I think that’s exactly what he hoped. You mentioned that he quoted from the Declaration of Independence- I believe Minh kept a copy in his office.
And it’s a real shame he didn’t get US support. Was there anything that made Vietnam inherently communist? If the U.S. had respected Minh, and recognized him as the duly elected leader of his people, it seems reasonable to believe that Vietnam would have been an eager US ally.
(Of course, that does require the US to disappoint the French. But would the US telling post WWII France that they were not going to back their colonial effort in Southeast Asia had been that much of an impediment to diplomatic cooperation?)
That is correct. Ho Chi Minh himself lived in northeastern Thailand for a spell, and the house he lived in is some sort of museum now, and a couple of trees he planted are flourishing. As late as the early 1980s, it could be downright dangerous to go into certain parts of the Northeast that were closer geographically to Hanoi than to Bangkok for fear of being abducted and killed by the substantial communist insurgency that still existed. The Thais credit the US involvement in Vietnam with giving their government some breathing room. It was a period when there was a big push to get electricity to the rural masses in that area, and healthcare and schools, thus presenting a competitive alternative to the communists. They saw what happened in Vietnam, in Laos and in Cambodia and were convinced they were the next domino in the line.
Most revolutions against colonising nation require some outside assistance. And if the that colonising nation is aligned with Western nations, it is unlikely for those nations to provide such assistance. For instance, in Belgian Congo, Patrice Lumumba was elected as Prime Minister, which didn’t sit well with Belgium, as well as the US and Britain. Lacking support from the west, Lumumba reached out to the Soviets. It didn’t end well for Lumumba. Likewise, Ho Chi Minh faced a similar situation in Vietnam, and China was his source of support.
The same situation played out in the American revolution. Jefferson and Franklin reached out to France for assistance, and France was happy to help defeat their rival Britain. But if the American colonies had been French colonies, I suspect Ben Franklin would have been talking to London and not Paris.
If Ho Chi Minh was a Communist first (with a capital C) and a nationalist second or a nationalist first and a communist second has been debated pretty much since the war ended. I don’t have a clear answer apart from my reading that if he was a communist first, it was with a little c, not a big one. One of the biggest misjudgments the US made early in the Cold War was in viewing communism as a monolith, with every communist party taking its orders from Moscow combined with a tendency to come to the often-erroneous conclusion that if an insurgency wasn’t being supported by us, it must be being supported by the Soviets and Communism.
There was evidence to be found even in the beginning of the Cold War with Tito in Yugoslavia that communism wasn’t a monolith, and even more so after the Sino-Soviet split, but the powers that be continued to treat it as a monolith regardless. The Sino-Soviet split began as early as 1956 and was in full bloom by as early as 1961, but the US didn’t even begin to treat with communist China until Nixon’s visit in 1972.
It certainly would not have helped, and it wouldn’t just have been the French. The UK didn’t decolonize immediately after the war either, and it was British troops that initially handled the occupation of French Indochina until the French could return. The French in French Indochina didn’t acquit themselves very well; they sided with the Vichy government and administered (read: fought the Viet Minh) Indochina for the Japanese for almost all of WWII until the writing was seriously on the wall when they planned to do something to salvage the honor of the 65,000 troops they had there. The Japanese caught wind of this and put them down before they could take action from March 9 until 15 May 1945.
Next door in Malaysia, the British fought what was known as the Malayan Emergency from 1948-60 against Mayalan communists before decolonizing there. Any anti-colonialist ideals the US espoused during WWII quickly took a back seat to the realpolitik of having to fight the emerging Cold War.
this illustrates to me the idiocy of our treatment of Cuba–Cuba is communist, but never killed one American, offers no REAL threat, but we “boycott” them, yet Vietnam is communist, killed Americans but they’re our friends
If we say that the deaths were in vain, it sounds, to very many people, as if we’re saying that the lives were in vain, and that the people who died are denigrated.
And if we say that the deaths must be honored – it amounts to honoring the war that caused them. No matter how ill-advised, no matter how based on lies, no matter how likely a given war is to make things worse instead of better.
And then we’re at least somewhat more likely to enter the next war, and the one after that, and the one after that – because we can’t say that lives lost in a war may have been wasted; we have to say they were honorable.
If somebody who cleary didn’t have any money gets killed in the process of a mugging, does it denigrate the person killed to say that the killing was senseless?
Readers of this thread might be interested in the new book by Michael Mann, On Wars. He argues that “it is a handful of political leaders—people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions—who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results.”
To the degree this is true, it may be difficult to claim Vietnam and other military campaigns were in support of broad “American” interests as opposed to the interests of a small, unrepresentative elite that pursued its own self-interest.
From there, one might wonder if the point of the nation-state was to conceal that self-interest with a thin veneer of very limited democracy. In that sense, one might start to think that deaths in service of that cause might well have been in vain.
As Rudyard Kipling put it after the death of his son in World War I, “If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
It seems to me that the defense industry did quite well during this conflict, above and beyond the steady pulse of Cold War defense spending.
It’s less a matter of whether anyone profited more than in previous wars and more a question of whether they profited more than they would have without this conflict and its spending.
Maybe I inherited my cynicism from my dad, whom I remember saying we had to get into a war every so often just to blow up enough toasters and kitchen appliances such that everyone had to buy new ones!
And “interests” may be more subtle than war profits per se: war to force access to markets, labour, and resources and maintain unpopular pliant client governments may serve some groups equally well even if they don’t directly produce ships, planes, munitions, etc.
I also wouldn’t overestimate the “threat” of communism, lower case. That is, notions of collective ownership and an egalitarian society where people have equal access to the means of production and associated fruits.
Doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea to me, but I can see how even the theory (thus conveniently bypassing the common retort that communism is great in theory, unworkable in practice) of communism might seem threatening to “the interests of a small, unrepresentative elite.”* Even in this thread, people seem to have taken it for granted that the spread of communism beyond Vietnam, but for US intervention, might have posed a genuine threat to, say, Thailand, without considering whether that threat might have been limited in scope to only those wielding disproportionate power over their compatriots.
And are things going so great for Thailand now? Sure, the economy is strong (great for anyone who gets a share, I suppose), but consider, when was the last time Vietnam had a coup? How about Thailand?
Did you mean “underestimate”? Apart from my confusion there, I agree with your take on the threat of communism. The “Red Scares” are additional evidence for your argument, from Haymarket to 1919 to McCarthyism (a misnomer, to be sure) to today.
Eh in the context of the domino theory, “the dpread of communism” referred to the spread of brurally authoritarian regjmes (and north vietnam and later all of vietnam was an example of that). US involvement in the Vietnam War was still a failure im that regard for many reasons including the fact that “the spread of communism” reached Cambodia in spite (or possibly because of) American policy in Vietnam.
No, I meant overestimate. As in, I personally think it is a mistake to overestimate the threat that communism genuinely poses, and so we should not fall into the trap of overestimating it as we evaluate whether deaths during the Vietnam War were or were not in vain. It might have bee perceived as a threat, but to the extent the threat was genuine, I think it was only to those elites who would stand to lose the most.
The deaths were only not in vain if one first presumes that communism was something that needed to be stopped from spreading for the good of other people and second considers that perhaps US intervention in Vietnam did in fact prevent its spread to Thailand and elsewhere.
Certainly that is how it was pitched by politicians to the American people in seeking to justify war. But then consider: is it that communism was brutal, or is it that the conditions of colonization and exploitation ensured that peaceful means of change were foreclosed, and only violent revolution could overcome the inertia of French and American intervention in Vietnam?
Consider also that the proper point of comparison for the brutality of the North Vietnamese government with respect to its own people or to the South Vietnamese is not the US or France, but rather the regimes propped up in South Vietnam by the US in the aftermath of France’s departure.
I think it’s also somewhat disingenuous to judge a people forced into violent revolution by colonial occupiers and similarly exploitative meddlers enabling a corrupt regime as if they brought the violent revolution upon themselves. When revolutions fail to come about peacefully it is often, as it was the case in Vietnam, because foreign powers see to it that peaceful revolution will be impossible.
ETA: It is ironic in the extreme that JFK of all people, given the expanding role of advisors to Vietnam under his term, is the one supposed to have said “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
It’s clearly disingenuous to say that a humanitarian concern about the spread of USSR-style “communism” was the actual motivation for the US but it’s still true that the humanitarian outcomes of the spread of Marxist-Leninist regimes was a disaster. Both can be simultaneously true.
But how much of that was because communism necessarily leads to brutal, authoritarian regimes, and how much of that is because world powers responded to popular uprisings with communist bents by isolating those countries from the international system and, quite often, by interfering, such as through supporting counter-revolutionaries or by directly intervening through invasion?
Countries like Vietnam in the 50s, 60s, and 70s could be forgiven for thinking that they were beset by enemies on all sides and reacting with a certain paranoia to internal dissent because it turns out they really were beset by enemies on all sides and other countries of the world really were trying to bring about the collapse of their system of government.
The US and its allies reacted to communist revolutions of the 20th century in a manner not unlike how European monarchies tended to react to republican revolutions in the 19th century: by stamping them out. That doesn’t mean republicanism and democracy are inherently bad, it just means that when the world powers want a revolutionary movement to fail, they might just see to it that it fails. And, yes, failed states cut off from the world do tend to become brutal and authoritarian.
Are conditions in North Korea today, for example, due to a failure of a communist regime, or the “success” of the world’s capitalist regimes at isolating communist movements, pushing them into failed states?
