should be denied.
This, I summit to you, is another, lesser known, practice of holocaust denial.
Clay Claiborne
18 January 2026
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