Another Vietnam – Unseen images of the war from the winning side
mashable.com
mashable.com
At one point, he was in jail for resisting the Americans. His father visited him, and asked "What the heck are you doing?" He answered "Fighting against the oppressor Americans!" His father responded "It's true that they're oppressors, but the communists are worse."
He didn't believe his father. When the Americans left, there was a victory parade through Hanoi. Which was composed only of communist regiments. He asked the other people involved in the resistance "Where are all the non-communist regiments, which were the majority of the fighters?" The answer was "On exercises in the country."
It turned out that the communists had infiltrated all of the non-communist resistance groups (of which there were many), and taken them over from the inside.
A few years later, with his life in danger from the communists, he fled Vietnam, became one of the boat people, and immigrated to America.
This shows how even though difficult, it is very important to keep in mind that conflicts like these are most of the time very multidimensional.
'The communists' might be the ones that surfaced at the end of the war as leaders of the new country, yet the vast majority of the battle was fought on the shoulders of young men and women believing in fighting for their independence.
They probably didn't give two cents about communism.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm really inspired by this on-the-nose third-hand bit of propaganda, and believe that if we hadn't lost our nerve at just 1.3 million deaths, we may have been able to save Vietnam from the evils of communism.
The big problem we had in vietnam is that we backed the wrong side from the beginning, and we did it for blindly ideological reasons (Ho Chi Minh was an avowed "communist" therefore evil). If Ho Chi Minh had been a race supremacist (South Africa) cannibal (idi amin) drug dealer (too many to mention), we'd have been happy to back him.
The Viet Minh, who fought the Japanese and largely defeated them with little outside help during WWII were disarmed by the French with US and British help after WWII. (Roosevelt appears to have wanted to let Vietnam be independent after the war, but he was dead.) So Vietnam went back to the French who created a hot mess, got their asses handed to them (despite a lot of US help) and then we stepped in and picked as our clients the bizarre collection of mobsters and thugs the French had been backing. And while your correspondent appears incensed that some people didn't get a parade (you know that they had reeducation camps in the South after the war? I would have led with that), from what I've heard and seen, Vietnam didn't end up too terrible, and certainly in no worse shape than places the US "won' in like Columbia, Chile, Honduras, etc.
No Buddhist monks burned themselves alive to protest the _north_ Vietnamese government.
Without an independent press corruption runs rampant and people are still routinely jailed for exposing the kleptocracy at the top. Ordinary Vietnamese aren't starving but it's still the case that most people with the means to emigrate will do so at the drop of a pin.
From the Vietnamese POV, the Americans were in cahoots with the French; they didn't want to go back to being a subjugated people. Mind you this was not America of 2016 but the America that toppled a democratic government in Iran to secure access to oil.
Then go visit Bangkok and marvel at how far behind Vietnam is.
It's hardly surprising that the communist government went crazy-anti-capitalism after having half the country turned to mush by the Americans, but things are getting better. After the war, the communists didn't even allow privately-owned shops, and the economy was awful. They started reversing that and the economy started recovering.
But just because somewhere else is doing better doesn't mean that a place hasn't improved significantly in recent years. That's a boom.
That may well be. I don't have much information about the Vietnam War seen from the Northern side. However, Stalin-backed communist infiltration of the Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War is well-documented, so this part doesn't sound unlikely.
I'm not claiming that communists were the only political movement to infiltrate army units.
"The mother of a prominent Vietnamese blogger has died after setting herself on fire as her daughter prepares to go on trial next week.
A police officer in the southern province of Bac Lieu said Dang Thi Kim Lieng, 64, died on Monday afternoon on the way to hospital in Ho Chi Minh City after setting herself alight that morning near her home.
Phil Robertson, Asia deputy director for Human Rights Watch, said Lieng's death 'points to some very, very serious concerns about the kind of harassment' that relatives of dissidents face in Vietnam. "
I'd rather live in Santiago, Chile or Medellin, Colombia.
The ironic thing about Vietnam is that culturally it's still one of the most capitalist countries on earth.
Vietnam would have been another former colony with western companies exploiting resources and the political class getting rich off corruption.
That means you have to read his work with a critical eye. It doesn't mean he's wrong. Communists have done similar things elsewhere.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=3y4uAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=P...
"Castro assured the world that his revolution belonged to neither the Communists nor the capitalists, that it was neither red nor black, but Cuban olive-green."
We know how that turned out.
As a massive improvement in the expected quality of life for 80% of the population, as opposed to when the government was jointly run by Batista and American organized crime?
"In 1958, Cuba was a relatively well-advanced country by Latin American standards, and in some cases by world standards".
Compare with Chile which used to be poor.
I think it was an example of "real politik".
Vietnam is currently accused by Human Rights Watch of having "over 135" political prisoners. The scale of human rights abuse in Vietnam, at its worst, is utterly dwarfed by those in US client states in South America.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph%E1%BA%A1m_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Th%E...
Regardless of the political overhead, from my personal experience the vast majority of the Vietnamese people at the time, already being Spartan like in certain manners and living in times of turmoil, saw the 'war of Resistance against America' (as the Vietnam War is called in VN)as the continuation of resistance against foreign superpowers, dating back thousands of years.
The US, after, Japan, France, the Mongols, China was seen as yet another invader in a long line, albeit arguably the one with the most overwhelming strength.
The average North Vietnamese person did not care about Communism, Capitalism, Political theories or world politics. They only cared about them in so far how they could help them achieve their goal: To be free! Sovereign in their own land.
This mindset coupled with the history of Vietnam is important to understand where the dermination of these units came from. Yes, the US military would 'win', as in being the last party to remain with living soldiers in an all out war until the very end no discussions, hands down. That is because, similar to the Japanese the morals of these Vietnamese guerilla peasants fighting would fight till the end.
In that regard, especially when seeing discussions here and mostly on reddit going back and forth about who 'won' the war, people forget that they might talk with completely different defnitions of winning in mind. (Or they are just American kiddos that cannot accept their great US ever loosing ever.)
It is a great tragedy in the end, because in the end, absurdly in a certain way, both sides fought for the same thing: Freedom.
The US won the battle, but lost the war.
Not really. The US government doesn't give a crap about freedom. What they want is influence and hegemony. Freedom/democracy are only PR excuses for american public consumption when it's convenient. Ordinary american people are nice people though.
And what "battle" did the US win? As a military exercise it was a debacle from start to finish (much like our more recent efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan). Wrong war, wrong reason, wrong plan, incompetently executed (strategically).
And the comparison with 'Spartans' is off too. The Spartans were pretty weird (not just by our standards, but by contemporary standards too) and their society was entirely wrapped around military tradition. Despite centuries of foreign occupation and resistance, Vietnamese culture was and is basically Confucian (in which the soldier is pretty much the bottom of the totem pole).
Speak to many southern Vietnamese even today and they'll tell you the war was an illegitimate land grab of the more fertile and valuable land in the south by communists in the north wrapping themselves in nationalist ideology.
Same thing can happen in England, too. They all seem to agree that they're English, though.
In fact, Vietnam would have never won if there were no substantial (some might even say majority) support from the Southern inhabitants. From manpower, to resources, to shelter and hiding FNL agents the support of the population helped to erode the Diem regime et al.
Being Spartan like in certain ways! Confucian philosophy Vietnamese flavoured. Values like respecting elders, being of virtue, and being studious certainly are highly regarded. But just as much valor, military prowess (and by proxy the ability to defend the country against much stronger occupying forces) and endurance in the face of adversity are highly regarded in Vietnamese culture.
So yes, the profession of being a soldier e.g. being a mercenary is not as respected as a teacher; a soldier 'by circumstance', following the call of duty, fighting to defend the country? Very much so.
No it wasn't. It was a political, moral, social debacle from the start. But not a military one. Read some history and understand difference between "engagement", "battle", and "war". Those words mean specific things in military context.
Also, as a french, I'm contractually obligated to do this:
We warned you guys, we told you this wasn't going to work out, we tried :^)
So if you side with the wrong guy, you force the world's biggest army to get in, wave it's dick around then force it withdraw and manage to establish a communist regime anyways ? Ho Chi Minh would consider that a pretty good deal.
>north and south
You do know the US was fighting WITH the South Vietnamese army, right?
>the forests and infrastructure destroyed, the consequences of that war today (Agent Orange, unexploded bombs),
A war happening in your country does that. It's not particularly special. We've had this little thing take place around here called World War I & II. The marks still exist, we find unexploded bombs rather regularly. It tends to happen when you bring explosives and various kinds of weapons and shoot them around. Are antipersonnel mines OK in your book too?
But hey, if you're happy that civilians died by the thousands (you know, that thing that almost every single country on the globe has agreed to not kill in the case of a war) as an example, that chemical weapons were used against populations and that hundreds of war crimes were commited in the name of "look, this happens if you side with the wrong guys, that is, not us", good for you. Muh freedom.
In the mean time, every single source I can find, the history I learned puts the US as the loser.
----------------
As an aside, our set of people who think the Vietnam was was a victory is now {"American kiddos that cannot accept their great US ever loosing ever.", mmustapic}
However, since you apparently think that death count is the only thing that matters, that must mean that the South won the US civil war, since the North lost more lives.
I must say though, it is disturbing that you count civilian dead in the South as being a point towards US victory, given that the US involvement was supposed to be defending those people.
For the longest time I thought the Vietnamese were the biggest losers in this. They got their independence, but down a path closer to North Korea instead of South Korea after much loss of life. But now I think America was the biggest loser. We lost a cornerstone of our culture: military service. We killed the draft and a generation has been inoculated with the attitude military service is for poor people without other options. The military has begun to privatize and isolate itself from America. Fewer and fewer people serve. Many people serving in Iraq were paid, foreign contractors. Debate about the military is nonexistent. Everyone “supports the troops,” but the wars are either patriotic or evil, with little discussion of execution and goals. It saddens me and makes me think of Rome at the end of the Republican period. [3]
[1] http://www.historynet.com/ho-chi-minh-and-the-oss.htm
[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=B59ZUKeNoD4C&pg=PA47&lpg=P...
[3] http://www.historynet.com/romes-barbarian-mercenaries.htm
http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/post/18436528466/dated-febr...
Published by the national archives, it shows that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and independence seeker first, and Communist second (or even third)
In fact, having spent time in Paris, Boston, Moscow and Hongkong working menial jobs and getting in contact with western philosophies in his youth he actually chose to quote
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"
The course of history might have been slightly different...
It's a shame, really.
Sounds to me like the people of Vietnam are the worse losers in this whole tragedy.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24...
The US hasn't been militarily threatened since the end of WWII, nearly four generations ago. Put the US in a realistically threatened position and watch the numbers swell.
And while the personnel count is lower than it has been for a few decades, the budget is still phenomenally large. For example, the US has as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined, and their smallest carrier is bigger than everyone else's bar Russia's single vehicle. Given that you have to get over giant oceans to even start to demonstrably threaten the US...
Rumours of the US's impending military demise are greatly exaggerated.
Only the most blinded, foaming patriots try to spin it that the US won the Vietnam war in any way, even with scare quotes. They were kicked out of the country, and at the end of their involvement had achieved none of their objectives.
It doesn't matter how many victorious battles you can point to, if at the end of the war you have lost all your land, extracted nothing of value to you, and greatly tarnished your own reputation both foreign and domestic, you have lost.
The VC won fair and square against the occupying and invading forces, and despite all the doom predictions of the time, they appear to still be a functioning state.
And, as an anecdote, as a guy how grew up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s things like Michael Jackson's music or Coca Cola bottles had a lot more lasting effect on "winning" the Cold War for the US then the nuclear warheads from North Dakota or the Nimitz-class carriers. Too bad that know-how has not been translated into trying to "win" over the hearts and minds of the Arab people.
Interestingly, none of them on their home territory.
The closest anyone's been able to point out to me are Pearl Harbor (which -- though striking -- was just a single attack) and some practically uninhabited islands Japan took over for a while.
The last time foreign soldiers invaded the US proper was when Canada marched into Washington.
Side note: a few Canadians marched into Washington with their British overlords. I have never understood why Canadians always seem to reference 1812 and never mention Dieppe when they talk about Hosers on the warpath.
Sure, war is hell. But a war at home is an entirely different category of horror than a war overseas or off the coast. Its effects on the collective psyche are entirely different.
A foreign army invaded the South decades after that.
Same with all of the other "wars."
The advantage in weaponry is staggering, and this weaponry has been bought with unprecedented military spending.
So, there are some kinks in the ideological goals and imposing those on others, but the killing machine seems to be fully optimized.
It seems to imply that because of the higher body count, we should consider the US the winner?
Or take WWI, where the collapse of the government was the death knell for the German military effort.
And to come back on the original point, you do War to kill enough people to make your opponent give up or until it is completely destroyed. In the case of WWII, even if Russia kept losing soldiers 10:1 vs German soldiers, Germany would have still run out of soldiers to fight with anyway because of Russia's massive supply of men behind the frontlines - And even if Russia did give up at some point, there would have been no way Germany would be able to control a country as large as the Soviet Union with the army they had on site. Germans were clearly bound to lose no matter what.
If you are talking about recent or ongoing wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria), indeed the goals are much less clear, so it's hard to see how anything currently being done is really helping.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm
The New York Times reported the US Air Force did the AWACs on this particular job and other sources report that the administration used mercenary contractors and supplied the invaders.
Check out Serb population in Kosovo, too.
I am not sure I agree. According to what I heard, the western leaders didn't know what was going on when Gorbachev let the Berlin wall to fall. Sure the U.S. built lot of weapons, but calling it a strategic victory.. you could then call peace a military victory as well.
Do you have a source for this? I don't personally know anyone that thinks either of those things.
https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-synd...
[NB I'm not in the US so I have no idea how popular these beliefs are - I suspect they aren't that common and perhaps quite understandable given the impact Vietnam had on the US].
Even the pop culture doesn't seem to put out a vibe that suggests the US won. Most of the popular movies about Vietnam tend to highlight the horrors of war in general and not some romantic notion of victory, patriotism, glory, etc. Almost all of them feature scenes with the US soldiers talking about how misguided and poorly run the war was.
At best, there may be some people that think "we could have won" had the war been waged in a different way, but I don't even hear that often. In fact, the quagmire of Vietnam was used repeatedly as an argument against the war in Iraq.
Typical complaint is that Congress wouldn't let them do enough bombing, and/or placed too many restrictions on it, in addition to choosing to withdraw rather than keep fighting.
There are definitely some who believe 'were forced to declare defeat by Congress'. I have heard a Vietnam Vet say the military won the war, but the government forced them to pull out.
Here's a video explaining that thesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk - which places the blame squarely on the Democratic Party for the US losing the war. You'll see that some in the comments also believe this to be true.
FWIW, 'Prager University' gives an American conservative perspective, and was set up to 'combat liberal bias and teach Judeo-Christian values'.
Sure, and the video you linked to is a great example of that. "Some who believe", though, is a far cry from the "majority of Americans"
Edit: Not saying you made that leap..more for the parents of this comment.
It's a difficult war to understand because it was not only a struggle to end colonialism in Vietnam but also a land and power grab by the northern communists.
As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part.
As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting.
The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out.
Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways.
I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.
It's weird: on one side, killing more people than your adversaries is not as important as it once was, but this means that conflicts are now harder to solve on the battlefield, so they tend to be longer and more bloody than before.
This ratio makes no sense and would imply almost 8 million dead NVA/Vietcong combatants by the end of the war.
And anyone that has lived here can tell you that the ruling communist kleptocracy is no friend of the Vietnamese people.
Centralized economies encourage corruption and stifle growth. Vietnam is no exception.
And Vietnam doesn't have a centralized economy any more. And neither does China. Your rants sound like the standard rants of everyone who wants to be willfully ignorant of development in these countries. "They aren't progressing because their stats are false. Why? Because I said so!". Nevermind the rise in real wages and standards of living.
[...]
> Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out.
But that's just not how wars work. No politician goes to war to get a good kill ratio. It's a question of strategic objectives. AFAIK, the dominant theory on the US side was that once the incompetently-led South Vietnam fell to the North, the "domino effect" would turn the rest of Southeast Asia into a bastion of godless communists. The US lost due in a large part to political factors, but anyone thinking that military factors are the only important thing in war shouldn't really be allowed to take any strategic decision. There is just no question that North Vietnam, on the other hand, achieved its own strategic objectives and won.
First off, in the context of the Vietnam War, VC stands for Viet Cong. I think that you mean North Vietnam, instead, because the Viet Cong were spent as a fighting force after the Tet Offensive. Thereafter, the Vietnam War was mostly a fight between regular armies.
In 1969, Richard Nixon began a modest pull-out of US troops from Vietnam.
In 1972, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam with 150,000 troops. They had support from the Soviet Union in the form of tanks. Lots of tanks. Zhukov would've been proud of that force. South Vietnam defended themselves with help from the United States in the form of air support.
Result: Fewer than 50,000 North Vietnamese soldiers made it back North. American KIA: 650.
Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks improved for a while before breaking down in mid-December 1972. Nixon then ordered North Vietnamese cities to be bombed for eleven days (the "Christmas Bombings"). Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks resumed. On January 27, 1973, both sides agreed to a cease fire, America would withdraw all of its forces, all POWs would be released, and South Vietnam would remain independent (of the North). By the end of 1973, all US troops were gone.
Being a bunch of communists, the North Vietnamese lied about their end of the deal. How's that for fair and square? They kept fighting to subjugate South Vietnam with the full support of the Soviet Union. South Vietnam fought on with aid from the United States... until August 1974 (thanks, Congress!).
So, strictly speaking, America didn't lose the Vietnam War in much the same way that tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. See? History can be complicated.
As for "doom predictions of the time," well, North Vietnam proceeded to aid communists elsewhere in Indo-China, just as the war hawks predicted (cf., Domino Theory: http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ ) By 1975, Cambodia and Laos had fallen to communist insurgents. In all of these places, they instituted revolutionary socialist reforms to overturn the legacy of foreign colonialist occupiers. These reforms so impressed the locals that more than a million of them took to the high seas in hand-made boats in order to return to those self-same "occupiers."
Here, in America, we have a number of Vietnamese neighborhoods made up of those people and their progeny. The grey hairs among them would take issue with your evaluation of modern Vietnam as "a functioning state."
Give or take 1,000+ civilian deaths:
In just one night, more than 2,000 homes were destroyed around Kham Thien, a busy shopping street in Hanoi. About 280 people were killed and at least as many again injured. Ha Mi had a friend, whose house was hit.
"There were a few houses still standing, but most of it was just rubble, flattened on the ground - or even just a big hole. Houses were just gone, it was horrible. I remember seeing people just standing there looking at it - but there was nothing there. Everything was just gone."
At the time the communist authorities said about 1,600 Vietnamese were killed, but many suspect the true figure is far higher.
I lived in Hanoi for two years, and been attending a local climbing club. A friend of mine, an American climber, once shared his thoughts on the war, and the way Vietnamese don't hate modern Americans despite having a war veteran in every family - it was a bit of surprise to him.
I think what he did not realize is that the US lost the war, and retrieved the forces, and Vietnamese are really proud of that, and it's very different to, for example, modern situation in the Arabic world, where the US just can't get enough of it.
>>Vietnamese had no Hollywood to force their point of view onto the global society
Sort of implies that Hollywood was reinforcing some view that the US won in Vietnam, or that the reasons for the war were noble, or?
I can't think of any Hollywood produced Vietnam centric movies that follow that sort of theme.
Some of them might not have been that bright, though. I remember an exchange student protesting a poem we read in English class because she thought it implied the US lost the war. There was complete silence in class and our teacher just said "well, they did lose." She actually said "No, we won it when we threw the bomb on Hiroshima."
Take the most average person you know. 1/2 of people in the world are dumber. Surprised someone doesn't know who won Vietnam?
> Take the most average person you know
The average person you know might not be close to population average, depending on the circle of people you know - let's say Stanford post-docs.
That's not really compelling evidence that there's a widespread belief among Americans that we won the Vietnam war.
Apologies for answering your question with another question - but have their been any movies that were even distributed (let alone produced) in the West that try and given an account of the war from a North Vietnamese viewpoint?
In the beginning the society didn't take the war too seriously, it took ten more years for the anti-war movement to gain strength. Ten years!
Then there's what is omitted. I can't think of a movie/TV show I've seen about Vietnam that mentioned we bombed South Vietnam as well, or that we propped up a dictator that rigged the election and made life so intolerable for the Buddhists that monks were self-immolating in protest.
On the other hand, most of the movies did highlight the horrors of war, highlight the futility of the effort, disillusion of the front line troops, etc.
So, the argument isn't that Hollywood did a terrific job, just that they weren't portraying the war as noble, winnable, etc.
http://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/09/25/famous-fakes-10-cel...
The article even says "this wasn't staged" - making the question of authenticity very obvious. Still, even if some of these were staged it's still a fascinating set of pictures.
I strongly disagree with this armchair analysis, 'gut feel' isn't good enough! Some photos happen serendipitously (not sure if that's the correct word for combat photographs). I'll be damned if the Saigon Execution[1] or the burning monk[2] were staged - yet the framing and timing could not have been any better.
1. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XwjZTVlnghk/U3Jv5jqOpBI/AAAAAAAAJF...
2. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ul72G5EX-Pc/VYjrTroozbI/AAAAAAAAJ5...
1) Vietnam was, as others wars are, a most profitable venture for the military industrial congressional complex. Even with the draft, the upper elite usually wiggled their way out it in some form or another.
2) The war was started, as were other wars, on false pretenses and lies. Now this is where you may expect a rambling about the gulf of tonkin, but the more sinister angle is that of the created enemy: communism. Through the Yale in China group, a front for an intelligence group, the Maoists were trained and put into power against Sun Yat-Sen who wanted to actually modernize the country.
The supranational elite use the hegellian dialectic in order to control the outcome. It's nowhere as direct as maany theorists would say, buts thats how its done, for whatever the enemy is, be it facism, communism, terrorism, and soon cyberterrorism.
No ones learns any of this in their heavily controlled history textbooks though.
By putting those two sides together, only then we can approximate truth.
Absolutely agree. And this is exactly where this article fails, which is precisely the point of my comment.
Imagine the same article with Third Reich, Mao or Cuban Castro regime. Would reading the thoughts and commentary by wermacht photographers, praising the fuhrer and describing the Normandy landing as "foreign invasion", without any neutral commentary, at least, not raise any questions or issues with you?
I'm pretty sure most everyone is well aware of the "other side" while looking at this one. Humans aren't so stupid that they can't compare what they already know to new information.
There is a lot more documentation about the Vietnam war that is from the US' perspective than from Viet Cong. Which is precisely what makes this article interesting. And it's just one article, and pretty short too.
(Also compare with the US wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or, more recently, the war on ISIL? How many articles tell ISIS' perspective?)
I've seen coverage of the war from a skewed pro-Viet Cong propaganda perspective. This isn't that.
After reading several replies like this one I finally understand why I'm being downvoted.
See, you assume that the article is in english, the audience is supposed to be from US, and the context is US culture. This is no longer true in modern world.
Personally, most of the information I was fed about Vietnam war throughout my life was the bullshit of Soviet and post-Soviet anti-US propaganda, so seeing this shit once again without any context seems sick. I guess a person from US, who have been mostly subjected to the other perspective, wouldn't understand it.
I'm not American, and I downvoted you for taking away from the discussion. What were you expecting from a link that reads "Unseen images of the war from the winning side"? Did you expect the Viet Cong to lack conviction in their beliefs?
> Personally, most of the information I was fed about Vietnam war throughout my life was the bullshit of Soviet and post-Soviet anti-US propaganda, so seeing this shit once again without any context seems sick.I guess a person from US, who have been mostly subjected to the other perspective, wouldn't understand it.
Speaking as a person born in a former colony, what I find sick is the pro-imperialist mindset that assumes being a western/american puppet state is better than getting communist benefactors in the fight for self-determination. Liberty or Death.
So, you would prefer to live in a North Korea to the South?
1. That's a false dichotomy -those are not the only options. The unstated implication (western-style democracy = success, communism = failure) is also wrong because there are many other orthogonal dimensions at play
2. Is South Korea a puppet state or a colony?
3. I think what you are really asking me is if I would rather be Fed or Free. There is no correct answer, but I would prefer both. How about you; would you rather be oppressed and flourishing or free and impoverished?
These are typical options though. A lot of historical examples show this pattern throughout 20th century.
Remember, how originally, words "1st world" and "2nd world" were supposed to mean "capitalist" and "communist", and ended up meaning "great places to live" and "not so good"?
> 2. Is South Korea a puppet state or a colony?
It may not have been formally a colony, but it's certainly a country under enormous political influence of western world in US in particular — just like post-WWII Japan and Western Germany. I don't think that formal status matters as much.
> 3. I think what you are really asking me is if I would rather be Fed or Free. There is no correct answer, but I would prefer both. How about you; would you rather be oppressed and flourishing or free and impoverished?
This is a false dichotomy, because "freedom" is good first and foremost because free societies are fed. Freedom is just a more effective society organization.
But a lot of former colonies never actually had this choice; instead, their struggle for "freedom" from western capitalism typically ended up in communist dictatorships in the USSR's sphere of influence. It's like the "free Palestine" guys, who know really well what they're fighting against, but refuse to open their eyes on what are they're fighting for.
I think pieces like this are important. Whilst you can disagree with it, it still makes you consider the views held by millions on the other side.
Yeah, nobody cares about the point of view of a 60kg Vietcong soldier. They are not supposed to have a face and keep quiet beneath that 2+ million bodycount. The brave war stories are reserved for the american GIs.. and hollywood.
"On 23 September 1945, with the knowledge of the British Commander in Saigon, French forces overthrew the local DRV government, and declared French authority restored..."[1]
It was one of the awful proxy conflicts of 20th century. I have no idea which is better - to be a colony in a market economy (the dominating effect is that profits from capital leak into the owning country) or a marxist dictatorship. Most dictatorships are kinda shitty - Marxist or not - but I have no calculus to compute is being a colony any better
Neighboring Cambodia lost a seventh of their population because of Communist evils.
By the way, despite leftist gleefulness of "American loss ". The US militarily won almost every battle and had a kill ratio of 134:1.
Winning battles doesn't count for much if you don't meet your strategic objectives (if you even have any). The same story has played out many times since then; the Soviets dominated the Afghans in every possible way, but accomplished nothing of note. Iraq now is much the same.
Losses in "Afgan" (Russian slang name of the country) weren't too high (15k either killed or died from wounds), even compared to American losses in Vietnam (58k KIA), and technically there were no major battles lost. Vietnamese were backed by the USSR, Afgans - by Saudis and the US.
But from a political point of view it was a clear loss, similar to Vietnam for the US: no pro-USSR government established, anti-war movement back home, further deligitimisation of the Party, etc. Unfortunately for the Soviets, this strongly resonated with other problems at the time resulting in... The collapse.
Reading through the comments, I see a lot of purportedly european folk who believe that many, if not most, people in the US are unfamiliar with the Vietnam conflict. If we discard children (15 and younger) I would be very surprised to find that half of the country is unaware of the war.
I think the confusion here is coming from the Idea that the US lost the war. They did not. There were two groups of winners and losers. On the winning side, you have Vietnam, Thailand, the US, and Japan. On the losing side you have France, Laos, Cambodia, and China. The last one was the true "enemy" the US was confronting. Given the recent developments in the Spratly's and Cam Ranh Bay, i think it is even more clear that the US, losses notwithstanding, gained much from the Vietnam Conflict.
Another point brought up by another comment was that the US does not fight at "home". This is intentional and the US has been very successful in this regard. Even if the US is forced to abandon policy aims as well as territory, it is hard to see it as a loss when it continues to economically prosper.
Wars are not like sporting events; there is no official scorecard. Body counts and capital losses play a role, but so do evolving narratives and cultural identity.
Only time tells us who wins and loses. The French definitely lost. The Vietnamese definitely won. All other participants, direct and indirect, occupy a gray area.
I don't understand. U.S. controls neither, Vietnam controls Cam Rang Bay. Given recent developments there, it looks like U.S. gained nothing from the Vietnam war.
Edited, I mistook about Vietnam controlling Spratly.