If you’re genuinely interested I’d recommend reading either Joseph Buttinger’s Vietnam: The Embattled Dragon or Stanley Karnow’s more readable Vietnam: A History.
Anyway, I don’t want to start a flame war but frankly it’s a bit ridiculous to complain about North Vietnam invading South Vietnam when it was America that invaded Vietnam.
I know many are going to object to my phrasing it like that but if we’re going to argue that the Soviets sending in troops to Afghanistan to prop up their puppet government was an invasion and that Israel sending troops into Lebabon in 1982 with the cooperation of the Falangists was an invasion then I don’t see how the US sending in a much larger army to prop up a regime we installed can be called anything but an invasion.
There were a lot of tragic things during the war, such as millions of deaths, and a few benefits, like immigrants and pho shops.
Was there a larger good? Perhaps our frustration in Vietnam led to a rethinking of our military adventurism. Perhaps the conflict there in the manner it was waged prevented the superpowers from facing off directly. If Iraq had taken place before Vietnam, or something like Iraq, with better terrain and an unpopular enemy, the US would be more willing to use military power earlier.
For example, as horrible as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, suppose the US didn’t use nukes until the mid-50s in an exchange with the Soviets in Europe, where the combatants wiped out 100 cities?
In short, maybe we learn from our experiences, and smaller, earlier conflicts might prevent larger and more deadly later conflicts. Such as the usual conclusions that everyone should have stood up to Hitler before he annexed Czechoslovakia.
Greenslime, you seem to have taken the position that the United States gets the credit for everything good that happened and North Vietnam gets the blame for everything bad that happened. It’s a simplistic and inaccurate view.
Quite possibly. But what I wanted people to do was to objectively assess the truth of what the article says. Certainly, there’s ample reason to doubt the revisionist contention that Ho Chi Minh was a popular revolutionary who was greeted in the streets of Saigon by happy liberated workers tossing flowers, and that he brought a new era of peace and prosperity to Indochina.
That’s a nonsensical misstatement of my position. I simply stated that our presence, while it was there, prevented the conquest of Indochina by an aggressive regime (armed and funded by Russia and China), and the genocides that eventually occured as a result of that conquest.
The US certainly mishandled the war but our intentions were good. Do I give the US credit for everything good that happened? No. I give the US credit for preventing, for the time being at least, something horrible from happening. Do I blame North Vietnam for everything bad that happened? Absolutely. They fought a war of aggression because half the country wasn’t good enough for them after the Geneva accords. Don’t forget, the war was fought in South Vietnam. They were invaders and ultimately, conquerors.
I also blame the North Vietnamese for the mass slaughters, deportations, imprisonments, and enslavement of over a million South Vietnamese after their victory in 1975. They also bear much of the blame for the Cambodia genocide since the Khmer Rouge were allies and Pol Pot a puppet. The North Vietnamese were the only functional military in the region, but they did nothing to stop the killing fields, probably because they had done the same thing to the South Vietnamese a few years ago, and they secretly approved.
By the way, I know all this after talking to dozens of South Vietnamese refugees in San Jose in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason, a lot of them wound up in that city–the downtown street signs there are in English and Vietnamese, for example. Every single person told me that the horror the North Vietnamese visited on their defeated foes was indescribable. They also said that the world media never reported the vast majority of it. So sure, my references are anecdotal, but that’s kind of the point–much of what the North Vietnamese did was hidden from the world for a long time, and much of it will never be told.
Lunacy. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam almost the day after the Geneva accords were signed. We didn’t have any troops at all in the country for several years after that.
You can say that our presence there was an “invasion,” but like it or not, it was with the assent of the South Vietnamese government. You could hardly say that the South Vietnamese invited the Viet Cong and the NVA in.
Also, when we were in military control of South Vietnam, we didn’t massacre millions of people (though on Planet Der Trihs, we did).
A lot of the nonsensical un-history floating around out there exists because we have some kind of national psychic trauma over the Vietnam war. That all too often veers into fantasy-land thinking; for instance, the image of the North Vietnamese as benevolent liberators rather than the bloodthirsty conquerors that they were.
An arguably better comparison is Germany uniting the various other German speaking lands such as Austria, the Saar, Danzig, and the Sudetenland whose locals were just as supportive if not more than the two Vietnams uniting.
Do you imagine that the majority of dead Vietnamese killed themselves? Who do you think killed them aside from America? It’s not a fact in dispute. You just don’t want any VC, NVA, or Vietnamese civilians in the North to count, and want to blame every civilian death in the South on the North Vietnamese.
It’s not revisionist in the slightest, and FYI the word revisionist only has a negative connotation due to holocaust deniers hijacking the word. There’s nothing inherently negative about historical revisionism.
For the second time, if you are unable to keep from calling me stupid, take it to the pit.
Since you again dodged answering it, I’ll repeat what I said earlier: 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?
We told them to stop dumping Agent Orange on themselves, but they wouldn’t listen. They thought it was orange-scented body wash. So many cancers could’ve been prevented.
Wow. This is quite simply 100% untrue. Pol Pot was not a puppet of North Vietnam and Vietnam in fact kicked him out of power in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. You are sorely misinformed if you think they secretly approved of the Cambodian Genocide; hard as it may be for you to wrap around your ideological blinders they actually ended the Cambodian Genocide.
This is as well entirely untrue. You can try to cast the war as an invasion of the South by the North all you want, but it is simply not true.
You really ought to get some better sources than Conservapedia.
The Accords were signed in 1954. North Vietnam didn’t send troops into South Vietnam until 1964.
That’s hardly “almost the day after”.
First of all, by the standard your setting the Soviets didn’t “invade” Afghanistan since they were there with the consent of the Afghan government.
Moreover, what do you mean “invite the Viet Cong in”. The National Liberation Front(NLF) were South Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Diem Government. The South Vietnamese government was massively unpopular because it was made up almost entirely of wealthy, Catholic landowners in a country where the population were mostly Buddhist peasants.
The NLF didn’t “come in”. They were already there.
Also, they didn’t call themselves the Viet Cong. That term, which means Vietnamese Communists, was hurled at them by the Diems to manipulate the Americansand deny the nationalist credentials of the NLF.
In all fairness many if not most of the dead Vietnamese were killed by other Vietnamese not the Americans.
For example the South Vietnames Army, the ARVN(Army of the Republic of Vietnam) suffered far, far more casualties than the Americans did even during the height of the American entanglement and may very well have killed more members of the NLF than the Americans did.
It’s tough to tell because most of the “estimates” of the death toll in Vietnam other than the American and maybe the ARVN casualties would be more accurately described as educated guesses and an educated guess is still a guess.
Other Vietnamese. Duh. (Apparently you’re saying that if Americans didn’t kill them, then they must have been suicides.)
You’re right that it’s not a “fact in dispute”; it’s a non-fact that is not in dispute. You can’t find a single credible source that validates your claim. Your assertion has no basis in fact whatsoever. None. Zippo. Zilch.
You have poor reading comprehension skills, it would seem. At no time have I called you stupid. I have called the things you’ve said–such as the above–unbelievably, ridiculously stupid, because they were. Smart people do indeed say stupid things, but the more such things you say, the more applicable Occam’s Razor becomes.
I cut you some slack on your previous comments, but you’re not getting the message. This is a formal warning: do not insult other users outside of the Pit.
Don’t fasten on the fact that I quoted Conservapedia like a dog chewing on a bone. I offered the article as food for thought. I was not vouching for the accuracy of either that article or Conservapedia in general.
That said, there is much in the article that is relevant to the discussion at hand. If you want to read it with an open mind, it mentions quite a few interesting aspects of that period in history. If you want to read it with a closed mind, however, it will be a waste of your time.
By 1964, there was a massive North Vietnamese army already in South Vietnam–both the North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong. Most of them infiltrated, not directly across the DMZ, but down the Ho Chi Minh trail. They had been infiltrating for a decade. Ho Chi Minh’s stated aim, after he didn’t acquire dominion over all of Vietnam, was to destabilize the South and eventually add it to his empire. Laos and Cambodia were next on the menu, but a few things went wrong with that. He wished to become a regional warlord and proxy to the Communist superpowers. He got most of what he wanted, precisely because he started the whole process in 1954.
Is it an insult to say that someone has said something stupid? Twice, I tried to differentiate that from calling the person stupid, but the poster in question didn’t seem to understand the distinction. I would have expected a moderator to, though.
Nonetheless, if one of the rather bizarre rules of this forum is that attacking a statement is equivalent to attacking the person who said it, I shall abide by that rule. I should note, however, that fifty or so posters who have attacked things I have said should likewise be warned/sanctioned. But another of the bizarre rules here is that the rules don’t apply equally to everyone.