America making a movie about what Vietnam did to their soldiers is like a serial killer telling you what stopping suddenly for hitchhikers did to his clutch."
- Frankie Boyle
Vietnam was a vile deception, and a tragic example of focusing on unfounded methodologies (McNamara, running War as a business, body counts), rather than on the why, whether and how.
Attributing the collective actions of every single person from the US to a single entity called "America" and then pointing out that these actions are inconsistent is a silly reductionist argument.
Edit: I should also add that I strongly think the world would be better if the filmmakers were creating movies about the effects of war on the _other_ side, not just their country's side.
They are also used by American pop culutre to understand the war and they absolutly do influnce how people view the conflict.
To get critical movies about US army we need to wait for full CGI. Although I bet Army will retailiate then through copyright law.
Unexploded ordinance dropped by the US on Cambodia and Laos has rendered large swaths of land unproductive, and still leads to hundreds of deaths and injuries every year to this very day. Cambodia has an entire cottage industry devoted to recycling and neutralising American bombs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
That communist and leftist had widly positive views of any regime that called itself 'communist' or 'socialist' is well known. Even if it is today often ignored.
The US didn't try to conquer North Vietnam. It didn't try to annex the nation. It got involved in an existing civil war - on the premise of fighting Communism's spread - and tried to keep North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam for exactly the same reason it acted to keep North Korea from conquering South Korea. The US left Vietnam, the North went on with its conquering anyway.
The US killed vast numbers of North Koreans in the Korean War as well, in the defense of the South. Why isn't that treated exactly the same way that the Vietnam War is? A curious inconsistentcy of popular sentiment: it's because to either wish the US had failed in Korea, or never got involved at all, is to be ok with the idea that South Korea would very likely look like North Korea today and that the South's people would have had the same horrific history the past six decades.
Let's see how things turned out.
South Korea: GDP per capita of Spain & Italy, ~$30,000.
Vietnam: GDP per capita of East Timor & the Solomon Islands, ~$2,300.
CHOMSKY: As far as the opinion makers are concerned, they have been doing exactly what it was obvious they would do. Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how — while it may have been a “mistake” or an “unwise effort” — the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That’s standard to say.
The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam. The real invasion of South Vietnam which was directed largely against the rural society began directly in 1962 after many years of working through mercenaries and client groups. And that fact simply does not exist in official American history. There is no such event in American history as the attack on South Vietnam. That’s gone. Of course, It is a part of real history. But it’s not a part of official history.
And most of us who were opposed to the war, especially in the early ’60’s — the war we were opposed to was the war on South Vietnam which destroyed South Vietnam’s rural society. The South was devastated. But now anyone who opposed this atrocity is regarded as having defended North Vietnam. And that’s part of the effort to present the war as if it were a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam with the United States helping the South. Of course it’s fabrication. But it’s “official truth” now.
QUESTION: This question of who the United States was fighting in Vietnam is pretty basic in terms of coming to any understanding of the war. But why would the U.S. attack South Vietnam, if the problem was not an attack from North Vietnam?
CHOMSKY: First of all, let’s make absolutely certain that was the fact: that the U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late ’50’s the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh — which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam. [The Geneva Accords of 1954 temporarily divided Northern and Southern Vietnam with the ultimate aim of reunification through elections. — editor’s note]
And so, not only were they not conducting any terrorism, but in fact, they were not even responding to the violence against them. It reached the point where by 1959 the Vietminh leadership — the communist party leadership — was being decimated. Cadres were being murdered extensively. Finally in May of 1959 there was an authorization to use violence in self-defense, after years of murder, with thousands of people killed in this campaign organized by the United States. As soon as they began to use violence in self-defense, the whole Saigon government apparatus fell apart at once because it was an apparatus based on nothing but a monopoly of violence. And once it lost that monopoly of violence it was finished. And that’s what led the United States to move in. There were no North Vietnamese around.
Then the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was formed. And its founding program called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And it’s very striking that the National Liberation Front was the only group that ever called for the independence of South Vietnam. The so-called South Vietnamese government (GVN) did not, but rather, claimed to be the government of all Vietnam. The National Liberation Front was the only South Vietnamese group that ever talked about South Vietnamese independence. They called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a kind of neutral block, working toward some type of integration of the South with North Vietnam ultimately.
Now that proposal in 1962 caused panic in American ruling circles. From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.
And in fact Kennedy and later Johnson tried to block every attempt at neutralization, every attempt at political settlement. This is all documented. There’s just no doubt about it. I mean, it’s wiped out of history, but the documentation is just unquestionable — in the internal government sources and everywhere else.
And so there’s just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South. There were no North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam then as far as anybody knew. And they anticipated of course when they began bombing the North from South Vietnamese bases that it would bring North Vietnamese troops into the South. And then it became possible to pretend it was aggression from the North. It was ludicrous, but that’s what they claimed.
First of, the US did not invade North Vietnam because they were afraid of war with USSR and China. Not for any other reason.
The US absolutly dominated the South, it was a client state. They basically made it possible for the South Vietnam government to exist. When the government there did perform as the US thought it should, the US installed a new government.
The US was the only thing preventing the South from failing. You are suffering from Propaganda if you believe the South Vietnam was much of state without US support. It did not have the support of the majority of people in Vietnam and probebly not even in the South.
The government that the US supported was handing out land to political cronies against the people on the land, who did you think they were fighint? Then the American went in and helped this corrupt regmie to enforce these policies.
The US Army absolutly slaughtered the people of Vietnam in unbelivable numbers. They spread 10% of the country with chemicals that lead to 100000s of deformed children. The numbers are stunnig and I could go on about all the other countires and people the US bombed and how that helped to great the worst genocide in human history (% based).
And all of this for what? The leader of North Vietnam wanted to firendly with the US in the beginning. Even basic geopolitics could tell you that he would much rather have the US as a supporter in order not to be dominated by China. This actually what has now happened, Vietnam is now US new best buddy. Also Vietnam turned capitalist pretty quickly once the US was gone. Most people realize that Communism is a idiotic idiology and most elites don't really like it at all.
Vietnam might not be rich yet, but they are doing much better. This process could have been started 20-30 years earlier but they had to fight a war for survival.
Your simplistic comparison with Korea is just that, stylised to fit your narrative. In reality the two situation were quite different.
The US also directly supported this and helped many people who otherwise would have stayed. It was part of a dilibrate strategy to weaken the North.
Many of the fears people had about what the Communist government was doing were false, and the Communist government actually implemted some sensable policies.
At that point it was not clear that the North would get more support, but over the coming years it became quite clear. The South just failed as a state way more so then the North.
A bunch of poor Vietnamese were able to defeat the biggest and most powerful military in the history of earth. That's a pretty hard thing to explain.
Also, lets remember that we should not take everything they say for granted.
A lot of resistance is also passive and that is effective as well.
That is not what US internal diplomatic notes said at the time, not in modern interviews if McNamara, Clark Clifford etc.
The Vichy French colonialists, then the non-Vichy French, then the Americans fought to retain the Vietnamese colony in the south. The fight was against the National Liberation Front in the south - Buddhist monks, Paris educated professionals, peasants etc. The north had little involvement until mid-1968. Also French Indochina was one country until 1954, and the ceasefire lines were supposed to be temporary barring national elections, which the US opposed. There never was a "South Vietnam".
> The South's people would have the same horrific history
US policy during the Korean War was to fire on civilians, as happened at No Gun Ri. South Korea was under a series of dictatorships with a more horrific history than anything happening up north until the late 1970s up until the Gwangju massacre in 1980 in South Korea. The northern economy eclipsed the southern one as well. Things began changing in both countries in the 1980s and 1990s for a variety of internal and external reasons.
That's neither the position of vietnam nor the US. Even during the separation the North left 10 000 vietcongs in the south to sow discord and guerrila activities. The different opposition organisations were soon under direct control from the north.
At least that is what the "People's Army of Vietnam" is saying which can be read here: https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Vietnam-Official-History-1954...