But as people keep pointing out to you, if being brutal and oppressive, and committing mass murder, are the proper criteria for intervention, then the number of candidates extends well beyond those on the list of official communist enemies.
And if those criteria are not confined to official communist enemies, then this suggests that the hifalutin humanitarian rhetoric designed to justify US intervention was largely self-serving sophistry.
You are confusing cause and effect here. The underlying reason for US intervention in Vietnam and the world at large wasn’t the domino theory. The underlying reason for it was opposition to communism, and that opposition was caused (for the umpteenth time) by the fact communism was a brutal authoritarian system that commited mass murders like the ones described in the OP. The people in charge of US foreign policy then went from “we should oppose communism” to “to oppose communism we need to intervene militarily in SE Asia against the wishes of the people that live there, otherwise the dominos will fall”. Spoiler alert, that was a bad idea
As I’ve pointed many times above that was a really bad idea, both ethically and practically. Supporting a mass murdering autocrat to prevent a country from being run by a murderous autocratic system is really dumb.
Do you have any evidence to support that in the case of Vietnam? We have tons of information on the motivation of us foreign policy in SE Asia. And for all the lies and dysfunction it clearly shows that the underlying motivation was opposition to communism. And that motivation was, wait for it, that communism was a brutal autocratic system that commited mass murder.
Just an FYI: the fact that you keep repeating something, over and over, doesn’t mean that your “analysis” is correct.
Also just denying something without presenting any evidence to back up your assertion doesn’t make it incorrect.
Unless you can present evidence that US foreign policy in SE Asia was not due to a fundamental belief in the heinous brutal nature of communist autocracy I am going to stand by this analysis.
Our level of “moral outrage” is usually far more dependent upon political expediency and economics than it is on actual “moral outrage”.
Doesn’t this just cover the land reform, and isn’t 200K at the low end of estimates? It could have been as high as 900K. During the war the communists are estimated to have purposely killed 130K-300K. After the war 1-2.5 million people were sent to reeducation camps. An estimated 165K people died in those camps. Then around 1 million people were sent to New Economic Zones in the mountains and and estimated 100K people died because of that. Then there were the 2 million boat people and 10-20% of those people died. The low end estimates of total people killed by the communists in Vietnam are around 700K and the high end around 1.7 million people.
Allende was a communist and wanted Chile to become part of the communist bloc. Declassified documents after the fall of the USSR showed that Allende was a communist and was funded by the KGB.
But other people have been pointing out the United States was okay with supporting brutal oppressive autocratic systems that combined mass murder - as long as they weren’t communist. It was communism we were opposed to.
And even that was something of a misdirection. Our opposition to communism was really opposition to the Soviet Union. Being communist and being allied to the Soviet Union just happened to have a substantial overlap. But we could make exceptions. We ended up being friendly with the People’s Republic of China, which was communist, and unfriendly with India, which was a non-communist country that got friendly with the Soviets. So ultimately it was an issue of whether a country was aligned with us or aligned with the Soviets.
We should have acknowledged this more directly. We weren’t going to convince Ho Chi Minh to give up on communism or Vietnamese independence and unification. But we probably could have convinced him to align with the United States rather than China and the Soviet Union. Vietnam could have been the Yugoslavia of Asia.
No, the low end estimates are down around a few hundreds. That’s unrealistically low. But I see 200,000 as a realistic figure. It came from sources that were opposed to communism but not willing to accept any rumor as fact.
And that opposition was because of the heinous crimes and oppression that resulted from communism (like the murders described in the OP).
Yeah that led to very dubious moral (and practical) decisions when it came to who to support, and how. It doesn’t change that fundamental motivation.
I am not saying the US was always fundamentally opposed to all autocratic, murderous, regimes for moral reasons (the history of the cold war shows that to be absolutely not true). I am saying that US opposition to communism was fundamentally based on the murderous autocratic and oppressive nature of communism.
Inevitably opposition to communism led to some “enemy of my enemy” compromises. And communism was never the monolithic worldwide workers brotherhood it was presented as in communist and anti-communist propaganda.
Your whole analysis reflects a narrow and simplistic view of history, one that both ignores the long-term American criticisms of communism as an ideology (well before the rise of brutal communist regimes), and that also fails to acknowledge that communism need not be inherently brutal and murderous.
The American intellectual and political tradition has a strong thread of individualism, going back to the classical Enlightenment liberalism of the founders. Many Americans were critical of socialist and communist ideologies in the nineteenth century, well before communism had any real political power and success, because they felt that it undermined the individualism and competitive spirit of capitalist democracy. Americans often opposed immigration from southern and eastern Europe because of a perception that political ideologies like socialism and communism were widely accepted in those places. Hostility to labor unions among some Americans sometimes had its roots in the same ideological principles.
These criticisms emerged well before any organized communist regimes took power, and many in the United States would have been (and were) opposed to communism even in its more benign, non-murderous forms. Indeed, during the anti-communist hysteria of the post-WWII era, manifestly non-brutal and non-murderous policies within the United States, such as public housing and government-subsidized healthcare, were heavily criticized for their alleged communist tendencies, despite the fact that no-one was under any illusion that implementing these policies would turn the United States into a murderous dictatorship.
I’m not arguing that the brutal and murderous practices of some communist leaders were irrelevant to American policies, but they existed alongside a broader and deeper ideological opposition to communism as an economic system. Also, as people have pointed out ad nauseum, the fact that the United States has been willing to tolerate, and even support, all sorts of brutal and murderous dictators sort of casts a bit of doubt on these criteria as the necessary and sufficient reasons for opposing communism.
Also, while communism has often produced oppression, it need not necessarily do this. It is possible for the people of a country to democratically support a communist system. It would be very difficult to make the argument that the Soviet people were in such a situation, but even American intelligence analysts conceded in the 1950s that Ho Chi Minh would have easily (like with probably more than 80 percent of the vote) won a democratic election in a reunited Vietnam. And some analysts of Ho’s oppressive polices have also argued that they came largely in response to concerted efforts to undermine his leadership, sponsored by outside influences like the United States. You can see similar patterns in Cuba, where oppression got worse over time as American-led sanctions and other external pressures made it harder for the Cuban government to maintain power and control.
None of this excuses the oppressive practices of these regimes, but while communism requires a certain amount of authoritarianism and control, it can exist without murderous brutality.
That it was exactly that bad and exactly that unethical when the US intervened in Chile, Vietnam, and other countries.
That is a crime.
But during Vietnam War, USA was responsible for the death of at least a MILLION civilians. That is a much greater crime.
On the other hand, the World may have been in danger of Global Communist Revolution.
Sad but true. US tactics at that time lead to enormous civilian losses.
If the US was motivated to combat brutal autocracy *qua *brutal autocracy, why did they not invade, say, Apartheid South Africa ? Why did the US oust ostensibly peaceable Allende, but not actually brutal Pinochet nor his counterparts in Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Paraguay, or Bolivia ? Why did the CIA try to kill Castro a million times, but never once Franco (who, at the time of this writing, credible sources affirm is still dead) or “Papa Doc” Duvalier ? Can you, in fact, point to *any *brutal autocracy aligned with fascist/nationalist/otherwise ultra right wing ideas the US did jack shit about at any point during the Cold War (or beyond, for that matter) ?
Cause the list of brutal fascists the US actively supported throughout the period is kinda long…
To be fair communism is and never has been about being a brutal autocratic form of government. It has worked out that way but that is not part of the communist manifesto.
The brutality is just the result of people in power. Power corrupts and all that.
In general the US does not give a shit (beyond lip service) to rulers mass murdering their population. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Peron…the list is sadly long. We are not in the business of ousting bad guys or avenging wrongs. If we oust someone we paint them as a bad guy, and they might really be a bad guy, but that is just a casus belli. Some really bad guys we protect and coddle.
Also, the US has no shortage of brutality of its own in order to get its way in its history. Indeed Vietnam might be seen as a proxy location for two brutal ideologies to duke it out. Tough shit for the people who live there.
But it was hardly the ONLY brutal autocratic system that committed mass murder. Why, then, was it the only such system targeted for opposition/elimination as a matter of U.S. foreign policy?
It doesn’t look like a failure to acknowledge it so much as a refusal to consider it.
Since Minh died, like I said, in 1969 I wonder if the US pullout a couple of years later was not based on the hope that his successor would be more benevolent in the job.