But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has been basically poverty-class Nike factory workers for the last 50 years.
Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.
I'm guessing you don't live near the Tamagawa River then. Granted this was 18 months ago but I remember there were evacuations and road closures in Setagaya. Things were a bit more dire on the Kanagawa side.
I recall something similar happening the year before too.
As seen in the movie Parasite depicting the stark contrast between rich and poor South Koreans, there is a scene where the entire neighborhood is flooded
My point being, you can cherry pick and see every city gets flooded. The difference with Saigon is flooding occurs throughout the city in critical areas. Government funds and projects exists to address these issues but the whole amount never gets allocated to properly developing the sewage infrastructure. Instead, hotfixes such as building the roads higher. This is a never ending back and forth with civilians building barriers or building their house higher so the water floods back into the streets. That's just one example of lack of infrastructure
Are you trying to convince us that Tokyo has better infrastructure than Saigon?
Because I don't think anyone was arguing otherwise. The person you replied to merely said the poverty in Vietnam wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm not sure how you went from that to flooding.
People are subject to a low standard of living. That’s literally the definition of poverty. Issues like this may merely be a proxy indicator of poverty, where it is debatable whether it is just a symptom. Nevertheless, it impedes people to go about and pursue greater economic activities when they have to worry about having clean water to drink, as another example .
I wish you luck drinking tap water or even the ice cubes at a street establishment in Vietnam
Edit: also, are you not proving my point? How can the people of a country be rich if the country itself is not? Unless there is great wealth disparity with most people living in impoverished conditions. I mean, if Vietnamese people were rich, they would have satiated their appetite for food, and other standard of living items, and eventually decide as a society that maybe they should fix the infrastructure problem that is wasting everyone’s time and even introducing risks of diseases / electrocution during these periods of flooding
You're reading things that aren't there. Literally no-one has argued Vietnam or its people are rich (or even suggested anything close to it). No one.
Recap: The commentator you replied to said it's gotten better in the best decade (factually correct) and suggested it's considerably better than most Westerners think it is (an opinion/observation that also correlates with my experience, but YMMV).
From that comment, you brought up flooding in Saigon to which it was pointed out (to illustrate the absurdity of even bringing it up), that one of the richest cities in the world also has parts of it that flood.
You took that to mean they think Vietnam is wealthier than Japan (?) and that flooding is worse in Tokyo (?). No one said either of those things.
Look, you seem articulate and intelligent but no-one has even come close to saying what you keep suggesting. Please re-read the thread with a less combative mindset and realize we are all pretty much in agreement.
Many of the trusted infrastructure and construction projects in Vietnam are actually lead by foreign teams with Japan being a notable example ( bridges, etc.)
When it comes to drainage, Vietnam didn’t take the learnings of Japan who had to learn first hand this “tech debt” of a concrete jungle. In fact, the solution in Vietnam is often layering on more layers of concrete, so water floods anywhere but the streets instead ( people’s home, who foundation is now 10 feet below ground). This is the lowest cost solution while offering the politicians a kickback, until people build their barricades high and flood the streets again.
As the parent post noted, that development comes from having American jobs exported there (e.g., those Nike factories). Being a socialist society, the wealth disparities are far more stark than what we have in the West.
I wouldn't say it's abject poverty. But it's certainly far less developed than South Korea or Taiwan, which is the most likely counterfactual for a free South Vietnam. OTOH you could possibly argue (though far more speculatively) that North Vietnam would've turned into North Korea from the paranoia, isolation and humiliation of a loss.
Those two countries were impoverished military dictatorships for the first few decades as well. They also received significant economic support from the United States.
I definitely saw it years ago up north. And it still occurs today: “In some areas stunting is as high as 75 percent. I don’t recall coming across such high rates anywhere else in the world. The average in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai is 40 percent, almost twice the national average in Vietnam.” - https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/visiting-nutritio...
That sentence implies the national average for stunted growth was 20% in 2015 - malnourishment is most definitely a sign of extreme poverty. Although I assume much of that is historical overhang?
They are developing and have for eating. They have some problems like the pollution... in Hanoi it is terrible. But the country is in better shape than Laos and Cambodia by far, but not at the level of BKK in Thailand for example.
I lived in Vietnam for almost 10 years, and one in Singapore and I plan to come back. I have mixed feelings when I get there, but overall, it is a lovely country, my second home, literally. I left a big chunk of my life there.
I will never forget how Vietnam changed my whole life, literally. For the good. Even with the negative things it has. I am spanish and Spain also has negative things (and positive). All countries do.
Vietnam is similar to China - the cities have a small middle class, a few very wealthy yet most of the country is quite poor, some of them brutally poor.
>But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side.
It is well beyond winning and losing sides in such wars. There is a foreign invader and the local population fighting against the invader tooth and nail with the invader losing it despite better/bigger weapons, economy, army. In many such wars one could make an argument that giving in to the foreign invader may have been a better option, at least in the long run, yet the deep guttural tribal drive to defend the Motherland takes over any of the rationality. I mean for example the Russian peasants, being by all the parameters slaves of Russian nobility, were fighting French in 1812 only to return to the same slavery like position after the war.
China, which intervened in the Korean War at the moment of North Korea's complete military collapse, has not been held to account for the horrific North Korean regime it saved and still protects. China doesn't want a unified Korea and the North Korean people pay the price.
China fought in the Vietnam war too, just not as directly as the U.S. Without the U.S. supporting the south, the north will easily win with the full resource support from China.
People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing. The world will look totally different today.
"If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing."
Chinese Communist government got involved in the communist evolutions in all the neighbor countries. And international communists did help each other in different countries to over throw legitimate government. Takeover the whole world was the goal of the international communists. Those are all facts, not a theory.
To add to the above, as much as some people want to mock America's involvement in Vietnam, one must note that The Domino Theory (used to justify that involvement) came true.
Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam.
And anyone who pulls the line of "independence from foreign domination" should have a talk with the grey hairs in your local Vietnamese neighborhood, here, in the States. They'll let you know how much people in South Vietnam wanted nothing to do with the tyrannical regime in the North.
Furthermore, one cannot disparage South Vietnam as a puppet regime without also disparaging South Korea, Taiwan, or West Germany for that matter.
There was a class divide with the educated in the south going through a french system asking for western support. I could see how different neighbourhoods would have different opinions. The richer more middle class or higher the more you wanted things to stay the same.
Erm, that’s a lie. US is pretty good at protecting its war criminals, and it was quite visible in this case, where only a single one of the perpetrators has been punished, and the punishment was hilariously low (iirc just a few years of prison).
That's just one of them that we have evidence of. We know this was not a one off event.
Anyone who pulls the line of "Domino Theory" and "America was just fighting communism" must note all the war crimes that the US committed and was never held responsible for.
No? My point is that Vietnam and China have a centuries-long history of antagonism; to take China's support of the North during the Vietnam War as anything other than realpolitik is to miss the greater context.
FWIW, I agree with you regarding the dangers of communist purges- I lived in Laos in the late 70's/early 80's. I saw plenty of first-hand examples of what happens.
Except for the Vietnamese invasion of the Chinese satellite regime in Cambodia, and the literal shooting war between China and Vietnam immediately afterwards.
The Sino-Soviet split was a Very Big Deal, and Vietnam was firmly on the Soviet side of that split.
IIRC. It was primarily the USSR which backed the North Vietnamese.
By the early 70’s the communist block had split between the USSR and China. Vietnam was USSR not Chinese ally.
Not long after the end of the Vietnam war, China attacked Vietnam (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War) ostensibly as the Vietnamese had attacked Cambodia, by this stage supported by China (and the US) to dispose the Khmer Rouge.
Suffice to say it went badly for the PLA and thanks to the Vietnamese the Khmer Rouge was ultimately disposed.
Noone wants a unified Korea, except Koreans. Japan is not interested in having such a powerful economic mix nearby and China the same. Noone wants. If someone wanted, it would be the Koreans only.
First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win.
Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.
> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US.
And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities:
No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO.
I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
Yes, Vietnam is awesome - and there's a lot of capitalism going on even if it's not official.
But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development.
The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.
I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival.
From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.
It is hard to make a comparison between South Korea or Taiwan and Vietnam.
South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.)
And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea.
And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money.
Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995).
A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US.
Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.
I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon.
When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.
I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders.
I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.
Weird, because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and there was nothing but negative press about the Vietnam War. Consensus has been that it was a giant mistake for most of the past couple decades.
I think you're right it was quickly viewed as a "blunder", even just before the war's end, but I think GP might feel that "mistake" is underselling it to a shocking extent. The Strategic Hamlet Program amounted to herding people in South Vietnam into concentration camps -- no, not as awful as those of the Nazis, but concentration camps nonetheless. There were many other brutal policies inflicted on non-combatants (not just spontaneous outbursts, policies).
Have you watched any movies about the Vietnam War? Like Casualties of War (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/, Apocalypse Now (1979), etc : https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ To argue that Americans have been 'heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit' doesn't square up with the coverage and popular media about Vietnam that I've seen since I've been alive. Virtually all of the movies and press are about disillusioned soldiers, brutality, violence, lost causes, etc.
The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea.
I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.
I'm not ncfausti so I think most of this comment doesn't apply to me. Nevertheless, I don't agree with many of your conclusions.
* The existence of films critical of the war does not imply that the mainstream "serious" political opinion of the day (that you would read in national newspapers, for example) went beyond calling the war a "quagmire" or "disaster", then with a justifying "but...", usually mentioning Domino theory or Containment as you implicitly do. I disagree with that assessment.
* The fact that North Vietnam (or Japan, or anyone) were awful in their treatment of PoWs doesn't excuse the US treating civilians in South Korea terribly. You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your own actions (or a close ally's actions), not someone else's. It's not "whataboutism" to focus on the effects you can actually control, even if it's historical. You can't change the past, but you can learn from your own history and understand what is "foreign propaganda" and what's actually just an uncomfortable truth.
* I can think of a few US interventions in the Cold War that seem to have hurt more than they helped, even with info available to decision-makers before committing to them. Vietnam is one of them.
Edit: I don't want to contribute to a pointless back-and-forth asking leading questions of each other, and don't have the time to go into major detail or link reading material, but I just thought I'd at least elaborate my thoughts more on the "blunder" comment, and the point about focusing on your own actions.
I've been to that same museum and also the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought they were neat examples of Vietcong ingenuity and resourcefulness but I'm not ashamed of the US at all. War is complicated and in the case of communist uprisings, internal purges follow "victories" that are just as atrocious as anything outside assistance can do. See Stalin's Great Purge, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc.
Right now, it's very popular on sites like Reddit and increasingly here to fill threads with bad historical takes that list everything bad the US has ever done, as if its acting in a vacuum where no other countries exist. In nearly every case of US intervention, you'll find that other countries were intervening on the other side. That's what the cold war was about. Domino theory was valid and rational. Large marxist countries exported revolution, allied powers supported governments resisting revolution. You might enjoy the underdog story of ethno-nationalists defeating the "empire" but on the other side of that story is always millions of families who lost lives and property to shitty redistribution schemes afterwards. My parents are from a latin american country that suppressed its marxist rebellion(with US help), but I have Cuban-American friends whose grandparents weren't so lucky.
>When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.
I'm generally pretty stoic about these sorts of things, but that museum really did a number on me. I felt emotional and choked up most of the time and it put a damper on the rest of my day. I'm glad I went, though.
>First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US.
My understanding of the war was the USA wasn't there to make Vietnam the 51st State. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.
> They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.
Vietnam was absolutely a second world country at that time, and it was an awful proxy war for many people. The theory that was used was the domino theory, that if a first world country would fall to a second world country, then others would start to fall in a "line of dominos".
There was huge ethnic and class component to the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in many ways it was far more important than the nominal communist character of the North, at least from the Vietnamese perspective.
Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later.
If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail.
The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.
I just googled when 'The Ugly American' came out. 1958! Nobody can say "noone could have known".
I'm not an expert on Vietnam, but I'll just say that whatever their problems with a Chinese merchant class, the problems with a Western burning-villages class were probably bigger at the time.
I'm not trying to defend American policies in Vietnam. But Vietnam became independent in 1954, albeit split between North and South. The Vietnam War as typically understood by Americans, and as encompassing most well known atrocities, wouldn't begin for another 10years.
Also, American and, more generally, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourses tend to infantilize people in these countries. I doubt the Vietnamese had a simplistic, love-hate relationship with either the French or the Americans even after the innumerable atrocities. Just like in every other nation even the masses were and are capable of complex strategic, mixed-motive thinking. Look at the sheer devastation America has caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet AFAIU neither most Iraqis nor most Afghanis wish for U.S. involvement to completely disappear. Americans would never believe themselves capable of pressing a war out of pure spite, anger, or retaliation; yet we somehow think other groups do? IOW, there's something problematic in thinking that what fundamentally drove the Vietnamese was a response to American atrocities. Far more likely (and consonant with the notion that all communities around the world tend to behave similarly) is that those atrocities exacerbated underlying, primary dynamics. Afterall, the merchant class by definition didn't tend to live on rice farms. They were centered in the cities.
The U.S. tried to implement many of the same policies the British did in Malaysia. During the communist insurgency in Malaysia the British corralled ethnic Chinese (the primary supporters of communism, such as they were--i.e. it wasn't that simple) into cities and towns. (To this day ethnic Chinese can't own rural farms outright in Malaysia.) But Chinese communities were already mostly urban, and were of course a minority (20-30%). It was a plan that arguably worked by accident. But such a strategy was never going to work in Vietnam because the dynamics were totally flipped. That would have been much more obvious if the U.S. saw the ethnic divisions for what they were.
Absolutely, except in this case the U.S. wasn't even capable of that. They missed the importance of the ethnic dynamics, apparently too focused on political and economic dynamics that were at best comorbidities and at worst reflections and mirages.
From the random CIA dispatch reports from Laos and Indonesia I've read, low-level American officials were capable of regional socio-political savvy. I just don't think that appreciation ever translated up the chain. So, for example, people have claimed that the U.S. incited genocide in Indonesia. That seems both true and false. True because low-level CIA officers certainly seemed to understand how political and ethnic divisions overlapped and therefore how their anti-communist campaigning could and did devolve to ethnic cleansing. But I don't think leaders in Washington appreciated that at all. Perhaps mostly out of a racist disinclination to consider such aspects, but oblivious nonetheless.
> the problems with a Western burning-villages class
"Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to cow the populace, liquidate opponents, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts. Estimates of the total number of South Vietnamese civilians killed by the VC/PAVN between 1954 and 1975 range from 106,000 to 227,000."
Perhaps we can go back in history a little bit further.
The name Vietnam most probably based on Nanyue or Nam Viet a small little known kingdom created by Qin Dynasty deputy General, name Zhao Tuo or Tro Duo, a Han Chinese [1]. The indigenous or the native people of central and south Vietnam are not from China, they are mainly from Austronesian origin probably Taiwan so called Chams or Cham people [2]. They were the main inhabitants of the land for more than a thousand years (around 1500 years) and had a flourishing Champa kingdoms from 2nd to 16th century AD. The Chams mainly Muslim at the time, had been evicted just like the Moro in the Spain during the Spanish Inquisition or forced to convert. The eviction is completed after the Kinh people from the north displaced them during the Nam tien or "March to the South" and by doing that essentially tripled the original northern kingdom area size [3]. It's a kind of ethnic cleansing by today's standard.
The Kinh is originally ethnic Chinese intermarriage with local Tai-Kadai of the northern Vietnam. For about a thousand years they were essentially conquered and ruled by imperial China. As an analogy the Chams is like the Maya people of Vietnam, until they were eventually evicted rather than assimilated in around 16th AD by the Nguyen lords from the north to the other surrounding countries/areas towards the end of Nam tien movements.
The Chams has a proper civilization called Champa just like the Mayan civilization. The Chams' language is the pre-cursor to the modern Malay and Indonesian language. Their oldest writing on a stone tablet namely Dong Yeng Chau contains an old classical writing of Chams languages in the 4th century AD and was discovered recently in modern Quang Nam province, central Vietnam. It is amazingly still comprehensible if you know the modern language [4]. Interestingly the old name for Quang Nam is Simhapura or Lion City, and it is highly probable than the Cham people conquered Singapore (Singapura) and renamed it similar to their capital's name just like York in the UK becomes New York in the US.
It was the same people on the north vietnamese side all throughout this entire multi-decade period, from the early 1940s till the mid-70s. They fought a rotating cast of western-backed fig leaf local rulers. I'm not sure what else I can tell you, here.
The Geneva Accords that dealt with the dismantling of French Indochina proved to have long-lasting repercussions, however. The crumbling of the French Empire in Southeast Asia led to the formation of the states of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the State of Vietnam (the future Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam), the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Kingdom of Laos.
> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it.
Most countries which became dependent on the US became rich and prosperous. West Germany, Japan, South Korea.
Also, it is much better to be dependent on the US, than dependent on USSR or China.
But of course many left-leaning americans don't understand that. Most of them never lived and never ever visited shithole countries where communism has won and their knowledge of the subject is limited to propaganda posters with Che Guevara portrait.
No I haven't been to Vietnam specifically, but I've been to other countries.
Also, you don't need to visit a country to learn what it's GDP per capita compared to other countries in the region. And you don't need to visit the country to learn that it's citizen are used as a source of cheap unskilled labour, in the country and abroad.
Vietnam is not doing too bad though, they are gradually switching to proper market economy.
Somehow I just knew if I looked back in your comment history, I would find some racism, and an impressive amount of dead/flagged comments. Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot. This doesn't mean you're being persecuted, by the way. It can just mean you're wrong. It's ok. I'm wrong a lot too. Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them?
> Take the hint dude, a lot of people think you're wrong, a lot.
The orange website is quite left-leaning, and there's nothing racist in my comments. Your opinion is understandable, but it doesn't mean I'm "wrong".
And no, I'm not going to bend to groupthink. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience is a greatest achievement of western civilization, and I'm going to use it despite of increasing number of attempts of left-leaning activists to shut it down.
> Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them?
Believe me, I do it, when I learn something new. But only then, but not when I'm downvoted/flagged or told I'm wrong or racist.
I wouldn't characterize HN as left-leaning. Maybe liberal with a dash of libertarian techbro thrown in.
Also to quote you: "I would hope CEO to protect someone saying “be safe from rioters and looters in BLM marches”, but that won’t happen.
It’s easy to protect someone who is supported by the majority. " Is pretty borderline racist. Maybe not overtly so, but the fact that you equate protesting getting killed with looting and rioting rubs a little too close to it. Oh and then denying racist policies are, in fact, racist just because they don't meet the dictionary definition of it.
Also - freedom of speech being the greatest achievement of western civ? No wonder it took the Muslim civilizations to get us out of the dark ages. And left-leaning activists shutting it down? Jesus dude. Read the constitution. You clearly have no idea what freedom of speech (in America) is.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
That's it. CONGRESS. Nothing about market forces pushing tech companies to deplatform people. Nothing about "cancel culture" or whatever. I mean, I also remember the Bush years, when we had "Free Speech Zones" and nobody on the right was really concerned about it because it only affected people who were protesting the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle.
I mean, Florida (a state run by a pretty right-wing governor) just passed a law essentially denying tech companies freedom of speech. The projection from the right is absolutely ridiculous at this point.
Sometimes, you're just wrong. Whether you admit it or whether you claim you are being some superior moral authority and refusing to bend to "groupthink."
Stupid HN denied me commenting "You're posting too fast". But it let you know that only when you submit the comment. So I'll post the comment from the fresh account.
> the fact that you equate protesting getting killed with looting and rioting rubs
Sorry, I could not understand that phrase. Who is getting killed, and what I equate to what?
> Oh and then denying racist policies are, in fact, racist just because they don't meet the dictionary definition of it.
It's really hard to talk to people which like to redefine words. Calling everything and everyone racists and literal nazis just because they don't like it.
I'll stick to the dictionary.
> And left-leaning activists shutting it down? Jesus dude. Read the constitution. You clearly have no idea what freedom of speech (in America) is.
Freedom of speech is far broader term than US constitution even in the US.
For example, UK has freedom in speech, but it is not in the constitution.
On the other hand, many authoritarian countries have more more freedom of speech in the constitution than the US. But they don't really have free speech.
"Cancelling" people for speech reduces that free speech even if it does not violate constitution.
I must say, you have no idea what freedom is speech is.
> I mean, Florida (a state run by a pretty right-wing governor) just passed a law essentially denying tech companies freedom of speech. The projection from the right is absolutely ridiculous at this point.
Denying companies right to deplatform people might be a limitation of business freedom or whatever, but calling it attack on freedom of speech, this is a hot take.
Yeah, we definitely have very different understanding of freedom of speech.
Just in case, this is a quote from wikipedia:
Freedom of speech: Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Censorship: Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. ... Censorship can be conducted by governments, *private institutions*, and other controlling bodies.
> Sorry, I could not understand that phrase. Who is getting killed, and what I equate to what?
People were out protesting the murders of black men by police, and you refer to them as looters and rioters in your prior comments - along with some defenses of Gab/Parler - both of which I was banned from for posting things that weren't right wing enough. Great freedom of speech there. I was cancelled by the right!
> Freedom of speech is far broader term than US constitution even in the US.
Right, that's why I said "in America" - which is commonly where people make up complaints about supposed leftists trying to get rid of it - when nearly every law limiting it in my lifetime has been proposed by either Republicans or Democrats - neither of which are leftist.
>"Cancelling" people for speech reduces that free speech even if it does not violate constitution.
No, it doesn't. If I choose to shop somewhere else because I think your products suck, or because I disagree with your views, I'm not reducing the total freedom of speech - I am using my right, in a semi-free market, to give business to whomever I choose. If you come into my house and say things I don't want being said in my house, it's my right to ask you to leave. If I go into a business with no shirt and no shoes - guess what - I get no service. I broke the rules, they don't have to serve me. This does not "reduce free speech" in any way. Free speech doesn't mean you get to do anything you want, and besides which, there are already limits on it - speech that incites violence, things like yelling "fire", making false statements under oath, threatening to kill someone, we had all kinds of anti-smut laws for decades here, on and on. I mean, do you bitch when AMC won't show a movie that isn't rated by the MPAA? Is that "censorship" or is it a business exercising their right to not show something they disagree with?
Political belief is not (and should not be) a protected class, therefore nobody is required to transact with you, they have a choice. It's also your choice to get butthurt and complain about being cancelled (on the very platforms that are supposedly doing the cancelling, just like Marjorie Green wearing a "censored" mask while speaking on national TV).
I get the the right has never really had to suffer any consequences ever, at least in America, for anything, so this may be a little disconcerting. Go ahead and look up how many right wing groups the FBI/CIA infiltrated just for being right wing, and compare that to America going out of it's way around the world to disrupt anything even remotely left of liberal. Or how many left wing publications have been targeted over the years by the government. Or how communism (as much as I disagree with it) was the biggest scare in the world and would get you blacklisted ("cancelled") here in the 50's for even being remotely associated or making someone think you might be associated with it, even if you were a famous physicist who led the development of the atomic bomb. Or you know, the Bush years, where I was teargassed and arrested for peacefully protesting the fact that my tax dollars were being used to bomb people who didn't do anything to me. Have you been teargassed or arrested for exercising your supposed right to free speech? I know the people arresting me DEFINITELY weren't spending their nights reading Chomsky, so if they weren't leftists "cancelling" me, then who were they?
> People were out protesting the murders of black men by police, and you refer to them as looters and rioters in your prior comments
No, I referred to people who were looting and rioting.
Also, it was not murder. George Floyd case was manslaughter at best. I think it is not even manslaughter, but I'm not a lawyer. Again, as I said before, it's hard to talk to people who redefine words for their advantage.
> along with some defenses of Gab/Parler - both of which I was banned from for posting things that weren't right wing enough. Great freedom of speech there. I was cancelled by the right!
It is called deplatforming, not cancelling. If that's true, shame on them! Show me the proof, I'm condemn both of these platforms.
> If I choose to shop somewhere else because I think your products suck, or because I disagree with your views, I'm not reducing the total freedom of speech - I am using my right, in a semi-free market, to give business to whomever I choose.
Yes. But if you dig 10 years old tweet, and then demand a company to fire an employee, and gather a big crowd, that is cancelling.
By the way, my personal policy is to ignore companies which participate in any political activity, whether they support gay rights, christian rights, nazi rights, black rights, human rights, animal rights or whatever, I don't care, I would pick a company which just sells a product. Simply because dividing society is bad, and I support companies which do not do that.
> Free speech doesn't mean you get to do anything you want, and besides which, there are already limits on it - speech that incites violence, things like yelling "fire"
Technically it does limit free speech. And limiting free speech is sometimes acceptable, when it is universally acceptable. Only a dozen of knuckleheads would support freedom to shout "fire" in a theater.
> do you bitch when AMC won't show a movie that isn't rated by the MPAA? Is that "censorship" or is it a business exercising their right to not show something they disagree with?
It is not freedom of speech issue for several reasons: they are not monopoly, their resource is limited, there are children who watch TV etc.
> I get the the right has never really had to suffer any consequences ever, at least in America, for anything, so this may be a little disconcerting. Go ahead and look up how many right wing groups the FBI/CIA infiltrated just for being right wing
Technically it was never? just because they are left wing, US has so many laws, there's a law to harass anyone. Ruby Ridge was one of many case where right-leaning people were harassed by the government. But I agree, until recently, left wing were harassed by the government more often.
That statement of yours looks like you are willing to retaliate against rights for injustices of the past. This is very shortsighted, let alone inhumane. Those FBI/CIA agents and their bosses are long dead. Don't punish children for the sins of their fathers.
> Have you been teargassed or arrested for exercising your supposed right to free speech?
I can tell you my story, and there are unpleasant parts in it, believe me, I know what I'm talking about. But that story is not for this website, we can continue in e-mail if you wish. farright@altmails.com is a redirect e-mail.
Anyway, I'm always on the side of those oppressed. When free speech is restricted for someone, I'm all for them regardless of their political views, lefts, rights, jews, arabs, blacks, whites, gays, christians, nazis, doesn't matter. When peaceful protesters get arrested, again, they have my full support regardless of their views. But when people start burning buildings because of police incident resulting in non-intentional killing of junkie criminal resisting arrest, they have no my support.
Yeah no thanks. “Junkie criminal” as if you knew him personally. And to think the protests were about a single person - clearly you don’t care enough to be informed.
I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever. Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part, oh great defender of free speech who also somehow supports people who want to take away the speech (and lives) of people who disagree.
Also, the civil rights movement is not the distant past. Ruby Bridges is still alive. The FBI did what they could to fuck that up. Occupy too, and now BLM. These are not ancient history, these are events within (some of) our lives.
I did not get that. Do I need to know him personally to know that he has junkie and a criminal?
> And to think the protests were about a single person
Sure protests were for all good and against all bad.
But there were too many posters about George Floyd and other black criminals, there was too many lies in crime statistics posted by left-wing media supporting these protests, so let's say these protesters were misinformed at best.
> clearly you don’t care enough to be informed.
Well, you have formed your opinion about what I know and what I don't (not the first time in this thread). It's not my job to convince you otherwise. Continue living in an imaginary world where everyone who disagree with you is literally nazi.
> I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever.
Thank you for your opinion, but I'm not on the side of nazis. I'm on the side of freedom of speech and other human rights.
> Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part
I'm not "siding" with these people. I try protect their rights and freedom as well as rights and freedoms of anyone else.
I'll try to explain the difference, but it is so obvious, so explanation might be hard.
There are two reasons: humanist and practical.
First, even serial killers and rapists deserve humane treatment, right to fair trial etc. Including free speech. Abandoning eye for an eye principle is also a great achievement of the western civilization.
Second, if society today decides it is acceptable to take speech rights from nazis, tomorrow it will decide it can take speech rights from communists, day after tomorrow you won't be able to talk freely. It happened too often throughout history, even in modern times, literally in the last decade (I'm not talking about the US, but it applies to the US to some degree).
> I did not get that. Do I need to know him personally to know that he has junkie and a criminal?
Yes, since you only seem to know what right wing media tells you. Rush Limbaugh was also a junkie and a criminal by those standards, yet he gets a medal of freedom or whatever.
> George Floyd and other black criminals
This is why you are an uninformed racist. You can disagree all you like but it doesn't really change the reality of it.
> everyone who disagree with you is literally nazi.
I never called you or anyone who disagrees with me a nazi. I said "defending nazis is reprehensible" basically.
> I'm on the side of freedom of speech and other human rights.
Again, no you are not. If you defend those who would seek to take away the lives of others, you are not on the side of human rights. Right to life and all that.
> serial killers and rapists deserve humane treatment, right to fair trial etc. Including free speech. Abandoning eye for an eye principle is also a great achievement of the western civilization.
I agree, but this isn't a trial.
>decides it is acceptable to take speech rights from nazis, tomorrow it will decide it can take speech rights from communists
I mean, it did? Look at the 50's. Rightwing cancel culture and deplatforming at it's finest. Also, taking away the rights of those who don't respect the same right in others is kind of ok - that's sort of what our justice system is based on, since you likened this to a trial.
> Rush Limbaugh was also a junkie and a criminal by those standards, yet he gets a medal of freedom or whatever.
Many criminals junkies walk free regardless of their skin color. George Floyd was just too unlucky to be high on several drugs, committed crime and resisted arrest on the same day. This combo could not end well.
> This is why you are an uninformed racist. You can disagree all you like but it doesn't really change the reality of it.
I'm not a racist, and I don't talk with people who throw insults, and generally don't talk to people who cannot conduct a constructive dialogue.
So this is my last reply to you. You may reply, and I'll read that reply, but I won't reply to you again. It was an interesting conversation. Thanks!
> I never called you or anyone who disagrees with me a nazi.
I was speaking figuratively. It just happens way to often by left wing people. In fact, you just called me racist in the same message. There's irony in that.
> If you defend those who would seek to take away the lives of others, you are not on the side of human rights.
I must say, you don't understand the modern meaning of human rights. Even criminals have these rights. Like UN requires it, all of the western countries signed it, most of the world countries signed it. It is universally agreed on in the western society. Well, I thought so, until I read your comment, and was quite disappointed. I thought better of left-wing people.
> Also, taking away the rights of those who don't respect the same right in others is kind of ok
So it's OK to rape the rapist, I got it. And I already replied to that: fortunately eye for an eye was abandoned by the western civilization, but unfortunately left-wing people are pulling civilization back to the dark ages.
The NY Times is NOT left wing, it is liberal. Same with CNN. Also, the Times article says he moved away to get a fresh start. Do you believe a person is ALWAYS a junkie or criminal? I've been to jail. Does that mean I am a criminal, permanently?
Since when are police allowed to be executioners? How can you be ok with that? Why can't non-lethal force be used, a person brought to jail, and then charged with a crime. He wasn't charged with anything, and in America I thought people were "innocent until proven guilty."
>I'm not a racist,
So you are one of the only humans I have ever met who has no unconscious bias, is perfectly aware of the entirety of their mind, and does not need anyone else to hold up a mirror for them to show them their blind spots. Got it.
> It just happens way to often by left wing people. In fact, you just called me racist in the same message.
You should hear what I've been called by right wing people. And I'm not saying all racists are nazis. Some racists are just racist without knowing it, some are "culturally racist" like much of my family - ignorant, usually. Some are just racist and don't want to exterminate other races, but believe all sorts of bullshit bell-curve garbage. There are plenty of other categories.
>Even criminals have these rights.
Yes, we agree. And what was being protested last year was the unequal application of those rights, and police forces acting as judges, juries, and executioners, when they are supposed to be people who apprehend (not kill) criminals or gather evidence to use at a trial. I used to live in a 99% white neighborhood. My former roommate was a black man. I never had a front license plate on my car (illegal here) in the three years I lived there and never had a problem. He drove without one for a week and got pulled over three times. By cops who "weren't racist" according to them. You think those cops thought they were racist? You could have even been one of them for all I know.
>So it's OK to rape the rapist, I got it
No, I don't believe in an eye for eye but you keep putting up straw men to try to make me into some caricature of what you think a left wing person is, like how calling people nazis happens often so I'm obviously doing it, when you were the first person to mention them at all anyways.
In fact, every single person on the left that I know of is pretty against retributive justice and instead prefers rehabilitative justice. In a rehabilitative system, someone like George Floyd would have gotten addiction counseling, support as he was getting back on his feet, and help keeping his life in order, and the protests of last year would likely never have happened. This is just more projection from you. The right wing is always the one who is all about eye-for-an-eye - how many right wing people are calling for the abolition of the death penalty? Isn't "tough on crime" usually a big hit with the right wing voting bloc? Even liberals are on board with that garbage. How many prison abolitionists can you name on the right or even center? It's how we end up with shit like the Clinton crime bill or whatever.
As a Brazilian, USA support in the 1964 military coup in Brazil is something that has negative consequences that endure to this day and will probably still last a few more decades.
Iran sold oil at basically the same price and with the same legal structure as Saudi Aramaco did. That shouldn't be surprising, both countries reliance on western expertise and capital investment lessened dramatically in the decade following the initial concessions; and with it, Iran and Saudi arabia were able to overturn the initial legal framework that favored UK and US investors. Iran and Saudi Arabia certainly did not give oil away.
As for Afghanistan, the taliban has only recently expanded its territorial base before 9/11. The afghan government of today controls more territory than the soviet backed state ever did; whose control only extended to the major population centers and connecting arteries.
> Iran problems began with islamic revolution, and USA had nothing to do with it, no?
This is incorrect. In 1953, the United States overthrew the democratically elected PM and installed a dictator. The Islamic Revolution was a response to that.
It is oversimplistic to say the Islamic Revolution was a response to that, because the Shah was already gone when Khomeini returned from exile. Rather, the general Iranian Revolution (with its heavy involvement of Communists and other secular movements) was a response to the Shah's dictatorship, and then the subsequent Islamic Revolution was a taking advantage of the resultant power vacuum.
Well, during and after the Korean War, South Korea was under a corrupt dictator who killed several hundred thousand civilians for being communist. Its economy didn't improve until 60s, and it couldn't be really called a democratic country until mid-90s.
So it's a bit of a stretch to claim that South Korea became today's South Korea because it survived the war in 1953. One could equally say that Vietnam's economic development in 2000s validates North Vietnam's victory.
True, and North Korea current poverty is totally made by the international sanctions lead by the US. Vietnam is a great example that a communist country can open slowly if not bullied into a antagonistic position by the US.
Do not defend communism, man... you have too many history records to know it is a failure in all senses: poverty and lack of freedom.
For the record, China and Vietnam is not what I would call communist. That is more North Korea or Cuba. In Vietnam even foreigners can buy property already nowadays. I do not recall the exact conditions but I know people who did it. It is a capitalist system, actually. With a lot of control sometimes, but with market rules.
It is not about the sanctions. It is the system chosen. Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that. There is a lot of literature about the problem of economic calculation in socialism systems proved by how russians did theirs, for example (black markets and copying countries budgets, the U.S. army compared to the russian one is an example of such a thing).
And do not make me started on the repression, that is the worst part. But all go hand in hand at the end.
Vietnam is developing, and I am glad it is. But what they are doing is not communism at all, do not sell us that. I have been living there for almost 10 years and I hope I can come back. It is a lovely country.
Yes, I know, and South Koreans had to fight ~40 years after the Korean War to gain that right. That's the point I'm trying to make: a war is never about good guys beating bad guys, and when it ends nobody goes home as a victor and lives happily ever after.
South Korea started growing rapidly by the beginning of the 1960's and its economic growth has been consistent regardless of the political regime [^1]. What has been consistent was a significantly different economic system than the North, which would certainly not have survived unification after a North Korean victory. Military spending can't explain the disparity between the North and South as China had similar economic performance and consistently lower aggregate per capita spending than the North.
Vietnam, on the other hand, only really began to reform its economy after the collapse of the soviet union. If anything, North Vietnam's victory emboldened communist leaders in the aftermath of the war.
South Korea was fortunate in that its second dictator, despite being an utterly despicable human shitbag, had a knack for economic development (or maybe he had good economic aides - I don't know). However, its 60s economic system was about as capitalist as 90s China - it was built upon massive government projects to boost export, allocated to large corporations, and the government repressed wages and crushed labor unions so that these corporations could stay competitive.
In fact there were strong parallels to the Soviet economic plans, see:
There has been a lot of studies into the economic performance of south korea and the other asian tigers compared to latin american countries that had similar levels of economic development after WWII and one commonality is the inability of government subsidies to influence export success. A product exported on the global market by a country desperate for foreign investment probably doesn't have the means to gain a competitive advantage through direct capital investment or subsidies.
Of course, a country can always be competitive by keeping wages low (probably artificially low in south korea) but I think south korea and the other asian tigers got a lot of things right that aren't comparable to how mainland china approached economic reform.
Besides being of a duration of five years there isn't a lot in common the economic planning of the soviet union and south korea in the aftermath of the Korean war. The soviet union's plans controlled the allocation of almost every resource and good in the economy and its ultimate price. South Korea's planning was mostly limited to guiding government investment and lacked the policy levers available to Gosplan.
Let's just say the government is super evil and they covered up 99 deaths every 100 deaths for some reason, although we have no evidence that they did. They lost 50,000 people.
It's generally seen as having as effective response against the pandemic. They closed borders early and have employed an effective testing and tracing strategy. Their data appears to be transparent and is corroborated by neighboring countries.
I just read this, posting the reference in another reply, seems to be a good enough summary:
"One of the reasons Vietnam was able to act so quickly and keep the case count so low is that the country experienced a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 and human cases of avian influenza between 2004 and 2010. As a result, Vietnam had both the experience and infrastructure to take appropriate action. Vietnam makes many key containment decisions in a matter of days, which may take weeks for governments in other countries to make. Although Vietnam is a highly centralized country, a number of key decisions were made at the local level, which also contributed to the swift response."
If you have any indication that the numbers are fabricated you're better off posting them (or any references at all). Otherwise you just sound like you're appealing to prejudices, like as if "south-east asian" countries couldn't possibly have had an effective epidemiologic response.
(It might not have - you might be right - still, the form of your argument is completely wrong for fruitful discussion)
I've spent time studying abroad in Vietnam so I think I can answer honestly.
One day, I went camping with some friends. We then returned to the capital and 2 days later I saw the high rise she lived in on the news. She lives in a high rise that's about 38 floors, with around 30 units per floor, so that's about 1000 units. Someone who lived somewhere in that high rise had tested positive for covid so they placed the building under a police barricade. A couple days later they limited the restrictions to only the floors the patient (zero) had been to.
Right now they're experiencing a really bad covid outbreak, and I'm not entirely confident that this isn't the big one that will lead to non-stop community transmission like in the US.
There are a ton of foreigners in the country, I know maaaany people working for embassies from western countries, if there are shady stuff going on you would hear it from them.
A recent development is that they aren't publishing the schedules of an infected person anymore. Before they use to say:
J.S who works at the Samsung Plant on 14 Main St. on the 14th of May visited the Starbucks from 2pm-3pm on Xuan Dieu street, then he visited the au co flower market from 3pm-4:30pm, and then went to Karaoke with colleagues at 54 Blueberry Lane from 5pm-9:30pm, afterwhich he took a cab home whose driver has not yet been identified.
And they would do that for every day since their suspected time of infection. So it was extremely privacy invasive but it helps with contact tracing. Now they will just announce the locations, I presume it's because there's too many new cases.
Recently in the news there was a couple who tested positive for covid but wouldn't come out of their house for 2 or 4 hours against police & health worker's demands. If you have covid, you are forced into hospitalization so you can be monitored by doctors and not infect others.
If you so much as went to the same grocery store at the same time as a covid patient you're going to get sent into centralized quarantine.
They know they can't handle millions of cases so they have to crack down hard on any cases. The death toll last week was only 30, it's these part few weeks that it's been steadily going up.
Do you believe widespread and aggressive quarantine and contact tracing are an effective tool against COVID-19? 50 does seem suspicious. I am skeptical of the data. And yet, if a government (and popluation) actually went along with contact tracing and (real) quarantine, I truly believe it would be relatively straight forward to contain and stop the spread of the virus.
Last year there was a story that Vietnam had spearfished the chinese health ministry and got an idea how bad covid is in real time. That's why they locked boarders pretty fast and got away rather lightly.
> Urbani realized that Chen's ailment was probably a new and highly contagious disease. He immediately notified the WHO, triggering a response to the epidemic (principally isolation and quarantine measures) that would end it within five months. He also persuaded the Vietnamese Health Ministry to begin isolating patients and screening travelers, thus slowing the early pace of the epidemic.
> But by the end of the two-hour meeting, the vice minister of health, Nguyen Van Thuong, had agreed to allow WHO to summon an international team of experts. He also promised to organize a task force at the ministry that would review the situation daily.
> It was, Brudon said, a "turning point."
> Vietnam's response contrasted with that of China, which for weeks tried to conceal the extent of its outbreak. But a health official in Vietnam, Le Thi Thu Ha, said her country made a simple calculation: "We needed that technical assistance," she said.
> ...
> That week, the Health Ministry set up a task force. Days later, a dozen epidemiologists and pathologists had arrived from Britain, the United States, Sweden, Germany, France and Australia.
They asked for help when they needed help, not saving face like China's handling of COVID in 2019.
This seems like a flame. Anyway, strategically speaking, US COVID-19 deaths had little impact on the country's fighting strength. So they're not really comparable to North Vietnam's war losses.
Attributing south Korea's success after 1980 to US intervention in 1950 is disingenuous.
South Korea had an economy that was similar to or slightly worse than North Korea until the 80s.
This is a classic example of "white man's burden" where south Korean success in 1980 is being attributed to white intervention in 1950, which was followed by decades of poverty. Apparently Koreans can't build a country without American help. Perhaps north Korea would also have been in much better shape without US sponsored world wide sanctions.
If you want to know the consequences of American intervention, latin America is impossible to ignore. Especially Haiti.
Winning a war and living with the consequences are two very different things. Vietnam won the war. At great cost. Things might have been different if they lost.
But the US did lose the war, come out of the region and its primary objective of preventing a socialist govt. in Vietnam could not be achieved.
Was it worth it for Vietnam to win the war, that is a totally different question. Was it worth it for US to lose the war? Definitely not. The mightiest nation on earth could not overcome a peasant nation with guerrilla fighters and outdated equipment. That is a slap in the face.
I wonder how the misadventures of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan would have played out had we had this sort of media coverage - CNN and others was just an extension of the Pentagon.
CNN was founded in 1980. The US withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 and Saigon fell in 1975. US media coverage of Vietnam near the end of the war was much fairer than cable news coverage of the Iraq wars, though it was still US-centric it did start to show the atrocities. During the Vietnam war US media were much freer to go out on their own (at great personal risk); the Gulf War model was for the Pentagon to manage coverage by having the press "embed" with military units so they would think like the US soldiers they were with.
The ultimate goal of removing Saddam and destroying the Iraqi army (4th largest) were important strategic goals because oil, although the reasons given to the American people were at best superficial. Saudi Arabia and other countries paid for part of the US military effort, around $40 billion.
Afghanistan is a strange story and isn't well-understood by Americans. Its location is important, as well as its natural resources. Ideally Russia, Pakistan and the US would have come up with a plan to occupy it since the Taliban is certainly a threat to Pakistan, as well as the Russian border.
(Pakistan is reluctant to fight the Taliban because of Islamic ideology swaying lower ranks in the Pakistani army. But Russia and the US worked at cross-purposes. In some ways Afghanistan and Palestine are similar - nobody wants them or to be responsible for them.)
As you look at those photos and read the captions, keep in mind that the people who migrated from North Vietnam to South Vietnam outnumbered those in the opposite direction by at least a factor of two while that war lasted.
Also keep in mind that, after North Vietnam successfully INVADED South Vietnam, one to two million million people crossed open ocean, through shark-infested waters, in hand-made boats in order to get away from the regime which those photos extol.
The pictures on that website are communist propaganda and should be taken as seriously as those made under the Soviet Union or East Germany.
That war was multi-faceted in many ways. There was the internal struggle between a corrupt government which was loath to reform (land reform as the US suggested) and on the other hand, the Communists who had become ideological and who killed and re-educated their own countryfolk from the losing side. Then there were external forces at play, France, then the US, the USSR and China. Finally the old guard was replaced by the new guard and VN and the US reconciled at long last.
> As you look at those photos and read the captions, keep in mind that the people who migrated from North Vietnam to South Vietnam outnumbered those in the opposite direction by at least a factor of two while that war lasted.
You might also keep in mind the millions killed in the bombing of the north. Might make me want to go south, too.
I am a software developer in the US with a Vietnamese origin, so I am no historian and my views are probably skewed.
I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.
When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win.
I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article:
>She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.
I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into.
My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.
By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html
> They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.
This belief is certainly reflected in one of the best books I've read about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, who was a reporter there throughout the war and devoted a large part of his life to chronicling it.
He repeatedly shows how the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), from commanders down to recruits, were not deeply motivated in the same way the Viet Cong were - abandoning battlefields, taking bribes to leave the front, etc. Additionally, the South Vietnamese political class was a corrupt gerontocracy with little in common with the people (either peasant farmers or urban) they were supposed to be leading.
For that reason, early American observers said they'd rather be on the side of the North than the South.
I like this video about a soldier on the ground who realized quickly why the war was unwinnable. The cycle of killing and destruction left the people with nothing but anger and pain, leading them to fight even harder:
> it became clear within three or four months,
That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear.
I mean this notion of defending the people against
these invaders from North Vietnam.
The people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me.
[...]
the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me.
I beat them, I sometimes kill them, I destroy their houses,
I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture.
Why in the hell should those people like me?
And I could see that I was doing that,
and I could see that nothing we were doing was having any impact on the war itself.
I think that video is part of a bigger documentary series by PBS[1]. I learned so much about the modern US history and how even to this day the Vietnam war continues to exert its influence in the US in many different ways.
If find it more often than not, the side losing the war is the one who thinks that the war was probably a good idea, and than it wasn't.
When your soldiers starting to think "wtf am doing here?," after first thinking they were going for a picnic, you loose in a short order. And even faster if soldier also think that their political leadership are idiots.
I have a bunch of family in the Bay Area, who ended up there from North Vietnam. You're right that the accents can be recognized, but I also think you're right that resentments have faded. At least I'm pretty sure one of my cousins married a South Vietnamese lady a few years ago.
We still have a couple of stories in the family about the bombings. I wonder how accurate the details are.
One was my uncle, who was driving a truck over the last bridge to be bombed in Hanoi. He got to the bridge, it got bombed, and everyone was looking for his body for days. My grandmother was at the river every day. Luckily, he had somehow not gotten killed, and was in fact stuck on the wrong side, safe. He'd driven upriver to the next crossing, which took some time.
The other story is that my mom's neighbour had a bomb land in her house. The family was killed, apart from the girl, who was my mom's age. My grandmother took her in to live with them. I think the memory had quite an impression on my parents, as they in turn took in a girl to live with them later in life.
A lot of wars in history have been won by invaders who chose near total genocide of the male population of annexed territories.
Many nations opposed by a military-superior enemy have lost no matter their sense of righteousness.
The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.
All credit to them. To be honest, few nations could have managed this. In that era they were likely the most battle-hardened people in the world.
> The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.
It's also worth mentioning that the US had no reasonable way to "win". The threat of Chinese involvement prevented them from invading the north, and strategic air campaigns alone aren't enough when it comes to guerrilla warfare.
Nixon admits within the tape that he's trying to incite Kissinger, whom he is addressing. Both of them knew the risks of increasing the stakes in Vietnam.
The threat of Chinese reaction to American over-reach was very real. It happened in Korea and the Americans didn't want to repeat that mistake.
The U.S. did try to use overwhelming force in Vietnam. It literally dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than it did during the whole of WWII. It drafted all the men the country would stand. It destroyed one, if not two, Presidents. Still not enough.
I guess the point of my comment is to push back against the suggestion that the US "could have won" except for pesky morals and domestic critics.
America lost Vietnam because they failed to understand how to undertake counter insurgency operations, they threw untrained conscripts (who didn’t want to be there, and fucked up) into it. They also didn’t care about winning hearts and minds of the local population to drive support away from the VietCong, measuring success by bodycount.
Vietnam massively scared the US military for a long time, only really going away with the massive success of the Gulf War. It is always valuable to get the other sides perspective on a conflict.
Ultimately in a civil war, both sides are usually good and bad, depending on the perspective you take. The vietnam war was no different. It is good to see that the wounds of the war are mostly healed.
Hey look, yet another simpleton confusing the 15-republics-wide USSR (encompassing over 100 national ethnicities) with the single republic of Russia. You sure seem like an expert on these matters.
Thanks for sharing your stories. I liked your blog post. I felt sadness, fear about the future and past, and hope as well as strength in there. I'm sorry this will probably seem like an inconsiderate or dumb question, and I don't know much about Vietnam's history or government, but I wanted to ask what do you think, or what do Vietnamese people think these days, about China's success with their socialism model?
Thank you for sharing. I read your blog and it was really well-said and moving. I shared it with a friend who thought it was poignant and fantastic writing. If you ever create a Substack or something of the sort, I'd certainly subscribe.
>Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.
Former bureaucrats and their children, who fled Vietnam before 2009, are always having disgruntled feeling against Vietnam and Vietnamese successes in general. I know a bunch of them but they won't exist much any longer since Vietnam will aggressively become more powerful and extend its Communist influence overseas. It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.
I strolled around many Chinatowns across the US to Europe, and I see PRC flags and Chinese United Fronts everywhere. This is the future of overseas Vietnamese communities.
>My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.
They won because they have been largely smarter than history. Trần Văn Hương, a former top RVN official, once said that only Northerners can reign the country supreme, while Southerners and Centralers are more fitting at commerce and warfare which Northerners are also very proficient. This is also my similar observation in the overseas Vietnamese communities where those Vietnamese people of Northern background or Chinese Vietnamese are largely more successful than anyone in the community - mostly Northerners.
The North won because it had been cultured, determined, militant, more clever due to centures of exposure with threats from China.
> It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.
As a Vietnamese I don't see this happening, if you think because it happened in China then it'll happen in Vietnam too, there are a couple of differences:
1) Vietnam doesn't have a "middle kingdom" mentality, we've always been and always will be a small country navigating our success with bigger powers around, so less of that blind nationalism bs, eventhough it's there
2) More importantly, we don't have a great firewall, so people are only going to be more disillussioned about the regime as more of them learn about the outside world.
I am pro socialism btw but of course it's a different thing. Socialism is a growing mindset in the west for sure.
What is the "winning" side? War comes at a massive cost for all participants. Interestingly the URL for the article implies the original name was "Vietnam war images from Vietnamese photographers" and was later changed to what it says now... I don't mean this as a slight to Vietnam whatsoever of course, I just don't understand using words "winning" and "losing" when anywhere from 1.5-4 million people died.
Completely agree. The "winning" side might be politicians or high-ranking army officers. The population? In almost all cases, they are the real losers, regardless of which sides they sympathize with, if any.
Indeed! And you could say that the real "winners" of this year's Super Bowl were the fans and spectators! Or, more cynically, perhaps the advertisers and other corporate interests who profited from it.
That's a reasonable thing to say and not at all willfully ignoring what is meant when someone talks about the winner of a competition between two opposed parties.
Really; More bombs in tonnage were dropped in three months than the entirety of WW2. The devastation wrought by the US on Vietnam is still being felt today, particularly the use of Agent Orange. The birth defects stemming from exposure are horrifying.
Looking at those pictures, I would not have predicted them as the winning side. The picture of the field operating theater in the middle of a swamp is particularly moving. They must have felt they were fighting against unbelievable odds: the most powerful military in the world, with all the bombers, the agent orange, the napalm, the best equipment.. it must have taken a lot of courage to keep up the fight against that. Especially as they watched all their compatriots dying like flies.
It's saving face. Robert McNamara was several different kinds of fool. JFK & LBJ were even bigger fools for keeping him as SecDef.
Later, when Nixon became president, the situation changed for the better, but it was a slog. Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese premier better terms than what LBJ was offering, but, by the time he came into office, the situation had gotten so bad that it was all that he could do just to guarantee South Vietnam's existence.
Nevertheless, the situation stabilized. The North Vietnamese army was pushed out of South Vietnam. Nixon got the North to sign a cease-fire agreement, which the North (being perfidious communists) violated.
And the South Vietnamese army got good enough that, after Nixon had pulled American ground troops out of the area, South Vietnam was able to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression, for a while.
In 1972, North Vietnam sent 150,000 troops—along with columns of tanks from the Soviet Union—to invade South Vietnam. The latter had American air support, but only its own troops on the ground.
Result: Less than a third of North Vietnam's invasion force made it back north. Roughly 650 Americans were KIA in a campaign as big as the Battle of Kharkov. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had won, big time.
Then, Watergate happened.
In 1975, North Vietnam—violating the cease-fire agreement AGAIN—launched another invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union continued to support North Vietnam. The Congress of the United States of America pulled all support from South Vietnam.
Result: Yet another workers' paradise blighting the history of the twentieth century. And the kind of gloating you can see in this discussion thread.
My dad was a hospital corpsman on the USS Repose (hospital ship) during Vietnam. Having seen some of his operating room photos, I can't imagine that we were on the "winning" side.
The video above is his amateur footage he took while aboard the ship. Probably 1968/1969.
* I'm not sure of the specifics of the camera. But the reels of film say "KodaChrome Movie Film Super 8" on their boxes.
* I don't think he ever saw the footage. I would assume that at some point he had a projector, but as far as I can remember, he just always kept them in his top drawer. He always talked about getting them transferred to VHS. Never did it.
He didn't like the military. He had a lot of explosive outbursts I remember growing up. Later in his life, when he was finally convinced to see a VA doctor, he was diagnosed with PTSD with - 100% related to the war. He received full disability but very late in life. He was fired from so many jobs during his lifetime.
In the 70s, Kodak introduced a variant of Super 8 film that had a magnetic strip for audio, but it wasn’t widely used. Later in the 70s video on magnetic tape cassettes became popular, which was the first time most people had home movies with sound.
Both technologies arrived too late for the US war in Vietnam.
Quite a coincidence. My dad was an HM3 on the USS Frontier from 1964 to 1967. He also passed in 2016. He never talked much about his service though. I only remember one story he told where US soldiers were issued bullet proof vests for the first time, and they chose to try them out by shooting each other with M16s. The result wasn't pretty.
Fascinating. I wonder what the psychology is there.
I saw a Plymouth Superbird a couple years ago that had “original damage”. It looked like it had been stolen and taken on a joyride. No straight body panels, scratches everywhere.
The story went that some kid got drafted and figured he was never coming home so he spent his life savings on the fastest car he could and tried to have as much fun as possible.
I assume it is a similar state of mind to a terminal medical diagnosis.
My Father-in-law was a Vietnam Vet, an older one who had been in the military for awhile and made a career out of it. I believe he retired in 1978, he passed several years ago.
My wife was born after he retired and he spoke very little about the war. He had PTSD, but he'd mostly dealt with it by the time I met him.
The only vivid story I recall. He talked about when they were stationed at an outpost. The supplies would be stacked up in a central area and he was getting the rations for his men. There was an explosion and everyone thought they were being shelled.
However, it turned out that one of the other Sergeants was wearing a grenade on his vest. The pin caught on something and pulled out without him noticing.
They had to spend the next few days taping down the pins on all the grenades to avoid another accident.
Amazing... my aeromedical examiner, Dr Richard Pellerin, served as a special forces medical corpsman in Vietnam in 1969/1970. He also filmed his own observations and recently digitized/uploaded about an hour worth, along with narration. Powerful stuff. https://youtu.be/87Dd7GSNAPM
What impressed me the most: "Using home-brewed chemicals, they developed their pictures in the open air or in underground tunnels" if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room, that is really not something easy to do with then available technology. It is basically Polaroid chemicals quality.
Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons. How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained. Specially considering Iraqi invasion decades later alleging chemical weapons suspicions.
Some pictures look extremely noise and grain free for such old photos. Makes me think they are probably digitally enhanced or Vietnam chemicals were really first class quality.
> Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons.
I believe the distinction is that Agent Orange was not used as a weapon per se, in that it wasn't applied to people, but rather was used to destroy plants. Please note I'm not making any claims about the ethics of its use.
Defoliation. A precursor for a lot of that junk was made by Philips-Duphar, and dumped in a polder 25 km North of Amsterdam. The cleanup operation continues today... Dioxin, 2-4-5-T, very nasty stuff.
If you irresponsibly drench a country with deadly poison, killing and crippling vast numbers of people and causing consequences that persist till this very day, you can't get out from under it by pretending it wasn't a weapon.
"I just set your house on fire to flush you out of it so I could kill you. I didn't intend the fire as a weapon itself."
The US avoided international courts because, technically, the chemical weapons were to clear forest covers and not intended for use on civilians and military personnel.
I'm not sure if lack of intent would absolve them of committing a war crime... not to mention that it's not clear that they didn't actually intend to cause harm to people by their use of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons like napalm.
Legally, whether something is a "chemical weapon" depends on whether it's used to attack people, or is used in population centers where many people will be directly injured regardless of intent.
See also the legal wrangling around US use of white phosphorous, which is 100% legal if used as an "illuminant" [https://treaties.unoda.org/t/ccwc_p3] (i.e. for flares), but not as a weapon against people.
You do know there is no such thing as international court, right? There are few organization which has name court in it like ICJ but they don't have any hard power like courts, and definitely have no force/military to stop a country.
A court doesn't need a military force to impose its will. The ICC and the ICY work on consensus and UN backing, it's just that the US refuses to take part because they're afraid they have way too many war criminals and it'd be bad for PR. And not only do they not accept the ICC's jurisdiction, they have a law allowing themselves to invade the Hague if another country turns their war criminals in, and the previous administration sanctioned ICC prosecutors ( obstruction of justice) for daring to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan on the behest of Afghanistan, an ICC member.
> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained.
It's probably relevant that the horrible health effects of Agent Orange were a result of accidental contaminants (dioxins), not the defoliant itself. Not that this makes it ok, but it's something different than dropping mustard gas on Kurdish civilians.
> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained
Might makes right, aka US foreign policy since its inception. The US has never recognised any court that could try them ( like the ICC) and have veto powers in the UN, so they can go about committing war crimes with impunity.
"The US has never recognised any court that could try them ( like the ICC) and have veto powers in the UN, so they can go about committing war crimes with impunity."
They don't have to recognize the court in order to be tried in the court, in absentia if need be.
It's interesting that despite the power to try alleged US war criminals, the ICC has chosen not to.
The ICC can't choose whatever it wants, it has a charter. It doesn't invent its jurisdiction, it's built on countries participating in it. Which is why its investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan, having jurisdiction there, but not Iraq, where it doesn't.
> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained
The fact the US has made it clear they will use any force necessary against the ICJ if they ever dare trying a US citizen should be a good explanation. You can get away with war crimes just fine if nobody dares to charge you with them.
There's a lot of people in the comments saying that Vietnam didn't really "win" the war. Their political and military objectives were ultimately successful, those of the US/South Vietnam were not. That's what a victory is. The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.
It's impressive how deep some of these psychological things run nearly 50 years on. It was such a blow to self-image that, let alone all the related domestic political fallout, people still have a hard time accepting what happened.
The sheer amount of ink and celluloid spent trying to come to terms with this is awesome, and a little depressing.
I'm not a native-born American and don't feel like I have skin in that game. I just feel like in war, there may be victors, but there are no winners. Especially in the modern age, if you get in a war, all sides lose. Victory is just a matter of who manages to lose less.
This is a cliche understanding. Wars can and have been won since warfare started. However, the actual people doing the fighting aren't winning, they're just dying and mostly (unless defending their own country) giving up their most valuable asset (life) so that rich men can play Axis and Allies.
I'd say we won Gulf war II, we've definitely lost Syria by now, Afghanistan probably lost.
That said, many of the well-known, long haul conflicts that the US are involved in are the ones they are most likely to lose. The ones they win they usually win quickly and are less well known.
There are plenty of interventions post-WWII that have been quick successes for the US, esp. in Latin America.
The problem with all these conflicts is winning is so poorly defined or multi-goal.
What's winning in Syria? Getting rid of assad and then leaving? We could probably do that in a week or less and utterly demolish the country if we wanted. The consequences of 'winning' that war under that definition would probably be pretty horrible.
But that doesn't seem to be the goal right now?
There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..).
Though Afghanistan is pretty simple imho. there aren't nearly as many global power stakes... The taliban explicitly does not want Democracy so if that is 'winning' it's doomed to a loss by default.
Eh - I'm not sure. Getting aircraft overhead would be difficult east of the euphrates when they have lots of anti-aircraft guns and they are also supported heavily by Russia.
The only Western power currently conducting airstrikes east of the euphrates is Israel and they have had planes shot down by Syria & Russia.
The US has a preponderance of military power, but I do think people are quick to assume that this means the US could easily topple lots of foreign nations. For some, that is definitely true, for others, like Iran, I think that is a misplaced confidence.
If the goal is total to level the country to the ground, we've had that capability for decades now: supersonic and stealth bombers, as well as SLBMs, SLCMs, and ICBMs. And there's always nukes of course.
The whole collateral damage aspect is pretty high. But if we were willing to deal with the humanitarian and diplomatic fallout, we could do it pretty easily.
Winning in Syria was helping Qatar build their Qatar gas pipeline to Europe, but Russia stepped in and didn't let that happen. It was too big of a threat to Russia's most crucial export monopoly: energy to Europe.
> There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..).
Excuse me, but the goal should be that exactly. Not leaving an inch of flesh of the bear unpoked.
If you resign your emotions, and try to think about it seriously, it makes a lot of sense strategically to conduct a massive provocation.
Right now, it's completely the other way around: Putin delivers one grievous provocation after another to NATO. NATO grovels, shivers, but does nothing, for the whole world to laugh on.
It earns him client states, and satellites. You absolutely don't want your enemies flocking together.
If you turn that around, the world, and his wannabe clients that it's him now who can't do anything, but throw adorable tantrums, his construct will melt away withing years.
2 birds 1 stone.
It's also the types like Orbans, Sisis, and Assads who are only showing the voice now, because they can afford to look brave when the West is intimidated. That will pull the carpet from under them too.
Nonsense, NATO is literally surrounding its so-called 'enemies' with endless streams of base-building. NATO is not groveling or shivering - it is slowly invading proxy countries and extending the US empire, creep creep ..
* I agree. But also parent has a point, Crimea, election hacking, extrajudicial poisoning on British etc soil didn't have a robust response - that we know of at least.
I do think Trump was very dangerous and damaging in regards to NATO and pushing our allies away. By not understanding that 'america first' means so much more than simply scraping a few billion more from allies. That's playing checkers in terms of only being able to think in slogan-first 1st order logic. 2nd order or more is understanding why NATO was formed in the first place and the current role it has advancing our interests.
And I think it's critical to actively work against movements of authoritarian nationalism and hold Europe and our allies together.
I'm glad and think Biden is doing a better job in the Pacific in that regard.
I would not classify Gulf war II as a "war". It was a blatant incursion, which even Saddam knew would not last, hence the focus on looting the victim, rather than planning for an occupation.
Saddam bet that if no ones does anything concrete, he can get away with it, else, he can return back.
I would call than an "occupation" rather than a "war".
Edit : I retract my comment. I meant Gulf War I, the occupation of Kuwait.
The government was toppled, a provisional government was installed by the US, and then replaced by a government that was, at the time, US-aligned with democratic elections.
I think it was a bad war and a mistake, but I don't think we "lost."
We can win the battles but we can't win the War. Keeping the enemy out of Kuwait was the biggest win we've had since WW2. If you want to win the war these days it takes total war like in Japan/Europe. You have to break the enemy or they will keep coming back and the modern world doesn't have the stomach for it.
> How many wars did the US win (as in "achieved the political goals") since WWII?
Depends upon whose interests are answering the question. These aren't so much "wars" as "resource shifting actions marketed as kayfabe [1] wars". This also isn't a new phenomenon. Such "wars" have existed throughout history, and is a side effect of a political sphere's emergent, loosely-defined requirements.
For common people in the path of destruction, a war has an unambiguous win/loss demarcation. For defense contractors if they are being honest with themselves, less so. For politicians with uncanny honesty, even more ambiguous.
With the scales involved today in not just people, speed, and destructive power, but also of information range and depth, I think it is time for a deep re-think of the "war is 'just' a political tool" paradigm.
IMO it’s a tad silly to say that the U.S. lost these wars. Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side? It’s crazy that this seems to never be mentioned.
This seems quite similar to Americans demanding their gun rights to protect themselves from the government. Well, I hate to inform you of this, but the government could out gun you since time immemorial. It’s a wild argument for gun rights.
Well, bring it down to the personal level - that's like losing a fistfight but comforting yourself that you could go and burn the other person's house down any time because you have a tank full of gasoline at home. I mean, you could, but that wouldn't unbloody your nose.
Not really, because it changes the political calculus for exactly the reasons you mentioned. If the US government wants to forcefully take over, and they aren't aligned with gun owners, they have to go through them. In that scenario its more likely they are a shade of grey evil than "lets methodically exterminate all of our citizens". In the former, gun owners standing their ground would be a major political hurdle.
I'd actually argue pro gun rights are a bit silly because those same parties aren't pro encryption / privacy. So they give up the tools they'd need to defend themselves (encryption) from all but the most direct assault. And I'd consider a soft assault by violating their privacy much more plausible.
> IMO it’s a tad silly to say that the U.S. lost these wars. Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side? It’s crazy that this seems to never be mentioned.
An observation not lost to the ground forces. I was in the US infantry 10+ years ago. We were well trained and lethal. We had an overwhelming technological targeting advantage. We had the support of a sizeable amount of the local population that we generally stayed a few steps ahead of the lower and mid tier rungs of whatever insurgency we were fighting (Al Qaeda in Iraq [ISIS predecessor], the Taliban, whatever-local-Afghan-village-thugs-in-later-deployments). We understood the war wasn't purely militaristic in "kill counts" or territory sieged, and the lessons of irregular warfare (hearts and minds) were beaten in to us.
The biggest issue, at least for us that actually had to kill and be shot at, was that the progressively restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) defanged us, both from lethal and willpower standpoints. There were so many nested bullet points and gotchas and just a wide breadth of rules that no person that wasn't a lawyer could keep up with it. Arbitrary things like "if you are in a gunfight with insurgents and they fall back into a cave, no matter who the insurgent is or how many casualties they were lucky to have inflicted on your forces, you absolutely cannot roll grenades into the cave." Very specific, very arbitrary, very confusing. Furthermore, it was beat into us that the full weight of the law was to fall on our heads if we screwed these things up. Which makes sense from a humanitarian point of view, but that lingering legal guillotine built in a sizeable amount of self-doubt and apprehension in us where we weren't ever sure when or if we were allowed to be lethal.
I imagine a set of ROE was drafted, and enough bureaucrats scribbled in "small edits" that the overarching sense of direction was lost in the sea of Great Ideas by Smart People and nobody with both the political clout and common sense was able to get to these revisions before they were inflicted on us on the ground. Not dissimilar to scope creep you see in software, except parties involved couldn't just vote with their feet and leave. That, and those functioning as the wars' PM's weren't as much concerned with delivering results as they perhaps were with empire building and political posturing. Just a god damn mess
Secondly, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head when it comes to the ROE being the main limiting factor in the "effectiveness" of the US military in being able to subdue its enemies, not just in Afghanistan/Iraq, but also in Vietnam and even to some extant in Korea. It seems to be one of the weird side-effects that nukes have on armed conflicts that when you have nukes, you really can never actually "fully commit" to a conflict. (Since going "all-in" could be apocalyptic.)
One thing I have always wondered, though, is the relationship between the ROE and irregular warfare. If the military personnel on the ground had broader discretion over their actions, would help or hinder the goal of "winning hearts and minds"?
The goal of the US in Afghanistan was to deny Al-Qaeda the use of one third of a country to plan their operations. That required taking control of that territory from the Taliban, who were allowing Al-Qaeda to operate without restriction. The US did that. They harassed the Taliban and denied them complete control of territory for 20 years. Not sure how this could be viewed as a strategic defeat in any way
What happened to all the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing then?
At the end of 20 years, US indirectly had to negotiate with them.
So the other way of looking at it is, a bunch of un-educated, poorly trained, poorly equipped mountain people, who themselves are divided into many warring factions, stood their ground against the mightiest nation on earth, for 20 year, and in the end US negotiated with them for transfer of power.
Now, I see this as sheer political and administrative failure. Militarily, sure, the US has an upper hand and can pile up bodies like no other, But it failed to win the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. It could not change the govt., it could not bring stability and democracy to the region, it could not transform the society, and it could not even change the idea of itself in the minds of the Afghan people.
US is too powerful, militarily, to formulate effective strategies that further its goals. It is good in doing that economically, through sanctions, etc. But as a military force, it is too powerful for its own good.
Heh, you would think that after literal decades of (moderate) sustained success in resisting incursions from three superpowers (British, then Soviets and then the US) the Pashtuns would get a little more credit then just being called "a bunch of un-educated, poorly trained, poorly equipped mountain people."
Even Churchill said of them: "Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian."
To be fair, US has decades of high tech warfare experience, institutions that study war and constantly research about it, has best infrastructure, excellent means to project power and has virtually unlimited resources.
The Afghans have no proper education system, no institutions other than local commanders directing their bunch of troops and have virtually no good infrastructure. They literally live among mountains and have no good networks for transportation.
I am giving the Afghans a lot of credit, because what I said about them is true. They won in spite of that.
My recollection of how the conflict was presented was "We need to go to Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda" 20 years later we're still fighting that same war, which is how many people look at the situation and say that the US hasn't achieved it's goals (i.e., has been defeated)
I suppose one could say that the US hasn't lost yet, but it's pretty tough to say that the US has won.
Honestly, at this point it feels like any discussion of the US staying in Afghanistan seems like it should devolve into a discussion of the halting problem. (/s, but only slightly)
Where do I even start with this. Do you just call all your favourite bad guys "Al-Qaeda" and group them all together as if they were all one organization?
Who is pulling out? Who's puppet government is already falling? Who is taking back control of every area we pulled out of?
What did you "win". Do you really like getting kicked in the nuts?
Al-Qeada and other groups just shifted to other unrested regions and even caused unrest. At a global scale the war only caused other countries harm.
Tell someone in your social circle that you're considering a business deal with a company in Afghanistan and might be flying out there next month, see what sort of reaction you get.
Agreed, We literally took over Afghanistan in a month and installed a government but somehow we lost? We just don't really have a dog in the fight anymore. This isn't defeat.
Yes, the US lost. The government in Afghanistan doesn't have much institutional depth or very firm control of the country. It's not a military defeat in the sense of having your army crushed, but an occupation that never achieves peacetime status is a failure by great power standards. Don't feel bad though, the US is the 3rd empire to make the exact same mistake in Afghanistan. It'd be comical if there weren't so much human suffering involved.
Giving up isn't defeat? If this was sports would anyone accept that definition?
The US just signed a peace deal with the Taliban agreeing to and withdraw all their troops and release aligned 5000 prisoners, the Taliban are also allowed back in government. Technically they could be in power at the next election.
What actual goal was fulfilled here after two decades of war?
Korean War: won, South Korea was transformed into an american colony a la Japan, and is now used as a platform to counter China in the east as well as trading partner and military base.
Vietnam: countered Soviet expansionism and prevented Vietnam from becoming a communist regional superpower, Vietnam has not done much besides be a trading partner for the US since.
Grenada: won
Gulf wars: overwhelming victories. Destabilized the middle east, provided an opportunity for american megacorps to heavily profit and exert massive influence. Led to Arab spring which further destabilized the middle east. The middle east is essentially no longer in the picture in the game of global hegemony, and in large part has to rely on American refineries and american corporations to handle oil extraction.
Afghanistan: success, stimulated the American economy, very successful unemployment program (provided jobs for America's high school dropouts for 20 years), justified further weapons development plans, allowed america to build tons of bases to help counter China's Silk Road initiative by destabilizing the region.
Syria: mostly a failure at this point. The hope was to break Syria and build the Qatar gas pipeline to hurt Russia's hegemony on european energy supplies. Looks like that is a lost cause at this point, but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.
The world is no longer about winning wars and conquering territory. It's about destabilizing rising threats to your power. It's about toppling dictators and installing democracies, which are much easier to bribe. It's about countering your enemies/competitors (Russia, china, the middle east) initiatives and causing chaos in their neighborhood.
> but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.
We now have strong evidence that both the Ghouta and Douma attacks were not chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government. In the case of Douma, the OPCW leaks have very strongly shown (in my opinion, conclusively) that it was staged and put on by the White Helmets, a US/UK funded organization. Senior OPCW officials then reedited their official's report to make it seem like the Syrian government used chlorine gas. Don't believe me? Listen to Noam Chomsky explain it. [1]
Why does this matter? It was used as a pretense for the Trump administration to bomb Syria, which it did a few days later. [2]
Gulf War 1991 is definitely a victory - deposing Saddam was not the goal of the US or its allies.
Similarly, Gulf War II is absolutely a loss, even though it "accomplished more" than 1991, because its strategic goals included dictating the post-war political arrangements in the country.
Victory and defeat are always relative to the parties' strategic goals.
The US won the Korean war, according to its objectives at the start of the war (Retain the status quo).
It did not win it according to the objectives set by MacArthur (Drive the commies into the sea). He was, incidentally, relieved of command, thanks to his escalation of the conflict to include China.
I'm not really sure what the difference is between a declaration of war and an authorization of war, but we've had congressional authorization for a couple conflicts since then. I would argue that if Congress voted on it in the affirmative, it's not really a secret or stealthy war.
A declaration of war means that the government has to answer to the people for its war crimes, per international legal standards.
An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it, because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.
> A declaration of war means that the government has to answer to the people for its war crimes, per international legal standards.
No, it doesn’t. A declaration of war has no effect at all on liability in international law. War criminals are responsible under international law whether or not war has been declared; the establishment of universal personal accountability of war criminals, including heads of state, for war crimes -- first unambiguously declared in the Nuremberg Principles -- declarations of war (which previously gave a veil of legitimacy to non-defensive war) have been pretty much irrelevant since non-defensive war was unambiguously itself declared to be a crime against peace.
> An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it,
No, it doesn’t.
> because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.
Formal declarations of war and war authorizations have no difference in either international or, to the extent the latter is a recognized thing, most national laws in terms of what legal basis there is for defining the parameters of the war, and whatever difference in effect they might have under the terms of local law has no bearing on liability under international law.of those engaging in war crimes, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity.
The war powers act has been around for 50 years now, and the supreme court has not invalidated it yet. I think it's safe to say that they believe it is constitutional.
Regardless, even if you believe that authorization for use of force is unconstitutional, that does not make it secret. Only Bill Clinton's engagement in Bosnia/Kosovo could be considered a secret war... The others were done with full authorization of Congress.
Korea was an American victory in the sense that we achieved the mission. It was not a military disaster caused by poor leadership like the Vietnam war. The leadership during the Korean war was extremely good and the outcome was more than satisfactory given the situation.
Yeah I dont really understand the cognitive dissonance people have over that war.
Vietnam has a single party Communist Party that teaches Marxist ideals while having upgraded to state capital patches like every other marxist ideology worshipping party. They are geopolitically irrelevant enough for that never to bother anyone. The US was there to stop that specific thing from happening and didnt. US lost, Vietnam was unified and the control was consolidated under Vietnamese representatives of the communist party and for them they won. That’s the same standard we use for any conflict. Why single out that one to a higher standard where we point out the loss of life? Doesnt make sense. Vietnam won a unified country, and it is under communist rule. There once was a side that didnt want communism and they lost, too!
China went free market. And with covid, I guess nature doesn't like senile murderers telling everyone what to do from far far away, under the threat of death by organ harvesting.
The USA still has the rule of law. Marx, a European with a higher body count than any colonialist by the way, has no law. Barbaric animals, who will send you to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
The USA was there because of Pearl Harbor. That ended in a battle the size of the Pacific, the sinking of 30 Japanese aircraft carriers that we actually built for them, and atomic warfare. Stalin killed FDR, making him travel to Yalta and Tehran. Stole our bomb. Raped children. And tried to start WW3 every chance he got.
Kruschev killed Kennedy. He did give that order for assassination.
What horrible people. The New World bails everyone out. Gives everyone human rights and makes them rich beyond belief. Cures famines and diseases. The animals of the world mess it up every chance they get. Don't deal with animals. You only become one when you have them around.
Next time anyone gets the idea to kick things up again, I'm melting everyone's eyes. Maybe when everyone's blind, they can finally see killing each other is a bad idea. And forget the USA. I'm doing it.
Depends on what you think the objectives were. Did the USA want to add another star to the Star Spangled Banner? Then yeah, they lost.
But if the objective of the USA was to prevent a domino of communism taking over all of South-East Asia, we can pretty clearly see where the advance of communism was stopped.
And if an American and a North Vietnamese communist from 1955 could see into the future 70 years, taking a tour around Hanoi or Saigon, I don't know if either would be so certain on their verdict of who 'won' or 'lost'. It might have been the North, but it certainly wasn't the communists.
I don't think anybody indoctrinated with marxist teachings is satisfied with any current or attempted version of communism. So in that regard I would agree, I still say its an impossible standard not used for other conflicts.
Even the last massacre in China was because the protestors wanted to democratically have more communism instead of the liberalization of the markets and private ownership. That gets reduced to “students wanted democracy”, geopolitically it would have even been worse. (It is sad they were killed and that unity in that country relies on never mentioning it or any other strife)
> But if the objective of the USA was to prevent a domino of communism taking over all of South-East Asia, we can pretty clearly see where the advance of communism was stopped.
But Communism flourished in Vietnam. So if you want to argue domino theory (which was wrong anyways), they certainly didn't stop the Vietnamese domino. So they didn't win in Vietnam.
I think if you're talking about the acute win/loss of the Vietnam war, then absolutely the North Vietnamese won. If the USA really wanted to win the war then they could have done it outright in 1967. But that would have been very ugly. Not an option.
Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.
Maybe their soceity would have been more successful if it wasn't bombed to hell and back by the Americans then made a soft client state of the USSR and then boycotted by the West.
If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.
Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Are you asking if the vietnamese people are winning in the crazy scenario drzaiusapelord suggested where viet nam is a super power - i think the answer is an obvious yes. But that's an unrealistic scenario.
Would they have been better off if france agreed to decolonize instead of trying to hold on to their failing colonial empire with force (leading to everything that came to follow)? Maybe we'll never know.
But i don't think there's any particular reason to assume that if the south won they would be any better off. South Vietnam hardly seems like it was the most stable/well run of governments - they were into fixing elections and persacuting buddhists, etc. Hardly what i would call an ideal state.
> If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
> Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Yeah, letting Russia and China subjugate the world would have gone SO MUCH better. What good has it done for nicaragua, cuba, north korea, afghanistan or the many noname countries in Africa? The USSR left only poverty and death whereever they went.
Imagine being an America. Confidently sprouting such nonsense. You can literally google what happened between China and Vietnam after the Vietnam War and disprove your entire narrative.
Ah yes, Afganistan, where Operation Cyclone funelled weapons to mujahadeen, which they used indiscriminantly against civilians. What could possibly go wrong?
And once USA took control of Afganistan, how has the situation improved?
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
Vietnam is communist but they're not very friendly with China, nor have they been since about 1975; vietnam is certainly not a satellite of China. Starting in 1979 they fought a low-intensity border war with China that went on for over a decade, a fact you seem to be unaware of.
Ehh no, we have history of thousands of years clashing with China so no we aren't that close to China. We might have some "co-operation" geographically and politically but the best depiction of our relationship is 2 guys shaking hands with knives on the other hand.
Oh and if you do some digging you will know that HCM sent a few letters to Trumman asking for US's aid, we could have been ally 70 years earlier, but no, the US branded him as a commie and the rest is history. Btw, the first line of our Proclamation of Independence is pretty much a paraphrase of the US's Declaration of Independence, that's to show how much we wanted the US to be ally.
> Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.
Do "the people" ever win a war? Something like 600,000 - 2 million civilians died in that war. If you're implying that people would be better off ecconomically if the other side won, that seems highly speculative with no evidence to back it up.
Its hardly identical, much of N. Korea's current struggles have direct causes that are more recent than the war (massive sanctions), and even if it was, a sample size of 1 is meaningless.
S. Koreans are unambiguously 'better off' than their counterparts in the North.
That's the closest comparable we have.
If the US were to have 'stayed' in S. Vietnamese, much like they did in S. Korea, that S. Vietnam would look 'somewhat' like S. Korea, but not nearly as prosperous given their agrarian history etc..
"Vietnam’s development over the past 30 years has been remarkable. Economic and political reforms under Đổi Mới, launched in 1986, have spurred rapid economic growth, transforming what was then one of the world’s poorest nations into a lower middle-income country. Between 2002 and 2018, GDP per capita increased by 2.7 times, reaching over US$2,700 in 2019, and more than 45 million people were lifted out of poverty"
People in the US misunderstand the Vietnamese perspective on the war pretty badly. Interestingly enough one of the best sources you can look at to learn about this is the documentary interview with McNamara, Fog of War. He's surprisingly frank about his own mistakes in perspective, as well as talking about conversations he had with his counterparts in later years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YONEXPMVaQM
Completely agree with you about Vietnam reaching its military objectives. However, I only see a couple of commenters disagreeing with that, which is not "a lot". Only curious about this because I wonder how prevalent that viewpoint is versus the perception of that viewpoint being prevalent. Perhaps this is off-topic but it seems this disparity between perception is central to so much of America's hangups with this war 50 years later.
Wikipedia is pretty unambiguous: "Following Vietnamese victory against the French in the First Indochina War, which ended in 1954, the nation was divided into two rival states: communist North and anti-communist South. Conflicts intensified in the Vietnam War, which saw extensive American intervention in support of South Vietnam, while the Soviets and the PRC supported the North, which ended with North Vietnamese victory in 1975. After North and South Vietnam were reunified as a communist state under a unitary socialist government in 1976"
I'm doubtful that this is really the best way to put it.
The US escalated it's involvement until the early 1970's when via strategic bombing of the North (which the US was unwilling to do previously), decisively destroyed the North Vietnamese ability to fight.
Then, the Americans left.
A couple of years later, the North Vietnamese rehabilitated their forces, and invaded the South.
The reality is such different perspective than 'North Vietnam Won' to the point wherein it's basically almost misinformation to just state it like that.
Finally, the tactical and strategic advantage of the US bombing with Nixon was enormous. The US could have feasibly stayed for a long time - after shedding their fears of 'Bombing the North' and just 'doing it', they finally gained the 'obvious advantage' that a major power should have had.
But Nixon ran on a platform of 'Getting out of Vietnam', and the folks back home lost interest in a miasma of populism.
I think those nuances are important, because I think it demonstrates how tactics, politics and populism fuelled the outcome.
The lessons of 'Fight to Win Only' and 'A long grinding war will turn your population against you' are straight out of the Art of War.
Those lessons informed the 1st US invasion of Iraq (and 2cnd), which was led by Vietnam vets. 'Overwhelming Force and Boots on the Ground to Unambiguously Overwhelm Enemy Forces', though the 2cnd occupation didn't go quite as well.
Finally, literally one day after Barack Obama ordered the last US units out of Baghdad, then Iraqi PM Malaki ordered a purge of Sunnis from his party and government. The Sunni Tribes, in fear of their lives from the then-emboldened Shia dominated Iraqi Army ... invited ISIS in. This very well could have been avoided by keeping a few units, neatly tucked away 'behind the wire' in Baghdad - just enough ongoing oversight and leverage to keep people like Malaki from self-destructing. It would have been better in hindsight to take a longer view of that situation as well.
It's hard to say if there is a direct parallel with Vietnam but it kind of looks like that.
The hilarious thing is, the entire time the US was in Vietnam, top leadership in the US admin was pretty much convinced they could never win, but had to put in a good show.
So they were never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning.
I'm doubtful of your assertion that 'top leadership didn't think they could win' and especially in the context of 'put on a show'.
Which elements of 'top leadership' believed this?
For whom would that 'show' be for?
You'll have to state which individuals took that position.
"never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning. "
This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?
The data (i.e. 'body count') was initially misleading, but that lesson was learned quickly enough.
By 1965 , at the start major escalation, The Pentagon wanted to do strategic bombing of the entirety of North Vietnam. US political leadership wanted to avoid Hanoi and other targets for political reasons i.e. 'Rolling Thunder'.
Rolling Thunder failed.
Later, with political limitations removed, Op. Linebacker I and II (in 1970's) successfully dismantled N. Vietnam's ability to fight.
Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms? The big rise in casualties to 1969 probably never would have happened, and the political repercussions would have been at least somewhat less.
Even the populist miasma is affected: when people are dying, it's one thing if 'major progress' is being made (think sicily and european campaigns against Hitler, once they started and were winning, it'd be impossible to bring them back until it was over), but altogether another if there's a stalemate or there isn't evidence of material progress.
But history is 20/20 and that's the whole point.
In 2021 we're still not done politicizing this war, the PBS documentary had some very good elements, but was still only one lens and entirely ignored the geopolitical aspects.
Macnamara v. Pentagon was realized 'All Over Again' with Maj. General Tommy Franks vs. Donald Rumsfeld. This time, the Army mostly go their 'Boots on the Ground and Overwhelming Power' to guarantee a fairly immediate collapse of the enemy. Too bad there was no plan for the occupation.
> Which elements of 'top leadership' believed this?
Macnamara. LBJ. Kennedy.
> For whom would that 'show' be for?
For the American people, for Congress, for the world. To prove that the US stands by its allies and can still win wars. To prevent accusations of being losers by domestic political opponents, both in the same and different parties. Pretty basic stuff, these political dynamics are in play in nearly every war.
> This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?
You are misreading the line. I am saying there were not winning either in reality nor in the leaderships minds. The US leadership did NOT think they were winning.
> Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms?
How do you propose to fix the problem of Chinese troops overwhelming any serious success like they did in Korea? That's nearly the entire reason the US couldn't fully commit to destroying North Vietnam.
How do you even fix the problem of having unreliable and problematic allies in Southern Vietnam that could never really rally the country properly?
It's not surprising the nuclear power with the largest military in the world could have won against half of a smaller and much poorer country under the right circumstances.
> 'Fight to Win Only' and 'A long grinding war will turn your population against you' are straight out of the Art of War.
That applies to the other side too. The real art of war is returning the martial to the civil. Limiting the violence, not creating it. Which one is going to put the world at ease:
Marxist, jihadi, drug cartel tyranny
Amoral, zero sum, win at all cost, identity liberalism
or
Self-evidence and inalienable rights
?
They have to stand for something. The USA does not. See the world as it is. What's the minimum needed to call ourselves a government?
It’s just how we Indians keep telling ourselves we didn’t really lose those wars against China. But we literally were thrashed at will and when they (China) kind of got tired or thought they taught us a lesson they stopped.
Exactly the same way our close neighbours Pakistan keeps thinking they didn’t really lose any wars against us.
Even the people who were not even a foetus during those wars. Emotion trumps facts it seems.
Totally agree. The narrative about China is mostly political tomfoolery, as the party that faced the war, was in power for decades after the war, giving it a tremendous opportunity to re-write history. They conveniently blamed some scapegoats and shut down the discussion, more or less.
Nehru was more interested in appeasement than long term strategic thinking, when it comes to international affairs. I think it stems from the deep seated inferiority complex that the British left in the elite and intellectuals of the country. Most of the leadership during the initial decade of Indian independence were heavily influenced by the British and looked up to them for guidance.
I agree to some extent but since you referred to the past I’m kinda doubtful where you’re going with it.
Nehru was quite a long-term thinker and a statesman. Hell it’s a miracle he navigated the country through the hell hole the cold war was.
Sad thing is he inherited a country and the people who just couldn’t rise above a certain level and that was where the Brits left us. On top of that the Brits ensured they left us broken and finished and deliberately at that I believe. I maybe wrong but I just can’t bring myself to look at the colonisers in any positive light. Trust me I’ve tried.
Again since you mentioned Nehru (while I’m not accusing you but it’s a pet “But Nehru” phrase used by the ultra nationalist right wing India of today[1]) and the past Govts, and yes they had their own follies and drawbacks, I just want to set the record straight that the current Govt has set India even further back by decades and I don’t see it recovering. Especially so as I majority will again elect current party for religious bigotry and things like temple.
While the past Govts could’ve done a lot lot better the current Govt has been successful in delivering the final blow.
[1] To others who aren’t familiar with the country and its pilots and scene today it’s actually funny. If something BJP the ruling ultra right wing party does and it fails and harms the public ;usually the case) the national chorus becomes “but what about Nehru”. Even if the intention was to fail or harm the public the chorus remains the same. Also Nehru died in 1964.
I actually updated my comment and mentioned whataboutism I saw in your comment. Glad that we both saw it. Also I usually don’t check other comments of a person so I was not able to be sure. Now I am. Also HN (selectively) hates flame wars so I’d say let’s stop here.
Many people in the US never accepted that they were defeated. And the US media did a good job of never making this point (the defeat against Vietnam) clear. It is a version of the "lost cause" phenomenon of the US south.
It's not simply accepting defeat that poses difficulty; it's being anything but the best, and first, and most able. American exceptionalism isn't just a cliche, it's a cult of identity, a nationalist truth that cannot be abridged without violent opposition.
Well, exceptionalism is a cult that is part of American education and media since early childhood. It is not just nationalism (loving your country), it is ultra-nationalism that preaches the idea that they're superior to other countries.
Yeah. The downfall of great nations begins with denying the reality. That slowly seeps into every nook and corner of the society, leading to rot from within. You can see this already happening in the US.
The drive is politics, the lube is the media. The denial of reality and the rejection of truth is more prominent than ever and it is showing its face everywhere in US politics.
As on date, for the last decade, no politician has ever resigned for lying or cheating, personally or professionally. The character and integrity of those in power is off the table for discussion (what he/she does in personal life is not for discussion)
Here is the fact. Perhaps in other jobs, white or blue collared ones, personal life may not affect the job. But when it comes to jobs that move the nation, political positions, powerful bodies, and what not, the personal character and integrity of the person ought to be the scale of foremost importance.
The worlds most advanced, wealthiest and militarily powerful country did not obtain it's primary objective in the war, stopping the spread of communism.
What's really amazing is that we could have done nothing, and it still would have failed eventually. There aren't any communist regimes that have been truly successful. The Soviets succeeded in industrialization, but then ate itself from within. The Chinese succeeded in industrialization, but only after transitioning away from maoist communism and more towards state capitalism. Everything else basically failed outright.
> The Chinese succeeded in industrialization, but only after transitioning away from maoist communism and more towards state capitalism.
Leninism and all its descendants, including Maoism, are, ab initio, state capitalism. What the CCP moved toward is more of xenophobic totalitarian corporatism than state capitalism; essentially fascism without, or at least with less, overt expansionism.
That's not how anyone who matters thinks of "winning". For the people pushing these wars, who I could name very specifically, "victory" happened when they made a boatload of money, and that's it.
I saw a French movie about a French soldier in Vietnam set in 1945
I was also in France at the time when viewing the movie, it was very surreal in so many ways to be empathizing for a protagonist on one of the enemy sides - from an American perspective as I am an American.
But I had never seen anything depicted about that war decades before the US got involved.
I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.
It was sensual, horrific, erotic, fascinating. I dont think it would get greenlit by American studios. Maybe some streaming services have it though.
Also Apocalypse Now extended cut has a part with the French elite still trying to live their old privileged life. I get why it's cut from a writing perspective, but it shows some important context.
> I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.
Not sure if the stipulation is a war movie about Vietnam, or just plain a war movie. But certainly here's a list of some non-U.S. 20th century war movies, very vivid, biased towards France:
The Battle of Algiers (French, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Come and See (Russian, Elem Klimov, 1985)
Ivan's Childhood (Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)
Beau Travail (French, Claire Denis, 1999) -- OK, soldiers but not war
Army of Shadows (French, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
A Man Escaped (French, Robert Bresson, 1956) -- POW, not front lines
Little Dieter Needs To Fly (British/French/German?, Werner Herzog, 1997) -- actually relates to the war in Vietnam
"Centurions" movie and more importantly the novel by the same name on which movie is based, written by Richard Lopteguy, offers an incredible French perspective of Vietnam experience including the demoralising defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
War movies produced in Israel are also a distinctly different experience from American ones.
They tend to be made by veterans of those wars, after the ~20 year gap that seems pretty standard for the PTSD barrier to crack. e.g. the best ones made about the Lebanon War (what Israel calls its intervention 1982-2000 in the Lebanese Civil War) all came out within a couple of years of each other:
* Lebanon (2009)
* Waltz with Bashir (2008)
* Beaufort (2007)
And the first of the good Yom Kippur War (1973) films is probably Kippur (2000), with the long-development-time miniseries Valley of Tears (Sha'at Ne'ila) only coming out last year.
Not quite enough time has passed for films about the heaviest fighting of the 2nd Intifada to be made - the closest thing I can think of is the TV show Fauda (2015-present) but that's a somewhat different genre.
I wrote a quick script the other day to colorize directories of family photos. I realized it would be cool to colorize these photos, too. Here's the album: https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf
The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi.
I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters.
If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos
That’s discounting the scores of people who prefer to watch cinema in black and white. Many movies are now coming out with black and white variants (Snyder cut of Justice League, Mad Max: Fury Road etc) black and white isn’t going anywhere. Saying this is like saying people won’t want to read books any more because digital text exists.
It’s not entirely fake. These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up due to subtlety or unfamiliarity with the time, place or people depicted. So while the colorized photos are not entirely faithful, they do tell us more about the scene the photo captured.
> These colorization processes exaggerate information about the grayscale tones that our eyes can’t pick up
It is a machine learning model, so not really.
Instead, the model makes an educated guess of the most likely color, based on vast amounts of pictures sampled un-uniformly from very different areas of the world.
Forgive me for the imprecise language—the bases for the educated guesses are the information I was referring to. Humans are not as good at seeing that a certain shade of gray is more likely to be light yellow than light blue, for example. You’re completely right that datasets trained on regions and historical information would produce more accurate results on black-and-white photos identified to the model as being from similar places and times.
I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive. I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white. Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology. It’s not like people wanted their pictures looking like that.
It’s even a common trope in modern films to use black and white when showing flashbacks to time periods around the beginning of the 20th century. But that’s not how the world looked! It’s a cheep and deceptive tool imho.
B&W photos don't have a lack of color; they've just restricted the color to certain values. A colorized photo might or might not get the colors correct, but the B&W photo definitely doesn't.
This makes my eyes roll like I'm a professional golfer. I love B&W, and even without using B&W film, I will still turn certain color images I take into B&W. There are lots of artistic reasons, but most of the time it just feels right. Sometimes, it's just an aesthetic reason of matching the decor of where the print is going to hang.
>I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white.
So what? There are also people that believe the world is flat. There are plenty of museums full of paintings from well before photography was invented that clearly show color. Anyone that believes that the world was in B&W before color film just need to be walked away from as there's nothing but frustration there.
> I actually think b&w photos are too deceptive...Recall that look is just an artificial limit imposed by immature chemical technology.
That limit materially constrained the information that could be captured, but it didn't invent false information. It was a dimensionality reduction from color to simple brightness intensity. Sure, the information captured was through that lens/filter, but there wasn't some AI inventing/guessing at what it was seeing. The photons directly exposed the chemicals in the film. They are not equivalent at all, and your reduction based upon the fact that humans add an additional interpretive perspective to each is a stretch.
I say all of this while being fine with colorized photos, but they should be accompanied by the original photo and the disclaimer that they were colorized. I think colorized photos can add a lot of immersion and trigger emotion, but so does generative, interpretive art.
We shouldn't treat Monet's water lilies as an accurate portrayal of his flower garden at his home in Giverny. Colorized photos, while not as extreme as impressionist paintings, are still a generated piece of art. Perhaps they are more akin to portraits, which have been historically shown bias towards an unflattering view of the subject -- as when they are unflattering, they tend to not to survive[1]
In my case I wasn't too concerned, since I was sharing the photos with my family, who understood they were artificially colorized. My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong. Nonetheless, to me and my family, it made our old photographs seem so close and alive, which made it worth it.
A good compromise may be to mark these retouched photos with a small watermark indicating that they have been altered. By the way, I think the colab instances running this model have the option to add watermarks for this reason (https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...).
Cambodia has called on US media group Vice to withdraw an article that featured newly-colourised photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge, saying the images are an insult to the dead because some had been altered to add smiles.
“We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims,” [Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture] said.
I wonder at what point the photo would be colorized correctly. The golden gate bridge is almost certainly in the training data if it's random photos. Maybe it knows to color completed things?
> My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong.
Did you figure out a way to achieve this other than repeat attempts or recoloring in post?
Is there a setup that retrains with user input such as by inputting an image with an object manually colored the model will then recognize it in later input and color similarly?
It seems like this could also help with persistence of colors in videos, training with the previously completed frame step before producing the next.
Even every photo you take with a smartphone these days is altered by a machine learned model, put through some filter, and tuned in some way, even if it's subtle.
people see a white golden gate and they immediately know that's not a realistic representation. They don't look at photos heavily touched or space photos with that expectation.
Silly question, but was the bridge definitely painted red at that stage of its life?
Panchromatic vs orthochromatic was still a choice even in the 70s. Spotmatics shipped with an ISO marker dial that included color, ortho, and panchro, 30 years after the Golden Gate Bridge was built.
Ortho bw — cheap 1930s snapshot — would show a red bridge as white, but if it was fancy panchro then I’d be more inclined to agree with the AI, given the luminosity.
Never tell someone to not do things like this. If it increases the audience all the better. It's the way people learn things. When you declare things as taboo it only hurts liberty.
People may just as easily infer the wrong things from black and white still photography. There's no defense against people's ability to misinterpret things.
So, be like the guy that applied some shitty style-transfer algorithm to the Tuol Sleng concentration camp photos, which made some of the victims start smiling?
It neat, and works amazingly well. I don't love it though, but I like the look of black and white photos (I was shooting black and white in the 90s when I worked at a college paper). Not having the color in there focuses your attention differently and in my case I would use the camera slightly differently.
But they've alway wanted colors in photographs. Going as far as actually hand coloring them. This is kinda like that but automated.
On the flip side it doesn't bring it to life for me because of the mistakes.
Several times you can see a hand is grey while the face is colorized to a peach type color. Wicker baskets are colored grey. All clothes are blue for some reason.
That kind of stuff just tells me it's making assumptions which are likely to be incorrect and I discount the colorization altogether.
This is fascinating, thank you. It’s hard to explain my color blindness to people and I’m inclined to begin with this HN thread in future.
I can differentiate color mostly fine and have never mis interpreted grass as green, but clothing and fabric always pose problems, just as with your AI.
I’ve learned to be ok with things not looking real. Black and white is just as unreal to me as false color toning, but feels more honest and deliberate. The luma of the Armalite wielding guerrilla is amazing — it’s hard to beat black and white as a descriptor format.
I recently read Garth Ennis' _Punisher: The Platoon_ and it does a great job of humanizing "the winning side". The art in that book (Goran Parlov) is excellent and reminds me a lot of the photos in this series.
The sourcing of these photos is terrible. Several are from before the US involvement, namely the Plain of Reeds photo which is from the French War in Indochina.
Plus, many of these photos are staged propaganda photos, in particular the battle scenes. After an enemy surrendered, POWs would often be told to “recreate” the battle. Actually battle photographs from the north are blurry and a bit more chaotic.
The other photos are posed as well. The downed wreckage, the Ca Mau operating room in the swamp, the Lam Son 719 photo are well known photos that were staged. You can find similar photos from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French POWs were asked/made to recreate the final battle for photographers.
An Eastern Bloc country, I believe the USSR or East Germany, sent photo equipment and photographers to North Vietnam. They understood the propaganda value of these photos.
And don't get me wrong, these photos are very valuable in reinforcing morale and swaying international opinion. The West does it too. There was less staging of photos by the West back then as they tended to have more people taking photos of the action at the time.
I have a friend who served as a tank gunner in Vietnam. Has was wounded and sent home. He ended up with 4 teeth left after his jaw has been shot.
He refused to accept that the US lost. No amount of reasoning would make him budge on that opinion. I dropped the subject as it was a risk to our friendship.
I understand where he is coming from though. To have lost so many friends in addition to his personal injury, it would mean to him that it was all for nothing if he were to acknowledge it as a loss.
it wasn't all for nothing. there was time when Americans cared about advancing a free world. Free from soviet style communism. And this was an ideal worth sacrificing for. Unfortunately, Americans have been demoralized by propaganda to the point of seeing freedom as something not worth dying for.
It is not your business or anybody's business to dictate what type of world people should live in. DropPing napalm on children is definitely not the right way to convince people on your vision of free world.
Impossible to say definitely. North Korea military spending has been around 25% of its GDP, which is said to be one of the top reasons why its economy plateaud in the 70s. Would it have needed to be so high if they had annexed the whole peninsula, and would they had closed up like they did if they had decisively won the war? Perhaps not: Vietnam certainly did better.
Around 20 percent of their population got also killed during the war.
>Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”
And instead of Marshall help they got global economic sanctions.
The carpet bombing of North Korea was one of the great war crimes in history. 15% of the population died. 85% of the buildings were destroyed. Many, many cities were wiped off the map forever.
All this for a country that had never offered the slightest threat to the United States.
If exporting freedom involves bombing civilians you're supposed to free and spraying their country with herbicides, then perhaps you should rethink your strategy.
The Vietnam war was a lost cause all the way from the start, just like more modern endeavours of trying to make ultra-conservative societies of Iraq and Afghanistan democracies by invading them. Pointless waste of money and lives.
Clearly, you are not a citizen of a nation who has been the target of one of the US's efforts. Crippling sanctions, extra-ordinary hypocrisy and outright lies/propaganda in the name of 'freedom', support of hard-core and insane terrorists as 'freedom-fighting' rebels, etc.
Millions of innocent people died for nothing, and the US learned nothing, and did it all over again many times, because so many Americans, like your friend, were unwilling to concede that there was anything wrong with Vietnam.
Suppose your friend were instead an injured Al Qaeda member who felt Al Qaeda was right. Would you accept that?
But the US has killed _hundreds_ of times as many innocent people as Al Qaeda - ten times as many just in Vietnam.
Small arms have a ceiling of around 10,000 ft, so aircraft flying at 5,000 ft would definitely be vulnerable. And 300mph is fairly slow compared to a small arms projectile traveling maybe 1700mph. Even today, fighter jets will often try to stay above 10,000 ft, roughly where small arms and flak peter out.
I could easily imagine WWII rifles having some success damaging helicopters, which were (and compared to modern fighters still are) low and slow.
There were a bunch of Forward Air Controllers who flew smaller, slower planes much lower to direct air strikes. In particular those flying in support of SF missions flew low routinely. Although the predominant danger is still going to be flak and large machine guns rather than rifles. Then you also have attack helicopters and troop transport helicopters are particularly vulnerable whilst loading and unloading who all fly lower and slower.
Dive-bombing (no clue whether that tactic was/is still in use) and strafing aircraft fly a lot lower when attacking ground targets. The danger is so great that ground-attack planes like the A-10 Thunderbolt are designed with survivability in mind and carry a lot of armor.
Japanese occupation was before the two wars cited though. It went French colony -> Japanese occupation -> War against the French -> War between North and South (with US siding with te South)
"From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won."
A Peoples History of the United States - Howard Zinn
> a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs
That book is extremely pro communist (hence the title). This is a pretty poor take on the war for several reasons, not least of which "maximum military effort" and didn't use most powerful weapons are somehow in the same sentence. They literally did not use their maximum military effort (not just on the atomic bomb front). It was a political war full of mishaps that were capitalized on by North Vietnam. I also thought PRC and Russia backed North Vietnam which seems relevant. The general point that military might isn't the sole determinant of a wars outcome is true and important -- and also pretty obvious.
If they didn't use their full force it is by definition not maximal. But that's skirting the point a bit. The quoted passage (and the book) are a very biased take on history in general. Zinn wants the narrative to be that powerful technocrats couldn't overcome the people backed by some mythical cause (communism) whose good is the ultimate destiny of mankind. The reality is Vietnam was in civil war, and super powers were backing differnt sides. The US literally could not use its maximal force because it risked escalating into a larger conflict (China, Russia, etc). The real story is nuanced, complex. The US did lose -- nobody is contesting that here. But the quoted passage (and much of the book) is as much an attempt to spin the narrative as is "The US could have won if it wanted to".
One of the problems with how people consider the Vietnam war is that they don't understand that it was not the US military (and partners) against the North Vietnamese military, it was the US et el against the entire North Vietnamese population along with a lot of southern sympathisers.
If the aim of the US was to ensure that Vietnam did not end up being communist, then they had to convince the people not to become communist. What they did, in some of the most horrific ways possible, was to convince the Vietnamese people, and a lot of those in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos that the western democracies didn't care about them as people, they were just playing politics with their lives. This left the Chinese backed communists and easy road to winning the hearts and minds.
The US lost the military war because they lost the public relations war, both at home, and in the country they were trying to liberate.
If you look at later wars, Gulf War 2, Afghanistan, you could argue that they have learnt nothing. You will never win people over to your way of thinking by dropping bombs on them, that just ensures that they will never bow to your will.
> If USA ever made a "maximum military effort" then the war would have been over in 3 months. That was the whole problem. They never did.
It doesn't matter what your imagination wants to have happened. It didn't. Why are you trying to put up your revisionist fantasy against a historical fact? We lost. Zinn's description is perfectly accurate.
Must be nice to smoke what you are smoking. The "west" lost entirely in Vietnam. Just look at Afghanistan today... 20 years of war and they have been beaten again.
There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime. It’s likely the US would have succeeded in that effort, much like it had 20 years earlier with invasions into German and Japanese held territories in WWII.
Why then did the US not invade North Vietnam? The last major conflict the US took part in was the Korean War. When the US pushed far enough above the 38th parallel, 700k Chinese troops entered the country and put the war into a stalemate.
The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.
The bind the US was in was that it couldn’t commit to winning, but it couldn’t lose either. The US tried to outlast an enemy, which was defending its own home turf, which was an awful strategic mistake and lead to millions dead and the trauma associated with the war. Eventually the US government came to its senses and left the situation.
> There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime. It’s likely the US would have succeeded in that effort, much like it had 20 years earlier with invasions into German and Japanese held territories in WWII.
That didn't happen. That's a militaristic fantasy. What Zinn is describing actually happened. This isn't a debate.
> The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.
Mutually Assured Destruction isn't "winning". Luckily that didn't happen either. We lost.
The US was fighting a proxy war with the soviet union. We had no interest in defeating the vietcong as much as stopping the spread of communism. Ho Chi Minh was a KGB agent and the communist revolution was largely born of soviet agitprop. So there is another layer to this conflict. Even though vietnam "won" they really were just puppets in a shadow war and it came at a huge cost for them. Much less than US.
Are you saying millions of Vietnamese who really wanted to kick out what they believed to be invaders puppets???? It is very CNN of you to say such a thing.
My understanding is that Ho Chi Minh was agitating for French socialists to join Lenin's 3rd International in the 1910s. I don't think he was a Soviet "agent" in any way, and had his own beliefs, aligning with Bolsheviks, certainly. However, you can definitely argue Vietnam was a client state of USSR.
Ho Chi Minh was trained at Lenin's "Comintern" with the expressive goal of training foreign assets to spread Soviet communist interests. These assets would be funded and supplied by the soviets to agitate revolution in their countries. This essentially is an agent.
OK, I see what you mean by agent now. I had assumed you meant "receiving and following orders", but receiving training (including ideological) seems more in line with your meaning.
I do think almost every leader in South and Central America in the latter 20th Century could be called a "CIA agent" by that definition though. Not something I'd say.
I was introduced to The Things They Carried in my freshman high school English class. That was a tough row to hoe as a 13-14 year old. I never understood why it was in there.
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong and Style were especially weird in the in-class discussions. That was 25+ years ago, and those classroom talks still stick with me. That teacher was either an unbelievable genius, or an insane person. Not sure.
My ex-wife Grandmother had spent over 10 years (1964-1975) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a reporter on the Vietnamese side during the Vietnam War and consecutive conflicts (Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia 1978).
She was the first European to walk all length of Ho Chi Minh trail, lived in Saigon undercover during American occupation and wrote couple of books about the Vietnam Wars.
She was telling a lot of stories and I remember some people from US visiting her in 90s hoping to use her contacts in order to find some lost American POWs.
Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English.
> Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity. Has anyone considered crowd sourcing a translation? I'd chuck in 10 bucks to read it and there's certainly a lot of history buffs out there looking for a fresh perspective.
Mind that Monika was reporting for largest communist daily in Poland - her books are good reporting, lots of focus on people involved in the war but there is also a propaganda narrative.
On the other hand her reporting angle is much better then some Western "useful idots"[1] like Tiziano Terzani [0] (der Spiegel), who had been calling Pol-pot 'great man with a vision for a nation' even on his deathbed.
On the other hand, this kind of prefaces often have the danger of sounding condescending or even disrespectful to the reader (and to the author). A safer bet that I've seen sometimes is to give two prefaces, exposing complementary or even contradictory views. This lets the reader approach the book without holding hands.
Yes you can see it explicitly from how he describes the two sentences above, one as an "intervention" and the other as an "occupation". I don't think most Cambodians considered the Vietnamese invasion in late '70's as an intervention, nor did the majority of the rest of the non-Soviet aligned world.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadThe White Silk Dress is an amazing Vietnamese War movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series)
Note: the imagery can be graphic and those afraid of seeing genocidal scenes and babies bombed should be warned.
But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has been basically poverty-class Nike factory workers for the last 50 years.
There is growing wealth disparity with the people at the top enjoying modern luxuries, yes.
Same thing can be said about parts of Tokyo during the typhoon season.
My family also owned a property next to a guy in Vietnam who owned a collection of 30 Ferraris.
To suggest Tokyo's flooding problem is anywhere close to Saigon is disingenuous.
I recall something similar happening the year before too.
My point being, you can cherry pick and see every city gets flooded. The difference with Saigon is flooding occurs throughout the city in critical areas. Government funds and projects exists to address these issues but the whole amount never gets allocated to properly developing the sewage infrastructure. Instead, hotfixes such as building the roads higher. This is a never ending back and forth with civilians building barriers or building their house higher so the water floods back into the streets. That's just one example of lack of infrastructure
Because I don't think anyone was arguing otherwise. The person you replied to merely said the poverty in Vietnam wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm not sure how you went from that to flooding.
I wish you luck drinking tap water or even the ice cubes at a street establishment in Vietnam
Edit: also, are you not proving my point? How can the people of a country be rich if the country itself is not? Unless there is great wealth disparity with most people living in impoverished conditions. I mean, if Vietnamese people were rich, they would have satiated their appetite for food, and other standard of living items, and eventually decide as a society that maybe they should fix the infrastructure problem that is wasting everyone’s time and even introducing risks of diseases / electrocution during these periods of flooding
Recap: The commentator you replied to said it's gotten better in the best decade (factually correct) and suggested it's considerably better than most Westerners think it is (an opinion/observation that also correlates with my experience, but YMMV).
From that comment, you brought up flooding in Saigon to which it was pointed out (to illustrate the absurdity of even bringing it up), that one of the richest cities in the world also has parts of it that flood.
You took that to mean they think Vietnam is wealthier than Japan (?) and that flooding is worse in Tokyo (?). No one said either of those things.
Look, you seem articulate and intelligent but no-one has even come close to saying what you keep suggesting. Please re-read the thread with a less combative mindset and realize we are all pretty much in agreement.
They wouldn't need those massive underground tanks to store stormwater as much if they had chosen a different approach.
When it comes to drainage, Vietnam didn’t take the learnings of Japan who had to learn first hand this “tech debt” of a concrete jungle. In fact, the solution in Vietnam is often layering on more layers of concrete, so water floods anywhere but the streets instead ( people’s home, who foundation is now 10 feet below ground). This is the lowest cost solution while offering the politicians a kickback, until people build their barricades high and flood the streets again.
See, for example "As Vietnam Gets Wealthier, Economic Inequality Also Gets Worse" - https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/17029-as-vietnam-gets-wea...
"The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation."
socialist society would be the other way around... unless you think Scandinavian countries are capitalists because they have lower wealth disparity
It's hard for long term growth when farmers can't hedge an off season
Additionally, you can look at food scarcity rates and the unbanked population.
Vietnam is still developing.
That sentence implies the national average for stunted growth was 20% in 2015 - malnourishment is most definitely a sign of extreme poverty. Although I assume much of that is historical overhang?
There were these elementary-school aged kids smoking cigarettes, cussing, etc. Eventually I realized they were 17.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...
I will never forget how Vietnam changed my whole life, literally. For the good. Even with the negative things it has. I am spanish and Spain also has negative things (and positive). All countries do.
It is well beyond winning and losing sides in such wars. There is a foreign invader and the local population fighting against the invader tooth and nail with the invader losing it despite better/bigger weapons, economy, army. In many such wars one could make an argument that giving in to the foreign invader may have been a better option, at least in the long run, yet the deep guttural tribal drive to defend the Motherland takes over any of the rationality. I mean for example the Russian peasants, being by all the parameters slaves of Russian nobility, were fighting French in 1812 only to return to the same slavery like position after the war.
People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing. The world will look totally different today.
Got downvoted on this. LOL.
This sounds like the Domino Theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory
Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam.
And anyone who pulls the line of "independence from foreign domination" should have a talk with the grey hairs in your local Vietnamese neighborhood, here, in the States. They'll let you know how much people in South Vietnam wanted nothing to do with the tyrannical regime in the North.
Furthermore, one cannot disparage South Vietnam as a puppet regime without also disparaging South Korea, Taiwan, or West Germany for that matter.
Communists, on the other hand, either suppress or celebrate their own atrocities.
LOL The ONLY person that received ANY punishment was Calley, and he was sentenced to life only to serve three years of house arrest.
"were punished" is a joke.
That's just one of them that we have evidence of. We know this was not a one off event.
Anyone who pulls the line of "Domino Theory" and "America was just fighting communism" must note all the war crimes that the US committed and was never held responsible for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Vietnam_relation...
FWIW, I agree with you regarding the dangers of communist purges- I lived in Laos in the late 70's/early 80's. I saw plenty of first-hand examples of what happens.
The vietmanese state has been an extension of the CCP since the 70s. This isn't up for debate, it's objective fact.
The Sino-Soviet split was a Very Big Deal, and Vietnam was firmly on the Soviet side of that split.
By the early 70’s the communist block had split between the USSR and China. Vietnam was USSR not Chinese ally.
Not long after the end of the Vietnam war, China attacked Vietnam (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War) ostensibly as the Vietnamese had attacked Cambodia, by this stage supported by China (and the US) to dispose the Khmer Rouge.
Suffice to say it went badly for the PLA and thanks to the Vietnamese the Khmer Rouge was ultimately disposed.
First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win.
Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.
And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords
North Vietnam then broke that agreement:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)
I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development.
The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.
From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.
South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.)
And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea.
And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money.
Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995).
A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US.
Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.
When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.
I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders.
I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.
The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea.
I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.
* The existence of films critical of the war does not imply that the mainstream "serious" political opinion of the day (that you would read in national newspapers, for example) went beyond calling the war a "quagmire" or "disaster", then with a justifying "but...", usually mentioning Domino theory or Containment as you implicitly do. I disagree with that assessment.
* The fact that North Vietnam (or Japan, or anyone) were awful in their treatment of PoWs doesn't excuse the US treating civilians in South Korea terribly. You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your own actions (or a close ally's actions), not someone else's. It's not "whataboutism" to focus on the effects you can actually control, even if it's historical. You can't change the past, but you can learn from your own history and understand what is "foreign propaganda" and what's actually just an uncomfortable truth.
* I can think of a few US interventions in the Cold War that seem to have hurt more than they helped, even with info available to decision-makers before committing to them. Vietnam is one of them.
Edit: I don't want to contribute to a pointless back-and-forth asking leading questions of each other, and don't have the time to go into major detail or link reading material, but I just thought I'd at least elaborate my thoughts more on the "blunder" comment, and the point about focusing on your own actions.
Right now, it's very popular on sites like Reddit and increasingly here to fill threads with bad historical takes that list everything bad the US has ever done, as if its acting in a vacuum where no other countries exist. In nearly every case of US intervention, you'll find that other countries were intervening on the other side. That's what the cold war was about. Domino theory was valid and rational. Large marxist countries exported revolution, allied powers supported governments resisting revolution. You might enjoy the underdog story of ethno-nationalists defeating the "empire" but on the other side of that story is always millions of families who lost lives and property to shitty redistribution schemes afterwards. My parents are from a latin american country that suppressed its marxist rebellion(with US help), but I have Cuban-American friends whose grandparents weren't so lucky.
I'm generally pretty stoic about these sorts of things, but that museum really did a number on me. I felt emotional and choked up most of the time and it put a damper on the rest of my day. I'm glad I went, though.
My understanding of the war was the USA wasn't there to make Vietnam the 51st State. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.
How could the Viet Cong have been as successful as they were if they didn't have substantial support in the south?
There was supposed to have been a referendum on re-unification in 1956, but it was cancelled by South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.
Vietnam was absolutely a second world country at that time, and it was an awful proxy war for many people. The theory that was used was the domino theory, that if a first world country would fall to a second world country, then others would start to fall in a "line of dominos".
It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later.
If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail.
The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.
I'm not an expert on Vietnam, but I'll just say that whatever their problems with a Chinese merchant class, the problems with a Western burning-villages class were probably bigger at the time.
Also, American and, more generally, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourses tend to infantilize people in these countries. I doubt the Vietnamese had a simplistic, love-hate relationship with either the French or the Americans even after the innumerable atrocities. Just like in every other nation even the masses were and are capable of complex strategic, mixed-motive thinking. Look at the sheer devastation America has caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet AFAIU neither most Iraqis nor most Afghanis wish for U.S. involvement to completely disappear. Americans would never believe themselves capable of pressing a war out of pure spite, anger, or retaliation; yet we somehow think other groups do? IOW, there's something problematic in thinking that what fundamentally drove the Vietnamese was a response to American atrocities. Far more likely (and consonant with the notion that all communities around the world tend to behave similarly) is that those atrocities exacerbated underlying, primary dynamics. Afterall, the merchant class by definition didn't tend to live on rice farms. They were centered in the cities.
The U.S. tried to implement many of the same policies the British did in Malaysia. During the communist insurgency in Malaysia the British corralled ethnic Chinese (the primary supporters of communism, such as they were--i.e. it wasn't that simple) into cities and towns. (To this day ethnic Chinese can't own rural farms outright in Malaysia.) But Chinese communities were already mostly urban, and were of course a minority (20-30%). It was a plan that arguably worked by accident. But such a strategy was never going to work in Vietnam because the dynamics were totally flipped. That would have been much more obvious if the U.S. saw the ethnic divisions for what they were.
From the random CIA dispatch reports from Laos and Indonesia I've read, low-level American officials were capable of regional socio-political savvy. I just don't think that appreciation ever translated up the chain. So, for example, people have claimed that the U.S. incited genocide in Indonesia. That seems both true and false. True because low-level CIA officers certainly seemed to understand how political and ethnic divisions overlapped and therefore how their anti-communist campaigning could and did devolve to ethnic cleansing. But I don't think leaders in Washington appreciated that at all. Perhaps mostly out of a racist disinclination to consider such aspects, but oblivious nonetheless.
"Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to cow the populace, liquidate opponents, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts. Estimates of the total number of South Vietnamese civilians killed by the VC/PAVN between 1954 and 1975 range from 106,000 to 227,000."
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...
The name Vietnam most probably based on Nanyue or Nam Viet a small little known kingdom created by Qin Dynasty deputy General, name Zhao Tuo or Tro Duo, a Han Chinese [1]. The indigenous or the native people of central and south Vietnam are not from China, they are mainly from Austronesian origin probably Taiwan so called Chams or Cham people [2]. They were the main inhabitants of the land for more than a thousand years (around 1500 years) and had a flourishing Champa kingdoms from 2nd to 16th century AD. The Chams mainly Muslim at the time, had been evicted just like the Moro in the Spain during the Spanish Inquisition or forced to convert. The eviction is completed after the Kinh people from the north displaced them during the Nam tien or "March to the South" and by doing that essentially tripled the original northern kingdom area size [3]. It's a kind of ethnic cleansing by today's standard.
The Kinh is originally ethnic Chinese intermarriage with local Tai-Kadai of the northern Vietnam. For about a thousand years they were essentially conquered and ruled by imperial China. As an analogy the Chams is like the Maya people of Vietnam, until they were eventually evicted rather than assimilated in around 16th AD by the Nguyen lords from the north to the other surrounding countries/areas towards the end of Nam tien movements.
The Chams has a proper civilization called Champa just like the Mayan civilization. The Chams' language is the pre-cursor to the modern Malay and Indonesian language. Their oldest writing on a stone tablet namely Dong Yeng Chau contains an old classical writing of Chams languages in the 4th century AD and was discovered recently in modern Quang Nam province, central Vietnam. It is amazingly still comprehensible if you know the modern language [4]. Interestingly the old name for Quang Nam is Simhapura or Lion City, and it is highly probable than the Cham people conquered Singapore (Singapura) and renamed it similar to their capital's name just like York in the UK becomes New York in the US.
[1]http://eastasiaorigin.blogspot.com/2018/05/ethnic-origin-of-...
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chams
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_ti%E1%BA%BFn
[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%C3%B4ng_Y%C3%AAn_Ch%C...
The Vietnam War is largely considered to be 1955-1975. The French were out by 1954, and American troops in any number were there from 1965 to 1973.
> 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
5x to 7x as many South Vietnamese troops died compared to Americans, who had combat troops there for less than half of those 20 years.
Yes, that's the reason the French were out in 1954.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Geneva_Conference
Most countries which became dependent on the US became rich and prosperous. West Germany, Japan, South Korea.
Also, it is much better to be dependent on the US, than dependent on USSR or China.
But of course many left-leaning americans don't understand that. Most of them never lived and never ever visited shithole countries where communism has won and their knowledge of the subject is limited to propaganda posters with Che Guevara portrait.
Feel free to downvote, I don't care.
Also, you don't need to visit a country to learn what it's GDP per capita compared to other countries in the region. And you don't need to visit the country to learn that it's citizen are used as a source of cheap unskilled labour, in the country and abroad.
Vietnam is not doing too bad though, they are gradually switching to proper market economy.
The orange website is quite left-leaning, and there's nothing racist in my comments. Your opinion is understandable, but it doesn't mean I'm "wrong".
And no, I'm not going to bend to groupthink. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience is a greatest achievement of western civilization, and I'm going to use it despite of increasing number of attempts of left-leaning activists to shut it down.
> Maybe reflect on your opinions a bit and reconsider a few of them?
Believe me, I do it, when I learn something new. But only then, but not when I'm downvoted/flagged or told I'm wrong or racist.
Also to quote you: "I would hope CEO to protect someone saying “be safe from rioters and looters in BLM marches”, but that won’t happen.
It’s easy to protect someone who is supported by the majority. " Is pretty borderline racist. Maybe not overtly so, but the fact that you equate protesting getting killed with looting and rioting rubs a little too close to it. Oh and then denying racist policies are, in fact, racist just because they don't meet the dictionary definition of it.
Also - freedom of speech being the greatest achievement of western civ? No wonder it took the Muslim civilizations to get us out of the dark ages. And left-leaning activists shutting it down? Jesus dude. Read the constitution. You clearly have no idea what freedom of speech (in America) is.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"
That's it. CONGRESS. Nothing about market forces pushing tech companies to deplatform people. Nothing about "cancel culture" or whatever. I mean, I also remember the Bush years, when we had "Free Speech Zones" and nobody on the right was really concerned about it because it only affected people who were protesting the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle.
I mean, Florida (a state run by a pretty right-wing governor) just passed a law essentially denying tech companies freedom of speech. The projection from the right is absolutely ridiculous at this point.
Sometimes, you're just wrong. Whether you admit it or whether you claim you are being some superior moral authority and refusing to bend to "groupthink."
> the fact that you equate protesting getting killed with looting and rioting rubs
Sorry, I could not understand that phrase. Who is getting killed, and what I equate to what?
> Oh and then denying racist policies are, in fact, racist just because they don't meet the dictionary definition of it.
It's really hard to talk to people which like to redefine words. Calling everything and everyone racists and literal nazis just because they don't like it.
I'll stick to the dictionary.
> And left-leaning activists shutting it down? Jesus dude. Read the constitution. You clearly have no idea what freedom of speech (in America) is.
Freedom of speech is far broader term than US constitution even in the US.
For example, UK has freedom in speech, but it is not in the constitution.
On the other hand, many authoritarian countries have more more freedom of speech in the constitution than the US. But they don't really have free speech.
"Cancelling" people for speech reduces that free speech even if it does not violate constitution.
I must say, you have no idea what freedom is speech is.
> I mean, Florida (a state run by a pretty right-wing governor) just passed a law essentially denying tech companies freedom of speech. The projection from the right is absolutely ridiculous at this point.
Denying companies right to deplatform people might be a limitation of business freedom or whatever, but calling it attack on freedom of speech, this is a hot take.
Yeah, we definitely have very different understanding of freedom of speech.
Just in case, this is a quote from wikipedia:
Freedom of speech: Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Censorship: Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. ... Censorship can be conducted by governments, *private institutions*, and other controlling bodies.
Emphasis mine.
People were out protesting the murders of black men by police, and you refer to them as looters and rioters in your prior comments - along with some defenses of Gab/Parler - both of which I was banned from for posting things that weren't right wing enough. Great freedom of speech there. I was cancelled by the right!
> Freedom of speech is far broader term than US constitution even in the US.
Right, that's why I said "in America" - which is commonly where people make up complaints about supposed leftists trying to get rid of it - when nearly every law limiting it in my lifetime has been proposed by either Republicans or Democrats - neither of which are leftist.
>"Cancelling" people for speech reduces that free speech even if it does not violate constitution.
No, it doesn't. If I choose to shop somewhere else because I think your products suck, or because I disagree with your views, I'm not reducing the total freedom of speech - I am using my right, in a semi-free market, to give business to whomever I choose. If you come into my house and say things I don't want being said in my house, it's my right to ask you to leave. If I go into a business with no shirt and no shoes - guess what - I get no service. I broke the rules, they don't have to serve me. This does not "reduce free speech" in any way. Free speech doesn't mean you get to do anything you want, and besides which, there are already limits on it - speech that incites violence, things like yelling "fire", making false statements under oath, threatening to kill someone, we had all kinds of anti-smut laws for decades here, on and on. I mean, do you bitch when AMC won't show a movie that isn't rated by the MPAA? Is that "censorship" or is it a business exercising their right to not show something they disagree with?
Political belief is not (and should not be) a protected class, therefore nobody is required to transact with you, they have a choice. It's also your choice to get butthurt and complain about being cancelled (on the very platforms that are supposedly doing the cancelling, just like Marjorie Green wearing a "censored" mask while speaking on national TV).
I get the the right has never really had to suffer any consequences ever, at least in America, for anything, so this may be a little disconcerting. Go ahead and look up how many right wing groups the FBI/CIA infiltrated just for being right wing, and compare that to America going out of it's way around the world to disrupt anything even remotely left of liberal. Or how many left wing publications have been targeted over the years by the government. Or how communism (as much as I disagree with it) was the biggest scare in the world and would get you blacklisted ("cancelled") here in the 50's for even being remotely associated or making someone think you might be associated with it, even if you were a famous physicist who led the development of the atomic bomb. Or you know, the Bush years, where I was teargassed and arrested for peacefully protesting the fact that my tax dollars were being used to bomb people who didn't do anything to me. Have you been teargassed or arrested for exercising your supposed right to free speech? I know the people arresting me DEFINITELY weren't spending their nights reading Chomsky, so if they weren't leftists "cancelling" me, then who were they?
No, I referred to people who were looting and rioting.
Also, it was not murder. George Floyd case was manslaughter at best. I think it is not even manslaughter, but I'm not a lawyer. Again, as I said before, it's hard to talk to people who redefine words for their advantage.
> along with some defenses of Gab/Parler - both of which I was banned from for posting things that weren't right wing enough. Great freedom of speech there. I was cancelled by the right!
It is called deplatforming, not cancelling. If that's true, shame on them! Show me the proof, I'm condemn both of these platforms.
> If I choose to shop somewhere else because I think your products suck, or because I disagree with your views, I'm not reducing the total freedom of speech - I am using my right, in a semi-free market, to give business to whomever I choose.
Yes. But if you dig 10 years old tweet, and then demand a company to fire an employee, and gather a big crowd, that is cancelling.
By the way, my personal policy is to ignore companies which participate in any political activity, whether they support gay rights, christian rights, nazi rights, black rights, human rights, animal rights or whatever, I don't care, I would pick a company which just sells a product. Simply because dividing society is bad, and I support companies which do not do that.
> Free speech doesn't mean you get to do anything you want, and besides which, there are already limits on it - speech that incites violence, things like yelling "fire"
Technically it does limit free speech. And limiting free speech is sometimes acceptable, when it is universally acceptable. Only a dozen of knuckleheads would support freedom to shout "fire" in a theater.
> do you bitch when AMC won't show a movie that isn't rated by the MPAA? Is that "censorship" or is it a business exercising their right to not show something they disagree with?
It is not freedom of speech issue for several reasons: they are not monopoly, their resource is limited, there are children who watch TV etc.
> I get the the right has never really had to suffer any consequences ever, at least in America, for anything, so this may be a little disconcerting. Go ahead and look up how many right wing groups the FBI/CIA infiltrated just for being right wing
Technically it was never? just because they are left wing, US has so many laws, there's a law to harass anyone. Ruby Ridge was one of many case where right-leaning people were harassed by the government. But I agree, until recently, left wing were harassed by the government more often.
That statement of yours looks like you are willing to retaliate against rights for injustices of the past. This is very shortsighted, let alone inhumane. Those FBI/CIA agents and their bosses are long dead. Don't punish children for the sins of their fathers.
> Have you been teargassed or arrested for exercising your supposed right to free speech?
I can tell you my story, and there are unpleasant parts in it, believe me, I know what I'm talking about. But that story is not for this website, we can continue in e-mail if you wish. farright@altmails.com is a redirect e-mail.
Anyway, I'm always on the side of those oppressed. When free speech is restricted for someone, I'm all for them regardless of their political views, lefts, rights, jews, arabs, blacks, whites, gays, christians, nazis, doesn't matter. When peaceful protesters get arrested, again, they have my full support regardless of their views. But when people start burning buildings because of police incident resulting in non-intentional killing of junkie criminal resisting arrest, they have no my support.
I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever. Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part, oh great defender of free speech who also somehow supports people who want to take away the speech (and lives) of people who disagree.
Also, the civil rights movement is not the distant past. Ruby Bridges is still alive. The FBI did what they could to fuck that up. Occupy too, and now BLM. These are not ancient history, these are events within (some of) our lives.
I did not get that. Do I need to know him personally to know that he has junkie and a criminal?
> And to think the protests were about a single person
Sure protests were for all good and against all bad.
But there were too many posters about George Floyd and other black criminals, there was too many lies in crime statistics posted by left-wing media supporting these protests, so let's say these protesters were misinformed at best.
> clearly you don’t care enough to be informed.
Well, you have formed your opinion about what I know and what I don't (not the first time in this thread). It's not my job to convince you otherwise. Continue living in an imaginary world where everyone who disagree with you is literally nazi.
> I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever.
Thank you for your opinion, but I'm not on the side of nazis. I'm on the side of freedom of speech and other human rights.
> Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part
I'm not "siding" with these people. I try protect their rights and freedom as well as rights and freedoms of anyone else.
I'll try to explain the difference, but it is so obvious, so explanation might be hard.
There are two reasons: humanist and practical.
First, even serial killers and rapists deserve humane treatment, right to fair trial etc. Including free speech. Abandoning eye for an eye principle is also a great achievement of the western civilization.
Second, if society today decides it is acceptable to take speech rights from nazis, tomorrow it will decide it can take speech rights from communists, day after tomorrow you won't be able to talk freely. It happened too often throughout history, even in modern times, literally in the last decade (I'm not talking about the US, but it applies to the US to some degree).
Yes, since you only seem to know what right wing media tells you. Rush Limbaugh was also a junkie and a criminal by those standards, yet he gets a medal of freedom or whatever.
> George Floyd and other black criminals
This is why you are an uninformed racist. You can disagree all you like but it doesn't really change the reality of it.
> everyone who disagree with you is literally nazi.
I never called you or anyone who disagrees with me a nazi. I said "defending nazis is reprehensible" basically.
> I'm on the side of freedom of speech and other human rights.
Again, no you are not. If you defend those who would seek to take away the lives of others, you are not on the side of human rights. Right to life and all that.
> serial killers and rapists deserve humane treatment, right to fair trial etc. Including free speech. Abandoning eye for an eye principle is also a great achievement of the western civilization.
I agree, but this isn't a trial.
>decides it is acceptable to take speech rights from nazis, tomorrow it will decide it can take speech rights from communists
I mean, it did? Look at the 50's. Rightwing cancel culture and deplatforming at it's finest. Also, taking away the rights of those who don't respect the same right in others is kind of ok - that's sort of what our justice system is based on, since you likened this to a trial.
You cannot seriously believe he was not a criminal and a junkie.
Here the left wing sources about his criminal history: https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd-who-is.html
Here is left wing source about his drug use: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/08/us/derek-chauvin-trial-ge...
> Rush Limbaugh was also a junkie and a criminal by those standards, yet he gets a medal of freedom or whatever.
Many criminals junkies walk free regardless of their skin color. George Floyd was just too unlucky to be high on several drugs, committed crime and resisted arrest on the same day. This combo could not end well.
> This is why you are an uninformed racist. You can disagree all you like but it doesn't really change the reality of it.
I'm not a racist, and I don't talk with people who throw insults, and generally don't talk to people who cannot conduct a constructive dialogue.
So this is my last reply to you. You may reply, and I'll read that reply, but I won't reply to you again. It was an interesting conversation. Thanks!
> I never called you or anyone who disagrees with me a nazi.
I was speaking figuratively. It just happens way to often by left wing people. In fact, you just called me racist in the same message. There's irony in that.
> If you defend those who would seek to take away the lives of others, you are not on the side of human rights.
I must say, you don't understand the modern meaning of human rights. Even criminals have these rights. Like UN requires it, all of the western countries signed it, most of the world countries signed it. It is universally agreed on in the western society. Well, I thought so, until I read your comment, and was quite disappointed. I thought better of left-wing people.
> Also, taking away the rights of those who don't respect the same right in others is kind of ok
So it's OK to rape the rapist, I got it. And I already replied to that: fortunately eye for an eye was abandoned by the western civilization, but unfortunately left-wing people are pulling civilization back to the dark ages.
The NY Times is NOT left wing, it is liberal. Same with CNN. Also, the Times article says he moved away to get a fresh start. Do you believe a person is ALWAYS a junkie or criminal? I've been to jail. Does that mean I am a criminal, permanently?
Since when are police allowed to be executioners? How can you be ok with that? Why can't non-lethal force be used, a person brought to jail, and then charged with a crime. He wasn't charged with anything, and in America I thought people were "innocent until proven guilty."
>I'm not a racist,
So you are one of the only humans I have ever met who has no unconscious bias, is perfectly aware of the entirety of their mind, and does not need anyone else to hold up a mirror for them to show them their blind spots. Got it.
> It just happens way to often by left wing people. In fact, you just called me racist in the same message.
You should hear what I've been called by right wing people. And I'm not saying all racists are nazis. Some racists are just racist without knowing it, some are "culturally racist" like much of my family - ignorant, usually. Some are just racist and don't want to exterminate other races, but believe all sorts of bullshit bell-curve garbage. There are plenty of other categories.
>Even criminals have these rights.
Yes, we agree. And what was being protested last year was the unequal application of those rights, and police forces acting as judges, juries, and executioners, when they are supposed to be people who apprehend (not kill) criminals or gather evidence to use at a trial. I used to live in a 99% white neighborhood. My former roommate was a black man. I never had a front license plate on my car (illegal here) in the three years I lived there and never had a problem. He drove without one for a week and got pulled over three times. By cops who "weren't racist" according to them. You think those cops thought they were racist? You could have even been one of them for all I know.
>So it's OK to rape the rapist, I got it
No, I don't believe in an eye for eye but you keep putting up straw men to try to make me into some caricature of what you think a left wing person is, like how calling people nazis happens often so I'm obviously doing it, when you were the first person to mention them at all anyways.
In fact, every single person on the left that I know of is pretty against retributive justice and instead prefers rehabilitative justice. In a rehabilitative system, someone like George Floyd would have gotten addiction counseling, support as he was getting back on his feet, and help keeping his life in order, and the protests of last year would likely never have happened. This is just more projection from you. The right wing is always the one who is all about eye-for-an-eye - how many right wing people are calling for the abolition of the death penalty? Isn't "tough on crime" usually a big hit with the right wing voting bloc? Even liberals are on board with that garbage. How many prison abolitionists can you name on the right or even center? It's how we end up with shit like the Clinton crime bill or whatever.
Afghanistan was better of before US took it... now Taliban controls more territory then they did before US came in...
list of countries that depended on the USA that got totally screwed over is larger then the list of a few that USA let become rich and prosperous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
As for Afghanistan, the taliban has only recently expanded its territorial base before 9/11. The afghan government of today controls more territory than the soviet backed state ever did; whose control only extended to the major population centers and connecting arteries.
Iran problems began with islamic revolution, and USA had nothing to do with it, no?
> Afghanistan was better of before US took it
Which conflict you are talking about? War in Afghanistan started almost 50 years ago.
> now Taliban controls more territory then they did before US came in
Yeah, the US need to finish what it started. I think Trump decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan was a mistake.
This is incorrect. In 1953, the United States overthrew the democratically elected PM and installed a dictator. The Islamic Revolution was a response to that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Anyway, it does not disprove my point about countries which became dependent on US, and civil wars where one party is supported by the US.
So it's a bit of a stretch to claim that South Korea became today's South Korea because it survived the war in 1953. One could equally say that Vietnam's economic development in 2000s validates North Vietnam's victory.
For the record, China and Vietnam is not what I would call communist. That is more North Korea or Cuba. In Vietnam even foreigners can buy property already nowadays. I do not recall the exact conditions but I know people who did it. It is a capitalist system, actually. With a lot of control sometimes, but with market rules.
It is not about the sanctions. It is the system chosen. Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that. There is a lot of literature about the problem of economic calculation in socialism systems proved by how russians did theirs, for example (black markets and copying countries budgets, the U.S. army compared to the russian one is an example of such a thing).
And do not make me started on the repression, that is the worst part. But all go hand in hand at the end.
Vietnam is developing, and I am glad it is. But what they are doing is not communism at all, do not sell us that. I have been living there for almost 10 years and I hope I can come back. It is a lovely country.
If we are into intellectual honesty, then North Korea does not match any features of Socialism or Communism I've ever read or heard of.
Tt is a totalitarian absolute monarchy bordering on "worship god emperror"
Have fun if you're Christian:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Vietnam
Vietnam, on the other hand, only really began to reform its economy after the collapse of the soviet union. If anything, North Vietnam's victory emboldened communist leaders in the aftermath of the war.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River
In fact there were strong parallels to the Soviet economic plans, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_of_South_Korea
vs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_Soviet_...
Of course, a country can always be competitive by keeping wages low (probably artificially low in south korea) but I think south korea and the other asian tigers got a lot of things right that aren't comparable to how mainland china approached economic reform.
Besides being of a duration of five years there isn't a lot in common the economic planning of the soviet union and south korea in the aftermath of the Korean war. The soviet union's plans controlled the allocation of almost every resource and good in the economy and its ultimate price. South Korea's planning was mostly limited to guiding government investment and lacked the policy levers available to Gosplan.
We grieve 58,000 deaths, but they lost more than a million (the figures are very fuzzy).
Their soldiers lived rough as hell, and weren't particularly well-equipped.
We bombed the living hell out of them. We used napalm.
Being an NVC was a tough gig.
From what I can see, Vietnam is actually starting to thrive, and I sincerely wish them the best.
The US lost half a million.
Are you happy now?
Do you think a south-east asian country with ~100,000,000 people only had 50 people die from the COVID-19 virus?
Answer honestly
It's generally seen as having as effective response against the pandemic. They closed borders early and have employed an effective testing and tracing strategy. Their data appears to be transparent and is corroborated by neighboring countries.
"One of the reasons Vietnam was able to act so quickly and keep the case count so low is that the country experienced a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 and human cases of avian influenza between 2004 and 2010. As a result, Vietnam had both the experience and infrastructure to take appropriate action. Vietnam makes many key containment decisions in a matter of days, which may take weeks for governments in other countries to make. Although Vietnam is a highly centralized country, a number of key decisions were made at the local level, which also contributed to the swift response."
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam
If you have any indication that the numbers are fabricated you're better off posting them (or any references at all). Otherwise you just sound like you're appealing to prejudices, like as if "south-east asian" countries couldn't possibly have had an effective epidemiologic response.
(It might not have - you might be right - still, the form of your argument is completely wrong for fruitful discussion)
For an example of a reference that is a counter-argument to your point, see - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam
One day, I went camping with some friends. We then returned to the capital and 2 days later I saw the high rise she lived in on the news. She lives in a high rise that's about 38 floors, with around 30 units per floor, so that's about 1000 units. Someone who lived somewhere in that high rise had tested positive for covid so they placed the building under a police barricade. A couple days later they limited the restrictions to only the floors the patient (zero) had been to.
Right now they're experiencing a really bad covid outbreak, and I'm not entirely confident that this isn't the big one that will lead to non-stop community transmission like in the US.
There are a ton of foreigners in the country, I know maaaany people working for embassies from western countries, if there are shady stuff going on you would hear it from them.
A recent development is that they aren't publishing the schedules of an infected person anymore. Before they use to say:
J.S who works at the Samsung Plant on 14 Main St. on the 14th of May visited the Starbucks from 2pm-3pm on Xuan Dieu street, then he visited the au co flower market from 3pm-4:30pm, and then went to Karaoke with colleagues at 54 Blueberry Lane from 5pm-9:30pm, afterwhich he took a cab home whose driver has not yet been identified.
And they would do that for every day since their suspected time of infection. So it was extremely privacy invasive but it helps with contact tracing. Now they will just announce the locations, I presume it's because there's too many new cases.
Recently in the news there was a couple who tested positive for covid but wouldn't come out of their house for 2 or 4 hours against police & health worker's demands. If you have covid, you are forced into hospitalization so you can be monitored by doctors and not infect others.
If you so much as went to the same grocery store at the same time as a covid patient you're going to get sent into centralized quarantine.
They know they can't handle millions of cases so they have to crack down hard on any cases. The death toll last week was only 30, it's these part few weeks that it's been steadily going up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Urbani
To quote wikipedia:
> Urbani realized that Chen's ailment was probably a new and highly contagious disease. He immediately notified the WHO, triggering a response to the epidemic (principally isolation and quarantine measures) that would end it within five months. He also persuaded the Vietnamese Health Ministry to begin isolating patients and screening travelers, thus slowing the early pace of the epidemic.
The minister didn't cover up anything, did anything they could to stop the new deadly virus. Urbani later died of SARS and was hailed as a hero: https://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/news/Fifteen_years_af...
Vietnam maybe is a third world country but they are very serious about deadly flu pandemic.
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/05/05/v...
> But by the end of the two-hour meeting, the vice minister of health, Nguyen Van Thuong, had agreed to allow WHO to summon an international team of experts. He also promised to organize a task force at the ministry that would review the situation daily.
> It was, Brudon said, a "turning point."
> Vietnam's response contrasted with that of China, which for weeks tried to conceal the extent of its outbreak. But a health official in Vietnam, Le Thi Thu Ha, said her country made a simple calculation: "We needed that technical assistance," she said.
> ...
> That week, the Health Ministry set up a task force. Days later, a dozen epidemiologists and pathologists had arrived from Britain, the United States, Sweden, Germany, France and Australia.
They asked for help when they needed help, not saving face like China's handling of COVID in 2019.
South Korea had an economy that was similar to or slightly worse than North Korea until the 80s.
This is a classic example of "white man's burden" where south Korean success in 1980 is being attributed to white intervention in 1950, which was followed by decades of poverty. Apparently Koreans can't build a country without American help. Perhaps north Korea would also have been in much better shape without US sponsored world wide sanctions.
If you want to know the consequences of American intervention, latin America is impossible to ignore. Especially Haiti.
But the US did lose the war, come out of the region and its primary objective of preventing a socialist govt. in Vietnam could not be achieved.
Was it worth it for Vietnam to win the war, that is a totally different question. Was it worth it for US to lose the war? Definitely not. The mightiest nation on earth could not overcome a peasant nation with guerrilla fighters and outdated equipment. That is a slap in the face.
The ultimate goal of removing Saddam and destroying the Iraqi army (4th largest) were important strategic goals because oil, although the reasons given to the American people were at best superficial. Saudi Arabia and other countries paid for part of the US military effort, around $40 billion.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-arabia-pays-us-500m...
Afghanistan is a strange story and isn't well-understood by Americans. Its location is important, as well as its natural resources. Ideally Russia, Pakistan and the US would have come up with a plan to occupy it since the Taliban is certainly a threat to Pakistan, as well as the Russian border.
(Pakistan is reluctant to fight the Taliban because of Islamic ideology swaying lower ranks in the Pakistani army. But Russia and the US worked at cross-purposes. In some ways Afghanistan and Palestine are similar - nobody wants them or to be responsible for them.)
Also keep in mind that, after North Vietnam successfully INVADED South Vietnam, one to two million million people crossed open ocean, through shark-infested waters, in hand-made boats in order to get away from the regime which those photos extol.
The pictures on that website are communist propaganda and should be taken as seriously as those made under the Soviet Union or East Germany.
You cannot invade your own country. If anything the invaders were the US.
You might also keep in mind the millions killed in the bombing of the north. Might make me want to go south, too.
Wait no it’s not this is the HackerNews, you all eat this up with a spoon
Now go ahead and shadowban me again :*
I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.
When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win.
I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article:
>She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.
I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into.
My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.
By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html
This belief is certainly reflected in one of the best books I've read about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, who was a reporter there throughout the war and devoted a large part of his life to chronicling it.
He repeatedly shows how the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), from commanders down to recruits, were not deeply motivated in the same way the Viet Cong were - abandoning battlefields, taking bribes to leave the front, etc. Additionally, the South Vietnamese political class was a corrupt gerontocracy with little in common with the people (either peasant farmers or urban) they were supposed to be leading.
For that reason, early American observers said they'd rather be on the side of the North than the South.
> it became clear within three or four months, That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear. I mean this notion of defending the people against these invaders from North Vietnam. The people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me. [...] the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me. I beat them, I sometimes kill them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture. Why in the hell should those people like me? And I could see that I was doing that, and I could see that nothing we were doing was having any impact on the war itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8
[1] https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war
That's why Sun-Tzu teaches to always leave an escape route for enemy, otherwise he will fight to the last man and inflict more damage than giving up.
> The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win
I think we can find many counterexamples of other peoples where the result did not turn out in their favor
When your soldiers starting to think "wtf am doing here?," after first thinking they were going for a picnic, you loose in a short order. And even faster if soldier also think that their political leadership are idiots.
We still have a couple of stories in the family about the bombings. I wonder how accurate the details are.
One was my uncle, who was driving a truck over the last bridge to be bombed in Hanoi. He got to the bridge, it got bombed, and everyone was looking for his body for days. My grandmother was at the river every day. Luckily, he had somehow not gotten killed, and was in fact stuck on the wrong side, safe. He'd driven upriver to the next crossing, which took some time.
The other story is that my mom's neighbour had a bomb land in her house. The family was killed, apart from the girl, who was my mom's age. My grandmother took her in to live with them. I think the memory had quite an impression on my parents, as they in turn took in a girl to live with them later in life.
Many nations opposed by a military-superior enemy have lost no matter their sense of righteousness.
The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.
All credit to them. To be honest, few nations could have managed this. In that era they were likely the most battle-hardened people in the world.
It's also worth mentioning that the US had no reasonable way to "win". The threat of Chinese involvement prevented them from invading the north, and strategic air campaigns alone aren't enough when it comes to guerrilla warfare.
Without these it's quite possible that the US might have used overwhelming force (like nukes) to "win" the Vietnam War.[1]
[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nixon-want...
The threat of Chinese reaction to American over-reach was very real. It happened in Korea and the Americans didn't want to repeat that mistake.
The U.S. did try to use overwhelming force in Vietnam. It literally dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than it did during the whole of WWII. It drafted all the men the country would stand. It destroyed one, if not two, Presidents. Still not enough.
I guess the point of my comment is to push back against the suggestion that the US "could have won" except for pesky morals and domestic critics.
Vietnam massively scared the US military for a long time, only really going away with the massive success of the Gulf War. It is always valuable to get the other sides perspective on a conflict.
Ultimately in a civil war, both sides are usually good and bad, depending on the perspective you take. The vietnam war was no different. It is good to see that the wounds of the war are mostly healed.
Former bureaucrats and their children, who fled Vietnam before 2009, are always having disgruntled feeling against Vietnam and Vietnamese successes in general. I know a bunch of them but they won't exist much any longer since Vietnam will aggressively become more powerful and extend its Communist influence overseas. It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.
I strolled around many Chinatowns across the US to Europe, and I see PRC flags and Chinese United Fronts everywhere. This is the future of overseas Vietnamese communities.
>My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.
They won because they have been largely smarter than history. Trần Văn Hương, a former top RVN official, once said that only Northerners can reign the country supreme, while Southerners and Centralers are more fitting at commerce and warfare which Northerners are also very proficient. This is also my similar observation in the overseas Vietnamese communities where those Vietnamese people of Northern background or Chinese Vietnamese are largely more successful than anyone in the community - mostly Northerners.
The North won because it had been cultured, determined, militant, more clever due to centures of exposure with threats from China.
As a Vietnamese I don't see this happening, if you think because it happened in China then it'll happen in Vietnam too, there are a couple of differences:
1) Vietnam doesn't have a "middle kingdom" mentality, we've always been and always will be a small country navigating our success with bigger powers around, so less of that blind nationalism bs, eventhough it's there
2) More importantly, we don't have a great firewall, so people are only going to be more disillussioned about the regime as more of them learn about the outside world.
I am pro socialism btw but of course it's a different thing. Socialism is a growing mindset in the west for sure.
That's a reasonable thing to say and not at all willfully ignoring what is meant when someone talks about the winner of a competition between two opposed parties.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...
So who really won?
I wonder how much of this is truth, or it's just the US trying to save face by claiming that they've lost to a world-class military.
Later, when Nixon became president, the situation changed for the better, but it was a slog. Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese premier better terms than what LBJ was offering, but, by the time he came into office, the situation had gotten so bad that it was all that he could do just to guarantee South Vietnam's existence.
Nevertheless, the situation stabilized. The North Vietnamese army was pushed out of South Vietnam. Nixon got the North to sign a cease-fire agreement, which the North (being perfidious communists) violated.
And the South Vietnamese army got good enough that, after Nixon had pulled American ground troops out of the area, South Vietnam was able to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression, for a while.
In 1972, North Vietnam sent 150,000 troops—along with columns of tanks from the Soviet Union—to invade South Vietnam. The latter had American air support, but only its own troops on the ground.
Result: Less than a third of North Vietnam's invasion force made it back north. Roughly 650 Americans were KIA in a campaign as big as the Battle of Kharkov. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had won, big time.
Then, Watergate happened.
In 1975, North Vietnam—violating the cease-fire agreement AGAIN—launched another invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union continued to support North Vietnam. The Congress of the United States of America pulled all support from South Vietnam.
Result: Yet another workers' paradise blighting the history of the twentieth century. And the kind of gloating you can see in this discussion thread.
My dad was a hospital corpsman on the USS Repose (hospital ship) during Vietnam. Having seen some of his operating room photos, I can't imagine that we were on the "winning" side.
The video above is his amateur footage he took while aboard the ship. Probably 1968/1969.
I had the film digitized after he passed in 2016.
Couple q's if you're up for it:
* What camera did he have? Was it common in that era for cameras to not have a mic? (not complaining, just curious)
* Did he ever watch the footage, after the war? I know some veterans, depending on how they processed their experience, just block it all out.
* Can you share more on what he thought of his service there?
* I don't think he ever saw the footage. I would assume that at some point he had a projector, but as far as I can remember, he just always kept them in his top drawer. He always talked about getting them transferred to VHS. Never did it.
* He's in the video at 38 seconds in. I assume his buddy from the previous frames filmed him. https://youtu.be/1hiNanqC5aQ?t=38
He didn't like the military. He had a lot of explosive outbursts I remember growing up. Later in his life, when he was finally convinced to see a VA doctor, he was diagnosed with PTSD with - 100% related to the war. He received full disability but very late in life. He was fired from so many jobs during his lifetime.
In the 70s, Kodak introduced a variant of Super 8 film that had a magnetic strip for audio, but it wasn’t widely used. Later in the 70s video on magnetic tape cassettes became popular, which was the first time most people had home movies with sound.
Both technologies arrived too late for the US war in Vietnam.
I saw a Plymouth Superbird a couple years ago that had “original damage”. It looked like it had been stolen and taken on a joyride. No straight body panels, scratches everywhere.
The story went that some kid got drafted and figured he was never coming home so he spent his life savings on the fastest car he could and tried to have as much fun as possible.
I assume it is a similar state of mind to a terminal medical diagnosis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ysQqHKYV1o
The company supplied us with kevlar gloves.
He took a drywall knife, and with all his might, propelled the knife into his hand.
He was know as Kevlar Ken from then on.
The only vivid story I recall. He talked about when they were stationed at an outpost. The supplies would be stacked up in a central area and he was getting the rations for his men. There was an explosion and everyone thought they were being shelled.
However, it turned out that one of the other Sergeants was wearing a grenade on his vest. The pin caught on something and pulled out without him noticing.
They had to spend the next few days taping down the pins on all the grenades to avoid another accident.
What impressed me the most: "Using home-brewed chemicals, they developed their pictures in the open air or in underground tunnels" if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room, that is really not something easy to do with then available technology. It is basically Polaroid chemicals quality.
Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons. How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained. Specially considering Iraqi invasion decades later alleging chemical weapons suspicions.
Some pictures look extremely noise and grain free for such old photos. Makes me think they are probably digitally enhanced or Vietnam chemicals were really first class quality.
I don't think that's what it means. They presumably developed the photos in near darkness, either during the night (open air) or in those tunnels.
I believe the distinction is that Agent Orange was not used as a weapon per se, in that it wasn't applied to people, but rather was used to destroy plants. Please note I'm not making any claims about the ethics of its use.
Article about this: https://www.volgermeer.nl/artikel/na-de-ontploffing-kwam-de-... (dutch)
"I just set your house on fire to flush you out of it so I could kill you. I didn't intend the fire as a weapon itself."
See also the legal wrangling around US use of white phosphorous, which is 100% legal if used as an "illuminant" [https://treaties.unoda.org/t/ccwc_p3] (i.e. for flares), but not as a weapon against people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosph...
You do know there is no such thing as international court, right? There are few organization which has name court in it like ICJ but they don't have any hard power like courts, and definitely have no force/military to stop a country.
It's probably relevant that the horrible health effects of Agent Orange were a result of accidental contaminants (dioxins), not the defoliant itself. Not that this makes it ok, but it's something different than dropping mustard gas on Kurdish civilians.
Might makes right, aka US foreign policy since its inception. The US has never recognised any court that could try them ( like the ICC) and have veto powers in the UN, so they can go about committing war crimes with impunity.
"'War crimes' are defined by the winners. I'm a winner, so I can make my own definition.".
They don't have to recognize the court in order to be tried in the court, in absentia if need be.
It's interesting that despite the power to try alleged US war criminals, the ICC has chosen not to.
This is common misconception. What you mean by "AK-47" is usually AKM rifle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM
Secondly: SKS rifles were very popular as well in North Vietnam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKS
The fact the US has made it clear they will use any force necessary against the ICJ if they ever dare trying a US citizen should be a good explanation. You can get away with war crimes just fine if nobody dares to charge you with them.
The sheer amount of ink and celluloid spent trying to come to terms with this is awesome, and a little depressing.
Korean war: half won, half lost.
Vietnam war: lost.
Grenada invasion: sort of won.
Gulf war 1991: I'd say won, despite Saddam staying in power.
Gulf war II: I'd say lost, despite Saddam deposition.
Afghanistan: lost, despite the killing of bin Laden.
Syria: can't tell yet.
It's a pretty depressing tally.
With that, I'd say that the US was on the winning side of a number of wars before that: WWII, WWI, Mexican war, Spanish war.
That said, many of the well-known, long haul conflicts that the US are involved in are the ones they are most likely to lose. The ones they win they usually win quickly and are less well known.
There are plenty of interventions post-WWII that have been quick successes for the US, esp. in Latin America.
The problem with all these conflicts is winning is so poorly defined or multi-goal.
What's winning in Syria? Getting rid of assad and then leaving? We could probably do that in a week or less and utterly demolish the country if we wanted. The consequences of 'winning' that war under that definition would probably be pretty horrible.
But that doesn't seem to be the goal right now?
There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..).
Though Afghanistan is pretty simple imho. there aren't nearly as many global power stakes... The taliban explicitly does not want Democracy so if that is 'winning' it's doomed to a loss by default.
Eh - I'm not sure. Getting aircraft overhead would be difficult east of the euphrates when they have lots of anti-aircraft guns and they are also supported heavily by Russia.
The only Western power currently conducting airstrikes east of the euphrates is Israel and they have had planes shot down by Syria & Russia.
The US has a preponderance of military power, but I do think people are quick to assume that this means the US could easily topple lots of foreign nations. For some, that is definitely true, for others, like Iran, I think that is a misplaced confidence.
The whole collateral damage aspect is pretty high. But if we were willing to deal with the humanitarian and diplomatic fallout, we could do it pretty easily.
The anti-aircraft guns obstacle is, as you've said, more than surmountable. The likelihood of Russian reprisal, imo, is not.
Excuse me, but the goal should be that exactly. Not leaving an inch of flesh of the bear unpoked.
If you resign your emotions, and try to think about it seriously, it makes a lot of sense strategically to conduct a massive provocation.
Right now, it's completely the other way around: Putin delivers one grievous provocation after another to NATO. NATO grovels, shivers, but does nothing, for the whole world to laugh on.
It earns him client states, and satellites. You absolutely don't want your enemies flocking together.
If you turn that around, the world, and his wannabe clients that it's him now who can't do anything, but throw adorable tantrums, his construct will melt away withing years.
2 birds 1 stone.
It's also the types like Orbans, Sisis, and Assads who are only showing the voice now, because they can afford to look brave when the West is intimidated. That will pull the carpet from under them too.
I do think Trump was very dangerous and damaging in regards to NATO and pushing our allies away. By not understanding that 'america first' means so much more than simply scraping a few billion more from allies. That's playing checkers in terms of only being able to think in slogan-first 1st order logic. 2nd order or more is understanding why NATO was formed in the first place and the current role it has advancing our interests.
And I think it's critical to actively work against movements of authoritarian nationalism and hold Europe and our allies together.
I'm glad and think Biden is doing a better job in the Pacific in that regard.
Saddam bet that if no ones does anything concrete, he can get away with it, else, he can return back.
I would call than an "occupation" rather than a "war".
Edit : I retract my comment. I meant Gulf War I, the occupation of Kuwait.
I think it was a bad war and a mistake, but I don't think we "lost."
Depends upon whose interests are answering the question. These aren't so much "wars" as "resource shifting actions marketed as kayfabe [1] wars". This also isn't a new phenomenon. Such "wars" have existed throughout history, and is a side effect of a political sphere's emergent, loosely-defined requirements.
For common people in the path of destruction, a war has an unambiguous win/loss demarcation. For defense contractors if they are being honest with themselves, less so. For politicians with uncanny honesty, even more ambiguous.
With the scales involved today in not just people, speed, and destructive power, but also of information range and depth, I think it is time for a deep re-think of the "war is 'just' a political tool" paradigm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
This seems quite similar to Americans demanding their gun rights to protect themselves from the government. Well, I hate to inform you of this, but the government could out gun you since time immemorial. It’s a wild argument for gun rights.
Not really, because it changes the political calculus for exactly the reasons you mentioned. If the US government wants to forcefully take over, and they aren't aligned with gun owners, they have to go through them. In that scenario its more likely they are a shade of grey evil than "lets methodically exterminate all of our citizens". In the former, gun owners standing their ground would be a major political hurdle.
I'd actually argue pro gun rights are a bit silly because those same parties aren't pro encryption / privacy. So they give up the tools they'd need to defend themselves (encryption) from all but the most direct assault. And I'd consider a soft assault by violating their privacy much more plausible.
How is that usefull unless you are willing to commit genocide?
An observation not lost to the ground forces. I was in the US infantry 10+ years ago. We were well trained and lethal. We had an overwhelming technological targeting advantage. We had the support of a sizeable amount of the local population that we generally stayed a few steps ahead of the lower and mid tier rungs of whatever insurgency we were fighting (Al Qaeda in Iraq [ISIS predecessor], the Taliban, whatever-local-Afghan-village-thugs-in-later-deployments). We understood the war wasn't purely militaristic in "kill counts" or territory sieged, and the lessons of irregular warfare (hearts and minds) were beaten in to us.
The biggest issue, at least for us that actually had to kill and be shot at, was that the progressively restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) defanged us, both from lethal and willpower standpoints. There were so many nested bullet points and gotchas and just a wide breadth of rules that no person that wasn't a lawyer could keep up with it. Arbitrary things like "if you are in a gunfight with insurgents and they fall back into a cave, no matter who the insurgent is or how many casualties they were lucky to have inflicted on your forces, you absolutely cannot roll grenades into the cave." Very specific, very arbitrary, very confusing. Furthermore, it was beat into us that the full weight of the law was to fall on our heads if we screwed these things up. Which makes sense from a humanitarian point of view, but that lingering legal guillotine built in a sizeable amount of self-doubt and apprehension in us where we weren't ever sure when or if we were allowed to be lethal.
I imagine a set of ROE was drafted, and enough bureaucrats scribbled in "small edits" that the overarching sense of direction was lost in the sea of Great Ideas by Smart People and nobody with both the political clout and common sense was able to get to these revisions before they were inflicted on us on the ground. Not dissimilar to scope creep you see in software, except parties involved couldn't just vote with their feet and leave. That, and those functioning as the wars' PM's weren't as much concerned with delivering results as they perhaps were with empire building and political posturing. Just a god damn mess
Secondly, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head when it comes to the ROE being the main limiting factor in the "effectiveness" of the US military in being able to subdue its enemies, not just in Afghanistan/Iraq, but also in Vietnam and even to some extant in Korea. It seems to be one of the weird side-effects that nukes have on armed conflicts that when you have nukes, you really can never actually "fully commit" to a conflict. (Since going "all-in" could be apocalyptic.)
One thing I have always wondered, though, is the relationship between the ROE and irregular warfare. If the military personnel on the ground had broader discretion over their actions, would help or hinder the goal of "winning hearts and minds"?
At the end of 20 years, US indirectly had to negotiate with them.
So the other way of looking at it is, a bunch of un-educated, poorly trained, poorly equipped mountain people, who themselves are divided into many warring factions, stood their ground against the mightiest nation on earth, for 20 year, and in the end US negotiated with them for transfer of power.
Now, I see this as sheer political and administrative failure. Militarily, sure, the US has an upper hand and can pile up bodies like no other, But it failed to win the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. It could not change the govt., it could not bring stability and democracy to the region, it could not transform the society, and it could not even change the idea of itself in the minds of the Afghan people.
US is too powerful, militarily, to formulate effective strategies that further its goals. It is good in doing that economically, through sanctions, etc. But as a military force, it is too powerful for its own good.
Even Churchill said of them: "Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian."
The Afghans have no proper education system, no institutions other than local commanders directing their bunch of troops and have virtually no good infrastructure. They literally live among mountains and have no good networks for transportation.
I am giving the Afghans a lot of credit, because what I said about them is true. They won in spite of that.
I suppose one could say that the US hasn't lost yet, but it's pretty tough to say that the US has won.
Honestly, at this point it feels like any discussion of the US staying in Afghanistan seems like it should devolve into a discussion of the halting problem. (/s, but only slightly)
Al-Qeada and other groups just shifted to other unrested regions and even caused unrest. At a global scale the war only caused other countries harm.
The US just signed a peace deal with the Taliban agreeing to and withdraw all their troops and release aligned 5000 prisoners, the Taliban are also allowed back in government. Technically they could be in power at the next election.
What actual goal was fulfilled here after two decades of war?
Vietnam: countered Soviet expansionism and prevented Vietnam from becoming a communist regional superpower, Vietnam has not done much besides be a trading partner for the US since.
Grenada: won
Gulf wars: overwhelming victories. Destabilized the middle east, provided an opportunity for american megacorps to heavily profit and exert massive influence. Led to Arab spring which further destabilized the middle east. The middle east is essentially no longer in the picture in the game of global hegemony, and in large part has to rely on American refineries and american corporations to handle oil extraction.
Afghanistan: success, stimulated the American economy, very successful unemployment program (provided jobs for America's high school dropouts for 20 years), justified further weapons development plans, allowed america to build tons of bases to help counter China's Silk Road initiative by destabilizing the region.
Syria: mostly a failure at this point. The hope was to break Syria and build the Qatar gas pipeline to hurt Russia's hegemony on european energy supplies. Looks like that is a lost cause at this point, but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.
The world is no longer about winning wars and conquering territory. It's about destabilizing rising threats to your power. It's about toppling dictators and installing democracies, which are much easier to bribe. It's about countering your enemies/competitors (Russia, china, the middle east) initiatives and causing chaos in their neighborhood.
We now have strong evidence that both the Ghouta and Douma attacks were not chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government. In the case of Douma, the OPCW leaks have very strongly shown (in my opinion, conclusively) that it was staged and put on by the White Helmets, a US/UK funded organization. Senior OPCW officials then reedited their official's report to make it seem like the Syrian government used chlorine gas. Don't believe me? Listen to Noam Chomsky explain it. [1]
Why does this matter? It was used as a pretense for the Trump administration to bomb Syria, which it did a few days later. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_KgRcw7mag [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/opcw-leaks-syria/
Please open a map, and take a look where Qatar is.
Similarly, Gulf War II is absolutely a loss, even though it "accomplished more" than 1991, because its strategic goals included dictating the post-war political arrangements in the country.
Victory and defeat are always relative to the parties' strategic goals.
It did not win it according to the objectives set by MacArthur (Drive the commies into the sea). He was, incidentally, relieved of command, thanks to his escalation of the conflict to include China.
An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it, because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.
No, it doesn’t. A declaration of war has no effect at all on liability in international law. War criminals are responsible under international law whether or not war has been declared; the establishment of universal personal accountability of war criminals, including heads of state, for war crimes -- first unambiguously declared in the Nuremberg Principles -- declarations of war (which previously gave a veil of legitimacy to non-defensive war) have been pretty much irrelevant since non-defensive war was unambiguously itself declared to be a crime against peace.
> An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it,
No, it doesn’t.
> because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.
Formal declarations of war and war authorizations have no difference in either international or, to the extent the latter is a recognized thing, most national laws in terms of what legal basis there is for defining the parameters of the war, and whatever difference in effect they might have under the terms of local law has no bearing on liability under international law.of those engaging in war crimes, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity.
Regardless, even if you believe that authorization for use of force is unconstitutional, that does not make it secret. Only Bill Clinton's engagement in Bosnia/Kosovo could be considered a secret war... The others were done with full authorization of Congress.
Vietnam has a single party Communist Party that teaches Marxist ideals while having upgraded to state capital patches like every other marxist ideology worshipping party. They are geopolitically irrelevant enough for that never to bother anyone. The US was there to stop that specific thing from happening and didnt. US lost, Vietnam was unified and the control was consolidated under Vietnamese representatives of the communist party and for them they won. That’s the same standard we use for any conflict. Why single out that one to a higher standard where we point out the loss of life? Doesnt make sense. Vietnam won a unified country, and it is under communist rule. There once was a side that didnt want communism and they lost, too!
China went free market. And with covid, I guess nature doesn't like senile murderers telling everyone what to do from far far away, under the threat of death by organ harvesting.
The USA still has the rule of law. Marx, a European with a higher body count than any colonialist by the way, has no law. Barbaric animals, who will send you to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
The USA was there because of Pearl Harbor. That ended in a battle the size of the Pacific, the sinking of 30 Japanese aircraft carriers that we actually built for them, and atomic warfare. Stalin killed FDR, making him travel to Yalta and Tehran. Stole our bomb. Raped children. And tried to start WW3 every chance he got.
Kruschev killed Kennedy. He did give that order for assassination.
What horrible people. The New World bails everyone out. Gives everyone human rights and makes them rich beyond belief. Cures famines and diseases. The animals of the world mess it up every chance they get. Don't deal with animals. You only become one when you have them around.
Next time anyone gets the idea to kick things up again, I'm melting everyone's eyes. Maybe when everyone's blind, they can finally see killing each other is a bad idea. And forget the USA. I'm doing it.
But if the objective of the USA was to prevent a domino of communism taking over all of South-East Asia, we can pretty clearly see where the advance of communism was stopped.
And if an American and a North Vietnamese communist from 1955 could see into the future 70 years, taking a tour around Hanoi or Saigon, I don't know if either would be so certain on their verdict of who 'won' or 'lost'. It might have been the North, but it certainly wasn't the communists.
Even the last massacre in China was because the protestors wanted to democratically have more communism instead of the liberalization of the markets and private ownership. That gets reduced to “students wanted democracy”, geopolitically it would have even been worse. (It is sad they were killed and that unity in that country relies on never mentioning it or any other strife)
But Communism flourished in Vietnam. So if you want to argue domino theory (which was wrong anyways), they certainly didn't stop the Vietnamese domino. So they didn't win in Vietnam.
Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.
If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.
Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Would they have been better off if france agreed to decolonize instead of trying to hold on to their failing colonial empire with force (leading to everything that came to follow)? Maybe we'll never know.
But i don't think there's any particular reason to assume that if the south won they would be any better off. South Vietnam hardly seems like it was the most stable/well run of governments - they were into fixing elections and persacuting buddhists, etc. Hardly what i would call an ideal state.
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
> Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Yeah, letting Russia and China subjugate the world would have gone SO MUCH better. What good has it done for nicaragua, cuba, north korea, afghanistan or the many noname countries in Africa? The USSR left only poverty and death whereever they went.
Go eat a big mac and overdose on oxy
And once USA took control of Afganistan, how has the situation improved?
Vietnam is communist but they're not very friendly with China, nor have they been since about 1975; vietnam is certainly not a satellite of China. Starting in 1979 they fought a low-intensity border war with China that went on for over a decade, a fact you seem to be unaware of.
Oh and if you do some digging you will know that HCM sent a few letters to Trumman asking for US's aid, we could have been ally 70 years earlier, but no, the US branded him as a commie and the rest is history. Btw, the first line of our Proclamation of Independence is pretty much a paraphrase of the US's Declaration of Independence, that's to show how much we wanted the US to be ally.
Do "the people" ever win a war? Something like 600,000 - 2 million civilians died in that war. If you're implying that people would be better off ecconomically if the other side won, that seems highly speculative with no evidence to back it up.
Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea right now?
That's the closest comparable we have.
If the US were to have 'stayed' in S. Vietnamese, much like they did in S. Korea, that S. Vietnam would look 'somewhat' like S. Korea, but not nearly as prosperous given their agrarian history etc..
But definitely better off.
50 years on, still in poverty.
Win or loose, live in poverty.
But you're right, it's poverty nontheless.
Such regressive thinking, that too about whole societies and nations. As if they are not human.
From https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview:
"Vietnam’s development over the past 30 years has been remarkable. Economic and political reforms under Đổi Mới, launched in 1986, have spurred rapid economic growth, transforming what was then one of the world’s poorest nations into a lower middle-income country. Between 2002 and 2018, GDP per capita increased by 2.7 times, reaching over US$2,700 in 2019, and more than 45 million people were lifted out of poverty"
The US escalated it's involvement until the early 1970's when via strategic bombing of the North (which the US was unwilling to do previously), decisively destroyed the North Vietnamese ability to fight.
Then, the Americans left.
A couple of years later, the North Vietnamese rehabilitated their forces, and invaded the South.
The reality is such different perspective than 'North Vietnam Won' to the point wherein it's basically almost misinformation to just state it like that.
Finally, the tactical and strategic advantage of the US bombing with Nixon was enormous. The US could have feasibly stayed for a long time - after shedding their fears of 'Bombing the North' and just 'doing it', they finally gained the 'obvious advantage' that a major power should have had.
But Nixon ran on a platform of 'Getting out of Vietnam', and the folks back home lost interest in a miasma of populism.
I think those nuances are important, because I think it demonstrates how tactics, politics and populism fuelled the outcome.
The lessons of 'Fight to Win Only' and 'A long grinding war will turn your population against you' are straight out of the Art of War.
Those lessons informed the 1st US invasion of Iraq (and 2cnd), which was led by Vietnam vets. 'Overwhelming Force and Boots on the Ground to Unambiguously Overwhelm Enemy Forces', though the 2cnd occupation didn't go quite as well.
Finally, literally one day after Barack Obama ordered the last US units out of Baghdad, then Iraqi PM Malaki ordered a purge of Sunnis from his party and government. The Sunni Tribes, in fear of their lives from the then-emboldened Shia dominated Iraqi Army ... invited ISIS in. This very well could have been avoided by keeping a few units, neatly tucked away 'behind the wire' in Baghdad - just enough ongoing oversight and leverage to keep people like Malaki from self-destructing. It would have been better in hindsight to take a longer view of that situation as well.
It's hard to say if there is a direct parallel with Vietnam but it kind of looks like that.
So they were never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning.
Which elements of 'top leadership' believed this?
For whom would that 'show' be for?
You'll have to state which individuals took that position.
"never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning. "
This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?
The data (i.e. 'body count') was initially misleading, but that lesson was learned quickly enough.
By 1965 , at the start major escalation, The Pentagon wanted to do strategic bombing of the entirety of North Vietnam. US political leadership wanted to avoid Hanoi and other targets for political reasons i.e. 'Rolling Thunder'.
Rolling Thunder failed.
Later, with political limitations removed, Op. Linebacker I and II (in 1970's) successfully dismantled N. Vietnam's ability to fight.
Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms? The big rise in casualties to 1969 probably never would have happened, and the political repercussions would have been at least somewhat less.
Even the populist miasma is affected: when people are dying, it's one thing if 'major progress' is being made (think sicily and european campaigns against Hitler, once they started and were winning, it'd be impossible to bring them back until it was over), but altogether another if there's a stalemate or there isn't evidence of material progress.
But history is 20/20 and that's the whole point.
In 2021 we're still not done politicizing this war, the PBS documentary had some very good elements, but was still only one lens and entirely ignored the geopolitical aspects.
Macnamara v. Pentagon was realized 'All Over Again' with Maj. General Tommy Franks vs. Donald Rumsfeld. This time, the Army mostly go their 'Boots on the Ground and Overwhelming Power' to guarantee a fairly immediate collapse of the enemy. Too bad there was no plan for the occupation.
Macnamara. LBJ. Kennedy.
> For whom would that 'show' be for?
For the American people, for Congress, for the world. To prove that the US stands by its allies and can still win wars. To prevent accusations of being losers by domestic political opponents, both in the same and different parties. Pretty basic stuff, these political dynamics are in play in nearly every war.
> This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?
You are misreading the line. I am saying there were not winning either in reality nor in the leaderships minds. The US leadership did NOT think they were winning.
> Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms?
How do you propose to fix the problem of Chinese troops overwhelming any serious success like they did in Korea? That's nearly the entire reason the US couldn't fully commit to destroying North Vietnam.
How do you even fix the problem of having unreliable and problematic allies in Southern Vietnam that could never really rally the country properly?
You have learned no lessons.
Or, maybe they didn't like their children being draft into the army and coming back crippled?
That applies to the other side too. The real art of war is returning the martial to the civil. Limiting the violence, not creating it. Which one is going to put the world at ease:
Marxist, jihadi, drug cartel tyranny Amoral, zero sum, win at all cost, identity liberalism
or
Self-evidence and inalienable rights
?
They have to stand for something. The USA does not. See the world as it is. What's the minimum needed to call ourselves a government?
Exactly the same way our close neighbours Pakistan keeps thinking they didn’t really lose any wars against us.
Even the people who were not even a foetus during those wars. Emotion trumps facts it seems.
Being in denial for so long.
Nehru was more interested in appeasement than long term strategic thinking, when it comes to international affairs. I think it stems from the deep seated inferiority complex that the British left in the elite and intellectuals of the country. Most of the leadership during the initial decade of Indian independence were heavily influenced by the British and looked up to them for guidance.
Nehru was quite a long-term thinker and a statesman. Hell it’s a miracle he navigated the country through the hell hole the cold war was.
Sad thing is he inherited a country and the people who just couldn’t rise above a certain level and that was where the Brits left us. On top of that the Brits ensured they left us broken and finished and deliberately at that I believe. I maybe wrong but I just can’t bring myself to look at the colonisers in any positive light. Trust me I’ve tried.
Again since you mentioned Nehru (while I’m not accusing you but it’s a pet “But Nehru” phrase used by the ultra nationalist right wing India of today[1]) and the past Govts, and yes they had their own follies and drawbacks, I just want to set the record straight that the current Govt has set India even further back by decades and I don’t see it recovering. Especially so as I majority will again elect current party for religious bigotry and things like temple.
While the past Govts could’ve done a lot lot better the current Govt has been successful in delivering the final blow.
[1] To others who aren’t familiar with the country and its pilots and scene today it’s actually funny. If something BJP the ruling ultra right wing party does and it fails and harms the public ;usually the case) the national chorus becomes “but what about Nehru”. Even if the intention was to fail or harm the public the chorus remains the same. Also Nehru died in 1964.
"That person may have done better, but what about the present person?"
The drive is politics, the lube is the media. The denial of reality and the rejection of truth is more prominent than ever and it is showing its face everywhere in US politics.
As on date, for the last decade, no politician has ever resigned for lying or cheating, personally or professionally. The character and integrity of those in power is off the table for discussion (what he/she does in personal life is not for discussion)
Here is the fact. Perhaps in other jobs, white or blue collared ones, personal life may not affect the job. But when it comes to jobs that move the nation, political positions, powerful bodies, and what not, the personal character and integrity of the person ought to be the scale of foremost importance.
N. Vietnam won, but that doesn't make war a success.
> N. Vietnam won, but that doesn't make war a success
Wars are disasters. 500,000 - 1 million (?) people died, the country was physically destroyed. That's not a good outcome.
Leninism and all its descendants, including Maoism, are, ab initio, state capitalism. What the CCP moved toward is more of xenophobic totalitarian corporatism than state capitalism; essentially fascism without, or at least with less, overt expansionism.
I was also in France at the time when viewing the movie, it was very surreal in so many ways to be empathizing for a protagonist on one of the enemy sides - from an American perspective as I am an American.
But I had never seen anything depicted about that war decades before the US got involved.
I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.
It was sensual, horrific, erotic, fascinating. I dont think it would get greenlit by American studios. Maybe some streaming services have it though.
edit: Les Confins du Monde (English: To the Ends of the World), 2018, directed by Guillaume Nicloux
I'm not immediately seeing where to stream it, I would really like to view it again! With English subtitles!
You're right, doesn't seem to be streaming yet. https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/to-the-ends-of-the-world
The first step
Not sure if the stipulation is a war movie about Vietnam, or just plain a war movie. But certainly here's a list of some non-U.S. 20th century war movies, very vivid, biased towards France:
The Battle of Algiers (French, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Come and See (Russian, Elem Klimov, 1985)
Ivan's Childhood (Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)
Beau Travail (French, Claire Denis, 1999) -- OK, soldiers but not war
Army of Shadows (French, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)
A Man Escaped (French, Robert Bresson, 1956) -- POW, not front lines
Little Dieter Needs To Fly (British/French/German?, Werner Herzog, 1997) -- actually relates to the war in Vietnam
SPOILER
- is that the one where the pow makes it to the front lines and gets shot by his own side who assume he's German, since he was disguised?
They tend to be made by veterans of those wars, after the ~20 year gap that seems pretty standard for the PTSD barrier to crack. e.g. the best ones made about the Lebanon War (what Israel calls its intervention 1982-2000 in the Lebanese Civil War) all came out within a couple of years of each other:
* Lebanon (2009)
* Waltz with Bashir (2008)
* Beaufort (2007)
And the first of the good Yom Kippur War (1973) films is probably Kippur (2000), with the long-development-time miniseries Valley of Tears (Sha'at Ne'ila) only coming out last year.
Not quite enough time has passed for films about the heaviest fighting of the 2nd Intifada to be made - the closest thing I can think of is the TV show Fauda (2015-present) but that's a somewhat different genre.
The Vietnamese and the hippie generation knew this was bullshit.
The American news media may be the biggest propaganda machine in the history of the world.
The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi.
Here's the repo for the colorizing model itself: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify
I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters.
If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos
It is a machine learning model, so not really.
Instead, the model makes an educated guess of the most likely color, based on vast amounts of pictures sampled un-uniformly from very different areas of the world.
It’s even a common trope in modern films to use black and white when showing flashbacks to time periods around the beginning of the 20th century. But that’s not how the world looked! It’s a cheep and deceptive tool imho.
This makes my eyes roll like I'm a professional golfer. I love B&W, and even without using B&W film, I will still turn certain color images I take into B&W. There are lots of artistic reasons, but most of the time it just feels right. Sometimes, it's just an aesthetic reason of matching the decor of where the print is going to hang.
>I mean too many people literally picture the world at the time to be black and white.
So what? There are also people that believe the world is flat. There are plenty of museums full of paintings from well before photography was invented that clearly show color. Anyone that believes that the world was in B&W before color film just need to be walked away from as there's nothing but frustration there.
That limit materially constrained the information that could be captured, but it didn't invent false information. It was a dimensionality reduction from color to simple brightness intensity. Sure, the information captured was through that lens/filter, but there wasn't some AI inventing/guessing at what it was seeing. The photons directly exposed the chemicals in the film. They are not equivalent at all, and your reduction based upon the fact that humans add an additional interpretive perspective to each is a stretch.
I say all of this while being fine with colorized photos, but they should be accompanied by the original photo and the disclaimer that they were colorized. I think colorized photos can add a lot of immersion and trigger emotion, but so does generative, interpretive art.
We shouldn't treat Monet's water lilies as an accurate portrayal of his flower garden at his home in Giverny. Colorized photos, while not as extreme as impressionist paintings, are still a generated piece of art. Perhaps they are more akin to portraits, which have been historically shown bias towards an unflattering view of the subject -- as when they are unflattering, they tend to not to survive[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%27s_Portrait_of_Win...
http://calvin-and-hobbes-comic-strips.blogspot.com/2011/11/c...
An example: this same model colorized the Golden Gate white: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3487a03626fd86d4f8c814636...
In my case I wasn't too concerned, since I was sharing the photos with my family, who understood they were artificially colorized. My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong. Nonetheless, to me and my family, it made our old photographs seem so close and alive, which made it worth it.
A good compromise may be to mark these retouched photos with a small watermark indicating that they have been altered. By the way, I think the colab instances running this model have the option to add watermarks for this reason (https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...).
Cambodia has called on US media group Vice to withdraw an article that featured newly-colourised photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge, saying the images are an insult to the dead because some had been altered to add smiles.
“We urge researchers, artists and the public not to manipulate any historical source to respect the victims,” [Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture] said.
Did you figure out a way to achieve this other than repeat attempts or recoloring in post?
Is there a setup that retrains with user input such as by inputting an image with an object manually colored the model will then recognize it in later input and color similarly?
It seems like this could also help with persistence of colors in videos, training with the previously completed frame step before producing the next.
https://www.npr.org/2011/04/26/135150942/the-golden-gate-bri...
and what about those space photos?
Panchromatic vs orthochromatic was still a choice even in the 70s. Spotmatics shipped with an ISO marker dial that included color, ortho, and panchro, 30 years after the Golden Gate Bridge was built.
Ortho bw — cheap 1930s snapshot — would show a red bridge as white, but if it was fancy panchro then I’d be more inclined to agree with the AI, given the luminosity.
But they've alway wanted colors in photographs. Going as far as actually hand coloring them. This is kinda like that but automated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs
I wish there was a little symbol you could put in the corner to indicate "colorized" or "altered" for composite photos done with photoshop.
Several times you can see a hand is grey while the face is colorized to a peach type color. Wicker baskets are colored grey. All clothes are blue for some reason.
That kind of stuff just tells me it's making assumptions which are likely to be incorrect and I discount the colorization altogether.
I can differentiate color mostly fine and have never mis interpreted grass as green, but clothing and fabric always pose problems, just as with your AI.
I’ve learned to be ok with things not looking real. Black and white is just as unreal to me as false color toning, but feels more honest and deliberate. The luma of the Armalite wielding guerrilla is amazing — it’s hard to beat black and white as a descriptor format.
Plus, many of these photos are staged propaganda photos, in particular the battle scenes. After an enemy surrendered, POWs would often be told to “recreate” the battle. Actually battle photographs from the north are blurry and a bit more chaotic.
An Eastern Bloc country, I believe the USSR or East Germany, sent photo equipment and photographers to North Vietnam. They understood the propaganda value of these photos.
And don't get me wrong, these photos are very valuable in reinforcing morale and swaying international opinion. The West does it too. There was less staging of photos by the West back then as they tended to have more people taking photos of the action at the time.
He refused to accept that the US lost. No amount of reasoning would make him budge on that opinion. I dropped the subject as it was a risk to our friendship.
I understand where he is coming from though. To have lost so many friends in addition to his personal injury, it would mean to him that it was all for nothing if he were to acknowledge it as a loss.
[edit - a word]
>Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”
And instead of Marshall help they got global economic sanctions.
https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hat...
All this for a country that had never offered the slightest threat to the United States.
The Vietnam war was a lost cause all the way from the start, just like more modern endeavours of trying to make ultra-conservative societies of Iraq and Afghanistan democracies by invading them. Pointless waste of money and lives.
Millions of innocent people died for nothing, and the US learned nothing, and did it all over again many times, because so many Americans, like your friend, were unwilling to concede that there was anything wrong with Vietnam.
Suppose your friend were instead an injured Al Qaeda member who felt Al Qaeda was right. Would you accept that?
But the US has killed _hundreds_ of times as many innocent people as Al Qaeda - ten times as many just in Vietnam.
> Even using antiquated WWII rifles such as these, the Vietnamese were able to cripple or down many U.S. aircraft.
Seems impossible? Allied aircraft were flying at least 5-10,000 ft, at least 300mph?
I could easily imagine WWII rifles having some success damaging helicopters, which were (and compared to modern fighters still are) low and slow.
A Peoples History of the United States - Howard Zinn
That book is extremely pro communist (hence the title). This is a pretty poor take on the war for several reasons, not least of which "maximum military effort" and didn't use most powerful weapons are somehow in the same sentence. They literally did not use their maximum military effort (not just on the atomic bomb front). It was a political war full of mishaps that were capitalized on by North Vietnam. I also thought PRC and Russia backed North Vietnam which seems relevant. The general point that military might isn't the sole determinant of a wars outcome is true and important -- and also pretty obvious.
If the aim of the US was to ensure that Vietnam did not end up being communist, then they had to convince the people not to become communist. What they did, in some of the most horrific ways possible, was to convince the Vietnamese people, and a lot of those in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos that the western democracies didn't care about them as people, they were just playing politics with their lives. This left the Chinese backed communists and easy road to winning the hearts and minds.
The US lost the military war because they lost the public relations war, both at home, and in the country they were trying to liberate.
If you look at later wars, Gulf War 2, Afghanistan, you could argue that they have learnt nothing. You will never win people over to your way of thinking by dropping bombs on them, that just ensures that they will never bow to your will.
> made a maximum military effort
USA did NOT make a maximum military effort in Vietnam.
If USA ever made a "maximum military effort" then the war would have been over in 3 months. That was the whole problem. They never did.
It doesn't matter what your imagination wants to have happened. It didn't. Why are you trying to put up your revisionist fantasy against a historical fact? We lost. Zinn's description is perfectly accurate.
Chest thumping about a war you lost 50 years ago...
There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime. It’s likely the US would have succeeded in that effort, much like it had 20 years earlier with invasions into German and Japanese held territories in WWII.
Why then did the US not invade North Vietnam? The last major conflict the US took part in was the Korean War. When the US pushed far enough above the 38th parallel, 700k Chinese troops entered the country and put the war into a stalemate.
The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.
The bind the US was in was that it couldn’t commit to winning, but it couldn’t lose either. The US tried to outlast an enemy, which was defending its own home turf, which was an awful strategic mistake and lead to millions dead and the trauma associated with the war. Eventually the US government came to its senses and left the situation.
That didn't happen. That's a militaristic fantasy. What Zinn is describing actually happened. This isn't a debate.
> The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.
Mutually Assured Destruction isn't "winning". Luckily that didn't happen either. We lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMgFyxu2Ij8
hmmm, but then you say:
> When the US pushed far enough above the 38th parallel, 700k Chinese troops entered the country and put the war into a stalemate.
Sounds like a military impediment to me.
I do think almost every leader in South and Central America in the latter 20th Century could be called a "CIA agent" by that definition though. Not something I'd say.
I read it in college in a Vietnam and the US History class and it was blown away.
This book, along with The Things They Carried[1] are worthwhile reads.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong and Style were especially weird in the in-class discussions. That was 25+ years ago, and those classroom talks still stick with me. That teacher was either an unbelievable genius, or an insane person. Not sure.
She was the first European to walk all length of Ho Chi Minh trail, lived in Saigon undercover during American occupation and wrote couple of books about the Vietnam Wars.
She was telling a lot of stories and I remember some people from US visiting her in 90s hoping to use her contacts in order to find some lost American POWs.
Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Warne%C5%84ska
https://www.amazon.com/PFADE-DURCH-DEN-DSCHUNGEL-Vietnam-Rep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
Sounds like an excellent opportunity. Has anyone considered crowd sourcing a translation? I'd chuck in 10 bucks to read it and there's certainly a lot of history buffs out there looking for a fresh perspective.
On the other hand her reporting angle is much better then some Western "useful idots"[1] like Tiziano Terzani [0] (der Spiegel), who had been calling Pol-pot 'great man with a vision for a nation' even on his deathbed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiziano_Terzani
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/231066
>> ... American occupation [of Saigon]
> but there is also a propaganda narrative.
Yes you can see it explicitly from how he describes the two sentences above, one as an "intervention" and the other as an "occupation". I don't think most Cambodians considered the Vietnamese invasion in late '70's as an intervention, nor did the majority of the rest of the non-Soviet aligned world.
Of course you would need to navigate international copyright law, but I could definitely see a market for this
Ah yes, yet another crazy Republican idea I had forgotten about, that there are still POWs being kept in secret camps in Vietnam.
Vietnam has opened their entire country to Americans to inspect, including Republican politicos, and yet America still tells this evil lie.
Which Vietnamese side?