Comment by adekok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adekok | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of an article I read in one of Jerry Pournelle's anthologies. It was written by a Vietnamese man who had agitated against the Americans during the Vietnam war.

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.

Bear in mind that Jerry Pournelle is a very right wing guy and was right wing at the time of the Vietnam war, so he looks for confirmation of his own pro war views.

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.

The Vietnamese certainly deserved independence from colonialism but it's hard to argue that the "right" side won when you consider how badly the current ruling regime mismanages and exploits the country.

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.

Have you been to/lived in Vietnam? Their economy is booming compared to their neighbours. They are communists in name only; much like China. You're conveniently missing out the part where the South reneged on promises for a vote on reunification which led to conflict.

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.

I've lived in Vietnam for the last five years. Ask the average Vietnamese how much they think their economy is booming.

Then go visit Bangkok and marvel at how far behind Vietnam is.

That's woefully poor analysis. Thailand did not fight wars from the 50's to the near 80's. That's a bit like asking the former Yugo states why their economy looks nothing like Turkey's.

Vietnam suffered mass near starvation after the war thanks to misguided communist economic policies. Go travel around the country like I have and tell me how much the average working class Vietnamese feels the current economic "boom".

Or maybe the US and pals placed Vietnam under an embargo from 75-94, and war only really ended in 79 after China got booted out? 94-16 isn't really that long. Check back in 20 years. I'll bet my bottom dollar their standards of living will improve faster than their neighbours'.

You are trying too hard and thanks to your recent comparison with the capital of a country that has been / is currently governed by military dictatorship, I really can no longer take you seriously.

It probably helped that a sizable portion of the food crops were sprayed with Agent Orange by US forces, rendering them worse than useless.

You have a really weird way of phrasing things. "Things really sucked after the war. They don't suck like that now, decades later. The average Vietnamese doesn't like how things are now".

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.

I think our economy is not growing as fast as we would like, but it is doing OK. Just ten years ago, most people who had a chance to emigrate would do so, but in recent years I've noticed that many people who studied in Western countries have come back to start their businesses at home.

> Bear in mind that Jerry Pournelle is a very right wing guy and was right wing at the time of the Vietnam war, so he looks for confirmation of his own pro war views.

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.

What is the purpose of that statement? That communists infiltrated other groups? Its not just communists who do/did that.

That if USSR-backed communists have effectively infiltrated army command in Spain, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that a different group of USSR-backed communists did exactly the same thing in Vietnam.

I'm not claiming that communists were the only political movement to infiltrate army units.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/31/vietnamese-blog...

"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 relevant comparison, though, I'd whether you'd rather live in a contemporary Vietnam after it had been under control of an American-backed military junta since the 70s plagued by a constant brutal Communist insurgency. Latter may be preferable, but it's not a huge difference.

Throw in the other counterfactual scenario, which is no US involvement in Vietnam post WWII at all, not much of a war, and thus far less incentive for reprisals, and the installment of leader who was always populist nationalist first and Marxist-sympathiser second and actually had good relations with the US in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Also probably no Communist coup in Laos, and a slim chance of stability in Cambodia.

The ironic thing about Vietnam is that culturally it's still one of the most capitalist countries on earth.

You clearly have no idea the kinds of crimes Diem and his cronies got up to in South Vietnam.

Vietnam would have been another former colony with western companies exploiting resources and the political class getting rich off corruption.

Doesn't the Socialist Republic of Vietnam have a former colonial status, Western companies, exploited resources and a political class getting rich off corruption now?

No. They're the second base for manufacturing after China now. Their economy is young, relatively debt free and growing. In a few decades they will overtake most of their ASEAN neighbours

> Bear in mind that Jerry Pournelle is a very right wing guy and was right wing at the time of the Vietnam war, so he looks for confirmation of his own pro war views.

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.

> 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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba

"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.

Cuba was under embargo all this time. Where and how it would be without embargo is the question.

Maybe so, but what of those in the other 20% who found themselves disappeared or shot for political reasons, or those simply held prisoner in their own country?

I'm not sure the situation wrt human rights changed much one way or another under the communists. It's not like the Batista regime encouraged dissidents and rewarded independent journalism.

It turned out that they needed a sponsor, and that turned out to be the Soviet Union?

I think the "race supremacists" were only supported in South Africa as the ANC and all the rebels were Communist. Letting the USSR get control of South Africa would have caused massive problems for the West.

I think it was an example of "real politik".

I've lived in both Chile and Vietnam, and Chile is light years ahead of Vietnam in every respect. I love Vietnam, but it has a long way to go before it reaches the standard of living of most South American nations

You cannot explain the difference in economy of those countries based on the ideology of their governments. Its more complicated than that. For instance, Chile is rich in agricultural and mineral resources and has less population than Vietnam.

Chile today is not Chile in 1980 say. And Chile did not suffer massive economic embargos arranged by the US for 20 years nor was it bombed by a superpower for a decade. (The US dropped more bombs in Laos -- which wasn't even technically a combatant -- than were dropped on Europe in WWII.) The amount of damage inflicted on Vietnam by the US is simply unprecedented. (And let's not even get into the "free fire zones" the US declared late in the war where it would simply shoot peasants and call them insurgents.)

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.

Thanks for this bit, very interesting!

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.

I think all of that pales in comparison to having a mole[1] be put in charge of village defense. It's much easier to turn the people against the government when you can choose parts of what the government does.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph%E1%BA%A1m_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Th%E...

If it weren't for the American retreat, Vietnam would be as beautiful and egalitarian as Afghanistan or Iraq.

Or even South Korea.

South Korea did manage to maintain the human rights standards of other US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel until 1987; hopefully a little northern belligerence will get them back in line.

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.

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