Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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I have a passion for history. I love reading biographies and hanging out on history forums.

As we're getting to the 50-year mark past the American involvement in Vietnam, things are progressing in ways not anticipated at the time. Vietnam, like several other Asian countries, is embracing capitalism and entrepreneurs. Old enemies hug and pose for photographs.

This seems to be a pattern, at least among American conflicts (I have not studied others very much). As the combatants grow into old age, it's not worth carrying a grudge around. Things that were worth dying and killing for 50 years ago are still important, but they're fights for young people. It becomes easier to see things from the other side.

I'd argue that by simply having a huge presence of Americans in Vietnam for so many years, the two countries have become joined for the next century or so, much the same as having kids in a marriage joins the two partners together even if they can't stand one another. I also note that things may end up turning out better for Vietnam in terms of economic development than if South Vietnam had won the war -- which would have only institutionalized worse corruption than they currently have.

This is all speculative, of course, but I seriously doubt anybody in the mid-70s would have guessed that this is where we'd all be 40 years later. It's been an interesting journey for both countries.

>>This seems to be a pattern, at least among American conflicts (I have not studied others very much). As the combatants grow into old age, it's not worth carrying a grudge around.

If you've ever been to Serbia/Croatia/Montenegro this is evident - to the point of being a little bit weird. You see the former combatants doing business and living next to one another and it's hard to believe that less than 15 years ago they were roaming around in paramilitary groups murdering each other. Going to Belgrade as an American, I expected at least a little bit of animosity...considering you could still see strafing/bombing damage from American bombs in certain parts of the city... No one cared - and Belgrade seemed to be doing pretty well. It was bizarre. But damn beautiful place - would recommend Belgrade, St. Stephan in Montenegro (actually, don't go there...you will ruin it) and Dubrovnik.

I was in Belgrade in 1999 about five days before the US started bombing the place. The people there were very friendly to me, even when they knew I was an American. The border guards sure scrutinized me and my passport (I had a transit visa), but they didn't give me any trouble other than that.

One of my more memorable experiences was visiting Tito's mausoleum. It was very quiet and I was the only person there. I got the impression that nobody was interested in visiting Tito anymore. The elderly security guard there was very happy to seem me and he talked to me in rudimentary German, the only language we had in common. As a gift he gave me some book discussing some Yugoslavian communist party conference back in the 60s with an English translation. Nice guy.

I was traveling from Sarajevo (a sad city at the time) on a bus through the Serbian part of Bosnia, and I was a little nervous about that. There were no problems though. Our bus did break down in a snowstorm and we were stuck there next to the road for about six hours, so I had plenty of time to talk to the other passengers (all Serbian as far as I could tell). They were either friendly or didn't pay attention to me, probably because most didn't speak any language I knew.

A couple in front of me on that bus were telling me that they heard that the Americans were about to bomb Belgrade at any moment. There was no animosity toward me personally, though: they were friendly people. I thought that was nonsense because the news had been talking about that for months and nothing seemed to be coming out of it. It turned out that in the few weeks I'd been traveling that things had gotten much more serious. I might have reconsidered traveling through Serbia if I knew things had gotten that serious. I saw a newspaper in Greek a few days after I left the country showing Belgrade and pictures of stealth bombers. I knew then that the people I was talking to had been right.

I haven't been to that region since that time, but I'd love to go again. I have lots of memories of friendly people.

> Things that were worth dying and killing for 50 years ago are still important, but they're fights for young people.

So what was behind the Vietnam War that was worth dying and killing for? What would you have died and killed for, when young?

Protecting your country, friends and family from an aggressive, invading force?

Ridding your country of a brutal, corrupt puppet dictatorship propped up by said aggressive, invading force?

I think most people would see that as a valid reason to kill and die for. Hell, said aggressive, invading force even convinced their young it was worth to go kill and die to do the invading, should be a piece of cake to convince those being attacked

I meant that from the American perspective, but alright.

> Protecting your country, friends and family from an aggressive, invading force?

And on the invaders' side? What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?

> Ridding your country of a brutal, corrupt puppet dictatorship propped up by said aggressive, invading force?

How about just going for the dictators specifically? The Vietnamese people declaring that they will kill any dictator the US installs there might have done the trick, as opposed to dying by the millions fighting the vastly superior American military.

But it's not that simple either. Think of something like North-Korea. Any sane person there sees that what's going on is totally. fucking. fucked. up.

But even if someone thinks freeing people from the insanity there is worth dying for, what if his death didn't actually result in the insanity ending? .. Fear, is sadly what keeps mass-murdering tyrannical regimes in power.

Many people truly believed at that time that countries re-forming into Communist states could build a kind of momentum, like a row of dominoes tipping over, and that allowing Vietnam to fall would inevitably lead to the US fighting off a "Red Dawn" invasion from the rest of the world that had gone Communist.

As with other wars, the justification was "fight them there, so we won't have to fight them here."

This works, because young military recruits are not often skilled at the skeptical, rational questioning of authority. Many of them literally believe that the invasion and occupation of foreign territory makes the US safer. It isn't until much later, if ever, that they face down the cognitive dissonance and accept that they were just pawns in the game of global politics.

Sure, but now you're just describing the propaganda that was used to get ordinary people to die and kill for their rulers.

Every step backward along the chain of causality is an equally valid reason.

Someone believing the propaganda is as much a reason as someone writing it, or someone ordering that it be written, or someone inventing the casus belli behind it.

It is a fallacy to assert a true root cause in anything, because no event is so cleanly disconnected from the rest of history that you can definitively say that a deciding event is truly independent of all those that came before.

The root cause for any war is psychopath rulers wanting more power and more wealth for themselves. The rest follows from that. Of course, the rulers will be spewing bullshit propaganda to get their peons to go die for them.

The commenter I originally responded to seemed to suggest that there would be a "good" reason for people to go die or kill people in a war.

But enriching his rulers is not exactly a good reason for an ordinary person to kill or die trying. What's in it for him? Wouldn't he much rather not do it?

> And on the invaders' side? What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?

Rich old men back home.

Yes, or more accurately: the psychopath rulers and their cronies back home.

That's what I've been getting at, as you probably gathered.

In other words, ordinary people don't actually have a good reason to die and kill for X in a war, because X is always rulers and wars are always about their personal gain at the expense of countless ordinary people.

You can always convince enough of the plebs that they are in danger and that your country needs to be the first to act. After that, it's just inerta.

The difference now is that there is economic incentive enough not to want that as much.

Reminds me of this:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

-- In an interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)

> What exactly were the American soldiers dying and killing for?

Many were drafted into compulsory military service. They were placed into a situation where it was "kill or be killed." If they didn't want to fight or they deserted, then it was federal prison.

Sure, but although it certainly suits their rulers, that's not exactly a good reason for them to go die or kill people.

That's how wars are maintained, by the way. Ordinary people are told they need to go kill some "enemies", or they will be killed by the um.. not-enemies..

At the time, there was an existential struggle going on between Soviet Union and Europe/US. Vietnam war was ultimately the wrong turn in that struggle, but it was far less obviously wrong at the time.

The so-called "domino theory" hypothesized that Communism could be modeled as a sort of ideological contagion. If one country became Communist, its neighbors were more likely to become Communist. So if left unchecked, Communism would spread throughout the world in a giant, red wave, leaving America as the last remaining bastion of freedom in the whole universe.

This theory was given additional credence because apparently, the Communists believed in it, too.

Well, it turns out that theory was just so much hot air.

Laos, Cambodia ended up Communist (though, ironically, it was Kissinger and the USA who ended up tolerating the Khmer Rouge as a pawn against the USSR and Vietnam, and Vietnam who ended up removing the Khmer Rouge from power and replacing them with a puppet state). It's also worth mentioning that Malaysia was fighting off a Communist insurgency, though that was pretty much dead by 1960.

And, perhaps most importantly, Indonesia had the largest (non-ruling) Communist Party in the world, with a seven figure membership. Had Vietnam been re-united under Communist rule, it's hard to anticipate how it would have developed. (1965 ended any chance of Communist revolution, there, though, with the US-supported mass murder of 500k+ CP members and Indonesian Chinese).

Even India and then-East Pakistan had to deal with a background level of Communist terrorism. We've got the benefit of the present to be able to poo-poo others' choices, but it was a genuinely big deal back then, and even now I'm not sure how things would have developed differently with a united Communist Vietnam in 1960.

ETA: Thailand and the Phillipines also had fairly active Communist insurgencies, though it seems their governments were able to put them down without too much difficulty.

ETA Again: As another counterfactual to build intuition: had the KMT beaten Mao in the 1940's, would there be a Communist Vietnam? A North Korea? The latter almost certainly not. The former is less definite--I'd personally expect an authoritarian anti-colonial regime. Something like Burma, with better outcomes than it because of regression toward the mean. A Communist Vietnam conditioned on a Nationalist China seems highly unlikely to me.

Exactly. Korea itself of course has been dealing with communists.

Burma and Laos had communist insurgencies. The CP of Laos, too, is an offshoot of the Vietnamese CP.

Most of Africa and South America had strong communist parties too.

It's quite simple. The CI (communist internatinal) was a world-imperialist organisation, and was trying to take over governments all over the world, following the Leninist model that had been 'successful' in Russia.

I look at it more in terms of concrete, material support: if you're geographically near a Communist state, that Communist state has a strong interest in undermining your government for its own ends. It's also far easier for them to supply material and men, rely on social networks to diffuse propaganda, etc. A Communist Vietnam IMO makes a Communist Indonesia and even India much more likely (which would be a disaster on a huge scale); South Africa or Peru, though, next to no effect, or maybe even a negative effect.

The real genius of Kissinger was realizing the abstraction of a unified Communist block was pretty faulty, and national interests superseded any ideological fidelity to the Communist cause.

    realizing the abstraction of a unified Communist block was pretty faulty, and national interests superseded any ideological fidelity to the Communist cause.

Interesting perspective. I think sino-soviet split, which was ideological, not nationalist, led Viet Nam to align with Moscow and Pol Pot with Beijing. This split was exploited.

    As another counterfactual to build intuition: had the KMT beaten Mao in the 1940's, would there be a Communist Vietnam?

Moscow sent weapons to Ho Chi Minh's and Pol Pot's armies via China. So it's extremely doubtful.

In what sense was it hot air? Saloth Sar (better known as Pol Pot), radicalised by the French communist party, trained in Moscow, Belgrade and Beijing, took over neighbouring Cambodia, aided by the communists in Hanoi. Indeed the Cambodian Communist party was an offshoot of Viet Nam's People's Army (the armed forces of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam).

The domino theory was a good one, because, as you point out yourself, it described the explicit modus operandi of the communists. Where it failed, it failed primarily because the communists received serious pushback.

It failed because the "domino" states represented an additional support burden on the Communist core states of Russia and China, who were themselves split ideologically. The Cold War basically prevented some internal conflict within the Communist Bloc by providing an external menace and scapegoat. But it was also economic warfare, turning what would have been a shooting war into another kind of money-spending contest.

Rather than building momentum, additional satellite nations just stressed the central powers economically. In theory, it would have been a self-supporting revolution, but in practice, it looked like just another overextended empire.

But it's too easy to criticize with the benefit of hindsight. They had no way of knowing back then the typical failure modes of Communist nations.

My hypothesis is that a better anti-Communist strategy would have been for the non-Communist nations to offer generous asylum/refugee-based immigration programs to those fleeing from the threat of Communist rebels in their home countries. Aside from that, stay out of the internal politics of the Communist bloc. Sadly, this is now untestable, so nobody should give it more than a few moments of light consideration.

    The Cold War basically prevented some internal conflict within the Communist Bloc by providing an external menace and scapegoat.

That's an interesting theory, but I'm not sure I can agree with it. Before the Sino-Soviet split, the communist world was really just one state, the Soviet union and everybody else was but a satellite.

   better anti-Communist strategy would have been for the non-Communist nations to offer generous asylum/refugee-based immigration programs

That is more or less exactly what West Germany did with refugees from East Germany. It was extremely successful, until the East build the wall and made fleeing next to impossible.

yes. But it wasn't obvious at the time. Part of the reason it turned out to be hot air, because communists failed to execute on this strategy, at least in part because they had to fight against non communists. It was a dynamic system, not a static one

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