My point (for which I have no cite, but it seems supported by my personal memories of the '70s) was that America immediately after SV fell was somewhat welcoming of Vietnamese immigrants, which it was not while the war was going on.
Simply that South Korea, AFIAK (I could be wrong), never had any Communist insurgency analogous to the Viet Cong.
According to this (warning: .pdf file) quick google search, there was a “widespread North-Korean supported leftist insurgency in the south”. The link is mostly about the lessons we can use from successfully countering the South Korean insurgency in Iraq, though.
“South Korean insurgency in Iraq” ?!
The lessons learned from the South Korean insurgency being applied to the situation in Iraq. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I was just using the article to point out that there was a communist insurgency in South Korea, but clarifying that it drew similarities to Iraq, not Vietnam.
I was responding to Captain Amazing’s post. The second passage he quoted - “Throughout South Vietnam, local officials and commanders gained confidence as it became apparent that the Viet Cong were effectively finished as a fighting force. In America, terminal disillusionment had set in.” - seemed to be implying that the ARVN had finally gotten its act together and was becoming an effective fighting force but that the United States simultaneously abandoned them just as they were ready to start fighting. I was pointing out that the actual timeline of events didn’t match that interpretation.
No, I can’t post a cite offhand. I have read that the Hanoi government did deliberately decide not to commit more than token regular forces, even when they realized that the NLF wouldn’t be able to win without them. And one of the reasons they made this decision was because they were willing to sacrifice the NLF.
And you can see the logic from a ruthless point of view. Hanoi’s immediate goal was to eliminate enemy resistance in the South - break the ARVN and drive out foreign allies like us. But their long term goal was to establish totalitarian control over the South. And at least some of the more pragmatic leaders in Hanoi had to be wondering how an underground organization that had spent years resisting a totalitarian government might fit into that plan. The NLF was an independant organization - it was allied with the North Vietnamese but it wasn’t owned by them (and in fact had its own shadow government that claimed to represent South Vietnam). If the NLF had still been intact in 1975 it could conceivably have formed the basis of an underground movement that opposed the Hanoi regime just as it had the Saigon regime. But in historical reality it never had the chance - Hanoi convinced the NLF to lead an uprising against the ARVN in 1968 and then stood back and watched as its current enemy and its future potential rival smashed away at each other.
It was like the Warsaw uprising in 1944. The Soviets didn’t care if the Germans defeated the Poles or the Poles defeated the Germans - they stood back and waited to take the city from whichever side that was left.
Most of the Vietnamese immigrants, though, were refugees fleeing Communism. If the South Vietnamese government hadn’t fallen, the refugees wouldn’t have felt the need to leave.
Hi all, I’m a Vietnamese and have enjoyed reading these forums for quite some time now, but never got around to registering for various reasons (one of them is the subscription fee cough) 
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Anyways I’d like to present my viewpoint as an average Vietnamese to your questions.
This one is easy, yes of course. Had the war not ended, the US Army would still be able to continue their carpet bombing of North Vietnam, and maybe this time would succeed in returning us to the Stone Age, as the late general LeMay, and president Nixon had suggested. No thank you, we’ve had enough. I have no doubt that South Vietnam (mainly Saigon) would fare better though.
What would be best IMO is that the US never went to war against us in the first place. Did you know that we have requested your goverment’s help in establishing a free, independant (and maybe democratic) many times before and during the war? We were even briefly your allies against the Japanese fascists before 1945! And we only fully sided with the Chinese and Soviets when the war against the French (backed by the US) went badly during 1947-1949. Oh well, we can’t have the cake or eat it either I guess.
Can’t say that our history is the longest or bloodiest (and I certainly hope not), but that remark is pretty much correct. It’s not easy being a neighbour to a super power for some thousand years, and managed not to become a part of it.
No, the Vietnamese are mostly of one ethnic group the Viet people), so your Warsaw analogy doesn’t work here, it would be like the Germans sacrificing their Aryan population to win WW2. Why that’s certainly not impossible, only a mad dictator would do something like that.
I agree with you that the NLF was an independant organization and not North Vietnam’s puppet, but to say that they were somehow against us is simply wrong, because (1) many members of the NLF were also members of the Viet Minh (Vietnamese National Liberation Movement) during the French-Vietnamese War, and (2) many of their leaders became leaders of North Vietnam during and after the war (Le Duan, Nguyen Huu Tho, Huynh Tuan Phat), etc.
I think all the article is claiming is that, with the defeat of the Viet Cong at Tet, South Vietnamese morale improved. Granted, it was pretty low to begin with. And, if you look at the history of the ARVN, it did get better as the war continued, even if it was never as good as the PAVN. But, they were able to (with US air support), mount a mostly successful defense at the Easter Offensive, and were successful in the Cambodian Campaign.
But you’re right, ARVN wasn’t, clearly, able to stand p against North Vietnam. But, like I said, they were, and probably would have been able, to put down internal resistance.
I rather doubt that that many would be allowed in. We seemed to have learned our lesson, though, considering we are letting in dozens of Iraqis.
Where I live we have Indians, Chinese and Afghans not going back. That attractiveness of coming here is clear. If we’re toting up plusses and minuses, that’s a potential plus - though it is possible that some would go back the minute they could.
Just popping in to say hi, Geekmustnotdie, welcome to the SDMB.
There was also no successful movement like the Viet Minh. The Koreans got their independence from Japan as a side effect of WW II, so there was no big revolutionary cadre. Also, the North Korean invasion was more of a traditional attack, and was met by traditional military means. If the North Vietnamese had been foolish enough to launch a conventional invasion, it probably could have been met more successfully than the guerilla war was - and there would be no reason not to invade the north, leaving an adequate buffer zone at the Chinese border, of course.
Welcome to the Dope! What’s Vietnam like today, in your opinion as an average Vietnamese? How prosperous is it? How do you like the government? How repressive is it? How free? Any changes you’d like to see?
Are you old enough to remember NV’s conquest of SV? Some posters (particularly the banned-after-two-days Trotsky) have asserted, in essence, that the death toll afterwards was on a scale equivalent to Stalin’s purges. Was it really that bad?
Ethnic solidarity only goes so far. After all the Saigon and Hanoi governments were both Vietnamese but that didn’t stop them from fighting each other.
While the NLF and North Vietnam had common goals and worked together in 1968, that doesn’t mean they might not have developed seperate goals and stopped working together in the 1970s. There have been numerous examples of fallings out among Communist governments: Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union and China; China and Vietnam; Vietnam and Kampuchea; Stalin and pretty much everyone else.
NV did not conquer SV. SV was an artificial US created puppet, not a country. The Communist regime finished off the nationalist vietnamese liberation project that was thwarted by the USA’s subversion of the Geneva Accords.
We should just have let the mandated elections go ahead and saved millions of fruitlessly extinguished lives.
The US didn’t create South Vietnam. It wasn’t OUR puppet at the beginning either (see France). And yes, the North DID conquer the South and impose their own government on it against the will of at least a large percentage (if not a majority) of folks in the South.
Other than that, your post is spot on…
When you say ‘we’, who do you mean exactly? Though in essence I agree…I can understand why the west didn’t want too, mind (that whole anti-communist period), but in rhetrospect it probably would have been wiser to do it that way, then just let Vietnam die on the vine as yet another failed communist state. Probably how things actually worked out for Vietnam, deaths and all, is better than what would have happened to them if they had simply had it handed to them on a silver platter. Having to fight and struggle for something sometimes makes it more vital, more real, etc.
-XT
SV was not a country - your assertion notwithstanding. The administrative divisions of a colonial occupier are irrelevant to the occupied people and the temporary division at the 17th Parallel was part of the Geneva Accords was just that - temporary pending elections. The State of Vietnam was the French 1949 attempt to grant independence to just the non-communist dominated part.
We = the West.
The lunatic anti-communism of the 50’s and 60’s was always counter-productive. We practically forced nationalists into the arms of the Soviets and the Chinese by our opposition to democracy let alone communism. (And look how well that worked out in Iran).
The Geneva Accords outlined an electoral process. Ho was going to win that election and the freedom-loving democratic West decided, screw that, let’s run with a Catholic dictator who seized power by a coup and pretend South Vietnam is a real country.
And SV was a puppet regime. We overthrew Diem and finally we imposed our ‘exit strategy’ on an unwilling SV regime. We propped them up, we pulled the plug and it collapsed.
Iraq will end the same way. In 5 years time most the current Iraq ‘govt’ will be running kebab shops in the USA, or they will be dangling from lamp-posts.
There are other things to consider as well.
Laos and Cambodia also fell when the U.S. pulled out, and both of these countries are undeniably worse off for their experiences since.
Burma also has maintained a severe authoritarian system since the 1960s, with a socialist economic model. They resist any reforms of their system and most interactions with Western nations - much like Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia until very recently. So it is obvious that they learned very important lessons from the Vietnam conflict as well.
No discussion of this topic can be worthwhile without considering the suffering of people in these countries in addition to the events in Vietnam itself.
Neither was North Vietnam a country…but you misunderheard what I was saying. I said the US didn’t create it, your own assertion notwithstanding “SV was an artificial US created puppet, not a country.”
Um…well, thats rather a skewed way of looking at things. One could say that it was Soviet aggression and the attempt to retain and expand these ‘temporary divisions’ that caused much of the friction with the west…especially those communist controlled ‘temporary divisions’ that attempted to re-unify through force of arms.
No doubt. Of course, the converse was true in other countries with these artificial divisions post-WWII…wasn’t it? Not that this makes it right, but there was a bit more back and forth going on here than simple the “US” or ‘The West’ keeping down these re-unification efforts. From MY perspective we should have never agreed in the first place to divide these countries either in Asia or in Europe, nor allow the Soviets the ‘right’ to continue to occupy the eastern block nations post-WWII. However, the political reality was that, unless we wanted general war, we had to do so. And since the Soviets WERE continueing to hold on to those possessions, I can certainly understand why the west didn’t want to give up anything they didn’t have too…or felt they couldn’t afford.
My own thoughts were that the US, having supported Ho Chi Mien and the Vietnamese during WWII in their fights with Japan, we should have supported him after the war as well and told the French to shove the rest of their tottering empire up their collective asses. But we fucked up…and the war was the price we paid for that.
The rest of your post is either inaccurate or not really worth getting into as it goes a bit far afield to what the thread is talking about. I could just as easily say that the North was a puppet of both the Chinese and Soviets…they controlled the purse strings, they made it possible…without them, the North would have imploded like an empty beer can. Iraq really has nothing to do with the thread.
-XT
There is nothing odd about skewed about the nationalist/communist comment. We continually conflated the two. Everyone that did not kow-tow to business interests was a ‘communist’. Chile, Iran, Nasser’s Egypt etc etc. The same mistake is being made with Chavez today.
We might not like the current regimes in V and Iran but they are the governments the people want within the choices they can make. Pretending they are evil incarnate is just counter-productive.
Theocratic Iran, if we just left it to stew in the dark ages, will come around because our superior system appeals more. Like with eastern europe waiting is a better option than subversion and aggression.
I agree - Potsdam was a bad deal all round but the only practical one that could be struck. I have absolutely no love of totalitarian regimes but doing nothing is a better approach to a problem if all you can do is make things worse by acting for actions sake. (See ‘Iraq’.)
As has already been stated Ho wanted to be our friend. He was a pragmatic politician, he was a nationalist and a patriot. Look how quickly national interests broke up the Sino-Soviet axis. Look how quickly Vietnam and China resumed their age-old conflict after 1975. Look how quickly Vietnam became our friend. Our system is simply better and more appealing.
There simply was not an international communist conspiracy, just the same old Great Game played out wearing different hats. A Game we played so badly and bloodily because we were fixated on the monster we conjured in our own head.
If I’d been Emperor of the West at that time I’d have swum with the nationalist anti-colonial tide and said ‘The Soviets are giving you guns huh? Here have even more and better guns, plus a whole slab of butter.’
What does not work is arming a few gangsters and pretending they are a viable alternative to the popular liberation movements.