He wasn’t personally responsible for the Vietnamese victory as in directly leading the troops, but wasn’t he the guy who set it all up and saw most of it through, only to die before it concluded?
Pol Pot is the killing fields guy, right? I’m pretty sure I’m not thinking of him.
Wiki says that Ho Chi Minh’s policies may have killed up to 200,000, and I thought I learned something similar in elementary school. (This was an American school in Taiwan, so possible anti-Vietnamese propaganda?). This is not a subject I’m terribly familiar with, again. Wikipedia does say that Ho Chi Minh is rather deified in Vietnam today, so is it possible you just don’t hear that much negativity about him being there? I honestly don’t know.
This puts me in mind of a poem I mentioned in another thread quite a while ago, called “How Big Was Alexander?” I think it was written in the earlier half of the twentieth century.
It’s a dialogue between a father and his young son, where the son struggles to understand why Alexander was called “the great.” When his dad tells him that Alexander’s wars of conquest made him famous, the son asks how killing could make a man famous, when a recently executed murderer was never called “great”. The father tries to explain that it’s a different thing in wartime, but the son asks if the people in the countries Alexander sacked or the families of the soldiers he killed would have called him “great”. The father has no answer.
Dan Carlin makes the argument in American Peril that the change happened at the turn of the century between the Spanish-American War and the Philippine War. (The American Peril).
Journalism played a big part. There was the romanticism and yellow journalism of Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, doing silly things, and then the humanitarian crisis and war crimes in the Philippines that made war, and imperialism, seem hellish.
Carlin makes the same argument again for WWI. The Brits and the French especially had romantic ideals about war, and yes, Napoleon played a big part, but machine guns and artillery shells put an end to that. Technology took the individual out of the war, and thus the hero was gone.
Journalism was still heavily censored. By Vietnam, the press could show what war was really like, and people were turned off even more.
This is not to say mass murder and conquest don’t happen–There was lots of genocide and ethnic cleansing in WWI and WW2, and still today. It’s just that it’s seen as distasteful.
Yes and I realised someone would correct me. Actually I had in mind Alexander who was no wimp when it came to obliterating his opponents.
You are absolutely right - battles and wars until recent times (1700s) were mostly fought by champions or hundreds (occasionally thousands) of men face to face. The English long-bow was a game changer as was the later flint-lock rifle.
Instead of battle, strong armed forces (Roman legions) arrived and scared the pants off the locals. Works every time.
I feel like war might be a bit more “celebratory” when it consists of beating other men in combat face to face with melee weapons. As opposed to celebrating that your part of a fortified trench line didn’t happen to have a mustard gas shell land on it or some sniper didn’t happen to catch you accidently poking your head around a corner today.
Plus I think we reached a point some time ago where “conquering” no longer consisted of sending an expeditionary force into some uncharted land and annihilating the fierce, uneducated, backward barbarians. Much of what we applaud Alexander and later the Romans for is bringing their modern notions of government and infrastructure to the people they conquered.
But more often than not, Romans are still the “bad guys” in most historical dramas.
Even the “British Empire” can go either way, depending on the context of the story and time period.
Much of modern day thought about the Civil War is from southern apologists, notably the idea that the war was about State’s Rights and not slavery. There are many who will tell you that the real reason for the war was the North’s tariff policies. As for State’s Rights, South Carolina seceded specifically because the Federal government was allowing other states to pass laws that made it impossible for the Federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.
The reason you were taught Napoleon was a despicable tyrant is that you were taught in an anglophone school. If you went to school in France you’d have been taught differently. If you go to Mongolia and ask people about Genghis Khan you’ll find that in Mongolia he’s not a byword for slaughter and cruelty.
As for the myth that “history is written by the winners”, that’s just nonsense. Losers often write history. Some of our most famous histories were written by people on the losing sides of wars. It is true in the sense that if you conquer a country and exterminate their literate class then we won’t have any surviving histories from the losing side. But did that happen in the American Civil War? Pretty much the day after the Civil War ended southerners started sharpening their pens to write about the war. In fact, since the Civil War defined the south for generations there have probably been a lot more written about the Civil War in the south than in the north. The Lost Cause mythology machine started cranking even before the war ended, and it still operates every time you hear someone insist that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
It is extremely rare for a nation to be so defeated in a war that nobody is left to write about it. I mean, we don’t have any examples of Etruscan history, only Roman. But we don’t have any contemporaneous accounts about the Etruscans from the Romans either, only things written about much later. But nobody thinks that just because hundreds of years after the Etruscans vanished some random Roman dude wrote about them, that means that what the Roman dude wrote must be God’s honest truth.
I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature which explores the decline in violence amongst human beings from ancient times through today. It’s a rather dense read and full of cites, but his main arguments for the decline are as follows (from wiki summary):
I highly recommend that you do some reading about the origins of Remembrance Day, in Britain. It’s a pretty good example, I think, of what you’re talking about. The Crown, Parliament, Generals etc, weren’t really on board with the whole thing initially, it seems.
They very much would have preferred to forgo ‘remembrances’ of the hard past, in overwhelming favour of celebrating their victory instead. That’s what they wanted to focus on entirely. With parades and fanfare!
But they hastily put up a monument, finally consented to the moment of silence, totally thinking it would be a smallish affair of little note, and likely a one off. Thought they’d get that celebration next year!
But the nation wanted to remember those they’d lost not celebrate a military victory. They were stunned by the turnout and depth of feeling expressed. It became clear, the next year, it was not a one off. A permanent monument was built.
I hope that’s the sort of moment you were looking for!
No, not “much” of it at all. The narrative of the victorious and therefore righteous Union, and the abolitionist Lincoln, is overwhelmingly dominant. To the point where people think you’re crazy, or an “apologist,” and probably racist, to argue that the Southern states perhaps had reasonable Constitutional grounds, or that war wasn’t actually necessary, or that Lincoln behaved as a tyrant in the suppression of dissenters.
I don’t equate homicide with murder. The original post tends to. I’ll admit there tends to be some movement along those ways. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese attempted to conquer South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. The focus of the attacks were on military and governmental targets resisting their aims. Many were killed defending and attacking those targets on both sides. In my mind that’s war and homicide but not murder. The attacks also included VC/NVA units rounding up civilians and killing them (predominantly middle class and educated that they thought would not support a Communist government. Deliberately and intentionally targeting those civilians was murder by my definition.
Most you list on the mass murder side did directly and intentionally murder civilians in ways that the laws of land warfare at the time clearly showed as not being appropriate targets. Frequently they also targeted their own civilians and not just civilians of an enemy. They’ve gone past accepted then-current practices for the settling of political disagreements by other means. Most on the left followed the practices of their time followed the accepted norms of their time for warfare. They were also sometimes pretty brutal against civiliians by current standards but that’s still usually quite different than say Nazi death camps or loading male Bosniaks on buses to be executed after the fall of Srebrenica.
As we’ve gotten relatively more peaceful there is a tendency by some to correlate all killing with murder (like the original post does.) I think a lot of it stems from after the World Wars. After the brutal effects of two large scale industrial conflicts we had a period where relative day to day safety was balanced against the chance of overwhelming if even smaller scale conflict pushed things too far. When any conquest or moderate size conflict comes with the chance of nuclear Armageddon that tends to sway opinion about those other conflicts.
Lots of history, much of it conflicting, is written by lots of different parties. Why some of it becomes the “truth of history” remains a fair question.
When it comes to the truth or otherwise of history I’m reminded of an article I read a couple of years ago regarding whether or not Khruschev actually did bang his shoe on the lectern at the UN in 1960. As one academic said with tongue in cheek but not without a point, paraphrased, “If we’re not sure exactly what happened in an incident that was televised, with hundreds of people present, many of whom are still living and with mass media coverage at the time, how can we be certain of events hundreds of years ago?”
Or as Napoleon said, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”
Thank you for the link and your summary! I’ve tried to listen to Carlin in the past, and tried again just for your post, but he’s just too long-winded and rambly for me – not that it’s bad, it’s just that reading is much easier than listening for me. I’m also not quite a native English speaker and so it’s sometimes hard for me to understand people without subtitles. Your post was much more concise and informative. Thanks!
We probably don’t; I failed both high school and college. But I think Lemur866 addressed this really well: A lot of it is still culturalized propaganda.
Thanks for this! Not the first time I’ve been recommended that book. I added it to my wishlist.
Actually I had in mind Alexander who was no wimp when it came to obliterating his opponents.