# Did anything good come out of the Vietnam War? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 16, 2012, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437 "2012-07-16T19:49:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/41 "2012-07-17T14:03:13Z")
> [@Victor\_Charlie](#): > > We got a bunch of good movies out of the deal. > > Plus Rambo. We got Rambo. And M_A_S\*H! ---
**Author:** ![elbows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/b3f665/32.png) [@elbows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elbows)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/42 "2012-07-17T14:11:21Z")
Inequities in US culture became more obvious. Take the draft. If your kid stayed in college he didn’t have to go to war and die. No way, no how, could you pull that kind of shit today, it just wouldn’t fly. (Mitt supported the war vocally, but did not serve:rolleyes:, dodging by being a ‘Missionary’ whilst living in a Palace in Europe!) It also woke up a generational cohort to the power they would have to shape the world. And when they were shot down, on college campuses, by the national guard, a generation of parents paused to say, “Wait, what?”. That cohort was willing to stand together, in numbers with the movement for equal rights that was raging. The court case waged in Chicago woke up even more people to what was really happening in their culture. These things can all be seen as interwoven threads. Nixon left the White House in shame, and things did change, over time. American’s are not as easily led into pointless wars. It’s not that they didn’t do their due diligence in Iraq or Afganistan, it’s that a President/White House set out to deceive the people and their representatives. They were forced to lie, because times had indeed changed, frothy rhetoric wouldn’t be enough ever again, hopefully. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/43 "2012-07-17T14:24:37Z")
One good thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t the alternative that the Cold War had been offering up until then: Brinkmanship. Years of “Will Berlin turn nuclear? Will Korea turn Nuclear? Will Cuba turn nuclear?” That wasn’t asked about Vietnam. In retrospect, it might have been a two-million-life safety valve that saved six billion lives. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/44 "2012-07-17T14:28:22Z")
> [@PrettyVacant](#): > > It’s a dictatorship - who knew. > > The people have thrown out the imperialists. If the people want further change, they’ve shown they seem to know how, which may explain the free market reforms and private property initiatives. > > Talking of freedom, check out #1 and #117: > [Highest to Lowest - Prison Population Total | World Prison Brief](http://www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate) If you think Vietnam isn’t a “dictatorship” then you either don’t know what the word means or you know nothing of Vietnam. If anything, the Vietnamese government is even more dictatorial and harsher than the Cuban government. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/45 "2012-07-17T14:31:59Z")
> [@elbows](#): > > Inequities in US culture became more obvious. > > Take the draft. If your kid stayed in college he didn’t have to go to war and die. No way, no how, could you pull that kind of shit today, it just wouldn’t fly. (Mitt supported the war vocally, but did not serve:rolleyes:, dodging by being a ‘Missionary’ whilst living in a Palace in Europe!) > > It also woke up a generational cohort to the power they would have to shape the world. And when they were shot down, on college campuses, by the national guard, a generation of parents paused to say, “Wait, what?”. That cohort was willing to stand together, in numbers with the movement for equal rights that was raging. The court case waged in Chicago woke up even more people to what was really happening in their culture. These things can all be seen as interwoven threads. > > Nixon left the White House in shame, and things did change, over time. American’s are not as easily led into pointless wars. It’s not that they didn’t do their due diligence in Iraq or Afganistan, it’s that a President/White House set out to deceive the people and their representatives. They were forced to lie, because times had indeed changed, frothy rhetoric wouldn’t be enough ever again, hopefully. To add to what you’re saying, without Vietnam the US might have engaged in more wars/police actions in the 70s and 80s. For example, we might very well have invaded Nicaragua. ---
**Author:** ![lost4life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c4cdca/32.png) [@lost4life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lost4life)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/46 "2012-07-17T14:39:09Z")
> [@BMalion](#): > > And M_A_S\*H! That took place a little farther north…or do I hear the whoosh of a MiG overhead? ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/47 "2012-07-17T14:43:37Z")
> [@lost4life](#): > > That took place a little farther north…or do I hear the whoosh of a MiG overhead? It may have been a whoosh, but while M_A_S\*H took place in Korea, it was _about_ Vietnam in many ways. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/48 "2012-07-17T14:43:43Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > That’s remarkably easy to [provide](http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/): The United States’ intervention didn’t cause those deaths; the North Vietnamese invasion did. North Vietnam’s war was one of conquest, and was remarkably brutal. To say that the United States was responsible for the South Vietnamese deaths in that war is like saying the British were responsible for the deaths in Poland in 1939. Obviously, your ridiculously distorted viewpoint is constructed from an America-hating perspective. To that end, you have cooked up an asinine assertion that because we tried to _stop_ the invasion and conquest of South Vietnam, we were somehow _responsible_ for the brutal slaughter perpetrated by the invaders. How very, very stupid to say that. ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/49 "2012-07-17T14:44:44Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > “Cost a million lives”: can you provide examples of how that many, or even close to that many, deaths were the direct result of US intervention, as opposed to North Vietnamese aggression? Oh, yes, you’re not gonna cite. > > And of course, in order to make your point, you needed to ignore mine, which was that our presence in South Vietnam helped to at least postpone the mass slaughter that finally ensued when the North Vietnamese took over (as well as the subsequent genocide in Cambodia). No Vietnam War, no Khymer Rouge. The USA had no business at all drawing a line on a map to create the made up country of South Vietnam in the first place. There was no ‘South’ Vietnam. There was just a temporarily partitioned Vietnam pending elections that the USA saw Ho was going to win. ---
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/50 "2012-07-17T14:46:03Z")
> [@lost4life](#): > > That took place a little farther north…or do I hear the whoosh of a MiG overhead? It took place in Korea, but it was really about Veitnam. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/51 "2012-07-17T14:56:39Z")
> [@tagos](#): > > No Vietnam War, no Khymer Rouge. The USA had no business at all drawing a line on a map to create the made up country of South Vietnam in the first place. There was no ‘South’ Vietnam. There was just a temporarily partitioned Vietnam pending elections that the USA saw Ho was going to win. Ah, so the US saw the future! Why would any sane Vietnamese have voted for Ho Chi Minh in a fair election (not that any fair election ever took place in North Vietnam)? And was the “made-up” country of North Vietnam somehow more valid in your mind because it was a communist dictatorship? It’s a rather insane piece of revisionist propaganda to blame the US for the North Vietnamese’s invasion of South Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh wasn’t satisfied with his half of Vietnam; he wanted it _all_. He was like the bigger and more violent of two siblings who isn’t satisfied with getting half the cake, and beats up his brother to take the other half, too. The Vietnam war gets painted by “historians” as a war of liberation. It was no such thing—it was an aggressive war of conquest, started by North Vietnam. The mass slaughter of the “liberated” South Vietnamese proved what Ho Chi Minh’s aspirations truly were, if there had been any real doubt up to that point. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/52 "2012-07-17T15:03:27Z")
> [@tagos](#): > > No Vietnam War, no Khymer Rouge. The USA had no business at all drawing a line on a map to create the made up country of South Vietnam in the first place. There was no ‘South’ Vietnam. There was just a temporarily partitioned Vietnam pending elections that the USA saw Ho was going to win. Vietnam was partitioned by the Geneva Accords, not by the United States. The government of South Vietnam canceled the elections not the United States. There is no way to know whether the Khmer Rouge would have taken power absent the Vietnam war. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/53 "2012-07-17T16:08:20Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > Why would any sane Vietnamese have voted for Ho Chi Minh in a fair election (not that any fair election ever took place in North Vietnam)? **greenslime1951** , you are so misinformed it’s astounding. North and South Vietnams had approximately equal populations and, per the terms of a Treaty signed by both Vietnams, France, U.K. etc., unifying elections were to be held in 1956 _under international supervision_. It was the South which broke this agreement, fearing that Ho would win. Would a bigger font help? _ **It was the South which broke this agreement, fearing that Ho would win** _. **greenslime1951** , you are so misinformed it’s astounding. > [@greenslime1951](#): > > The United States’ intervention didn’t cause those deaths; the North Vietnamese invasion did. Deaths _restricted to just North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers_ have been estimated at over 1 million. Were these “caused by the North Vietnamese invasion”? (If so, it would follow that America – not Hitler – was to blame for American WWII losses in Europe.) Know that the Viet Cong had strong support in the South, that the South government was largely propped up by the U.S., that South leaders more than once considered conciliation with revolutionaries but were overruled by their American masters. Yet I have no simple answers to questions about Vietnam. You do; but yours are wrong. > [@greenslime1951](#): > > … ridiculously distorted viewpoint … America-hating perspective. … asinine … How very, very stupid to say that. Silly hyperbole doesn’t make your foolish assertions less foolish North Vietnam was brutal. But so was U.S.A. I don’t have, even in hindsight, clear answers to what U.S. “should” have done in Vietnam. I just know you’re confident clarity is a false one. And your confused comments about Cambodia make me think you’ve completely overlooked the timeline of that country’s tragedy. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/54 "2012-07-17T16:25:32Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > **greenslime1951** , you are so misinformed it’s astounding. > > North Vietnam was brutal. But so was U.S.A. I don’t have, even in hindsight, clear answers to what U.S. “should” have done in Vietnam. I just know you’re confident clarity is a false one. > > And your confused comments about Cambodia make me think you’ve completely overlooked the timeline of that country’s tragedy. If you truly equate the US treatment of the Vietnamese people with that by the North Vietnamese regular army, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese government, well…all I can do is laugh. I am well aware of the timeline in Cambodia. The genocide there never would have happened had there been a continued US presence in Indochina. Pol Pot inherited a power vacuum. If you have no clear answers, how can you pretend to refute _my_ answers? All I know is, while we were in Indochina, the South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were not being subjected to mass slaughter. When we left and the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam, that slaughter ensued. Is this so very difficult to understand? The simple fact is that the US presence, while it persisted, prevented the warlord Ho Chi Minh from conquering Indochina. When we left and Ho took over, millions of people were murdered. Our presence forestalled chaos and slaughter. Vietnam may be a functional, unified country now, but that came at the expense of purges, expulsions, labor camps, and massive death. The regime gradually learned how to be civilized and less inhuman, but that took a generation. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/55 "2012-07-17T16:39:34Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > I think he’s asking how many of those people would have died in the war anyway without us getting involved. I know, and the answer is close to none of them. South Vietnam was teetering on the edge of collapse in 1963 and would have ended fairly soon with the same outcome less 12 years of bloodshed causing those 58,000 American and 1 to 2 million Vietnamese deaths if the US hadn’t intervened and extended the war another 12 years. > [@greenslime1951](#): > > The United States’ intervention didn’t cause those deaths; the North Vietnamese invasion did. North Vietnam’s war was one of conquest, and was remarkably brutal. To say that the United States was responsible for the South Vietnamese deaths in that war is like saying the British were responsible for the deaths in Poland in 1939. These statements display a blinding ignorance of history. Vietnam was not a war of brutal invasion and conquest of the south by the north; it was a civil war caused by the artificial division of the country into two separate nations in 1954 and the refusal of the dictator in the south to hold the agreed upon election in 1956 because it would mean the country would reunite under the dictator in the north. Again your rather poor attempt at godwinization is a total non sequiter. Germany was conquering a foreign country (Poland) whose independence had been guaranteed by Britain and the people killed by the Germans in Poland in 1939 would have been killed if the British had kept their word and declared war on Germany on September 3rd or not. > [@](#): > > Obviously, your ridiculously distorted viewpoint is constructed from an America-hating perspective. To that end, you have cooked up an asinine assertion that because we tried to _stop_ the invasion and conquest of South Vietnam, we were somehow _responsible_ for the brutal slaughter perpetrated by the invaders. How very, very stupid to say that. I’d recommend you not play with matches with the amount of straw you throw around. American-hating?:rolleyes: I hate to be the one to break it to you but the majority of the deaths were inflicted by the Americans. Again, calling the war an invasion and conquest of the South that we tried to stop is absurd on its face; it was a civil war and the majority of the NLF was South Vietnamese Viet Cong until after Tet in 1968. Also, if you wish to call me so very, very stupid take it to the pit. I noticed you only replied to one of my three responses to you. I guess it would be pointless to ask for your comments on your absurd godwinization in the uniting of independent nations under the boot of Nazi Germany as you are still comparing the Vietnam War to the German invasion of Poland, but you have no response at all to the US support for the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam threw them out of power? Or any comment on the fact that the US did jack and shit to stop the Cambodian Genocide? ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/56 "2012-07-17T16:42:05Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > Ah, so the US saw the future! This seems like your most valid point: that we’re here patting ourselves on the back for the clarity and scope of our hindsight. However, plenty of influential people during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations said intervention as a bad idea. Not Lefitst sympathisers (or outright Red operatives like Alger Hiss) who’d somehow survived the McCarty Era. People in the military like Matthew Ridgeway, who’d cleaned up McArthur’s mess in Korea, said Vietnam was a bad idea. People in the State Dept. who saw Tito thumbing his nose at Moscow and believed that Ho would be even more likely do so to Peiking, given the history of China and Vietnam. But these people were dismissed by the hubris of John Foster Dulles and William McNamara. And the hubris of the post-war American people, who’d crucify any politician who was in office and of whom it could be said “Oh no - first you lost China, now you’ve lost…what was the name of that little country again? Well, whatever it is, you’ve betrayed the USA!” ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/57 "2012-07-17T16:45:05Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > Obviously, your ridiculously distorted viewpoint is constructed from an America-hating perspective. To that end, you have cooked up an asinine assertion that because we tried to _stop_ the invasion and conquest of South Vietnam, we were somehow _responsible_ for the brutal slaughter perpetrated by the invaders. How very, very stupid to say that. You can say a post is wrong in this forum, but when you say it’s “stupid,” “asinine,” and “ridiculously distorted” all in one post, it becomes insulting to the poster. If you’re going to participate in debates here, you need to use this kind of language sparingly or not at all. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/58 "2012-07-17T16:46:08Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > All I know is, while we were in Indochina, the South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians were not being subjected to mass slaughter. When we left and the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam, that slaughter ensued. Is this so very difficult to understand? Are you seriously unaware of how many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian civilians were killed between 1963-75? That’s the only reason I could imagine for you making the statement that they weren’t being subject to mass slaughter while the US was in South Vietnam. Are you aware that the US dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on Cambodia alone than it did on all of the Axis powers in WW2 combined, both atomic bombs included? ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/59 "2012-07-17T16:50:49Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > II’d recommend you not play with matches with the amount of straw you throw around. American-hating?:rolleyes: I hate to be the one to break it to you but the majority of the deaths were inflicted by the Americans. > > Also, if you wish to call me so very, very stupid take it to the pit. The majority of deaths were caused by the AMERICANS??? Wow, how revisionist and, yes…stupid. You have a faint glimmer of intelligence but your viewpoint is grossly distorted. I am, therefore, calling what you are saying stupid rather than saying that you are–the causal factor for your delusion is probably external. You’re not even to blame for that as you doubtless had no choice in your thinking. Here’s a link for you to sneer at. It documents, among other things, the millions of deaths caused by the North Vietnamese regime, including many, many instances of deliberate, calculated mass murder. You won’t give it any credence since in your mind, all those deaths were caused by the US, so I include it primarily for the benefit of other, non-delusional readers. > **[Vietnam War - Conservapedia](https://www.conservapedia.com/Vietnam_War)** ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/60 "2012-07-17T17:06:42Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > [http://conservapedia.com/Vietnam\_War](http://conservapedia.com/Vietnam_War) Holy Christ, you quote conservafuckingpedia??? Read what this “cite” says about Obama: > [@](#): > > Promoted heavily by liberals, as demonstrated by his unjustified receipt of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, … > > In effect, that change has been an embrace of socialism and liberal policies. Barack Obama has been widely criticized by the American business community and others for his anti-business policies that are killing American jobs during a period of high unemployment… > > Despite having been born with US citizenship through his mother, it has been argued that as he was born with dual nationality, he is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and thus constitutionally ineligible to become President. > > Also Obama is a socialist and a Muslim. Recently he instated socialized healthcare in the USA which will eventually lead to a Communist regime that resembles the Soviet Union. Expert economists in this field have also speculated that he is truly the anti-Christ. In the next few months Obama’s secret police will start taking away your freedom. The bible makes this very clear. Holy fuck, the dingleberries from Rush Limbaugh’s ass have more credibility than conservapedia. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437.md?page=4)