# Since Ho Chi Minh mass-murdered in 1956 --how unethical was it really for the US to stop him? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 31, 2018, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222 "2018-05-31T20:19:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ned12](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f1d935/32.png) [@ned12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ned12)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2018, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/21 "2018-05-31T23:30:27Z")
> [@ned12](#): > > Stop him from taking South Vietnam that is. In 1956 Ho committed a brutal North Vietnam land reform where many thousands of landlords were brutally killed. Then a huge revolt caused by this land reform and Ho forces squashed the revolt without any mercy. (In his new book on Vietnam Ken Burns himself talks of this violent land reform/revolt incident.) If he had gotten South Vietnam seems much like they would have been in for more of his tragic mass-murder. He never did win the southern country and he died in 1969. An excellent book to read on the subject of what happened miserably to the poor men of the army of South Vietnam is titled “South Vietnamese Soldiers”. Read some of this great book at [books.google.com](http://books.google.com) ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2018, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/22 "2018-05-31T23:36:18Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > Actually, no. We supported numerous brutal authoritarian rulers during the Cold War whose only selling point was that they were anti-communist. A classic example was when Nixon and Kissinger enabled the fall of Salvador Allende, a socialist but not part of the communist bloc in any meaningful sense, with the brutal Pinochet. > > Reagan’s foreign policy advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick was quite explicit about this: that somehow brutal ‘authoritarian’ strongmen were preferable to brutal communist strongmen. It was strictly a matter of communists being bad because they were communists, and everybody else being good if they weren’t. That was neither the right thing to do either ethically or practically (US foreign policy played into the hands of soviets, who could say to people in the third world: “Look what the evil Americans are doing! They don’t care about you or your right to self determination”). But it doesn’t change the fact that those decisions were made because communism was a brutal autocratic system that was responsible for mass murder and oppression. Yeah, supporting an autocratic regime responsible for mass murder and oppression to prevent a country from being taken over by an autocratic political system that has a tendency to oppress and commit mass murder is really dumb. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/23 "2018-06-01T00:05:05Z")
> [@XT](#): > > You must be talking about war deaths in South Vietnam verse North Vietnam, because if we are talking about the deaths due to the communist regime we are talking a lot more than 200K. Assuming this is what you are referring too, you are correct…but then, this is why it’s called asymmetric warfare after all. The 200,000 figure was non-war deaths; people killed for political crimes. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/24 "2018-06-01T00:09:03Z")
> [@ned12](#): > > An excellent book to read on the subject of what happened miserably to the poor men of the army of South Vietnam is titled “South Vietnamese Soldiers”. Read some of this great book at [books.google.com](http://books.google.com) Have you read any good oral histories of American veterans on their thoughts about the war? ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 12:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/25 "2018-06-01T00:19:07Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > No argument there from me. I wasn’t saying the intervention in Vietnam was either correct or ethical. > > I was saying that Americans, on the whole, opposed communism during the cold war because of the mass murder, oppression and authoritarian rule that resulted from communism, not from wanting to impose capitalism on the world or any other motive. > > Awful unethical things were done because of that, including the Vietnam war (once you start on the “end justify the means” slippery slope it is easy to do awful things). I don’t think many Americans knew firsthand what life in a 1950s and 60s communist country was like. Their only source of information was their own government’s heavily biased propaganda - which was carefully orchestrated to persuade Americans of exactly this idea. (And not, on the other hand, orchestrated to be particularly truthful.) ---
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/26 "2018-06-01T00:23:24Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > That was neither the right thing to do either ethically or practically (US foreign policy played into the hands of soviets, who could say to people in the third world: “Look what the evil Americans are doing! They don’t care about you or your right to self determination”). > > But it doesn’t change the fact that those decisions were made because communism was a brutal autocratic system that was responsible for mass murder and oppression. Yeah, supporting an autocratic regime responsible for mass murder and oppression to prevent a country from being taken over by an autocratic political system that has a tendency to oppress and commit mass murder is really dumb. By this exact logic (must prevent autocratic government from gaining a foothold), France and Germany would be perfectly justified in storming the White House tomorrow morning. An elected but bad government is still elected. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/27 "2018-06-01T02:09:20Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#): > > I don’t think many Americans knew firsthand what life in a 1950s and 60s communist country was like. Their only source of information was their own government’s heavily biased propaganda - which was carefully orchestrated to persuade Americans of exactly this idea. (And not, on the other hand, orchestrated to be particularly truthful.) Not true at all. The mass murders, oppression and other atrocities in places like the Soviet Union and China were well (and fairly accurately)reported in the west. Yeah the exact details of the day to day lives of citizens in the communist block were not. But, again, that is less important. The US (on the whole) did not oppose communism because it was an inefficient economic system that made really crappy fridges for its people. It opposed communism because it was brutal autocratic system that murdered its citizens in huge numbers. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/28 "2018-06-01T02:11:00Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#): > > By this exact logic (must prevent autocratic government from gaining a foothold), France and Germany would be perfectly justified in storming the White House tomorrow morning. An elected but bad government is still elected. Errrr and Your point is? I guess we agree it would be a bad idea (and unethical ) for France and Germany to interfere in the self determination of the united States? Even if Trump starts murdering US citizens by the thousands . ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/29 "2018-06-01T02:23:13Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > The US (on the whole) did not oppose communism because it was an inefficient economic system that made really crappy fridges for its people. It opposed communism because it was brutal autocratic system that murdered its citizens in huge numbers. I think that is _half_ true and I firmly believe that many of those in power that opposed communism had honest motivation with that train of thought in their minds. But only half-true. Because I feel that even if an honest-to-god benevolent worker’s paradise had come to pass, the United State would not have conceeded the point and backed off. Things like the abolition of private property, organized religion and the like would have still been considered evil in abstraction and an inimical threat to “The American Way of Life.” No one would have been willing to spot the commies a pass to try and make the world better even if a good role model existed. I think it is naive to believe otherwise. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/30 "2018-06-01T02:43:48Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Yes, but you have to look at the numbers. A good estimate is that the Vietnamese communist government killed around 200,000 people for political reasons. It’s estimated that 2,000,000 Vietnamese were killed in the war we fought to prevent that government from taking over the south. So even if we had succeeded, we killed ten times more people than we would have saved. Sometimes you have to destroy the province to save the village, right? ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/31 "2018-06-01T03:35:33Z")
One all-but-forgotten reason for Americans’ outrage toward Ho was Tom Dooley and his best-seller, _Deliver Us From Evil_. What? You’ve never heard of it or Tom Dooley? There are various reasons for that, but the fact is, after his death form lung cancer in 1961, Dooley was ranked third in a Gallup poll of the “most esteemed men,” right behind Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Pope. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and the Medal of Freedom. As[Boston College](http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/summer_2002/ll_fighting.html) magazine (and others have agreed, “No one played a larger role than Dooley did in moving Vietnam to the forefront of public concern in the United States.” The fact that Dooley created out of thin air such stories as the priest who had nails pounded into his skull to simulate the Crown of Thorns, the Catholic boys who had chopsticks pounded into their ears, the priest who had been beaten until his belly was distended and his flesh blackened, wasn’t widely known at the time. But it was, for the millions of Americans who read his books, utterly believable, and “managed to make a large segment of the American public care passionately about preserving South Vietnam from communist tyranny.” (Ibid.) Few people today have heard of Tom Dooley, in part because after his death, his promiscuity and homosexuality, as well as his medical ineptitude, were revealed and partly because the war, itself, belied his accounts. But to ignore Dooley is to ignore the role American beliefs about Communism and religion played in shaping American attitudes toward Ho, the war, and American support for it. ---
**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:** [June 1, 2018, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/32 "2018-06-01T03:51:01Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > Reagan’s foreign policy advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick was quite explicit about this: that somehow brutal ‘authoritarian’ strongmen were preferable to brutal communist strongmen. It was strictly a matter of communists being bad because they were communists, and everybody else being good if they weren’t. Many cold warriors were opposed to benign socialists as well as brutal communists. Many interventions were less about opposing communism than serving the interests of U.S. and British corporations. Chile’s Allende was neither brutal nor communist, unless “brutal” includes economic programs to reduce severe wealth inequality. Iran’s Mosaddeq had no interest in communism — his sin was trying to remove Britain’s arguably-illegal stranglehold on the Persian economy. Even Cuba’s Castro, less brutal than the government he replaced, didn’t ally with the Soviet Union until after the C.I.A. and Cosa Nostra had entered into an alliance to depose him. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/33 "2018-06-01T05:34:33Z")
> [@septimus](#): > > Many cold warriors were opposed to benign socialists as well as brutal communists. Many interventions were less about opposing communism than serving the interests of U.S. and British corporations. > > Chile’s Allende was neither brutal nor communist, unless “brutal” includes economic programs to reduce severe wealth inequality. Iran’s Mosaddeq had no interest in communism — his sin was trying to remove Britain’s arguably-illegal stranglehold on the Persian economy. Even Cuba’s Castro, less brutal than the government he replaced, didn’t ally with the Soviet Union until after the C.I.A. and Cosa Nostra had entered into an alliance to depose him. Right. Add Guatemala to that list. I think you can make a strong argument that independent nationalism (i.e., a nationalist desire to maintain local control over resources) was a more threatening ideology, in the minds of American policymakers and American business leaders, than socialism or communism. Ho Chi Minh might have had socialist policies, but he was never interested in being part of a broad Soviet-dominated global communist order. He never considered himself a domino, in the sense that US cold war ideologues talked about, and his main concern was to overthrow the French colonial regime and return control of the country to the Vietnamese. And as **griffin1977** noted above, he had the support of a substantial majority of the people of Vietnam. The US State Department, in its own reports during the late 1950s, conceded that Ho Chi Minh would comfortably win any truly democratic election, and Eisenhower acknowledged the same thing in his memoirs. That’s precisely why the United States did everything it possibly could to ensure that the elections outlined by the Geneva peace accords after Dien Bien Phu never went ahead. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/34 "2018-06-01T07:41:18Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > Ho Chi Minh might have had socialist policies, but he was never interested in being part of a broad Soviet-dominated global communist order. He never considered himself a domino, in the sense that US cold war ideologues talked about, and his main concern was to overthrow the French colonial regime and return control of the country to the Vietnamese. But he was a brutal autocratic and did clearly murder tens of thousands of his own people, for the crime of owning a little too much property. So where exactly he fell in the geopolitical makeup is kind of academic. Opposing him was totally correct. Militarily intervening (at a cost of millions of lives) to ensure he didn’t rule all of Vietnam, despite the fact it was clearly what the people of Vietnam wanted was the mistake. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/35 "2018-06-01T08:02:45Z")
> [@ned12](#): > > Stop him from taking South Vietnam that is. In 1956 Ho committed a brutal North Vietnam land reform **where many thousands of landlords were brutally killed**. Then **a huge revolt** caused by this land reform and Ho forces squashed the revolt without any mercy. (In his new book on Vietnam Ken Burns himself talks of this violent land reform/revolt incident.) If he had gotten South Vietnam seems much like they would have been in for more of his tragic mass-murder. He never did win the southern country and he died in 1969. (bolding mine) Was that what he was trying to accomplish ? Beyond that, we guaranteed free elections and then refused to hold them when it looked like the result wasn’t going to be the “right” one. Turns out people don’t really like cronies in the pocket of colonial powers - who knew ?! That, alone, makes the whole thing preposterous to try and paint the war as some kind of moral endeavour (to say nothing of how the war itself was prosecuted). The Vietnamese people had and have the right to self-determination - the right of the people to dispose of themselves is enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights. What they do with themselves and whether or not it looks good to you doesn’t really feature in the equation at all. As for the land reforms, yes, they got bloody ; but land reforms usually are, whether they happen in Ancient Sparta, modern France or 20th century Spain. But it’s not the _point_ to be bloody, and the reforms typically answer more systemic injustice and violence. And FWIW, as communist regimes go Vietnam was and is among the least heavy-handed ones, plus today Vietnam is a booming economy. It wasn’t the Khmer Rouge. Which we happily left alone to murder some 3 million people - in fact it’s those selfsame Vietnamese commies who had to go in and stop that madness. So tell me again how ethical we were in Southeast Asia ? ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/36 "2018-06-01T14:00:21Z")
nm ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/37 "2018-06-01T14:10:13Z")
Apologies if anyone tried to read my previous post. I thought I was replying to a different post than I quoted. > [@griffin1977](#): > > That was neither the right thing to do either ethically or practically (US foreign policy played into the hands of soviets, who could say to people in the third world: “Look what the evil Americans are doing! They don’t care about you or your right to self determination”). > > But it doesn’t change the fact that those decisions were made because communism was a brutal autocratic system that was responsible for mass murder and oppression. Yeah, supporting an autocratic regime responsible for mass murder and oppression to prevent a country from being taken over by an autocratic political system that has a tendency to oppress and commit mass murder is really dumb. You can say it was merely really dumb for the U.S. to oppose brutal authoritarian Communist regimes for their brutal authoritarian-ness by supporting brutal authoritarian non-Communist regimes, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. If the difference between the Third World regimes the U.S. supported and those it opposed wasn’t their brutality or authoritarian character, but rather their Communism or opposition to Communism, I think that speaks for itself. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/38 "2018-06-01T15:01:02Z")
South Vietnam wasn’t some human rights paradise at the time either. The US largely turned a blind eye towards the South’s persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic minority in power and propped up a series of weak leaders for political expediency. Part of the reason the North was able to win was because they felt like they had a government that genuinely represented the people while the South had a series of puppet leaders who the population didn’t feel represented them. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/39 "2018-06-01T15:55:43Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > But he was a brutal autocratic and did clearly murder tens of thousands of his own people, for the crime of owning a little too much property. So where exactly he fell in the geopolitical makeup is kind of academic. Opposing him was totally correct. I’ve taken no position on whether or not Ho Chi Minh was a good leader. But we’re talking, in this thread, specifically about the rationale for US intervention in foreign countries, and Vietnam’s place in the geopolitical picture needs to be taken into consideration, because its potential as a “domino” in the communist quest for world domination was part of the reasoning offered by US policymakers for getting involved. If being a brutal autocrat who murders his own people is the main criterion for intervention, then why wasn’t the US sending troops into Franco’s Spain, Suharto’s Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile, or any one of a dozen other friendly dictatorships? Hell, in a number of cases, brutal autocrats who murdered their own people were actually installed and supported by the United States. What is your position on America’s support for those people? ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2018, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222/40 "2018-06-01T16:08:47Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > Apologies if anyone tried to read my previous post. I thought I was replying to a different post than I quoted. You can say it was merely really dumb for the U.S. to oppose brutal authoritarian Communist regimes for their brutal authoritarian-ness by supporting brutal authoritarian non-Communist regimes, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. > > If the difference between the Third World regimes the U.S. supported and those it opposed wasn’t their brutality or authoritarian character, but rather their Communism or opposition to Communism, I think that speaks for itself. That’s not what I am saying at all. I am saying the motivation for the US opposing communism was a that communism was a brutal oppressive autocratic system that combined mass murder. That doesn’t justify all the things done in the name of opposing communism during the cold war. But those things don’t change that fundamental motivation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/since-ho-chi-minh-mass-murdered-in-1956-how-unethical-was-it-really-for-the-us-to-stop-him/815222.md?page=3)