> 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?
So what was behind the Vietnam War that was worth dying and killing for? What would you have died and killed for, when young?
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
> 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.
Rich old men 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.
The difference now is that there is economic incentive enough not to want that as much.
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)
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.
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 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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
better anti-Communist strategy would have been for the non-Communist nations to offer generous asylum/refugee-based immigration programs
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.
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.
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.
As another counterfactual to build intuition: had the KMT beaten Mao in the 1940's, would there be a Communist Vietnam?