the war remnant museum

which is where i went today. everyone told me to go, and it was interesting in that it portrayed the war from the local perspective. and it was good and introspective in that regard. but here are a few things which i found uncomfortable...not like upsetting because it is disturbing (the only really disturbing part i actually had to walk out of was the prisoner/torture part), but more like eh this is not how i would do this museum part.
so there is a lot of stuff on international anti-war support which was cool, and some historical facts and strategical involvement part. but the issue is vietnam remains a socialist country. there are party flags all around the city (at first, i was confused why there are all these almost soviet flags, with hammer and sickle, around the city, but i think it's just the party flag). children wear young pioneer neck ties, red like in the soviet union, not blue like in GDR. so some of the information read a bit propaganda-esque, and i think there is an actual reason for that.
the other thing is that some of the information/commentary seemed to forget that this was a political conflict. not to downplay the US involvement: i fully believe that this was not our conflict, and we had a lot of political AND economic interest, and we did a lot of shitty shitty things to many civilians, but there was a greater political context to this. other parties were involved, and while the museum did mention, casually at some point, the number of guns supplied by china and the soviet union to the north, and while i doubt the chinese or the russians were committing atrocities, still this was a bigger thing. and because i am generally obsessed with 20th century history, and specifically, with the politics of the 60s, this to me seemed odd. and war is war, terrible and unnecessary, but any war is war. and showing pictures of bombed out factories just to show 'look how bad things got' seemed redundant. i mean, of course, factories will be bombed, in any armed conflict, right?
the other thing that was less palatable was the excess of pathos when discussing war 'casualties'. again, i think the amount of civilian badness that the US committed is inexcusable and absolutely terrible. but it was portrayed in, maybe, a slightly over-dramatic way. there was a room dedicated to victims of chemical orange, and it was literally a wall of pictures of people with handicaps and deformities with inscriptions like "this newborn is deformed because it was born to parents exposed to agent orange, how will it start its life??" "this girl is mentally retarded because her parents were exposed to agent orange, she spends her day in a cage where her parents put her." (wait, what??) "this newborn has anencephaly and it died a few hours after it was born because its parents were exposed to agent orange" (anencephaly is not so uncommon chromosomal abnormality, and can be caused, among other things, things like lack of folic acid or advanced maternal age, so causality here is less clear to me, from a professional stand point). yes, dioxin is terrible, yes we poured tons of bad shit on a lot of people, yes the pictures are powerful and profound, but maybe overly so?
and of course, as any museum, it was full of tourists, with complete and total lack of personal space manners, who would eagerly try to read the inscriptions even though i am already standing perfectly right in front of it. and then being super obnoxious and taking pictures next to museum exhibits and posing, smilingly, with the war aircraft outside. yeah, that's tacky.