Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side | Hacker News Reader

Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

rarehistoricalphotos.com

741 pointspmoriarty581 comments

I am a software developer in the US with a Vietnamese origin, so I am no historian and my views are probably skewed.

I am among the minority Northern Vietnamese people in the US, most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are (refugees) from the South. People can tell where one comes from with one's accent. It was undeniable that much suffering and injustice was done for Southern people, especially after the war ended. So many still have a lot of resentments against the Hanoi government in particular and people from the North in general. Some still secretly view Northen international students in the US as red princes and princesses. The truth is far from that, they are just ordinary people looking for a better life. Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.

When I was a student in the US, I borrowed as many books and DVDs about the Vietnam war I could from the library and began watching to understand where I came from, and what to make of the war. I am still searching for the answer. One thing I began to understand is the reason that the North won the war. The people from the North did have a charismatic leader and more importantly, they had a sense of righteousness and revenge when they participated in the war. I still remember vividly, one day I watched an (American) documentary about a farmer after the 1972 bombing operation. The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies. The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win.

I see that pattern a lot in places that talked about the war, for example in the article:

>She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.

I do not have as much exposure (or at least as much as I wished) to the literature, arts, and music of the South, but I can say that the sense of righteousness while fighting wasn't as strong in places that I have looked into.

My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

By chance, I just revisited the Vietnam war and the scar it left a couple of days ago, how much it matters in my everyday life, and wrote an essay about it on my blog. Here is the blog I wrote a couple of days ago about the war, btw, if you're so interested: http://www.tnhh.net/posts/lullaby-of-the-artillery.html

> They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

This belief is certainly reflected in one of the best books I've read about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, who was a reporter there throughout the war and devoted a large part of his life to chronicling it.

He repeatedly shows how the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), from commanders down to recruits, were not deeply motivated in the same way the Viet Cong were - abandoning battlefields, taking bribes to leave the front, etc. Additionally, the South Vietnamese political class was a corrupt gerontocracy with little in common with the people (either peasant farmers or urban) they were supposed to be leading.

For that reason, early American observers said they'd rather be on the side of the North than the South.

Thank you for sharing this with us.

I like this video about a soldier on the ground who realized quickly why the war was unwinnable. The cycle of killing and destruction left the people with nothing but anger and pain, leading them to fight even harder:

> it became clear within three or four months, That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear. I mean this notion of defending the people against these invaders from North Vietnam. The people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me. [...] the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me. I beat them, I sometimes kill them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture. Why in the hell should those people like me? And I could see that I was doing that, and I could see that nothing we were doing was having any impact on the war itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8

The US had no real conception of what 'winning' was, no real connection to the actual politics.

I think that video is part of a bigger documentary series by PBS[1]. I learned so much about the modern US history and how even to this day the Vietnam war continues to exert its influence in the US in many different ways.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war

> The bomb killed all of his family members and all the pigs he raised and left him with nothing. He cried and vowed to fight till he dies.

That's why Sun-Tzu teaches to always leave an escape route for enemy, otherwise he will fight to the last man and inflict more damage than giving up.

As a south Vietnamese refugee, I think you make good points. I disagree here:

> The guy had lost everything, he had nothing left to lose. That was the moment I realized it was inevitable that the North would inevitably win

I think we can find many counterexamples of other peoples where the result did not turn out in their favor

If find it more often than not, the side losing the war is the one who thinks that the war was probably a good idea, and than it wasn't.

When your soldiers starting to think "wtf am doing here?," after first thinking they were going for a picnic, you loose in a short order. And even faster if soldier also think that their political leadership are idiots.

I have a bunch of family in the Bay Area, who ended up there from North Vietnam. You're right that the accents can be recognized, but I also think you're right that resentments have faded. At least I'm pretty sure one of my cousins married a South Vietnamese lady a few years ago.

We still have a couple of stories in the family about the bombings. I wonder how accurate the details are.

One was my uncle, who was driving a truck over the last bridge to be bombed in Hanoi. He got to the bridge, it got bombed, and everyone was looking for his body for days. My grandmother was at the river every day. Luckily, he had somehow not gotten killed, and was in fact stuck on the wrong side, safe. He'd driven upriver to the next crossing, which took some time.

The other story is that my mom's neighbour had a bomb land in her house. The family was killed, apart from the girl, who was my mom's age. My grandmother took her in to live with them. I think the memory had quite an impression on my parents, as they in turn took in a girl to live with them later in life.

A lot of wars in history have been won by invaders who chose near total genocide of the male population of annexed territories.

Many nations opposed by a military-superior enemy have lost no matter their sense of righteousness.

The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.

All credit to them. To be honest, few nations could have managed this. In that era they were likely the most battle-hardened people in the world.

> The Vietnamese won because they managed to inflict sufficiently large number of American casualties that the US lost the will to war. Some folks say wars are won by logistics and not tactics. But it seems that Vietcong guerrilla tactics were far superior to American ones at the time.

It's also worth mentioning that the US had no reasonable way to "win". The threat of Chinese involvement prevented them from invading the north, and strategic air campaigns alone aren't enough when it comes to guerrilla warfare.

Not to mention that the US had a huge antiwar movement, a widely despised draft, and a media which actually did real reporting on the war.

Without these it's quite possible that the US might have used overwhelming force (like nukes) to "win" the Vietnam War.[1]

[1] - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nixon-want...

Nixon admits within the tape that he's trying to incite Kissinger, whom he is addressing. Both of them knew the risks of increasing the stakes in Vietnam.

The threat of Chinese reaction to American over-reach was very real. It happened in Korea and the Americans didn't want to repeat that mistake.

The U.S. did try to use overwhelming force in Vietnam. It literally dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia than it did during the whole of WWII. It drafted all the men the country would stand. It destroyed one, if not two, Presidents. Still not enough.

I guess the point of my comment is to push back against the suggestion that the US "could have won" except for pesky morals and domestic critics.

America lost Vietnam because they failed to understand how to undertake counter insurgency operations, they threw untrained conscripts (who didn’t want to be there, and fucked up) into it. They also didn’t care about winning hearts and minds of the local population to drive support away from the VietCong, measuring success by bodycount.

Vietnam massively scared the US military for a long time, only really going away with the massive success of the Gulf War. It is always valuable to get the other sides perspective on a conflict.

Ultimately in a civil war, both sides are usually good and bad, depending on the perspective you take. The vietnam war was no different. It is good to see that the wounds of the war are mostly healed.

Thanks for sharing your stories. I liked your blog post. I felt sadness, fear about the future and past, and hope as well as strength in there. I'm sorry this will probably seem like an inconsiderate or dumb question, and I don't know much about Vietnam's history or government, but I wanted to ask what do you think, or what do Vietnamese people think these days, about China's success with their socialism model?

Thank you for sharing. I read your blog and it was really well-said and moving. I shared it with a friend who thought it was poignant and fantastic writing. If you ever create a Substack or something of the sort, I'd certainly subscribe.

>Many of the Northern people also have resentments with the current government as much as anyone else. However, I have to say much of the suffering and conflict is fading. I am so glad that in the last three years I was in the Bay Area, I have made many new Vietnamese friends, and have gone to many Vietnamese-owned shops buying groceries. I have not once had bad experiences with anyone in here. We spoke to each other and caring about each other despite of the differences.

Former bureaucrats and their children, who fled Vietnam before 2009, are always having disgruntled feeling against Vietnam and Vietnamese successes in general. I know a bunch of them but they won't exist much any longer since Vietnam will aggressively become more powerful and extend its Communist influence overseas. It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.

I strolled around many Chinatowns across the US to Europe, and I see PRC flags and Chinese United Fronts everywhere. This is the future of overseas Vietnamese communities.

>My (personal and flawed) conclusion is that it wasn't the policy, the brainwashing, or the political power of communism, or the help of Russia that made the North win. They won despite despite being poor as hell, they won despite being communist, and they won despite having lost more troops. They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

They won because they have been largely smarter than history. Trần Văn Hương, a former top RVN official, once said that only Northerners can reign the country supreme, while Southerners and Centralers are more fitting at commerce and warfare which Northerners are also very proficient. This is also my similar observation in the overseas Vietnamese communities where those Vietnamese people of Northern background or Chinese Vietnamese are largely more successful than anyone in the community - mostly Northerners.

The North won because it had been cultured, determined, militant, more clever due to centures of exposure with threats from China.

> It's merely a matter of time that you will not only see hatred from anti-Communist side disappearing but also pro-Communist side triumphs.

As a Vietnamese I don't see this happening, if you think because it happened in China then it'll happen in Vietnam too, there are a couple of differences:

1) Vietnam doesn't have a "middle kingdom" mentality, we've always been and always will be a small country navigating our success with bigger powers around, so less of that blind nationalism bs, eventhough it's there

2) More importantly, we don't have a great firewall, so people are only going to be more disillussioned about the regime as more of them learn about the outside world.

I am pro socialism btw but of course it's a different thing. Socialism is a growing mindset in the west for sure.

My ex-wife Grandmother had spent over 10 years (1964-1975) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a reporter on the Vietnamese side during the Vietnam War and consecutive conflicts (Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia 1978).

She was the first European to walk all length of Ho Chi Minh trail, lived in Saigon undercover during American occupation and wrote couple of books about the Vietnam Wars.

She was telling a lot of stories and I remember some people from US visiting her in 90s hoping to use her contacts in order to find some lost American POWs.

Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monika_Warne%C5%84ska

https://www.amazon.com/PFADE-DURCH-DEN-DSCHUNGEL-Vietnam-Rep...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh_trail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...

> Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity. Has anyone considered crowd sourcing a translation? I'd chuck in 10 bucks to read it and there's certainly a lot of history buffs out there looking for a fresh perspective.

Mind that Monika was reporting for largest communist daily in Poland - her books are good reporting, lots of focus on people involved in the war but there is also a propaganda narrative.

On the other hand her reporting angle is much better then some Western "useful idots"[1] like Tiziano Terzani [0] (der Spiegel), who had been calling Pol-pot 'great man with a vision for a nation' even on his deathbed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiziano_Terzani

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/231066

That's something that I think can be put into context with a short preface. I think propaganda is some of the most interesting parts of history.

On the other hand, this kind of prefaces often have the danger of sounding condescending or even disrespectful to the reader (and to the author). A safer bet that I've seen sometimes is to give two prefaces, exposing complementary or even contradictory views. This lets the reader approach the book without holding hands.

Sure, it used to be. I'm sad beautiful propaganda is gone and all the propaganda is about stupid internet trolling nowadays.

>> ... Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia

>> ... American occupation [of Saigon]

> but there is also a propaganda narrative.

Yes you can see it explicitly from how he describes the two sentences above, one as an "intervention" and the other as an "occupation". I don't think most Cambodians considered the Vietnamese invasion in late '70's as an intervention, nor did the majority of the rest of the non-Soviet aligned world.

You're quoting the same person you're replying to.

That sounds like a very good startup idea. Crowdsourcing for translations, with each chapter being a stretch goal.

Of course you would need to navigate international copyright law, but I could definitely see a market for this

Fascinating! It looks like her books have Russian translations; will be very interested to give them a read.

> I remember some people from US visiting her in 90s hoping to use her contacts in order to find some lost American POWs.

Ah yes, yet another crazy Republican idea I had forgotten about, that there are still POWs being kept in secret camps in Vietnam.

Vietnam has opened their entire country to Americans to inspect, including Republican politicos, and yet America still tells this evil lie.

>> reporter on the Vietnamese side

Which Vietnamese side?

The one not artificially kept alive by a foreign power through a puppet regime.

I think you will still need to be more specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War

The US is repeatedly on the wrong side of history. And they cannot even face that.

Red scare. Supporting neo-liberal-to-fascist govts. Yelling democracy but then killing democratically chosen representatives when they do not "suit de US likings". Bitching about some "meddling" in their election when the history is full of US meddling in democratic process of other nations. Giving "foreign aid" to apartheid regimes.

US looked like a force of good after WW2, but that deteriorated quickly. Not that other western nation states are holy, but the US seems to be the ringleader.

Now I know HN is not all about jokes. But this came to mind in context of this most horrible war the Viet had to fight to gain independence from their colonial overlords:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/6zefas/the_flag_...

Never mind the horrors inflicted by the North on their newly liberated Southern brethren, 800,000 of whom fled by boat (many to take up successful lives as immigrants in the evil, racist USA).

You should investigate CIA/NATO funded clandestine operations such us GLADIO involving terror attacks in Europe against civilians. AKA "strategy of tension".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:J...

>The August 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station which killed 85 people, is widely recognized as a Gladio operation. While it was initially blamed on the communist “Red Brigades,” eventually, right-wing and fascists elements were discoverd to be the culprits. Two Italian secret service agents and Licio Gelli, the head of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge, were convicted in connection to the bombing.

>1969: “In Italy, the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan kills 16 and injures and maims 80 [….] during a trial of rightwing extremists General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counterintelligence, alleges that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and rightwing terrorists on the orders of the US secret service CIA in order to discredit Italian Communists.”

It's telling that mere links to factual information on Wikipedia can still garner downvotes on HN.

Eh, my relatives are South Vietnamese, Vietcong was basically mafia and when communists won, they were horrible to the South.

Not saying Diem government was that good, especially in their last months their anti-buddhist paranoia made them insane; but yeah communists were bad against the buddhists too once they came into power.

But yeah Agent Orange and napalm were horrible. There is no debate about that.

Sorry that this got downvoted. Large numbers of Vietnamese refugees fled Vietnam after the North's victory.[1] Arbitrary arrest and torture remains widespread in Vietnam according to Amnesty International.

These were incredibly interesting and inspiring pictures and it's a shame to see the top comment hijacked by juvenile America-baaad-ism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people

Well nowadays the government is much better and basically tolerable. Torture and death sentences are still present, but I would not say widespread, unlike in the hardest years of communism.

There are political prisoners, but it’s not random and widespread.

Coincidentally, Vietnamese communist government nowadays tries to be Best Friend with USA.

> Torture and death sentences are still present, but I would not say widespread

Also in the US that you seem to defend...

My Vietnamese friends would explain to you: They are happy to have worked hard here, own restaurants, get degreees and raise children in a system that is largely fair and representative.

It does not lack problems but they would argue it is far fairer than communism.

I am not defending or commenting on US itself, I have never been there honestly.

I am kind of defending US actions in Vietnam, and really not US actions themselves, but the South Vietnam government (US did some bad stuff there)

The difference between N.Korea and S.Korea is a good support for this. At the time of the Korean war maybe they weren't too different but the difference today is stark. Not difficult to imagine a similar outcome if the south had won the Vietnam war.

The hardliner Communists may have never taken over the Northern government if elections had happened and Ho Chi Min was elected, as was expected. He modeled their constitution on the US constitution and asked the US for help.

It's a lot easier to see that in hindsight and I'm sure it was not easy at the time to make the right decisions though.

This file has a long list of some of those things. It has some bias and some things I don't think there's much evidence for but I think it's good entry point for starting to research:

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...

A controversial assertion. If there's a "wrong side" of history, there must also be a "right side." Who do you consider to occupy that position?

~~False.~~ Their does not need to be a right side just because there is a, or even many, wrong. Everyone can be shitty.

e: not false, I misread.

Wouldn't your view be in agreement with the poster? They aren't saying they personally believe there must be a right side but that the metaphor implies it.

I think you are right.

Not a country or group, but individuals. The countless good people who work for what is right. Like Corrie Ten Boom who wrote The Hiding Place [1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrie_ten_Boom

I'd say post WW2 Scandinavia+Iceland has been rather exemplar. Bhutan comes to mind too.

Apparently Bhutan has some nationalist fuckery going on, exiling "non-Bhutanese people" and declaring them non-citizens. Most people don't know because it is so small. If it were a larger country it would be a big deal.

I see. Bhutan, Scandinavia, and possibly some other countries too small to have much of an effect on humanity one way or the other.

You failed to mention the times the US was on the right side of history. Most importantly, it defeated the USSR, which was, as Ronald Reagan correctly pointed out, an evil empire.

As a former East German, 90% of that "defeat" was done by the USSR (and the Eastern Bloc) itself, not the USA. Credit where it is due, since you insist.

That defeat could have been deferred a long time if it was free to gobble up countries and bring them into the communist sphere.

The USSR collapsed from the inside.

> it defeated the USSR

Very arguably: no, it didn't.

The USSR defeated itself. It overspent and was rife with corruption. They don't call it "the collapse of the USSR" for no reason. It couldn't maintain its own weight and fell in on itself.

Yes, every empire collapses under its weight, sooner or later.

Why did the USSR overspend? Was it trying to keep up with the west?

I agree overall!

The USSR didn't really "overspend" though. The amount of money it was spending on the military was wildly exaggerated by the CIA and other people who wanted more budget.

The issue was the centrally planned economy and the monthly plans where factories would be effective for one week a month and spend the other three turning raw materials into garbage.

In the end, the USSR was simply unable to deliver sufficient goods and services to its citizens.

> Most importantly, it defeated the USSR

I just hurt my eyes from rolling them _so hard._

The USSR collapsed because it was a wildly inefficient system that was unable to provide goods and services to its people.

In order to believe your wild statement you have to believe a lot of huge implausibilities, like the idea that the USSR would not have spent money on their military if not for the Americans, which would literally make them the ONLY empire in history to do that.

Particularly hard to believe is the idea that if Reagan hadn't spent trillions on thoroughly useless weapons, the USSR would have magically flourished.

> Ronald Reagan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals

Americans just love their wildly incompetent and corrupt Presidents, don't they?

It is not at all implausible that competition with the US made the USSR spend more on arms. The reason empires throughout history spend money on arms, as you rightly say, is to compete with their neighbours. The US upped the ante.

I'm not arguing either for or against Reagan. I merely point out that he was right about the USSR.

The USSR suffered a bloody revolution at the turn of the 20th Century which upended its social order. Then tens of millions of its people dies in WW2 and the country was devastated, tens of millions more died of famine or were killed, imprisoned, and/or enslaved by a totalitarian regime which terrorized its people. Much of its intelligencia (the creative lifeblood of any society) were themselves oppressed or exiled.

None of this had anything to do with the United States, but it did contribute greatly to just how broken the USSR was by the time it collapsed. The collapse wasn't only about this, but it certainly wasn't simply a defeat by the US either.

"the history is full of US meddling in democratic process of other nations"

There's an interesting book about this called Overthrow.[1]

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Cha...

Yes, the world is a chaotic reflexive system and trying to manipulate it always creates unintended consequences. The US absolutely does dumb stuff all the time, and power always gets abused.

But for a contrarian view on the “US Bad” narrative, check out a book called The Accidental Superpower

Here’s a good summary of the book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-a...

It presents an interesting case that the relative peace of modern society is entirely due to US military over-investment brought on by the Cold War—which allows for uninterrupted global supply chains, safe global trade, and enforces the intertwining of economic interests through global markets.

Absent the US existing, the world doesn’t suddenly become a utopia of people living happily ever after. Humans don’t have a great track record of being nice to each other. Unfortunately the alternative options to US power don’t look all that great.

The amount of goodwill the US had from ending WWII is sadly running out. US felt invincible after it and tried to do the right thing. But did not actually manage to replicate to what they did in WWII.

Backup these results with data is not the way to go. You have to proof the same results could have not been achieved without force. Which is impossible to proof IMO

Sure, it’s impossible to prove what would have happened otherwise (given the chaotic reflexive system).

But an interesting thought experiment, imagine, after ending WWII the US and its people simply sunk into the ocean.

Then you’ve got a massive imbalance of power tilted towards Stalin and the Soviets with nuclear weapons and allied with China, vs a weak UK and France.

While it’s impossible to prove the USSR wouldn’t have started caring about democracy and human rights and stopped caring about expansion on their own...I don’t think it’s a leap to say the world would be a worse place.

Same what if problem.. Of course the shift in power would change how we would life now, probably for the worse. That still doesn't justify anything.

> goodwill the US had from ending WWII is sadly running out.

Sadly? It's about time. Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, most of Latin America, many places in Africa. They all have a US hangover.

> US felt invincible after it and tried to do the right thing.

Serious? What propaganda outlet do you read? They try to help their big biz make max profits. That's all. That's not "the right thing". Yeah sure they sell it as "the right thing". Who does not...

Thank you for saying things so directly. I was trying to give them at least some slack, maybe it's already time.. but I'm afraid my personality wont let me. It's like giving up hope

Yet the US is still the premier nation that everyone tries to immigrate to, because as a nation it actually works. The same can’t be said of many of the nations you mentioned, and that was before U.S involvement. The cool narrative of today is to point a finger at the west, but most people I think who espouse this view haven’t had the misery of living under the absolutely nuts regimes that exist in this world.

>Yet the US is still the premier nation that everyone tries to immigrate to

Yes, because they are richest natiom in the world. How is that statement not a complete non sequitur to what was being discussed?

The immediate post I responded to was arguing that the US doesn’t do the right thing, but tries to extract max profits for its big businesses and a bunch of foreign policy mistakes.

My point was the US is more than that, and “good” as illustrated by its popularity with immigrants. You can, actually, in this court system receive justice, you can speak your mind at least legally without reprisal. You can leave this nation if you so choose.

Being just a “rich” nation isn’t it. There are many rich nations and many not as accommodating.

So your argument is: if Finland is a nice place to live, then it has the moral right to invade any country where standards of living are lower?

Also before US involvement all countries were colonies, do you think being repeatedly invaded and bombed has any negative effects?

No, it’s not about standards of living, it’s about defending people. If you’re in a position to help then you should! South Vietnam was invaded, South Korea was invaded. Would you prefer South Korea to be a North Korea?

I agree bombings, chemical warfare and the like are some of the worst outcomes for people, but what would you suggest for the Koreans under attack? Not my problem? I don’t have the moral authority to get involved? Send aid? What about the Cambodians massacred? No help from anyone and they were absolutely brutally destroyed by the millions. Millions. We haven’t even spoken of the millions in the 20s in Eastern Europe or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I can’t so easily write off those dead, and I don’t think inaction is the answer, but war.

> Yet the US is still the premier nation that everyone tries to immigrate to, because as a nation it actually works.

Not really - the US looks really attractive from the outside - Hollywood propaganda probably does the heavy lifting. The reality is disappointing. Before I immigrated, I told an American expat friend my plans and he asked me a bewildered "Why?!" and that surprised me a little because "The greatest country on earth" and all that. After my first month in the US, I was legitimately depressed, and I finally understood why he had asked. The reality of living in the US is not close to being as good as it appears from the outside (or as a visitor). Fortunately, I got better at coping but I'm still very much aware of how abnormal and batshit crazy some things are in the US that most Americans are inured to.

The (gross) salary and tech scene are good, but almost everything else is worse compared to other developed nations. I probably would have been better off moving to Canada, Germany or the Netherlands (I might do that yet - the 2020 elections were pivotal in my decision to stay put for now)

All my friends are moving to Canada. I intend to go there and buy an apartment for my children next year. USA is not more the dream country to emigrate to.

Agree. I decided to move to Australia instead. That was a very good choice!

Sure, if we compare like for like, I suppose other rich nations, those are real alternatives, However, since I’m black I am also aware of the incredibly prevalent casual racism of the other G7. It’s not even a point of discussion it’s so common, and good luck trying to get government help in your language if it isn’t English, or trying to obtain citizenship (Japan).

Comparing racism vintages is depressing as fuck, but I'll give it a go. I'm black too - I'll take casual racism over whatever the US has going on, which appears to be casual racism and a mix of disregard of, and generalized fear of black people (black men to be specific). One is a threat to my well-being, the other is threat to well-being as well as life and limb. I've never felt uneasy or witnessed people crossing the street to avoid me while cycling through well-to-do neighbourhoods in Amsterdam.

I'll take the Gollywog and Schwartz Pete over anxiety-inducing traffic stops any day.

That the US (rich) rapes poor nations not something we can critique because people from the poo nations want to immigrate to the US.

This is such a bad argument I dont even know where to begin with unpacking.

Regimes being bad to their own people (US is also in this category, but not like some poorer countries), is separate from it behaving bad to other nations. Internal affairs vs foreign affairs.

> US felt invincible after it and tried to do the right thing

Wait, you think that was the motivation for US actions?

>> the US had from ending WWII is sadly running out.

Right there is half of the animosity behind the cold war. Try telling a Russian that it was the US that "ended" WWII. Remember to duck. The US bombings of Japan were bad, but worse was the threat of a Russian invasion of the home islands. Japan decided that it would rather be occupied by Americans than Russians. And it was Russian troops on the streets of Berlin. They suffered far more losses and killed more enemies. It isn't "WWII" in Russia. It's "The Great Patriotic War". Despite what Texas highschool textbooks say, the US did not end that war solo.

True, the Americans were the better alternative for hegemon, hands down.

I agree with you that a “US Bad” view which paints everything America as evil is misguided. But also the other extreme which portraits US as a savior and protector is also not true.

From the book:

> American disinterest in the world means that American security guarantees are unlikely to be honored. Competitions held in check for the better part of a century will return. Wars of opportunism will come back into fashion.

It sounds like a narrative where a powerful monopolistic entity backed by military power bullies everyone else and claims to provide “protection” for them.

When was the last time consolidated power in one place ended up to be good for people?

I believe a world with US as a powerful country along with other equally powerful nations (an equilibrium) is a much better place for everyone to live in (also for people of US). Maybe it’s naive, at least for now, but one can only dream.

I also agree an equilibrium would be the ideal state.

But I just don’t think humans do equilibrium well. We seem to have a constant need to seek control or to be controlled.

Didn't we have that equilibrium (sorta) with USSR? I don't think it was a good kind of equilibrium - mutually assured destruction and all.

Nope. Pick any point in history and there was a huge imbalance between the sides. Often such "gaps" were unrecognized at the time, but each side would later learn that their perception of the other was incorrect. The "missile gap" and "bomber gap" were illusory. The public picture, the one on which budgets were based, was disconnected from the intelligence picture which was in turn often disconnected from the on-the-ground reality. Those involved at each stage of abstraction turned the information to suit their own needs. People who sold airplanes in the US counted extra bombers in the USSR. The people who drafted budgets counted more troops in the opposing army. In the end they all got what they wanted: massive spending on material.

An interesting example is the number of ICBMs programs on both sides. The engineering culture within the USSR meant that it had many different missile designs, some only ever resulting in a handful of missiles. Missiles would have short service lives and then be replaced by a new model. The Americans were different. They stuck to a smaller number of designs but mass produced and maintained them for decades. Both sides perceived that the other "had more missiles" because they were effectively counting them differently. The USSR saw American missile factories churning out missiles. The US saw a flood of new designs on parade and assumed they were being mass produced. Such cultural splits continue to inflate budgets today.

I would say the US is a hegemony like any other...with the benefit of structural hedges of the Madisonian system to avoid the most egregious abuses of power. Not perfect but better than tyrants of the past...

> Absent the US existing, the world doesn’t suddenly become a utopia of people living happily ever after.

And importantly we can't know the counterfactual, so we can't claim that the US is responsible for all those good outcomes with any real certainty, and it's entirely possible that the incentives were there no matter which nation had the resources to control global affairs.

Nice review! Thanks!

The US made it possible that war is less wanted then economic relations.

And the world is not perfect, but for whatever it's worth. I think the US does and did a fine job.

You have to admit though, the US does have a history of producing good music.

Tell that to the generation of Viet women that have no men.

How dare you on an article like this...

But then sure, I have to admit. :)

Not as good as the UK, and historically Germany and Austria, which have their own little problems in the past...

US involvement in Vietnam was based on complete misunderstanding. The US is not know for their cultural or historical intelligence to begin with, but McCarthyism had wiped out many China and Asia experts from the State Department.

US misunderstood the history of Vietnam and the goals of the belligerents. Vietcong also misunderstood the US.

Ho Chi Minh and Vietcong were nationalists first, communists second. US feared the domino effect that had no change of happening with Vietnam. Vietnam would not side with China for any reason and China was prepared to go to war against Russia if Russia got too much influence in Vietnam.

> complete misunderstanding

So admit it, say sorry, pay reparations.

No.

Say sorry, why not, but demanding to pay back I don't understand. It is not the same people in power nor the same population, why should they pay for their parents? It is preposterous. And where do you stop with this logic, neolithic?

They're still paying the price for what the US did to them, I don't think it's too uncommon for reparations to be payed by different people because usually reparations are on behalf of the government itself. If a different government took over the US then I think it would be a bit unfair to expect reparations. But as it stands it's the same government and a lot of the people who took part in the atrocities are still alive today, it's not like it happened hundreds of years ago.

There is no 'right' and 'wrong' side of history. There are complicated shades of grey coloured by propaganda. And if there was a right side of history, the US has a very credible claim to it. They've pushed science and the arts forward, promoted freedom as a cultural aspiration rather than rule by a monarch and generally acted as a credible supporting force for the greatest improvement of living standards the world has ever seen in Asia.

There was a lot of cruelty, bloodshed and lies. But there has not yet been anyone in history who avoided that while being large. The US could certainly have been much worse.

You say:

> There is no 'right' and 'wrong' side of history.

But then you conclude:

> There was a lot of cruelty, bloodshed and lies. [...] The US could certainly have been much worse.

So you do accept there's a gradient of right and wrong.

> The US could certainly have been much worse.

But also a lot better!

> But there has not yet been anyone in history who avoided that while being large.

What we've seen is next level. This is due to the increase in mobility and world trade, sure. But it has been abused heavily, and seemingly to every extend possible. I dont know how it could have been worse without being a straight up dictatorship. (having only two parties come very close to being a dictatorship if you ask me; only one party better than the China the US like to bash so much lately).

> They've pushed science and the arts forward, promoted freedom as a cultural aspiration rather than rule by a monarch and generally acted as a credible supporting force for the greatest improvement of living standards the world has ever seen in Asia.

Tell that to the Vietnamese and North Koreans. Indonesia and Philippines also have a bit of a US hangover.

Science is fucked nowadays. Very "proprietary", as by the US-push patent law.

I think there is right and wrong. Read some Jesus and you know that ideas of what it good behavior and what is bad is not at all new. I'm not religious, but just to show that it is not merely the last decades that we know we should be nice to people and now do any horrible act for a bit of profit.

There is a gradient of right and wrong. Most (realistically all) successful countries are on the wrong side of it.

I mean, look at the path the Europeans took to get to the modern era. Short periods of it, like the last 2000 years, have involved questionable acts.

I believe the point is that we have to acknowledge this rather than sugar-coat US history.

US history is extensively documented. Nobody is claiming that there aren't long lists of terrible things done (and still doing, I might add). The factual nature of those claims isn't really open to challenge. It is often pointed out in real time as the decisions are made.

If 'acknowledge' literally means acknowledge then I doubt you'll struggle getting what you want. If 'acknowledge' means 'and then we have to follow my political recipe for what to do next' then it might be a struggle.

Bro you live in the Netherlands.

I have numerous Dutch friends who are not as young and foolish, and your perspective is not the mainstream one in that country.

Your nation was under occupation by the Nazis until the United States came in with the UK and made it otherwise.

Obviously that doesn't mean the United States isn't imperfect and of course it has tremendous flaws and has yet to live up to its true ideals in its founding documents. That being said there aren't American soldiers walking around outside your door right now.

Ask yourself if anyone in the EU will stand up for your nation?

Angela Merkel sat on her hands and did absolutely nothing when a Dutch jet liner was blown up by Russian weaponry in Eastern Ukraine. Hundreds of your fellow citizens died and nobody in Europe did a single thing. Sure, sanctions were procured and many other nasty letters but not a single Russian military asset was arrested or brought to justice. Hundreds of your countrymen are dead and nobody was ever held accountable for it. It was a war crime and there is no trial.

I look forward to the United States continuing to recede from its superpower status so that the world can finally realize what they were taking for granted. About half of the United States population spent the last 5 years talking about how terrible their government was. That makes the US unique compared to the other superpowers in the world which are authoritarian at their core.

I should hope that India will eventually step up and develop into a democratic superpower but until then you have no other options other than a toothless, useless Germany dominated EU. The EU couldn't even handle vaccines properly, so I'm sure they'll do very well in protecting your citizens from the realities of authoritarian superpowers.

While i don't agree with the whole US Bad sentiment, shooting down a civil airliner isn't something that never happened to the US military. And i don't think anyone went to jail for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

So confused.

"Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal." -- Immortal Technique

I don't know what's confusing about it.

After WW2, Stalin immediately began claiming as much of western Europe as possible. Historical documents reveal he wanted the Warsaw Pact to extend over all of Europe.

The only thing that prevented this was the US/UK forces immediately after WW2. The Berlin Airlift wasn't supported by the French government, because they viewed Berlin as a lost cause.

The Netherlands would have ended up like East Germany if not for the evil capitalist empire you clearly despise, despite the fact that it's technology is how you make a living. As a United States taxpayer, I strongly dislike the size of the US military, and wish we would scale it back dramatically, and let Europe handle (and pay for) their own defense. If I was you, I would want this as well.

In the meantime, realize that you benefit tremendously from the evil empire you openly resent, not unlike a spoiled teenager who complains about her rich father from her bedroom in the mansion.

Cannot complain about your evil overlords if they give you prosperity, right?

> promoted freedom as a cultural aspiration rather than rule by a monarch

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

Iran '53 and Guatemala '54 are some of my favourites, as is Timor.

Both Iran and Guatemala were operations undertaken by the CIA with absolutely no knowledge by the American public.

You do understand this right? At no point were the American public consulted by the intelligence agencies when they did these operations.

It's rather childish to retcon history by implying that declassified operations that were deeply unethical were endorsed by the American public at the time. These operations were ultra-classified in the American public had no idea about them for decades. Do you think that's fair to make the assertion that the American public do not promote freedom as a cultural aspiration based on this?

Meanwhile millions of people have lost their freedom in the last year when the CCP officially retook Hong Kong and violated the treaty with the British. They are literally being deprived of their democratic rights. Less than 10% of the Chinese public have any form of voice in their government (via CCP membership). Hong Kong is vastly less free than it was a year ago. But sure attack the US for crimes committed 70 years ago, while ignoring what's happening as we speak.

The fact that we had no knowledge was intentional and does not diminish the impact of the operations.

Let's compare Hong Kong and Guatemala, right now, and pick one to live in.

>"You do understand this right? At no point were the American public consulted by the intelligence agencies when they did these operations."

German public was not informed of the gas chambers, and Soviet public didnt endorse the gulag. So thet don't count then?

The German public were responsible for what they knew of and had control of, just like the Soviet public. These were authoritarian regimes.

Nobody is responsible for what they don't know about and are unable to learn about. In what world should they be?

Well, there are cases where you are legally responsible, like sex with minors and money laundering, because otherwise noone would ever face punishment

Whether this applies here depends on what you mean by 'responsible' in thos context, is it morally responsible?

I'm a big fan of the enlightenment principle that human beings are responsible for the things which they can control. As opposed to the belief that we are all extensions of our collective tribe, and are therefore collectively responsible for our tribe's crimes, as well as those of our ancestors.

I am not morally responsible for actions I don't commit, or actions that others commit that I had no way of stopping.

This belief appears to go against a current cultural zeitgeist of regressing to tribalism and collective/ancestral guilt. The labelling is different, but the implications are the same.

So are you responsible for things you could have known, but deliberately chose not to look into (or not believe)?

> At no point were the American public consulted by the intelligence agencies when they did these operations.

That's exactly the problem! Once the federal government started conducting secret projects during the world wars, it stopped being accountable to the public. And it used that latitude to commit war crimes, assassinate foreign leaders, and experiment on American citizens. All in the name of lower commodity prices and fat profit margins for well connected companies.

The CIA should have been disbanded after what came out in federal hearings in the 70s. We have known since the 90s that the joint chiefs of staff endorsed killing Americans in a terrorist attack to justify invading Cuba.

Americans as a whole are good people, or at least no worse than anyone else. But our government is a bloodthirsty imperial machine whose claims of any sort of moral high ground are laughable.

But nobody said they were endorsed by the American public. The discussion is if the American actions were for a force of good, just because Americans were lied to by propaganda doesn't wipe away the actions. What do you think the people in the USSR thought (and knew about?)?

Moreover, many of the US operations were not really secret, people either ignored them, or favoured them. Also you say crimes 70 years ago? The US implemented the largest mass surveillance system in the world very recently, strong-arming many allies and infiltrating the internet infrastructure of other allies as well as likely violating their own constitution in the process. Also note that the US has by far the largest proportion of their population incarcerated (although the unknown numbers on China's internment camps adding some uncertainty).

Now nobody is saying China is better. The issue is that very often people (typical Americans) portrait the US as the main force of "good" in the world, but as soon as somebody points to all the atrocious things the US (the state not the people) have done, they get accused of anti-americanism, or people bring up "but China"

And Iraq invasion of 2001, that replaced a stable (albeit dictatorial) regime by a civil war, and enabled ISIS to become a state.

Even ignoring the warlords, it's in constant revolt due to corruption now.

So the "right side" is a communist dictatorship?

https://www.fallacyfiles.org/eitheror.html

If you have a war between two sides and you are calling one the wrong side, you are creating a dichotomy

>US looked like a force of good after WW2, but that deteriorated quickly. Not that other western nation states are holy, but the US seems to be the ringleader.

Humanity has seen the most positive growth by far under Pax Americana.

What's your alternative?

>Humanity has seen the most positive growth by far under Pax Americana.

It's not really much of a Pax Americana in the middle east or Central/South America. East Asia seems to be next too. "Pax Americana" has definitely been amazing for the west and it's friends but as countries like China and India start to challenge that, true colors will probably start to show as the existing world power(s) fight to keep that title.

Global poverty has plummeted over the last 70 years

The United States is happy to accept all credit for any correlation, no proof of causation necessary.

Since the US has been at the forefront of technological development, global stability, and investing in many of the biggest economic players today (south Korea, Japan, and Germany) it deserves significant credit for the current state of the world.

> it deserves significant credit for the current state of the world.

Ok good, so both the good things and the bad things they did, yes credit where credit is due.

Stop with the whataboutism we don't know if there was a better alternative because we hadn't have the chance to see one. It's that easy it could have been worse or better.

>It's that easy it could have been worse or better.

Lead by who?

The Southern Vietnamese population in the US would strongly disagree with you. One shouldn’t forget what happened to them after the U.S. pulled out. It wasn’t a rainbows and sunshine reunification, but murder, anguish and famine.

I don't think the "other side of history" is much better most of the time

While it is true that the US has done morally questionable and practically useless world-policing, it's not as cut and dry as you state. In both world wars, the US was undeniably a force for good, against the extremely evil Nazis, the extremely cruel Imperial Japanese, and helping more monetarily and supply wise in WW1. Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. While it's true the South attempted to leave to keep their slavery power, the other half of the US stomped them in the war.

Outside of militarism, the US has generally been cruelly expansionist against Native Americans, and has seen a lot of atrocities on "its own" soil. Yet the colonists eventually established a nation today that is pivotal to the arts, science, technology, and even human rights, humanitarianism, and large scale philanthropy.

How do we weigh all these? The US is not merely on the wrong side; we are a mixture of good and bad.

> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War.

This is simply not true.

The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union. It was only afterward that it was re-imagined as a war of liberation. This reimagination makes perfect sense from a propaganda perspective. After all, the Confederacy was a democracy. Its people voted to leave the Union. The Yanks, for the stated purpose of "preserving the Union" invaded a democracy and killed half a million of its citizens. Ingeniously, by pretending that the war was always about freeing the slaves, the US has people walking around celebrating a one-million casualty war as a sign of their country's morality! Woof!

The truth is this: The Civil War was waged to preserve the American Empire in North America. The fact that it happened, in an unforeseeable confluence of circumstances, to result in the end of slavery, does not make it a moral war.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/01951...

A democracy? Not for Blacks in the South...

Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. In fact, when Lincoln started the war by calling up 50,000 volunteers to "put down the rebellion", there were more slave states still in the Union (DC, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) than there were in the Confederacy! Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded only after they realized that Lincoln intended to wage war on the South.

> Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either.

That’s overgeneralized. They couldn’t vote everywhere in the North, and in some of the states where they (and sometimes other nonwhite citizens) could they had different terms than whites (e.g., New York imposed a property requirement on non-Whites for voting that wasn’t imposed on Whites.)

This is just more "Lost Cause" tripe. If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution.

“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”

> If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution.

You seem confused. Nobody said that.

"The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union."

This is known as the Lost Cause myth, and it's investigated in an Atlantic article titled "Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist?"

From the article:

It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

We know this is a lie, because the people who fought in the Civil War told us so. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world," Mississippi lawmakers declared during their 1861 secession convention. Slavery was "the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution," the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, said, adding that the Confederacy was founded on "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."

The Lost Cause asks us to ignore this evidence. Besides, it argues, slavery wasn't even that bad...

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/confede...

> This is known as the Lost Cause myth

No, the Lost Cause myth is not that the North was fighting for the Union, it was that the South was defending against Northern aggressionn rather than to prevent the perceived threat of future abolition.

The aims of opposing sides in a war are often not simple inverses of each other. The South fought for slavery, but the North (especially the slave states in the Union) did not fight against it.

There is a common little rhetorical tool, utilized frequently by politicians, where when you find yourself asked a question which you don't like, you choose instead to pretend that you've been asked a question with which you're more comfortable. That's what you've done here, by ignoring the points that I've made, and instead attempting to associate me with some other bucket of claims which you feel more comfortable responding to.

> The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people.

The states that seceded in 1860 seceded purely to preserve slavery--that's a matter of fact. I don't see how that changes anything I stated above, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

> The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

This is an odd statement, because it contains two assertions, one true and one false. The Confederacy was created by white supremacists who wanted to preserve slavery. But they didn't start a war, they started a country. A country which was, for all the odious motivations underpinning its inception, just as much a democracy as the one that was founded by the Washington and Jefferson. When the United States declared their intent to wage war on the South, they were just as much a foreign power as the British were in 1775. The idea that Southerners were not defending their communities is simply bizarre.

None of this has any bearing on the assertions made above. Slavery is evil, we're all on the same page there. The Confederacy was created to preserve slavery. That was evil. But that doesn't change the fact that the North did not fight the war to free the slaves, but to subjugate the South and to preserve the American Empire. The fact that Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery doesn't have any bearing on the simple moral fact that imperialism is evil, too. And that nations don't get to start imperial wars, kill a million people, fall ass-backwards into taking an important moral action, and then pretend that the war was about that moral action all along.

If the North had fought the war to free the slaves, then you could make the case that it was a moral war. But they didn't, and it wasn't. It was an evil war which happened to bring about the end of an evil institution. We're adults, and we should be able to entertain nuance in our appreciation of history. It is okay observe that the end of slavery was a beautiful thing, and that we're glad that it happened, AND that the Civil War itself was a moral abomination and nothing to be proud of.

> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War.

Neither side of the Civil War fought to free slaves. One side fought to separate itself to prevent the distant future threat of that happening, the other side fought to preserve the Union (those on that aide interested in abolition had previously decided to defer it to preserve the Union.)

Secession and the rebellion ended up backfiring and also enabling abolition sooner than it otherwise would have happened, but that wasn’t what the war was fought for in the same way as WWII wasn’t fought to establish the UN.

> repeatedly on the wrong side of history

Also repeatedly on the right side of history. It's really intellectually dishonest to ignore one over the other.

> they cannot even face that

I don't know who "they" are, but Americans are extremely self critical -- just look at this thread. It's also certainly the only of three global superpowers where citizens can be (and are) openly critical of their country's policies.

> Red scare

I'm sorry, have you ever lived in a communist country?

> Supporting neo-liberal-to-fascist govts

Yeah pretty much any time a country is a global superpower / police, it's going to make mistakes. But also, many governments the US has supported historically have had broad popular support on the ground, too, and the governments overthrown have been oppressive regimes. The regimes that take their place may often have also been oppressive, but that's not known without the benefit of hindsight. (Also there are legitimate victories in this camp too. Just ask any resident of South Korea.)

I could keep going, but it seems like your main beef with the US is that it operates like a global superpower pursuing its own domestic and international policy. I don't know what you think the world would look like under another superpower like China or Russia, but given the treatment of those countries _towards their own citizens_ in Chechnya, Crimea*, Uyghur Xinjiang, and Tibet, it's hard to imagine your or my life would be much better off under those global regimes.

I also challenge you to find a global superpower in world history that has yielded a more unshakeable global peace for almost a century.

> the wrong side of history

I can't stand this phrase. It reeks of the history is a narrative with good guys and bad guys point of view.

Tell me more about the communist contributions to human history without omission on its costs.

Communism invented space travel, the mobile phone, and the artifical heart.

Where's the without omission on its costs part?

> US looked like a force of good after WW2

Watching some of the US WW2 propaganda is really eye opening. We're the lesser of 2 evils, but that's not saying much.

> And they cannot even face that.

Except for maybe the Germans, Americans have a credible claim to more "facing" of their sins than any other country on Earth. Have you consumed any U.S. news over the last 20 years? Wrestling with our past is practically the national pastime.

"Wrestling with our past is practically the national pastime."

Most Americans don't care about politics, don't care about history, and certainly don't engage in any past wrestling.

It's a relatively small, well educated elite who has that interest. The rest of the population would rather watch cat videos.

Sure, but that's true of all people in any country at any point in history. When we say something like, "they cannot even face that," we're either talking about the portion of the population that pays attention to and discusses national issues or we're not talking about anybody at all, pretty much by definition.

Still, you can't call something done only by a small minority of the population a national pastime.

Watching sports is a national American pastime. So is drinking beer.

Wrestling with the past is not.

Things the US fought against: Japanese occupation of East Asia. Nazi occupation of Europe. Soviet occupation and oppression of Eastern Europe. Oppression of Iran by a theocratic fascist government. Russia again. Establishment of a nuclear capable unbelievably horrible regime in North Korea. More Russia. A regime in Afghanistan that murders girls for wanting to read. Lots of more recent Putin shit, for details ask the populace of any neighbour of Russia on it's western side.

So yes, they've done a lot of bad crap. Their history of supporting corrupt murderous fascists in latin America is a notable series of lows. Not that the communist alternatives were all that wonderful. However it's a very mixed bag. Take the US out of the post-war period, and does it really look a whole lot better?

If you're going to go off on one about countries the rest of the world could have done fine without for the last 70 years I could probably name a few for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hiNanqC5aQ

My dad was a hospital corpsman on the USS Repose (hospital ship) during Vietnam. Having seen some of his operating room photos, I can't imagine that we were on the "winning" side.

The video above is his amateur footage he took while aboard the ship. Probably 1968/1969.

I had the film digitized after he passed in 2016.

Dont imagine and look at the article . They refer to photos taken by vietnamese photographers. It is actually pretty good.

This is really cool, what an honor to see. Thank you for digitizing the footage and sharing it to the world.

Couple q's if you're up for it:

* What camera did he have? Was it common in that era for cameras to not have a mic? (not complaining, just curious)

* Did he ever watch the footage, after the war? I know some veterans, depending on how they processed their experience, just block it all out.

* Can you share more on what he thought of his service there?

* I'm not sure of the specifics of the camera. But the reels of film say "KodaChrome Movie Film Super 8" on their boxes.

* I don't think he ever saw the footage. I would assume that at some point he had a projector, but as far as I can remember, he just always kept them in his top drawer. He always talked about getting them transferred to VHS. Never did it.

* He's in the video at 38 seconds in. I assume his buddy from the previous frames filmed him. https://youtu.be/1hiNanqC5aQ?t=38

He didn't like the military. He had a lot of explosive outbursts I remember growing up. Later in his life, when he was finally convinced to see a VA doctor, he was diagnosed with PTSD with - 100% related to the war. He received full disability but very late in life. He was fired from so many jobs during his lifetime.

Most Super 8 cameras could not record sound.

In the 70s, Kodak introduced a variant of Super 8 film that had a magnetic strip for audio, but it wasn’t widely used. Later in the 70s video on magnetic tape cassettes became popular, which was the first time most people had home movies with sound.

Both technologies arrived too late for the US war in Vietnam.

Quite a coincidence. My dad was an HM3 on the USS Frontier from 1964 to 1967. He also passed in 2016. He never talked much about his service though. I only remember one story he told where US soldiers were issued bullet proof vests for the first time, and they chose to try them out by shooting each other with M16s. The result wasn't pretty.

Fascinating. I wonder what the psychology is there.

I saw a Plymouth Superbird a couple years ago that had “original damage”. It looked like it had been stolen and taken on a joyride. No straight body panels, scratches everywhere.

The story went that some kid got drafted and figured he was never coming home so he spent his life savings on the fastest car he could and tried to have as much fun as possible.

I assume it is a similar state of mind to a terminal medical diagnosis.

pro-Russian rebels of the Donbass war trying out bulletproof vest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ysQqHKYV1o

Arghhh! Where was Darwin when this video was made?

I worked with a electrician whom was my boss.

The company supplied us with kevlar gloves.

He took a drywall knife, and with all his might, propelled the knife into his hand.

He was know as Kevlar Ken from then on.

My Father-in-law was a Vietnam Vet, an older one who had been in the military for awhile and made a career out of it. I believe he retired in 1978, he passed several years ago. My wife was born after he retired and he spoke very little about the war. He had PTSD, but he'd mostly dealt with it by the time I met him.

The only vivid story I recall. He talked about when they were stationed at an outpost. The supplies would be stacked up in a central area and he was getting the rations for his men. There was an explosion and everyone thought they were being shelled.

However, it turned out that one of the other Sergeants was wearing a grenade on his vest. The pin caught on something and pulled out without him noticing.

They had to spend the next few days taping down the pins on all the grenades to avoid another accident.

Amazing... my aeromedical examiner, Dr Richard Pellerin, served as a special forces medical corpsman in Vietnam in 1969/1970. He also filmed his own observations and recently digitized/uploaded about an hour worth, along with narration. Powerful stuff. https://youtu.be/87Dd7GSNAPM

The photo https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-StC-dVAdOns/YK081DEgPdI/AAAAAAAAd... is probably a captured M16 since, AFAIK, Vietnam used AK-47.

What impressed me the most: "Using home-brewed chemicals, they developed their pictures in the open air or in underground tunnels" if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room, that is really not something easy to do with then available technology. It is basically Polaroid chemicals quality.

Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons. How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained. Specially considering Iraqi invasion decades later alleging chemical weapons suspicions.

Some pictures look extremely noise and grain free for such old photos. Makes me think they are probably digitally enhanced or Vietnam chemicals were really first class quality.

Maybe they developed the photos in open air at night?

"...if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room"

I don't think that's what it means. They presumably developed the photos in near darkness, either during the night (open air) or in those tunnels.

> Also "The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong." means chemical weapons.

I believe the distinction is that Agent Orange was not used as a weapon per se, in that it wasn't applied to people, but rather was used to destroy plants. Please note I'm not making any claims about the ethics of its use.

Defoliation. A precursor for a lot of that junk was made by Philips-Duphar, and dumped in a polder 25 km North of Amsterdam. The cleanup operation continues today... Dioxin, 2-4-5-T, very nasty stuff.

Article about this: https://www.volgermeer.nl/artikel/na-de-ontploffing-kwam-de-... (dutch)

If you irresponsibly drench a country with deadly poison, killing and crippling vast numbers of people and causing consequences that persist till this very day, you can't get out from under it by pretending it wasn't a weapon.

"I just set your house on fire to flush you out of it so I could kill you. I didn't intend the fire as a weapon itself."

The US avoided international courts because, technically, the chemical weapons were to clear forest covers and not intended for use on civilians and military personnel.

I'm not sure if lack of intent would absolve them of committing a war crime... not to mention that it's not clear that they didn't actually intend to cause harm to people by their use of Agent Orange and other chemical weapons like napalm.

Legally, whether something is a "chemical weapon" depends on whether it's used to attack people, or is used in population centers where many people will be directly injured regardless of intent.

See also the legal wrangling around US use of white phosphorous, which is 100% legal if used as an "illuminant" [https://treaties.unoda.org/t/ccwc_p3] (i.e. for flares), but not as a weapon against people.

Also for smoke, apparently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/middleeast/22phosph...

> How the US avoided international courts

You do know there is no such thing as international court, right? There are few organization which has name court in it like ICJ but they don't have any hard power like courts, and definitely have no force/military to stop a country.

A court doesn't need a military force to impose its will. The ICC and the ICY work on consensus and UN backing, it's just that the US refuses to take part because they're afraid they have way too many war criminals and it'd be bad for PR. And not only do they not accept the ICC's jurisdiction, they have a law allowing themselves to invade the Hague if another country turns their war criminals in, and the previous administration sanctioned ICC prosecutors ( obstruction of justice) for daring to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan on the behest of Afghanistan, an ICC member.

> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained.

It's probably relevant that the horrible health effects of Agent Orange were a result of accidental contaminants (dioxins), not the defoliant itself. Not that this makes it ok, but it's something different than dropping mustard gas on Kurdish civilians.

> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained

Might makes right, aka US foreign policy since its inception. The US has never recognised any court that could try them ( like the ICC) and have veto powers in the UN, so they can go about committing war crimes with impunity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiKFAwiKjBo

"'War crimes' are defined by the winners. I'm a winner, so I can make my own definition.".

"The US has never recognised any court that could try them ( like the ICC) and have veto powers in the UN, so they can go about committing war crimes with impunity."

They don't have to recognize the court in order to be tried in the court, in absentia if need be.

It's interesting that despite the power to try alleged US war criminals, the ICC has chosen not to.

The ICC can't choose whatever it wants, it has a charter. It doesn't invent its jurisdiction, it's built on countries participating in it. Which is why its investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan, having jurisdiction there, but not Iraq, where it doesn't.

>Vietnam used AK-47.

This is common misconception. What you mean by "AK-47" is usually AKM rifle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM

Secondly: SKS rifles were very popular as well in North Vietnam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKS

> How the US avoided international courts is something that should be better explained

The fact the US has made it clear they will use any force necessary against the ICJ if they ever dare trying a US citizen should be a good explanation. You can get away with war crimes just fine if nobody dares to charge you with them.

I have a friend who served as a tank gunner in Vietnam. Has was wounded and sent home. He ended up with 4 teeth left after his jaw has been shot.

He refused to accept that the US lost. No amount of reasoning would make him budge on that opinion. I dropped the subject as it was a risk to our friendship.

I understand where he is coming from though. To have lost so many friends in addition to his personal injury, it would mean to him that it was all for nothing if he were to acknowledge it as a loss.

[edit - a word]

it wasn't all for nothing. there was time when Americans cared about advancing a free world. Free from soviet style communism. And this was an ideal worth sacrificing for. Unfortunately, Americans have been demoralized by propaganda to the point of seeing freedom as something not worth dying for.

When I think of the word "propaganda", the first two things that come to mind are the Nazis and the "fight against communism".

Because South Korea would be so much better off today had it fallen to Kim Il Sung rule...

Impossible to say definitely. North Korea military spending has been around 25% of its GDP, which is said to be one of the top reasons why its economy plateaud in the 70s. Would it have needed to be so high if they had annexed the whole peninsula, and would they had closed up like they did if they had decisively won the war? Perhaps not: Vietnam certainly did better.

Around 20 percent of their population got also killed during the war.

>Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”

And instead of Marshall help they got global economic sanctions.

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hat...

The carpet bombing of North Korea was one of the great war crimes in history. 15% of the population died. 85% of the buildings were destroyed. Many, many cities were wiped off the map forever.

All this for a country that had never offered the slightest threat to the United States.

If exporting freedom involves bombing civilians you're supposed to free and spraying their country with herbicides, then perhaps you should rethink your strategy.

The Vietnam war was a lost cause all the way from the start, just like more modern endeavours of trying to make ultra-conservative societies of Iraq and Afghanistan democracies by invading them. Pointless waste of money and lives.

Clearly, you are not a citizen of a nation who has been the target of one of the US's efforts. Crippling sanctions, extra-ordinary hypocrisy and outright lies/propaganda in the name of 'freedom', support of hard-core and insane terrorists as 'freedom-fighting' rebels, etc.

The US has historically been perfectly happy to advance its agenda of "freedom" by installing or supporting brutal dictatorships that suppress all political opposition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta....

Why would you be friends with someone like that?

Millions of innocent people died for nothing, and the US learned nothing, and did it all over again many times, because so many Americans, like your friend, were unwilling to concede that there was anything wrong with Vietnam.

Suppose your friend were instead an injured Al Qaeda member who felt Al Qaeda was right. Would you accept that?

But the US has killed _hundreds_ of times as many innocent people as Al Qaeda - ten times as many just in Vietnam.

> Viet Cong meet the enemy face-to-face, most likely in the Mekong Delta or Plain of Reeds. This rare image shows both sides in combat, ARVN soldiers at the top and Viet Cong in the foreground. The VC have flanked the enemy at left and right, which likely meant the ARVN unit was wiped out.

This photo is a well known to be staged.

Makes me doubt the authenticity of everything else.

I thought that looked pretty dubious. Do you know of anywhere to read up on it?

edit: some reddit discussion here https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/44gfpz/astonishing...

You mean there weren't photo ops on the american side? Come on it's war there is propaganda everywhere take it all with a grain of doubt.

The operating picture looks staged too despite the caption claiming otherwise. Battlefield hospitals tend to be chaotic and bloody things. Not peaceful and calm operating rooms without a drop of blood in sight.

Anyone looking for context of what it was like as a soldier fighting for the north in the Vietnam war, I highly recommend The Sorrow of War[0].

I read it in college in a Vietnam and the US History class and it was blown away.

This book, along with The Things They Carried[1] are worthwhile reads.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried

I was introduced to The Things They Carried in my freshman high school English class. That was a tough row to hoe as a 13-14 year old. I never understood why it was in there.

Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong and Style were especially weird in the in-class discussions. That was 25+ years ago, and those classroom talks still stick with me. That teacher was either an unbelievable genius, or an insane person. Not sure.

The sourcing of these photos is terrible. Several are from before the US involvement, namely the Plain of Reeds photo which is from the French War in Indochina.

Plus, many of these photos are staged propaganda photos, in particular the battle scenes. After an enemy surrendered, POWs would often be told to “recreate” the battle. Actually battle photographs from the north are blurry and a bit more chaotic.

I only see one other battle scene (NVA soldiers dash) aside from the Plain of Reeds photo.

The other photos are posed as well. The downed wreckage, the Ca Mau operating room in the swamp, the Lam Son 719 photo are well known photos that were staged. You can find similar photos from the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French POWs were asked/made to recreate the final battle for photographers.

An Eastern Bloc country, I believe the USSR or East Germany, sent photo equipment and photographers to North Vietnam. They understood the propaganda value of these photos.

And don't get me wrong, these photos are very valuable in reinforcing morale and swaying international opinion. The West does it too. There was less staging of photos by the West back then as they tended to have more people taking photos of the action at the time.

I’m pretty sure USSR published a photo book “Vietnamskiy Reportazh”

European now living in Vietnam. One thing I learned pretty quickly about the Vietnam war... it was two wars:the French War and the American war.

Technically it was three, the third Indochina war took place between Vietnam and China

Don’t forget the 5 years of Japanese occupation sandwiched in there.

Japanese occupation was before the two wars cited though. It went French colony -> Japanese occupation -> War against the French -> War between North and South (with US siding with te South)

The political impossibility of invading North Vietnam meant the war became an insurrection in the south, at that point I think the conflict became a competition of will to win and the north and Vietcong were more motivated.

If it had been a full on traditional war like in Korea the conflict might have ended differently but the risk of a full blown world war would have been high.

I absolutely love seeing history from different perspectives.

The White Silk Dress is an amazing Vietnamese War movie.

I saw a French movie about a French soldier in Vietnam set in 1945

I was also in France at the time when viewing the movie, it was very surreal in so many ways to be empathizing for a protagonist on one of the enemy sides - from an American perspective as I am an American.

But I had never seen anything depicted about that war decades before the US got involved.

I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.

It was sensual, horrific, erotic, fascinating. I dont think it would get greenlit by American studios. Maybe some streaming services have it though.

What is the name of the film?

I need to look it up from the time and place I was there, I'll edit if I find it in two hours or make a separate comment

edit: Les Confins du Monde (English: To the Ends of the World), 2018, directed by Guillaume Nicloux

I'm not immediately seeing where to stream it, I would really like to view it again! With English subtitles!

Thank you.

You're right, doesn't seem to be streaming yet. https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/to-the-ends-of-the-world

A DVD is available on Amazon without subtitles.

The first step

There are some depictions of the French occupation of Vietnam in the beginning of "We Were Soldiers".

Also Apocalypse Now extended cut has a part with the French elite still trying to live their old privileged life. I get why it's cut from a writing perspective, but it shows some important context.

Also The Quiet American

> I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywood. Or a director with primarily french influences producing a war movie.

Not sure if the stipulation is a war movie about Vietnam, or just plain a war movie. But certainly here's a list of some non-U.S. 20th century war movies, very vivid, biased towards France:

The Battle of Algiers (French, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

Come and See (Russian, Elem Klimov, 1985)

Ivan's Childhood (Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962)

Beau Travail (French, Claire Denis, 1999) -- OK, soldiers but not war

Army of Shadows (French, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

A Man Escaped (French, Robert Bresson, 1956) -- POW, not front lines

Little Dieter Needs To Fly (British/French/German?, Werner Herzog, 1997) -- actually relates to the war in Vietnam

Thanks! These are new to me

A Man Escaped

SPOILER

- is that the one where the pow makes it to the front lines and gets shot by his own side who assume he's German, since he was disguised?

"Centurions" movie and more importantly the novel by the same name on which movie is based, written by Richard Lopteguy, offers an incredible French perspective of Vietnam experience including the demoralising defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

War movies produced in Israel are also a distinctly different experience from American ones.

They tend to be made by veterans of those wars, after the ~20 year gap that seems pretty standard for the PTSD barrier to crack. e.g. the best ones made about the Lebanon War (what Israel calls its intervention 1982-2000 in the Lebanese Civil War) all came out within a couple of years of each other:

* Lebanon (2009)

* Waltz with Bashir (2008)

* Beaufort (2007)

And the first of the good Yom Kippur War (1973) films is probably Kippur (2000), with the long-development-time miniseries Valley of Tears (Sha'at Ne'ila) only coming out last year.

Not quite enough time has passed for films about the heaviest fighting of the 2nd Intifada to be made - the closest thing I can think of is the TV show Fauda (2015-present) but that's a somewhat different genre.

Is the trend of "publish with sensational title, switch to benign version to continue growth" creeping into HN or is it the fate

I don't think it's sensational to say that North Vietnam won and South Vietnam lost.

Original title for this post was “Rare Vietnam War images from the winning side”

HN is not the same place it was a few years ago.

It's a victim of its own success.

Looking at those pictures, I would not have predicted them as the winning side. The picture of the field operating theater in the middle of a swamp is particularly moving. They must have felt they were fighting against unbelievable odds: the most powerful military in the world, with all the bombers, the agent orange, the napalm, the best equipment.. it must have taken a lot of courage to keep up the fight against that. Especially as they watched all their compatriots dying like flies.

I went to Vietnam a few years ago. The locals I spoke to had a very dim of view of their government, saying that it was deeply corrupt. It is a shame that the extraordinary sacrifices made fighting the French and then the US resulted in such poor outcome for the Vietnamese people.

As a counterpoint, it does not seem to a foreigner that their government is worse than average

> I went to Vietnam a few years ago. The locals I spoke to had a very dim of view of their government, saying that it was deeply corrupt.

I feel like if you asked random Americans on the street how they felt about their government the sentiment would be at least as bad.

I recently read Garth Ennis' _Punisher: The Platoon_ and it does a great job of humanizing "the winning side". The art in that book (Goran Parlov) is excellent and reminds me a lot of the photos in this series.

These pictures are stunning. Each one of them is so powerful. We've really only been shown our side of history. Le Minh Truong is an astounding photographer, and one that should be as celebrate as Robert Capa, or many other Western photoreporters. Impressive. The picture with the two women and the fishnet is one of the most beautifully composed pictures I've ever seen, period. And I've seen a lot. Insane that I never got to see these pictures before today.

>> We've really only been shown our side of history.

Really? Maybe if one confines one's self to US TV news channels. There have been plenty of books, films, and documentary series that address the Vietnamese side of the war.

If I were to recommend one, I suggest "Vietnam Minefield" (2005), covering the Australian's improper use of a minefield that resulted in countless bombings as Viet Cong forces repurposed captured mines as IEDs.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488904

https://donaldwilliamtate.medium.com/the-minefield-australia...

I've always known that, yes. Yet, as an Italian kid of the 80s I've been raised by American and American-influenced media way more that I would like to admit. I knew the US were wrong, but there was still a disconnect between that and the depiction of the American War (as they call it in Vietnam) I took as "standard" for so long. My wake up call was 2017, during the first of a few trips to Vietnam. The War museum in Saigon is impressive. Despite having known qiute a bit about the conflict, for example, I had never heard of My Lai. Boy, that was hard to watch. I also was not aware of Cu Chi. I'm surprised I didn't get to see pictures from Le Minh Truong in Vietnam, or maybe I did, and I didn't recognize their power back then? There's also an easy language barrier, as this part of history is mostly told in languages different from the ones I speak.

You hadn't heard of Mi Lai? That's like know about the Iraq war but not Abu Ghraib, the war on terror but not Gitmo. If I had to list things to know about the Vietnam war, Mi Lai would be in the top five. If people are hearing about the Vietnam war, but not that part, then American media indeed has problems communicating history.

Consider that in Italian high school study plans, history "stops" at WW2, sometimes right after. I never got exposed to the Vietnam War as a history topic, and I've got my information like many others in my generation in Italy mostly from Rambo movies. Want another one? I had no idea Nixon bombed Cambodia secretly for five years until I visited Cambodia, also in 2017, and visited the landmine museum near Seam Reap.

>A guerrilla in the Mekong Delta paddles through a mangrove forest defoliated by Agent Orange. The Americans denuded the landscape with chemicals to deny cover to the Viet Cong

The official line, maybe, but untrue. Agent Orange was used to destroy crops. Its side effects and lasting effects are well known, but the focus on these are to the detriment of awareness about why the US used it. The indiscriminate destruction of food for combatants and innocents alike is genocide.

After a few decades or years someone will come up about afghan war, the next Vietnam for US.

These are really neat. One photo has this caption:

> Even using antiquated WWII rifles such as these, the Vietnamese were able to cripple or down many U.S. aircraft.

Seems impossible? Allied aircraft were flying at least 5-10,000 ft, at least 300mph?

Small arms have a ceiling of around 10,000 ft, so aircraft flying at 5,000 ft would definitely be vulnerable. And 300mph is fairly slow compared to a small arms projectile traveling maybe 1700mph. Even today, fighter jets will often try to stay above 10,000 ft, roughly where small arms and flak peter out.

I could easily imagine WWII rifles having some success damaging helicopters, which were (and compared to modern fighters still are) low and slow.

There were a bunch of Forward Air Controllers who flew smaller, slower planes much lower to direct air strikes. In particular those flying in support of SF missions flew low routinely. Although the predominant danger is still going to be flak and large machine guns rather than rifles. Then you also have attack helicopters and troop transport helicopters are particularly vulnerable whilst loading and unloading who all fly lower and slower.

Dive-bombing (no clue whether that tactic was/is still in use) and strafing aircraft fly a lot lower when attacking ground targets. The danger is so great that ground-attack planes like the A-10 Thunderbolt are designed with survivability in mind and carry a lot of armor.

I wonder how the misadventures of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan would have played out had we had this sort of media coverage - CNN and others was just an extension of the Pentagon.

CNN was founded in 1980. The US withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 and Saigon fell in 1975. US media coverage of Vietnam near the end of the war was much fairer than cable news coverage of the Iraq wars, though it was still US-centric it did start to show the atrocities. During the Vietnam war US media were much freer to go out on their own (at great personal risk); the Gulf War model was for the Pentagon to manage coverage by having the press "embed" with military units so they would think like the US soldiers they were with.

If anyone here is interested in Vietnam war photography, I highly recommend the book Vietnam Inc., by Philip Jones Griffith (1971).

It's interesting how history differs in perspectives. Great read!

I wrote a quick script the other day to colorize directories of family photos. I realized it would be cool to colorize these photos, too. Here's the album: https://imgur.com/a/aJbpMjf

The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi.

Here's the repo for the colorizing model itself: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify

I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters.

If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos

This is really great. Even if the colours might be off from actual reality, it brings it to life nonetheless.

You have successfully removed the visual excellence of those images.

This is fascinating, thank you. It’s hard to explain my color blindness to people and I’m inclined to begin with this HN thread in future.

I can differentiate color mostly fine and have never mis interpreted grass as green, but clothing and fabric always pose problems, just as with your AI.

I’ve learned to be ok with things not looking real. Black and white is just as unreal to me as false color toning, but feels more honest and deliberate. The luma of the Armalite wielding guerrilla is amazing — it’s hard to beat black and white as a descriptor format.

This was really cool. Thank you for taking the time to put that together.

There's a lot of people in the comments saying that Vietnam didn't really "win" the war. Their political and military objectives were ultimately successful, those of the US/South Vietnam were not. That's what a victory is. The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.

It's impressive how deep some of these psychological things run nearly 50 years on. It was such a blow to self-image that, let alone all the related domestic political fallout, people still have a hard time accepting what happened.

The sheer amount of ink and celluloid spent trying to come to terms with this is awesome, and a little depressing.

I'm not a native-born American and don't feel like I have skin in that game. I just feel like in war, there may be victors, but there are no winners. Especially in the modern age, if you get in a war, all sides lose. Victory is just a matter of who manages to lose less.

In war there are no winners, only widows.

This is a cliche understanding. Wars can and have been won since warfare started. However, the actual people doing the fighting aren't winning, they're just dying and mostly (unless defending their own country) giving up their most valuable asset (life) so that rich men can play Axis and Allies.

I think WW2 had pretty decisive winners and losers

Although some of the victors were also losers (like the Soviet Union). Basically the only decisive winner was the US.

How many wars did the US win (as in "achieved the political goals") since WWII?

Korean war: half won, half lost.

Vietnam war: lost.

Grenada invasion: sort of won.

Gulf war 1991: I'd say won, despite Saddam staying in power.

Gulf war II: I'd say lost, despite Saddam deposition.

Afghanistan: lost, despite the killing of bin Laden.

Syria: can't tell yet.

It's a pretty depressing tally.

With that, I'd say that the US was on the winning side of a number of wars before that: WWII, WWI, Mexican war, Spanish war.

I'd say we won Gulf war II, we've definitely lost Syria by now, Afghanistan probably lost.

That said, many of the well-known, long haul conflicts that the US are involved in are the ones they are most likely to lose. The ones they win they usually win quickly and are less well known.

There are plenty of interventions post-WWII that have been quick successes for the US, esp. in Latin America.

Yeah Syria is interesting

The problem with all these conflicts is winning is so poorly defined or multi-goal.

What's winning in Syria? Getting rid of assad and then leaving? We could probably do that in a week or less and utterly demolish the country if we wanted. The consequences of 'winning' that war under that definition would probably be pretty horrible.

But that doesn't seem to be the goal right now?

There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..).

Though Afghanistan is pretty simple imho. there aren't nearly as many global power stakes... The taliban explicitly does not want Democracy so if that is 'winning' it's doomed to a loss by default.

> We could probably do that in a week or less

Eh - I'm not sure. Getting aircraft overhead would be difficult east of the euphrates when they have lots of anti-aircraft guns and they are also supported heavily by Russia.

The only Western power currently conducting airstrikes east of the euphrates is Israel and they have had planes shot down by Syria & Russia.

The US has a preponderance of military power, but I do think people are quick to assume that this means the US could easily topple lots of foreign nations. For some, that is definitely true, for others, like Iran, I think that is a misplaced confidence.

If the goal is total to level the country to the ground, we've had that capability for decades now: supersonic and stealth bombers, as well as SLBMs, SLCMs, and ICBMs. And there's always nukes of course.

The whole collateral damage aspect is pretty high. But if we were willing to deal with the humanitarian and diplomatic fallout, we could do it pretty easily.

Fair enough - we can get a lot done with cruise missiles, but as you said, it would be challenging to do without significant civilian casualties.

The anti-aircraft guns obstacle is, as you've said, more than surmountable. The likelihood of Russian reprisal, imo, is not.

Winning in Syria was helping Qatar build their Qatar gas pipeline to Europe, but Russia stepped in and didn't let that happen. It was too big of a threat to Russia's most crucial export monopoly: energy to Europe.

> There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..).

Excuse me, but the goal should be that exactly. Not leaving an inch of flesh of the bear unpoked.

If you resign your emotions, and try to think about it seriously, it makes a lot of sense strategically to conduct a massive provocation.

Right now, it's completely the other way around: Putin delivers one grievous provocation after another to NATO. NATO grovels, shivers, but does nothing, for the whole world to laugh on.

It earns him client states, and satellites. You absolutely don't want your enemies flocking together.

If you turn that around, the world, and his wannabe clients that it's him now who can't do anything, but throw adorable tantrums, his construct will melt away withing years.

2 birds 1 stone.

It's also the types like Orbans, Sisis, and Assads who are only showing the voice now, because they can afford to look brave when the West is intimidated. That will pull the carpet from under them too.

Nonsense, NATO is literally surrounding its so-called 'enemies' with endless streams of base-building. NATO is not groveling or shivering - it is slowly invading proxy countries and extending the US empire, creep creep ..

* I agree. But also parent has a point, Crimea, election hacking, extrajudicial poisoning on British etc soil didn't have a robust response - that we know of at least.

I do think Trump was very dangerous and damaging in regards to NATO and pushing our allies away. By not understanding that 'america first' means so much more than simply scraping a few billion more from allies. That's playing checkers in terms of only being able to think in slogan-first 1st order logic. 2nd order or more is understanding why NATO was formed in the first place and the current role it has advancing our interests.

And I think it's critical to actively work against movements of authoritarian nationalism and hold Europe and our allies together.

I'm glad and think Biden is doing a better job in the Pacific in that regard.

I would not classify Gulf war II as a "war". It was a blatant incursion, which even Saddam knew would not last, hence the focus on looting the victim, rather than planning for an occupation.

Saddam bet that if no ones does anything concrete, he can get away with it, else, he can return back.

I would call than an "occupation" rather than a "war".

Edit : I retract my comment. I meant Gulf War I, the occupation of Kuwait.

The government was toppled, a provisional government was installed by the US, and then replaced by a government that was, at the time, US-aligned with democratic elections.

I think it was a bad war and a mistake, but I don't think we "lost."

People in USA usually call the war from 1980-88 “Iran-Iraq War” after 1991

Ah yes, I misunderstood what they were saying. I was confused because the details didn't quite match up...

We can win the battles but we can't win the War. Keeping the enemy out of Kuwait was the biggest win we've had since WW2. If you want to win the war these days it takes total war like in Japan/Europe. You have to break the enemy or they will keep coming back and the modern world doesn't have the stomach for it.

> How many wars did the US win (as in "achieved the political goals") since WWII?

Depends upon whose interests are answering the question. These aren't so much "wars" as "resource shifting actions marketed as kayfabe [1] wars". This also isn't a new phenomenon. Such "wars" have existed throughout history, and is a side effect of a political sphere's emergent, loosely-defined requirements.

For common people in the path of destruction, a war has an unambiguous win/loss demarcation. For defense contractors if they are being honest with themselves, less so. For politicians with uncanny honesty, even more ambiguous.

With the scales involved today in not just people, speed, and destructive power, but also of information range and depth, I think it is time for a deep re-think of the "war is 'just' a political tool" paradigm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

IMO it’s a tad silly to say that the U.S. lost these wars. Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side? It’s crazy that this seems to never be mentioned.

This seems quite similar to Americans demanding their gun rights to protect themselves from the government. Well, I hate to inform you of this, but the government could out gun you since time immemorial. It’s a wild argument for gun rights.

How can you “win” a war when the other country can press a single button and eliminate 100% of the people in your country?

Well, bring it down to the personal level - that's like losing a fistfight but comforting yourself that you could go and burn the other person's house down any time because you have a tank full of gasoline at home. I mean, you could, but that wouldn't unbloody your nose.

Because they won’t hit that button. Just look at how Vietnam won.

> It’s a wild argument for gun rights.

Not really, because it changes the political calculus for exactly the reasons you mentioned. If the US government wants to forcefully take over, and they aren't aligned with gun owners, they have to go through them. In that scenario its more likely they are a shade of grey evil than "lets methodically exterminate all of our citizens". In the former, gun owners standing their ground would be a major political hurdle.

I'd actually argue pro gun rights are a bit silly because those same parties aren't pro encryption / privacy. So they give up the tools they'd need to defend themselves (encryption) from all but the most direct assault. And I'd consider a soft assault by violating their privacy much more plausible.

"Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side?"

How is that usefull unless you are willing to commit genocide?

> IMO it’s a tad silly to say that the U.S. lost these wars. Can you really lose a war with a massive nuclear arsenal on your side? It’s crazy that this seems to never be mentioned.

An observation not lost to the ground forces. I was in the US infantry 10+ years ago. We were well trained and lethal. We had an overwhelming technological targeting advantage. We had the support of a sizeable amount of the local population that we generally stayed a few steps ahead of the lower and mid tier rungs of whatever insurgency we were fighting (Al Qaeda in Iraq [ISIS predecessor], the Taliban, whatever-local-Afghan-village-thugs-in-later-deployments). We understood the war wasn't purely militaristic in "kill counts" or territory sieged, and the lessons of irregular warfare (hearts and minds) were beaten in to us.

The biggest issue, at least for us that actually had to kill and be shot at, was that the progressively restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) defanged us, both from lethal and willpower standpoints. There were so many nested bullet points and gotchas and just a wide breadth of rules that no person that wasn't a lawyer could keep up with it. Arbitrary things like "if you are in a gunfight with insurgents and they fall back into a cave, no matter who the insurgent is or how many casualties they were lucky to have inflicted on your forces, you absolutely cannot roll grenades into the cave." Very specific, very arbitrary, very confusing. Furthermore, it was beat into us that the full weight of the law was to fall on our heads if we screwed these things up. Which makes sense from a humanitarian point of view, but that lingering legal guillotine built in a sizeable amount of self-doubt and apprehension in us where we weren't ever sure when or if we were allowed to be lethal.

I imagine a set of ROE was drafted, and enough bureaucrats scribbled in "small edits" that the overarching sense of direction was lost in the sea of Great Ideas by Smart People and nobody with both the political clout and common sense was able to get to these revisions before they were inflicted on us on the ground. Not dissimilar to scope creep you see in software, except parties involved couldn't just vote with their feet and leave. That, and those functioning as the wars' PM's weren't as much concerned with delivering results as they perhaps were with empire building and political posturing. Just a god damn mess

Firstly, thank you for your service!

Secondly, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head when it comes to the ROE being the main limiting factor in the "effectiveness" of the US military in being able to subdue its enemies, not just in Afghanistan/Iraq, but also in Vietnam and even to some extant in Korea. It seems to be one of the weird side-effects that nukes have on armed conflicts that when you have nukes, you really can never actually "fully commit" to a conflict. (Since going "all-in" could be apocalyptic.)

One thing I have always wondered, though, is the relationship between the ROE and irregular warfare. If the military personnel on the ground had broader discretion over their actions, would help or hinder the goal of "winning hearts and minds"?

The goal of the US in Afghanistan was to deny Al-Qaeda the use of one third of a country to plan their operations. That required taking control of that territory from the Taliban, who were allowing Al-Qaeda to operate without restriction. The US did that. They harassed the Taliban and denied them complete control of territory for 20 years. Not sure how this could be viewed as a strategic defeat in any way

What happened to all the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing then?

At the end of 20 years, US indirectly had to negotiate with them.

So the other way of looking at it is, a bunch of un-educated, poorly trained, poorly equipped mountain people, who themselves are divided into many warring factions, stood their ground against the mightiest nation on earth, for 20 year, and in the end US negotiated with them for transfer of power.

Now, I see this as sheer political and administrative failure. Militarily, sure, the US has an upper hand and can pile up bodies like no other, But it failed to win the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. It could not change the govt., it could not bring stability and democracy to the region, it could not transform the society, and it could not even change the idea of itself in the minds of the Afghan people.

US is too powerful, militarily, to formulate effective strategies that further its goals. It is good in doing that economically, through sanctions, etc. But as a military force, it is too powerful for its own good.

Heh, you would think that after literal decades of (moderate) sustained success in resisting incursions from three superpowers (British, then Soviets and then the US) the Pashtuns would get a little more credit then just being called "a bunch of un-educated, poorly trained, poorly equipped mountain people."

Even Churchill said of them: "Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian."

To be fair, US has decades of high tech warfare experience, institutions that study war and constantly research about it, has best infrastructure, excellent means to project power and has virtually unlimited resources.

The Afghans have no proper education system, no institutions other than local commanders directing their bunch of troops and have virtually no good infrastructure. They literally live among mountains and have no good networks for transportation.

I am giving the Afghans a lot of credit, because what I said about them is true. They won in spite of that.

My recollection of how the conflict was presented was "We need to go to Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda" 20 years later we're still fighting that same war, which is how many people look at the situation and say that the US hasn't achieved it's goals (i.e., has been defeated)

I suppose one could say that the US hasn't lost yet, but it's pretty tough to say that the US has won.

Honestly, at this point it feels like any discussion of the US staying in Afghanistan seems like it should devolve into a discussion of the halting problem. (/s, but only slightly)

They definitely defeated Al-Qaeda, they just didn't wipe out the Taliban.

Al-Qaeda was defeated? How does that reconcile with ISIS popping up a few years later, and Libya and Iraq still being in the grips of civil war?

Where do I even start with this. Do you just call all your favourite bad guys "Al-Qaeda" and group them all together as if they were all one organization?

You lost. Deal with it. The level of immaturity... coming up with stories to tell yourself.

We didn't lose though.

Who is pulling out? Who's puppet government is already falling? Who is taking back control of every area we pulled out of? What did you "win". Do you really like getting kicked in the nuts?

Al-Qeada and other groups just shifted to other unrested regions and even caused unrest. At a global scale the war only caused other countries harm.

Tell someone in your social circle that you're considering a business deal with a company in Afghanistan and might be flying out there next month, see what sort of reaction you get.

Agreed, We literally took over Afghanistan in a month and installed a government but somehow we lost? We just don't really have a dog in the fight anymore. This isn't defeat.

Yes, the US lost. The government in Afghanistan doesn't have much institutional depth or very firm control of the country. It's not a military defeat in the sense of having your army crushed, but an occupation that never achieves peacetime status is a failure by great power standards. Don't feel bad though, the US is the 3rd empire to make the exact same mistake in Afghanistan. It'd be comical if there weren't so much human suffering involved.

Giving up isn't defeat? If this was sports would anyone accept that definition?

The US just signed a peace deal with the Taliban agreeing to and withdraw all their troops and release aligned 5000 prisoners, the Taliban are also allowed back in government. Technically they could be in power at the next election.

What actual goal was fulfilled here after two decades of war?

Korean War: won, South Korea was transformed into an american colony a la Japan, and is now used as a platform to counter China in the east as well as trading partner and military base.

Vietnam: countered Soviet expansionism and prevented Vietnam from becoming a communist regional superpower, Vietnam has not done much besides be a trading partner for the US since.

Grenada: won

Gulf wars: overwhelming victories. Destabilized the middle east, provided an opportunity for american megacorps to heavily profit and exert massive influence. Led to Arab spring which further destabilized the middle east. The middle east is essentially no longer in the picture in the game of global hegemony, and in large part has to rely on American refineries and american corporations to handle oil extraction.

Afghanistan: success, stimulated the American economy, very successful unemployment program (provided jobs for America's high school dropouts for 20 years), justified further weapons development plans, allowed america to build tons of bases to help counter China's Silk Road initiative by destabilizing the region.

Syria: mostly a failure at this point. The hope was to break Syria and build the Qatar gas pipeline to hurt Russia's hegemony on european energy supplies. Looks like that is a lost cause at this point, but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.

The world is no longer about winning wars and conquering territory. It's about destabilizing rising threats to your power. It's about toppling dictators and installing democracies, which are much easier to bribe. It's about countering your enemies/competitors (Russia, china, the middle east) initiatives and causing chaos in their neighborhood.

> but of all the wars America has recently waged, this one is probably the most justifiable.

We now have strong evidence that both the Ghouta and Douma attacks were not chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government. In the case of Douma, the OPCW leaks have very strongly shown (in my opinion, conclusively) that it was staged and put on by the White Helmets, a US/UK funded organization. Senior OPCW officials then reedited their official's report to make it seem like the Syrian government used chlorine gas. Don't believe me? Listen to Noam Chomsky explain it. [1]

Why does this matter? It was used as a pretense for the Trump administration to bomb Syria, which it did a few days later. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_KgRcw7mag [2] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/opcw-leaks-syria/

> Syria: mostly a failure at this point. The hope was to break Syria and build the Qatar gas pipeline to hurt Russia's hegemony

Please open a map, and take a look where Qatar is.

Kosovo?

Gulf War 1991 is definitely a victory - deposing Saddam was not the goal of the US or its allies.

Similarly, Gulf War II is absolutely a loss, even though it "accomplished more" than 1991, because its strategic goals included dictating the post-war political arrangements in the country.

Victory and defeat are always relative to the parties' strategic goals.

The US won the Korean war, according to its objectives at the start of the war (Retain the status quo).

It did not win it according to the objectives set by MacArthur (Drive the commies into the sea). He was, incidentally, relieved of command, thanks to his escalation of the conflict to include China.

To be fair none of these actually involved a declaration of war, the US congress ha not declared war since ww2 - these have all been wars by stealth

I'm not really sure what the difference is between a declaration of war and an authorization of war, but we've had congressional authorization for a couple conflicts since then. I would argue that if Congress voted on it in the affirmative, it's not really a secret or stealthy war.

A declaration of war means that the government has to answer to the people for its war crimes, per international legal standards.

An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it, because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.

> A declaration of war means that the government has to answer to the people for its war crimes, per international legal standards.

No, it doesn’t. A declaration of war has no effect at all on liability in international law. War criminals are responsible under international law whether or not war has been declared; the establishment of universal personal accountability of war criminals, including heads of state, for war crimes -- first unambiguously declared in the Nuremberg Principles -- declarations of war (which previously gave a veil of legitimacy to non-defensive war) have been pretty much irrelevant since non-defensive war was unambiguously itself declared to be a crime against peace.

> An authorization for war means that war crimes can be committed and war criminals can get away with it,

No, it doesn’t.

> because there is no legal basis for defining that war, except for what Politician-de-jour says it is.

Formal declarations of war and war authorizations have no difference in either international or, to the extent the latter is a recognized thing, most national laws in terms of what legal basis there is for defining the parameters of the war, and whatever difference in effect they might have under the terms of local law has no bearing on liability under international law.of those engaging in war crimes, crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity.

The constitution only provides for declarations of war, and requires that the congress (not the president) declare war

The war powers act has been around for 50 years now, and the supreme court has not invalidated it yet. I think it's safe to say that they believe it is constitutional.

Regardless, even if you believe that authorization for use of force is unconstitutional, that does not make it secret. Only Bill Clinton's engagement in Bosnia/Kosovo could be considered a secret war... The others were done with full authorization of Congress.

Korea was an American victory in the sense that we achieved the mission. It was not a military disaster caused by poor leadership like the Vietnam war. The leadership during the Korean war was extremely good and the outcome was more than satisfactory given the situation.

I think many people forget that it took until the Gulf War (90-91) to dispel those demons.

Yeah I dont really understand the cognitive dissonance people have over that war.

Vietnam has a single party Communist Party that teaches Marxist ideals while having upgraded to state capital patches like every other marxist ideology worshipping party. They are geopolitically irrelevant enough for that never to bother anyone. The US was there to stop that specific thing from happening and didnt. US lost, Vietnam was unified and the control was consolidated under Vietnamese representatives of the communist party and for them they won. That’s the same standard we use for any conflict. Why single out that one to a higher standard where we point out the loss of life? Doesnt make sense. Vietnam won a unified country, and it is under communist rule. There once was a side that didnt want communism and they lost, too!

Depends on what you think the objectives were. Did the USA want to add another star to the Star Spangled Banner? Then yeah, they lost.

But if the objective of the USA was to prevent a domino of communism taking over all of South-East Asia, we can pretty clearly see where the advance of communism was stopped.

And if an American and a North Vietnamese communist from 1955 could see into the future 70 years, taking a tour around Hanoi or Saigon, I don't know if either would be so certain on their verdict of who 'won' or 'lost'. It might have been the North, but it certainly wasn't the communists.

I don't think anybody indoctrinated with marxist teachings is satisfied with any current or attempted version of communism. So in that regard I would agree, I still say its an impossible standard not used for other conflicts.

Even the last massacre in China was because the protestors wanted to democratically have more communism instead of the liberalization of the markets and private ownership. That gets reduced to “students wanted democracy”, geopolitically it would have even been worse. (It is sad they were killed and that unity in that country relies on never mentioning it or any other strife)

> But if the objective of the USA was to prevent a domino of communism taking over all of South-East Asia, we can pretty clearly see where the advance of communism was stopped.

But Communism flourished in Vietnam. So if you want to argue domino theory (which was wrong anyways), they certainly didn't stop the Vietnamese domino. So they didn't win in Vietnam.

I think if you're talking about the acute win/loss of the Vietnam war, then absolutely the North Vietnamese won. If the USA really wanted to win the war then they could have done it outright in 1967. But that would have been very ugly. Not an option.

Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.

Maybe their soceity would have been more successful if it wasn't bombed to hell and back by the Americans then made a soft client state of the USSR and then boycotted by the West.

If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.

Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.

Are the Vietnamese people winning in this scenario? Are the Vietnamese people winning right now?

Are you asking if the vietnamese people are winning in the crazy scenario drzaiusapelord suggested where viet nam is a super power - i think the answer is an obvious yes. But that's an unrealistic scenario.

Would they have been better off if france agreed to decolonize instead of trying to hold on to their failing colonial empire with force (leading to everything that came to follow)? Maybe we'll never know.

But i don't think there's any particular reason to assume that if the south won they would be any better off. South Vietnam hardly seems like it was the most stable/well run of governments - they were into fixing elections and persacuting buddhists, etc. Hardly what i would call an ideal state.

Various countries which were "bombed to hell and back" are doing well now. Various Europe countries, Korea, Japan, etc

Helps that it was in usa's geopolitical interest for these countries to be strong to counter communism (Marshall plan)

> If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.

Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.

> Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.

Yeah, letting Russia and China subjugate the world would have gone SO MUCH better. What good has it done for nicaragua, cuba, north korea, afghanistan or the many noname countries in Africa? The USSR left only poverty and death whereever they went.

Ah yes, Afganistan, where Operation Cyclone funelled weapons to mujahadeen, which they used indiscriminantly against civilians. What could possibly go wrong?

And once USA took control of Afganistan, how has the situation improved?

Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.

Vietnam is communist but they're not very friendly with China, nor have they been since about 1975; vietnam is certainly not a satellite of China. Starting in 1979 they fought a low-intensity border war with China that went on for over a decade, a fact you seem to be unaware of.

Ehh no, we have history of thousands of years clashing with China so no we aren't that close to China. We might have some "co-operation" geographically and politically but the best depiction of our relationship is 2 guys shaking hands with knives on the other hand.

Oh and if you do some digging you will know that HCM sent a few letters to Trumman asking for US's aid, we could have been ally 70 years earlier, but no, the US branded him as a commie and the rest is history. Btw, the first line of our Proclamation of Independence is pretty much a paraphrase of the US's Declaration of Independence, that's to show how much we wanted the US to be ally.

> Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.

Do "the people" ever win a war? Something like 600,000 - 2 million civilians died in that war. If you're implying that people would be better off ecconomically if the other side won, that seems highly speculative with no evidence to back it up.

USA fought a very similar war in Korea 10 years prior.

Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea right now?

Its hardly identical, much of N. Korea's current struggles have direct causes that are more recent than the war (massive sanctions), and even if it was, a sample size of 1 is meaningless.

S. Koreans are unambiguously 'better off' than their counterparts in the North.

That's the closest comparable we have.

If the US were to have 'stayed' in S. Vietnamese, much like they did in S. Korea, that S. Vietnam would look 'somewhat' like S. Korea, but not nearly as prosperous given their agrarian history etc..

But definitely better off.

10% of USA people live in poverty.

50 years on, still in poverty.

Win or loose, live in poverty.

Big difference between "USA poverty" and "Vietnam poverty".

But you're right, it's poverty nontheless.

They may be living in poverty, but they are living in self-respect. They have problems, but who doesn't. Do you think only money matters?

Such regressive thinking, that too about whole societies and nations. As if they are not human.

Vietnam GDP historical data: https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/gdp

From https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview:

"Vietnam’s development over the past 30 years has been remarkable. Economic and political reforms under Đổi Mới, launched in 1986, have spurred rapid economic growth, transforming what was then one of the world’s poorest nations into a lower middle-income country. Between 2002 and 2018, GDP per capita increased by 2.7 times, reaching over US$2,700 in 2019, and more than 45 million people were lifted out of poverty"

50 years of misery ongoing, Vietcong won bigly.

People in the US misunderstand the Vietnamese perspective on the war pretty badly. Interestingly enough one of the best sources you can look at to learn about this is the documentary interview with McNamara, Fog of War. He's surprisingly frank about his own mistakes in perspective, as well as talking about conversations he had with his counterparts in later years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YONEXPMVaQM

The fog of war is an incredible documentary. I'd suggest it to anyone who is willing to watch it.

It and Iraq in Fragments (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiu8cXhjpX4) are the two most incredible documentaries I've ever seen on this topic.

Completely agree with you about Vietnam reaching its military objectives. However, I only see a couple of commenters disagreeing with that, which is not "a lot". Only curious about this because I wonder how prevalent that viewpoint is versus the perception of that viewpoint being prevalent. Perhaps this is off-topic but it seems this disparity between perception is central to so much of America's hangups with this war 50 years later.

Wikipedia is pretty unambiguous: "Following Vietnamese victory against the French in the First Indochina War, which ended in 1954, the nation was divided into two rival states: communist North and anti-communist South. Conflicts intensified in the Vietnam War, which saw extensive American intervention in support of South Vietnam, while the Soviets and the PRC supported the North, which ended with North Vietnamese victory in 1975. After North and South Vietnam were reunified as a communist state under a unitary socialist government in 1976"

I'm doubtful that this is really the best way to put it.

The US escalated it's involvement until the early 1970's when via strategic bombing of the North (which the US was unwilling to do previously), decisively destroyed the North Vietnamese ability to fight.

Then, the Americans left.

A couple of years later, the North Vietnamese rehabilitated their forces, and invaded the South.

The reality is such different perspective than 'North Vietnam Won' to the point wherein it's basically almost misinformation to just state it like that.

Finally, the tactical and strategic advantage of the US bombing with Nixon was enormous. The US could have feasibly stayed for a long time - after shedding their fears of 'Bombing the North' and just 'doing it', they finally gained the 'obvious advantage' that a major power should have had.

But Nixon ran on a platform of 'Getting out of Vietnam', and the folks back home lost interest in a miasma of populism.

I think those nuances are important, because I think it demonstrates how tactics, politics and populism fuelled the outcome.

The lessons of 'Fight to Win Only' and 'A long grinding war will turn your population against you' are straight out of the Art of War.

Those lessons informed the 1st US invasion of Iraq (and 2cnd), which was led by Vietnam vets. 'Overwhelming Force and Boots on the Ground to Unambiguously Overwhelm Enemy Forces', though the 2cnd occupation didn't go quite as well.

Finally, literally one day after Barack Obama ordered the last US units out of Baghdad, then Iraqi PM Malaki ordered a purge of Sunnis from his party and government. The Sunni Tribes, in fear of their lives from the then-emboldened Shia dominated Iraqi Army ... invited ISIS in. This very well could have been avoided by keeping a few units, neatly tucked away 'behind the wire' in Baghdad - just enough ongoing oversight and leverage to keep people like Malaki from self-destructing. It would have been better in hindsight to take a longer view of that situation as well.

It's hard to say if there is a direct parallel with Vietnam but it kind of looks like that.

I'll happily accept 'if the US didn't pull out before winning, they might have won', but this isn't the same as 'the US won'.

The hilarious thing is, the entire time the US was in Vietnam, top leadership in the US admin was pretty much convinced they could never win, but had to put in a good show.

So they were never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning.

I'm doubtful of your assertion that 'top leadership didn't think they could win' and especially in the context of 'put on a show'.

Which elements of 'top leadership' believed this?

For whom would that 'show' be for?

You'll have to state which individuals took that position.

"never even "winning" in the sense that the US leadership thought they were winning. "

This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?

The data (i.e. 'body count') was initially misleading, but that lesson was learned quickly enough.

By 1965 , at the start major escalation, The Pentagon wanted to do strategic bombing of the entirety of North Vietnam. US political leadership wanted to avoid Hanoi and other targets for political reasons i.e. 'Rolling Thunder'.

Rolling Thunder failed.

Later, with political limitations removed, Op. Linebacker I and II (in 1970's) successfully dismantled N. Vietnam's ability to fight.

Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms? The big rise in casualties to 1969 probably never would have happened, and the political repercussions would have been at least somewhat less.

Even the populist miasma is affected: when people are dying, it's one thing if 'major progress' is being made (think sicily and european campaigns against Hitler, once they started and were winning, it'd be impossible to bring them back until it was over), but altogether another if there's a stalemate or there isn't evidence of material progress.

But history is 20/20 and that's the whole point.

In 2021 we're still not done politicizing this war, the PBS documentary had some very good elements, but was still only one lens and entirely ignored the geopolitical aspects.

Macnamara v. Pentagon was realized 'All Over Again' with Maj. General Tommy Franks vs. Donald Rumsfeld. This time, the Army mostly go their 'Boots on the Ground and Overwhelming Power' to guarantee a fairly immediate collapse of the enemy. Too bad there was no plan for the occupation.

> Which elements of 'top leadership' believed this?

Macnamara. LBJ. Kennedy.

> For whom would that 'show' be for?

For the American people, for Congress, for the world. To prove that the US stands by its allies and can still win wars. To prevent accusations of being losers by domestic political opponents, both in the same and different parties. Pretty basic stuff, these political dynamics are in play in nearly every war.

> This directly contradicts your first statement. Did US leadership think they were winning or not?

You are misreading the line. I am saying there were not winning either in reality nor in the leaderships minds. The US leadership did NOT think they were winning.

> Imagine how history would have changed were, in 1965, the Pentagon were able to fight on it's own terms?

How do you propose to fix the problem of Chinese troops overwhelming any serious success like they did in Korea? That's nearly the entire reason the US couldn't fully commit to destroying North Vietnam.

How do you even fix the problem of having unreliable and problematic allies in Southern Vietnam that could never really rally the country properly?

You have learned no lessons.

It's not surprising the nuclear power with the largest military in the world could have won against half of a smaller and much poorer country under the right circumstances.

"and the folks back home lost interest in a miasma of populism"

Or, maybe they didn't like their children being draft into the army and coming back crippled?

It’s just how we Indians keep telling ourselves we didn’t really lose those wars against China. But we literally were thrashed at will and when they (China) kind of got tired or thought they taught us a lesson they stopped.

Exactly the same way our close neighbours Pakistan keeps thinking they didn’t really lose any wars against us.

Even the people who were not even a foetus during those wars. Emotion trumps facts it seems.

Being in denial for so long.

Totally agree. The narrative about China is mostly political tomfoolery, as the party that faced the war, was in power for decades after the war, giving it a tremendous opportunity to re-write history. They conveniently blamed some scapegoats and shut down the discussion, more or less.

Nehru was more interested in appeasement than long term strategic thinking, when it comes to international affairs. I think it stems from the deep seated inferiority complex that the British left in the elite and intellectuals of the country. Most of the leadership during the initial decade of Indian independence were heavily influenced by the British and looked up to them for guidance.

I agree to some extent but since you referred to the past I’m kinda doubtful where you’re going with it.

Nehru was quite a long-term thinker and a statesman. Hell it’s a miracle he navigated the country through the hell hole the cold war was.

Sad thing is he inherited a country and the people who just couldn’t rise above a certain level and that was where the Brits left us. On top of that the Brits ensured they left us broken and finished and deliberately at that I believe. I maybe wrong but I just can’t bring myself to look at the colonisers in any positive light. Trust me I’ve tried.

Again since you mentioned Nehru (while I’m not accusing you but it’s a pet “But Nehru” phrase used by the ultra nationalist right wing India of today[1]) and the past Govts, and yes they had their own follies and drawbacks, I just want to set the record straight that the current Govt has set India even further back by decades and I don’t see it recovering. Especially so as I majority will again elect current party for religious bigotry and things like temple.

While the past Govts could’ve done a lot lot better the current Govt has been successful in delivering the final blow.

[1] To others who aren’t familiar with the country and its pilots and scene today it’s actually funny. If something BJP the ruling ultra right wing party does and it fails and harms the public ;usually the case) the national chorus becomes “but what about Nehru”. Even if the intention was to fail or harm the public the chorus remains the same. Also Nehru died in 1964.

This sounds suspiciously like whataboutism.

"That person may have done better, but what about the present person?"

I actually updated my comment and mentioned whataboutism I saw in your comment. Glad that we both saw it. Also I usually don’t check other comments of a person so I was not able to be sure. Now I am. Also HN (selectively) hates flame wars so I’d say let’s stop here.

Many people in the US never accepted that they were defeated. And the US media did a good job of never making this point (the defeat against Vietnam) clear. It is a version of the "lost cause" phenomenon of the US south.

It's not simply accepting defeat that poses difficulty; it's being anything but the best, and first, and most able. American exceptionalism isn't just a cliche, it's a cult of identity, a nationalist truth that cannot be abridged without violent opposition.

Well, exceptionalism is a cult that is part of American education and media since early childhood. It is not just nationalism (loving your country), it is ultra-nationalism that preaches the idea that they're superior to other countries.

Yeah. The downfall of great nations begins with denying the reality. That slowly seeps into every nook and corner of the society, leading to rot from within. You can see this already happening in the US.

The drive is politics, the lube is the media. The denial of reality and the rejection of truth is more prominent than ever and it is showing its face everywhere in US politics.

As on date, for the last decade, no politician has ever resigned for lying or cheating, personally or professionally. The character and integrity of those in power is off the table for discussion (what he/she does in personal life is not for discussion)

Here is the fact. Perhaps in other jobs, white or blue collared ones, personal life may not affect the job. But when it comes to jobs that move the nation, political positions, powerful bodies, and what not, the personal character and integrity of the person ought to be the scale of foremost importance.

Then again, denying reality has been ingrained in the us for what, 200 years?

> The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.

N. Vietnam won, but that doesn't make war a success.

It was for the northern regime. They took control of the south, by force. That's pretty straightforward war-winning.

As I said,

> N. Vietnam won, but that doesn't make war a success

Wars are disasters. 500,000 - 1 million (?) people died, the country was physically destroyed. That's not a good outcome.

The worlds most advanced, wealthiest and militarily powerful country did not obtain it's primary objective in the war, stopping the spread of communism.

What's really amazing is that we could have done nothing, and it still would have failed eventually. There aren't any communist regimes that have been truly successful. The Soviets succeeded in industrialization, but then ate itself from within. The Chinese succeeded in industrialization, but only after transitioning away from maoist communism and more towards state capitalism. Everything else basically failed outright.

> The Chinese succeeded in industrialization, but only after transitioning away from maoist communism and more towards state capitalism.

Leninism and all its descendants, including Maoism, are, ab initio, state capitalism. What the CCP moved toward is more of xenophobic totalitarian corporatism than state capitalism; essentially fascism without, or at least with less, overt expansionism.

I guess I can see that, but whatever it was, it wasn't communism.

Maybe a nitpick, but it's weird to call "Vietnam" the winner in the civil war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam.

"From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won."

A Peoples History of the United States - Howard Zinn

> a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs

That book is extremely pro communist (hence the title). This is a pretty poor take on the war for several reasons, not least of which "maximum military effort" and didn't use most powerful weapons are somehow in the same sentence. They literally did not use their maximum military effort (not just on the atomic bomb front). It was a political war full of mishaps that were capitalized on by North Vietnam. I also thought PRC and Russia backed North Vietnam which seems relevant. The general point that military might isn't the sole determinant of a wars outcome is true and important -- and also pretty obvious.

they dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in WWII, I'd say that sounds pretty maximal

If they didn't use their full force it is by definition not maximal. But that's skirting the point a bit. The quoted passage (and the book) are a very biased take on history in general. Zinn wants the narrative to be that powerful technocrats couldn't overcome the people backed by some mythical cause (communism) whose good is the ultimate destiny of mankind. The reality is Vietnam was in civil war, and super powers were backing differnt sides. The US literally could not use its maximal force because it risked escalating into a larger conflict (China, Russia, etc). The real story is nuanced, complex. The US did lose -- nobody is contesting that here. But the quoted passage (and much of the book) is as much an attempt to spin the narrative as is "The US could have won if it wanted to".

One of the problems with how people consider the Vietnam war is that they don't understand that it was not the US military (and partners) against the North Vietnamese military, it was the US et el against the entire North Vietnamese population along with a lot of southern sympathisers.

If the aim of the US was to ensure that Vietnam did not end up being communist, then they had to convince the people not to become communist. What they did, in some of the most horrific ways possible, was to convince the Vietnamese people, and a lot of those in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos that the western democracies didn't care about them as people, they were just playing politics with their lives. This left the Chinese backed communists and easy road to winning the hearts and minds.

The US lost the military war because they lost the public relations war, both at home, and in the country they were trying to liberate.

If you look at later wars, Gulf War 2, Afghanistan, you could argue that they have learnt nothing. You will never win people over to your way of thinking by dropping bombs on them, that just ensures that they will never bow to your will.

Zinn's writings about the Vietnam war have been questioned and debunked for a long time now.

> made a maximum military effort

USA did NOT make a maximum military effort in Vietnam.

If USA ever made a "maximum military effort" then the war would have been over in 3 months. That was the whole problem. They never did.

> If USA ever made a "maximum military effort" then the war would have been over in 3 months. That was the whole problem. They never did.

It doesn't matter what your imagination wants to have happened. It didn't. Why are you trying to put up your revisionist fantasy against a historical fact? We lost. Zinn's description is perfectly accurate.

Why aren't you Americans more embarrassed to post stuff like this?

Chest thumping about a war you lost 50 years ago...

Must be nice to smoke what you are smoking. The "west" lost entirely in Vietnam. Just look at Afghanistan today... 20 years of war and they have been beaten again.

> maximum military effort

There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime. It’s likely the US would have succeeded in that effort, much like it had 20 years earlier with invasions into German and Japanese held territories in WWII.

Why then did the US not invade North Vietnam? The last major conflict the US took part in was the Korean War. When the US pushed far enough above the 38th parallel, 700k Chinese troops entered the country and put the war into a stalemate.

The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.

The bind the US was in was that it couldn’t commit to winning, but it couldn’t lose either. The US tried to outlast an enemy, which was defending its own home turf, which was an awful strategic mistake and lead to millions dead and the trauma associated with the war. Eventually the US government came to its senses and left the situation.

> There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime. It’s likely the US would have succeeded in that effort, much like it had 20 years earlier with invasions into German and Japanese held territories in WWII.

That didn't happen. That's a militaristic fantasy. What Zinn is describing actually happened. This isn't a debate.

> The risk of the US putting full effort into the Vietnam was not that the US would lose, it was that US would find its self in a direct armed conflict with other nuclear equipped powers, and this would have set off events leading to a global nuclear war.

Mutually Assured Destruction isn't "winning". Luckily that didn't happen either. We lost.

Reminds me of the old Amiga strategy game Nuclear War, with your leader jumping up and down after the nuclear holocaust yelling "I won! I won!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMgFyxu2Ij8

His point is that it, therefore, wasn't a "maximum military effort" as Zinn claimed in his sloppy prose.

> There was nothing, militarily, keeping the US from executing a full scale ground invasion of Hanoi and decapitate the North Vietnamese regime.

hmmm, but then you say:

> When the US pushed far enough above the 38th parallel, 700k Chinese troops entered the country and put the war into a stalemate.

Sounds like a military impediment to me.

The point is it invalidates the Zinn quote

The Vietnam War: a series of huge tactical wins for the US that lead to an overall strategic failure.

Very few wars in history end that way.

More or less. The Tet Offensive was crushed and had Saigon supporting troops pushed into the North quickly, there’s a chance the war would have ended differently. The North was massively depleted at this point.

But the political and propaganda goals of the Tet Offensive worked and made the USA timid when it should have been aggressive. It was at this point that citizen support for the war began to fade quickly as the media incorrectly reported that VC were making progress and couldn’t be stopped, in essence unwittingly passing along the propaganda that VC hoped would spread.

Not sure the outcome would have been different in the end though. The people were colonized by the French and then the Japanese and then the French again - the USA wasn’t looking like the great liberator.

Not saying I want that to have happened but the USA don't have colonies, in the traditional way that the French and the Japanese do

Some great visuals and imagery of the bombing of the Vietnamese can be found in the Ken Burns documentary series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vietnam_War_(TV_series)

Note: the imagery can be graphic and those afraid of seeing genocidal scenes and babies bombed should be warned.

Ken Burns’ documentaries are profoundly life changing and shocking. Every person should learn about the history of war, especially during this time.

"...by the mid-’70s, a force the U.S. military conceded was one of the finest in the world"

I wonder how much of this is truth, or it's just the US trying to save face by claiming that they've lost to a world-class military.

It's saving face. Robert McNamara was several different kinds of fool. JFK & LBJ were even bigger fools for keeping him as SecDef.

Later, when Nixon became president, the situation changed for the better, but it was a slog. Nixon had promised the South Vietnamese premier better terms than what LBJ was offering, but, by the time he came into office, the situation had gotten so bad that it was all that he could do just to guarantee South Vietnam's existence.

Nevertheless, the situation stabilized. The North Vietnamese army was pushed out of South Vietnam. Nixon got the North to sign a cease-fire agreement, which the North (being perfidious communists) violated.

And the South Vietnamese army got good enough that, after Nixon had pulled American ground troops out of the area, South Vietnam was able to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression, for a while.

In 1972, North Vietnam sent 150,000 troops—along with columns of tanks from the Soviet Union—to invade South Vietnam. The latter had American air support, but only its own troops on the ground.

Result: Less than a third of North Vietnam's invasion force made it back north. Roughly 650 Americans were KIA in a campaign as big as the Battle of Kharkov. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam had won, big time.

Then, Watergate happened.

In 1975, North Vietnam—violating the cease-fire agreement AGAIN—launched another invasion of South Vietnam. The Soviet Union continued to support North Vietnam. The Congress of the United States of America pulled all support from South Vietnam.

Result: Yet another workers' paradise blighting the history of the twentieth century. And the kind of gloating you can see in this discussion thread.

What is the "winning" side? War comes at a massive cost for all participants. Interestingly the URL for the article implies the original name was "Vietnam war images from Vietnamese photographers" and was later changed to what it says now... I don't mean this as a slight to Vietnam whatsoever of course, I just don't understand using words "winning" and "losing" when anywhere from 1.5-4 million people died.

Completely agree. The "winning" side might be politicians or high-ranking army officers. The population? In almost all cases, they are the real losers, regardless of which sides they sympathize with, if any.

Indeed! And you could say that the real "winners" of this year's Super Bowl were the fans and spectators! Or, more cynically, perhaps the advertisers and other corporate interests who profited from it.

That's a reasonable thing to say and not at all willfully ignoring what is meant when someone talks about the winner of a competition between two opposed parties.

Really; More bombs in tonnage were dropped in three months than the entirety of WW2. The devastation wrought by the US on Vietnam is still being felt today, particularly the use of Agent Orange. The birth defects stemming from exposure are horrifying.

Dow Chemical was the real winner.

Well it certainly wasn't the USA, fortunately.

It's interesting, the "winning side" in this case overwhelmingly supports free market capitalism when surveyed today:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...

So who really won?

The US was fighting a proxy war with the soviet union. We had no interest in defeating the vietcong as much as stopping the spread of communism. Ho Chi Minh was a KGB agent and the communist revolution was largely born of soviet agitprop. So there is another layer to this conflict. Even though vietnam "won" they really were just puppets in a shadow war and it came at a huge cost for them. Much less than US.

My understanding is that Ho Chi Minh was agitating for French socialists to join Lenin's 3rd International in the 1910s. I don't think he was a Soviet "agent" in any way, and had his own beliefs, aligning with Bolsheviks, certainly. However, you can definitely argue Vietnam was a client state of USSR.

Ho Chi Minh was trained at Lenin's "Comintern" with the expressive goal of training foreign assets to spread Soviet communist interests. These assets would be funded and supplied by the soviets to agitate revolution in their countries. This essentially is an agent.

OK, I see what you mean by agent now. I had assumed you meant "receiving and following orders", but receiving training (including ideological) seems more in line with your meaning.

I do think almost every leader in South and Central America in the latter 20th Century could be called a "CIA agent" by that definition though. Not something I'd say.

some thoughts on the Viet Nam war.

A whole lot of excess words here, because the key point was here:

“The US […] supported the French return to Viet Nam.”

It was a US continuation of the reassertion of French imperialism, and as long as that imperialism continued, Hanoi wasn’t looking to roll over and avoid conflict, but to win it. Which, you know, they did.

The opportunity to avoid the war was for the US not to try to take over the failed French imperialist mission.

what you are saying is just not true. France gave up any claim to Vietnam in 1954. The US involvement was to attempt to stem the spread of communism, not to help the French.

These are some great photos!

But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has been basically poverty-class Nike factory workers for the last 50 years.

Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.

Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season.

There is growing wealth disparity with the people at the top enjoying modern luxuries, yes.

>Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season.

Same thing can be said about parts of Tokyo during the typhoon season.

That's funny because I actually live in Tokyo.

My family also owned a property next to a guy in Vietnam who owned a collection of 30 Ferraris.

To suggest Tokyo's flooding problem is anywhere close to Saigon is disingenuous.

I'm guessing you don't live near the Tamagawa River then. Granted this was 18 months ago but I remember there were evacuations and road closures in Setagaya. Things were a bit more dire on the Kanagawa side.

I recall something similar happening the year before too.

As seen in the movie Parasite depicting the stark contrast between rich and poor South Koreans, there is a scene where the entire neighborhood is flooded

My point being, you can cherry pick and see every city gets flooded. The difference with Saigon is flooding occurs throughout the city in critical areas. Government funds and projects exists to address these issues but the whole amount never gets allocated to properly developing the sewage infrastructure. Instead, hotfixes such as building the roads higher. This is a never ending back and forth with civilians building barriers or building their house higher so the water floods back into the streets. That's just one example of lack of infrastructure

Are you trying to convince us that Tokyo has better infrastructure than Saigon?

Because I don't think anyone was arguing otherwise. The person you replied to merely said the poverty in Vietnam wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm not sure how you went from that to flooding.

To be fair, to suggest widespread flooding in SE Asia during monsoon season is proof of anything at all is kind of disingenuous.

It's an infrastructure problem that money can mitigate.

I'm really not sure what point you're arguing. That Japan is many times richer than Vietnam? (You don't say!).

People are subject to a low standard of living. That’s literally the definition of poverty. Issues like this may merely be a proxy indicator of poverty, where it is debatable whether it is just a symptom. Nevertheless, it impedes people to go about and pursue greater economic activities when they have to worry about having clean water to drink, as another example .

I wish you luck drinking tap water or even the ice cubes at a street establishment in Vietnam

Edit: also, are you not proving my point? How can the people of a country be rich if the country itself is not? Unless there is great wealth disparity with most people living in impoverished conditions. I mean, if Vietnamese people were rich, they would have satiated their appetite for food, and other standard of living items, and eventually decide as a society that maybe they should fix the infrastructure problem that is wasting everyone’s time and even introducing risks of diseases / electrocution during these periods of flooding

You're reading things that aren't there. Literally no-one has argued Vietnam or its people are rich (or even suggested anything close to it). No one.

Recap: The commentator you replied to said it's gotten better in the best decade (factually correct) and suggested it's considerably better than most Westerners think it is (an opinion/observation that also correlates with my experience, but YMMV).

From that comment, you brought up flooding in Saigon to which it was pointed out (to illustrate the absurdity of even bringing it up), that one of the richest cities in the world also has parts of it that flood.

You took that to mean they think Vietnam is wealthier than Japan (?) and that flooding is worse in Tokyo (?). No one said either of those things.

Look, you seem articulate and intelligent but no-one has even come close to saying what you keep suggesting. Please re-read the thread with a less combative mindset and realize we are all pretty much in agreement.

Tokyo's problem is caused by water flow impediment, because Tokyo is a concrete jungle. So water can't soak through the ground.

They wouldn't need those massive underground tanks to store stormwater as much if they had chosen a different approach.

Many of the trusted infrastructure and construction projects in Vietnam are actually lead by foreign teams with Japan being a notable example ( bridges, etc.)

When it comes to drainage, Vietnam didn’t take the learnings of Japan who had to learn first hand this “tech debt” of a concrete jungle. In fact, the solution in Vietnam is often layering on more layers of concrete, so water floods anywhere but the streets instead ( people’s home, who foundation is now 10 feet below ground). This is the lowest cost solution while offering the politicians a kickback, until people build their barricades high and flood the streets again.

New Orleans?

See also: Atlantis

As the parent post noted, that development comes from having American jobs exported there (e.g., those Nike factories). Being a socialist society, the wealth disparities are far more stark than what we have in the West.

In regards to income inequalities, "socialist" literally means the opposite of what you are implying.

See, for example "As Vietnam Gets Wealthier, Economic Inequality Also Gets Worse" - https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/17029-as-vietnam-gets-wea...

so USA is a socialist state? because it has a very large wealth disparities

"The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation."

socialist society would be the other way around... unless you think Scandinavian countries are capitalists because they have lower wealth disparity

I wouldn't say it's abject poverty. But it's certainly far less developed than South Korea or Taiwan, which is the most likely counterfactual for a free South Vietnam. OTOH you could possibly argue (though far more speculatively) that North Vietnam would've turned into North Korea from the paranoia, isolation and humiliation of a loss.

Vietnam did not have a derivatives market until 5 years ago with liquidity being a fraction of other capital markets.

It's hard for long term growth when farmers can't hedge an off season

Additionally, you can look at food scarcity rates and the unbanked population.

Those two countries were impoverished military dictatorships for the first few decades as well. They also received significant economic support from the United States.

Vietnam is still developing.

I definitely saw it years ago up north. And it still occurs today: “In some areas stunting is as high as 75 percent. I don’t recall coming across such high rates anywhere else in the world. The average in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai is 40 percent, almost twice the national average in Vietnam.” - https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/visiting-nutritio...

That sentence implies the national average for stunted growth was 20% in 2015 - malnourishment is most definitely a sign of extreme poverty. Although I assume much of that is historical overhang?

I was hanging out a billiards establishment in a remote village ( population less than 10,000) a decade ago.

There were these elementary-school aged kids smoking cigarettes, cussing, etc. Eventually I realized they were 17.

It's a wealthy country because they've continually moved away from their brand of "communism".

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...

They are developing and have for eating. They have some problems like the pollution... in Hanoi it is terrible. But the country is in better shape than Laos and Cambodia by far, but not at the level of BKK in Thailand for example. I lived in Vietnam for almost 10 years, and one in Singapore and I plan to come back. I have mixed feelings when I get there, but overall, it is a lovely country, my second home, literally. I left a big chunk of my life there.

I will never forget how Vietnam changed my whole life, literally. For the good. Even with the negative things it has. I am spanish and Spain also has negative things (and positive). All countries do.

Vietnam is similar to China - the cities have a small middle class, a few very wealthy yet most of the country is quite poor, some of them brutally poor.

Leaving aside the question of whether anyone won that war, have you been to Vietnam? The country is developing extremely rapidly.

My jaw dropped the first time I went to Royal City in Hanoi. I hadn't seen anything like that in the US.

>But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side.

It is well beyond winning and losing sides in such wars. There is a foreign invader and the local population fighting against the invader tooth and nail with the invader losing it despite better/bigger weapons, economy, army. In many such wars one could make an argument that giving in to the foreign invader may have been a better option, at least in the long run, yet the deep guttural tribal drive to defend the Motherland takes over any of the rationality. I mean for example the Russian peasants, being by all the parameters slaves of Russian nobility, were fighting French in 1812 only to return to the same slavery like position after the war.

China, which intervened in the Korean War at the moment of North Korea's complete military collapse, has not been held to account for the horrific North Korean regime it saved and still protects. China doesn't want a unified Korea and the North Korean people pay the price.

China fought in the Vietnam war too, just not as directly as the U.S. Without the U.S. supporting the south, the north will easily win with the full resource support from China.

People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing. The world will look totally different today.

Got downvoted on this. LOL.

"If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing."

This sounds like the Domino Theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory

Chinese Communist government got involved in the communist evolutions in all the neighbor countries. And international communists did help each other in different countries to over throw legitimate government. Takeover the whole world was the goal of the international communists. Those are all facts, not a theory.

To add to the above, as much as some people want to mock America's involvement in Vietnam, one must note that The Domino Theory (used to justify that involvement) came true.

Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam.

And anyone who pulls the line of "independence from foreign domination" should have a talk with the grey hairs in your local Vietnamese neighborhood, here, in the States. They'll let you know how much people in South Vietnam wanted nothing to do with the tyrannical regime in the North.

Furthermore, one cannot disparage South Vietnam as a puppet regime without also disparaging South Korea, Taiwan, or West Germany for that matter.

Tell your neighbors come and talk with people from Mỹ Lai

There was a class divide with the educated in the south going through a french system asking for western support. I could see how different neighbourhoods would have different opinions. The richer more middle class or higher the more you wanted things to stay the same.

Those responsible for what happened there received due process of law and were punished.

Communists, on the other hand, either suppress or celebrate their own atrocities.

> Those responsible for what happened there received due process of law and were punished.

LOL The ONLY person that received ANY punishment was Calley, and he was sentenced to life only to serve three years of house arrest.

"were punished" is a joke.

Erm, that’s a lie. US is pretty good at protecting its war criminals, and it was quite visible in this case, where only a single one of the perpetrators has been punished, and the punishment was hilariously low (iirc just a few years of prison).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre

That's just one of them that we have evidence of. We know this was not a one off event.

Anyone who pulls the line of "Domino Theory" and "America was just fighting communism" must note all the war crimes that the US committed and was never held responsible for.

That part is true, but communists killed millions more. There is no perfect history to love, sad ?

The justification of America's involvement and the lionization of it does not rest upon "but communists killed millions more."

OK. So just let the communists kill millions more, or just call God to send the perfect army.

China was not on friendly terms with the north. They invaded Vietnam shortly after the Americans left, in response to Vietnam's actions in Cambodia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...

Lol. That's later story. China supported north in the Vietnam war, is this even a question?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War

No? My point is that Vietnam and China have a centuries-long history of antagonism; to take China's support of the North during the Vietnam War as anything other than realpolitik is to miss the greater context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Vietnam_relation...

FWIW, I agree with you regarding the dangers of communist purges- I lived in Laos in the late 70's/early 80's. I saw plenty of first-hand examples of what happens.

This is some propaganda for sure. ho chi mihn was a political prisoner and figurehead of the CCP state, similar to kim il-sung.

The vietmanese state has been an extension of the CCP since the 70s. This isn't up for debate, it's objective fact.

Except for the Vietnamese invasion of the Chinese satellite regime in Cambodia, and the literal shooting war between China and Vietnam immediately afterwards.

The Sino-Soviet split was a Very Big Deal, and Vietnam was firmly on the Soviet side of that split.

IIRC. It was primarily the USSR which backed the North Vietnamese.

By the early 70’s the communist block had split between the USSR and China. Vietnam was USSR not Chinese ally.

Not long after the end of the Vietnam war, China attacked Vietnam (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War) ostensibly as the Vietnamese had attacked Cambodia, by this stage supported by China (and the US) to dispose the Khmer Rouge.

Suffice to say it went badly for the PLA and thanks to the Vietnamese the Khmer Rouge was ultimately disposed.

Not really, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War

Noone wants a unified Korea, except Koreans. Japan is not interested in having such a powerful economic mix nearby and China the same. Noone wants. If someone wanted, it would be the Koreans only.

I would assume Japan would rather have a powerful economic neighbour than a hostile nuclear one.

You are confused two thing though.

First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win.

Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.

> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US.

And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords

North Vietnam then broke that agreement:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)

Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war

No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO.

I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)

You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?

Yes, Vietnam is awesome - and there's a lot of capitalism going on even if it's not official.

But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development.

The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.

I must have missed the parts where South Korea and Taiwan were bombed into the stone age for years and then forced to repeatedly fight their neighbors for continued survival.

From the virtually complete annihilation of civilian infrastructure in the north to the widespread deforestation, poisoning, and unexploded ordinance in the south, the US barely left a country behind. Such comparisons are incredibly disingenuous without a view of how long Vietnam had to spend just rebuilding functioning infrastructure, education, etc and all without wealthy foreign investment. The Vietnamese people and government should be applauded for everything they have achieved.

It is hard to make a comparison between South Korea or Taiwan and Vietnam.

South Korea was the recipient of one of the largest and most consistent foreign aid packages for decades. From 1946-1978 South Korea received as much foreign aid from the US as all of Africa combined over the same period. (South Korea has a population of 50 million; Africa has a population of 1.3 billion.)

And then on top of that was the military aid from the US, which made up 20-40% of all aid. Half a billion dollars just under the CRIK program from 1950-1956. Even today, the US spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on its military presence in South Korea.

And that's just from the US. Japan also contributed billions of aid and development money.

Meanwhile Vietnam received no foreign aid and was instead under a 30-year trade embargo until 1995. Unsurprisingly, as soon as the embargo was removed, the Vietnamese economy began growing strongly (9.5% growth in 1995).

A similar story can be told about Taiwan and the massive economic and military aid it received from the US.

Plus South Korea and Taiwan were both single-party dictatorships with state-directed economies for decades, so it isn't really clear what was so great about them being "state capitalistic but not democratic". See the 228 Massacre in Taiwan, for instance.

Different leaders, different flavors of communism, different time.

I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon.

When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.

I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders.

I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.

Weird, because I grew up in the 80s and 90s and there was nothing but negative press about the Vietnam War. Consensus has been that it was a giant mistake for most of the past couple decades.

I think you're right it was quickly viewed as a "blunder", even just before the war's end, but I think GP might feel that "mistake" is underselling it to a shocking extent. The Strategic Hamlet Program amounted to herding people in South Vietnam into concentration camps -- no, not as awful as those of the Nazis, but concentration camps nonetheless. There were many other brutal policies inflicted on non-combatants (not just spontaneous outbursts, policies).

Have you watched any movies about the Vietnam War? Like Casualties of War (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097027/, Apocalypse Now (1979), etc : https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000091595/ To argue that Americans have been 'heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit' doesn't square up with the coverage and popular media about Vietnam that I've seen since I've been alive. Virtually all of the movies and press are about disillusioned soldiers, brutality, violence, lost causes, etc.

The North had Hanoi Hilton and Desert Inn and plenty of places it kept and tortured political dissidents and American POWs in violation of the Geneva convention. The Vietnam War was a giant mistake, a huge blunder, however, as others have mentioned the Korean war was fought under similar pretexts and no one regrets the U.S. stepping in to save South Korea.

I don't know whether or not the U.S. made all the right choices in the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. Would you prefer a world in which the U.S. hadn't engaged at all against Russia or stayed completely out of Asia (as well as European conflicts)? I don't know if the world that exists today would be better or worse off, really hard to say.

I'm not ncfausti so I think most of this comment doesn't apply to me. Nevertheless, I don't agree with many of your conclusions.

* The existence of films critical of the war does not imply that the mainstream "serious" political opinion of the day (that you would read in national newspapers, for example) went beyond calling the war a "quagmire" or "disaster", then with a justifying "but...", usually mentioning Domino theory or Containment as you implicitly do. I disagree with that assessment.

* The fact that North Vietnam (or Japan, or anyone) were awful in their treatment of PoWs doesn't excuse the US treating civilians in South Korea terribly. You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your own actions (or a close ally's actions), not someone else's. It's not "whataboutism" to focus on the effects you can actually control, even if it's historical. You can't change the past, but you can learn from your own history and understand what is "foreign propaganda" and what's actually just an uncomfortable truth.

* I can think of a few US interventions in the Cold War that seem to have hurt more than they helped, even with info available to decision-makers before committing to them. Vietnam is one of them.

Edit: I don't want to contribute to a pointless back-and-forth asking leading questions of each other, and don't have the time to go into major detail or link reading material, but I just thought I'd at least elaborate my thoughts more on the "blunder" comment, and the point about focusing on your own actions.

I meant “civilians in South Vietnam”. Although the Jeju uprising massacres of leftists in post-war South Korea were unjustifiable also.

I've been to that same museum and also the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought they were neat examples of Vietcong ingenuity and resourcefulness but I'm not ashamed of the US at all. War is complicated and in the case of communist uprisings, internal purges follow "victories" that are just as atrocious as anything outside assistance can do. See Stalin's Great Purge, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc.

Right now, it's very popular on sites like Reddit and increasingly here to fill threads with bad historical takes that list everything bad the US has ever done, as if its acting in a vacuum where no other countries exist. In nearly every case of US intervention, you'll find that other countries were intervening on the other side. That's what the cold war was about. Domino theory was valid and rational. Large marxist countries exported revolution, allied powers supported governments resisting revolution. You might enjoy the underdog story of ethno-nationalists defeating the "empire" but on the other side of that story is always millions of families who lost lives and property to shitty redistribution schemes afterwards. My parents are from a latin american country that suppressed its marxist rebellion(with US help), but I have Cuban-American friends whose grandparents weren't so lucky.

>When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.

I'm generally pretty stoic about these sorts of things, but that museum really did a number on me. I felt emotional and choked up most of the time and it put a damper on the rest of my day. I'm glad I went, though.

>First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US.

My understanding of the war was the USA wasn't there to make Vietnam the 51st State. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.

> the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists

How could the Viet Cong have been as successful as they were if they didn't have substantial support in the south?

There was supposed to have been a referendum on re-unification in 1956, but it was cancelled by South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem.

> They were there fighting a proxy war against the Russians and Chinese and to protect the south of the country that wanted nothing to do with the communists.

Vietnam was absolutely a second world country at that time, and it was an awful proxy war for many people. The theory that was used was the domino theory, that if a first world country would fall to a second world country, then others would start to fall in a "line of dominos".

It wasn’t a war of independence from the US, it was a civil war the US was dumb enough to get involved in.

It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US.

It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.

It could have ended in 1919 or even 1940's, lots of lost opportunities. https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-18/little-known-story-vi...

There was huge ethnic and class component to the Vietnam conflict. In fact, in many ways it was far more important than the nominal communist character of the North, at least from the Vietnamese perspective.

Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later.

If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail.

The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.

I just googled when 'The Ugly American' came out. 1958! Nobody can say "noone could have known".

I'm not an expert on Vietnam, but I'll just say that whatever their problems with a Chinese merchant class, the problems with a Western burning-villages class were probably bigger at the time.

I'm not trying to defend American policies in Vietnam. But Vietnam became independent in 1954, albeit split between North and South. The Vietnam War as typically understood by Americans, and as encompassing most well known atrocities, wouldn't begin for another 10 years.

Also, American and, more generally, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourses tend to infantilize people in these countries. I doubt the Vietnamese had a simplistic, love-hate relationship with either the French or the Americans even after the innumerable atrocities. Just like in every other nation even the masses were and are capable of complex strategic, mixed-motive thinking. Look at the sheer devastation America has caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet AFAIU neither most Iraqis nor most Afghanis wish for U.S. involvement to completely disappear. Americans would never believe themselves capable of pressing a war out of pure spite, anger, or retaliation; yet we somehow think other groups do? IOW, there's something problematic in thinking that what fundamentally drove the Vietnamese was a response to American atrocities. Far more likely (and consonant with the notion that all communities around the world tend to behave similarly) is that those atrocities exacerbated underlying, primary dynamics. Afterall, the merchant class by definition didn't tend to live on rice farms. They were centered in the cities.

The U.S. tried to implement many of the same policies the British did in Malaysia. During the communist insurgency in Malaysia the British corralled ethnic Chinese (the primary supporters of communism, such as they were--i.e. it wasn't that simple) into cities and towns. (To this day ethnic Chinese can't own rural farms outright in Malaysia.) But Chinese communities were already mostly urban, and were of course a minority (20-30%). It was a plan that arguably worked by accident. But such a strategy was never going to work in Vietnam because the dynamics were totally flipped. That would have been much more obvious if the U.S. saw the ethnic divisions for what they were.

Maybe trying to exploit and maximize ethnic differences in other countries is fundamentally a bad idea in the medium/long term.

Absolutely, except in this case the U.S. wasn't even capable of that. They missed the importance of the ethnic dynamics, apparently too focused on political and economic dynamics that were at best comorbidities and at worst reflections and mirages.

From the random CIA dispatch reports from Laos and Indonesia I've read, low-level American officials were capable of regional socio-political savvy. I just don't think that appreciation ever translated up the chain. So, for example, people have claimed that the U.S. incited genocide in Indonesia. That seems both true and false. True because low-level CIA officers certainly seemed to understand how political and ethnic divisions overlapped and therefore how their anti-communist campaigning could and did devolve to ethnic cleansing. But I don't think leaders in Washington appreciated that at all. Perhaps mostly out of a racist disinclination to consider such aspects, but oblivious nonetheless.

> the problems with a Western burning-villages class

"Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to cow the populace, liquidate opponents, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts. Estimates of the total number of South Vietnamese civilians killed by the VC/PAVN between 1954 and 1975 range from 106,000 to 227,000."

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Cong_and_People%27s_Army_...

Perhaps we can go back in history a little bit further.

The name Vietnam most probably based on Nanyue or Nam Viet a small little known kingdom created by Qin Dynasty deputy General, name Zhao Tuo or Tro Duo, a Han Chinese [1]. The indigenous or the native people of central and south Vietnam are not from China, they are mainly from Austronesian origin probably Taiwan so called Chams or Cham people [2]. They were the main inhabitants of the land for more than a thousand years (around 1500 years) and had a flourishing Champa kingdoms from 2nd to 16th century AD. The Chams mainly Muslim at the time, had been evicted just like the Moro in the Spain during the Spanish Inquisition or forced to convert. The eviction is completed after the Kinh people from the north displaced them during the Nam tien or "March to the South" and by doing that essentially tripled the original northern kingdom area size [3]. It's a kind of ethnic cleansing by today's standard.

The Kinh is originally ethnic Chinese intermarriage with local Tai-Kadai of the northern Vietnam. For about a thousand years they were essentially conquered and ruled by imperial China. As an analogy the Chams is like the Maya people of Vietnam, until they were eventually evicted rather than assimilated in around 16th AD by the Nguyen lords from the north to the other surrounding countries/areas towards the end of Nam tien movements.

The Chams has a proper civilization called Champa just like the Mayan civilization. The Chams' language is the pre-cursor to the modern Malay and Indonesian language. Their oldest writing on a stone tablet namely Dong Yeng Chau contains an old classical writing of Chams languages in the 4th century AD and was discovered recently in modern Quang Nam province, central Vietnam. It is amazingly still comprehensible if you know the modern language [4]. Interestingly the old name for Quang Nam is Simhapura or Lion City, and it is highly probable than the Cham people conquered Singapore (Singapura) and renamed it similar to their capital's name just like York in the UK becomes New York in the US.

[1]http://eastasiaorigin.blogspot.com/2018/05/ethnic-origin-of-...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chams

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_ti%E1%BA%BFn

[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%C3%B4ng_Y%C3%AAn_Ch%C...

> It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US.

The Vietnam War is largely considered to be 1955-1975. The French were out by 1954, and American troops in any number were there from 1965 to 1973.

> 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.

5x to 7x as many South Vietnamese troops died compared to Americans, who had combat troops there for less than half of those 20 years.

Dienbienphu was in 1954, just for starters.

> Dienbienphu was in 1954, just for starters.

Yes, that's the reason the French were out in 1954.

It was the same people on the north vietnamese side all throughout this entire multi-decade period, from the early 1940s till the mid-70s. They fought a rotating cast of western-backed fig leaf local rulers. I'm not sure what else I can tell you, here.

The Geneva Accords that dealt with the dismantling of French Indochina proved to have long-lasting repercussions, however. The crumbling of the French Empire in Southeast Asia led to the formation of the states of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), the State of Vietnam (the future Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam), the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Kingdom of Laos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Geneva_Conference

Well, during and after the Korean War, South Korea was under a corrupt dictator who killed several hundred thousand civilians for being communist. Its economy didn't improve until 60s, and it couldn't be really called a democratic country until mid-90s.

So it's a bit of a stretch to claim that South Korea became today's South Korea because it survived the war in 1953. One could equally say that Vietnam's economic development in 2000s validates North Vietnam's victory.

True, and North Korea current poverty is totally made by the international sanctions lead by the US. Vietnam is a great example that a communist country can open slowly if not bullied into a antagonistic position by the US.

Do not defend communism, man... you have too many history records to know it is a failure in all senses: poverty and lack of freedom.

For the record, China and Vietnam is not what I would call communist. That is more North Korea or Cuba. In Vietnam even foreigners can buy property already nowadays. I do not recall the exact conditions but I know people who did it. It is a capitalist system, actually. With a lot of control sometimes, but with market rules.

It is not about the sanctions. It is the system chosen. Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that. There is a lot of literature about the problem of economic calculation in socialism systems proved by how russians did theirs, for example (black markets and copying countries budgets, the U.S. army compared to the russian one is an example of such a thing).

And do not make me started on the repression, that is the worst part. But all go hand in hand at the end.

Vietnam is developing, and I am glad it is. But what they are doing is not communism at all, do not sell us that. I have been living there for almost 10 years and I hope I can come back. It is a lovely country.

"Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that"

If we are into intellectual honesty, then North Korea does not match any features of Socialism or Communism I've ever read or heard of.

Tt is a totalitarian absolute monarchy bordering on "worship god emperror"

And today, in 2021, someone living in South Korea can criticize the government. Does someone in Vietnam have the same right/privilege/ability?

Have fun if you're Christian:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_Vietnam

Yes, I know, and South Koreans had to fight ~40 years after the Korean War to gain that right. That's the point I'm trying to make: a war is never about good guys beating bad guys, and when it ends nobody goes home as a victor and lives happily ever after.

How is this being downvoted? This site is incredible.

South Korea started growing rapidly by the beginning of the 1960's and its economic growth has been consistent regardless of the political regime [^1]. What has been consistent was a significantly different economic system than the North, which would certainly not have survived unification after a North Korean victory. Military spending can't explain the disparity between the North and South as China had similar economic performance and consistently lower aggregate per capita spending than the North.

Vietnam, on the other hand, only really began to reform its economy after the collapse of the soviet union. If anything, North Vietnam's victory emboldened communist leaders in the aftermath of the war.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River

South Korea was fortunate in that its second dictator, despite being an utterly despicable human shitbag, had a knack for economic development (or maybe he had good economic aides - I don't know). However, its 60s economic system was about as capitalist as 90s China - it was built upon massive government projects to boost export, allocated to large corporations, and the government repressed wages and crushed labor unions so that these corporations could stay competitive.

In fact there were strong parallels to the Soviet economic plans, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_of_South_Korea

vs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_Soviet_...

There has been a lot of studies into the economic performance of south korea and the other asian tigers compared to latin american countries that had similar levels of economic development after WWII and one commonality is the inability of government subsidies to influence export success. A product exported on the global market by a country desperate for foreign investment probably doesn't have the means to gain a competitive advantage through direct capital investment or subsidies.

Of course, a country can always be competitive by keeping wages low (probably artificially low in south korea) but I think south korea and the other asian tigers got a lot of things right that aren't comparable to how mainland china approached economic reform.

Besides being of a duration of five years there isn't a lot in common the economic planning of the soviet union and south korea in the aftermath of the Korean war. The soviet union's plans controlled the allocation of almost every resource and good in the economy and its ultimate price. South Korea's planning was mostly limited to guiding government investment and lacked the policy levers available to Gosplan.

South Korea literally wouldn’t exist today without UN intervention.

They won, but the cost was enormous.

We grieve 58,000 deaths, but they lost more than a million (the figures are very fuzzy).

Their soldiers lived rough as hell, and weren't particularly well-equipped.

We bombed the living hell out of them. We used napalm.

Being an NVC was a tough gig.

From what I can see, Vietnam is actually starting to thrive, and I sincerely wish them the best.

To put that into perspective, the US has lost more than half a million people due to the Coronavirus. Vietnam lost 50 people. And there was no war.

How do you know that Vietnam has only lost 50 people?

Let's just say the government is super evil and they covered up 99 deaths every 100 deaths for some reason, although we have no evidence that they did. They lost 50,000 people.

The US lost half a million.

Are you happy now?

Let me ask you something.

Do you think a south-east asian country with ~100,000,000 people only had 50 people die from the COVID-19 virus?

Answer honestly

The CDC currently rates Vietnam's covid levels as "Low" https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-vie...

It's generally seen as having as effective response against the pandemic. They closed borders early and have employed an effective testing and tracing strategy. Their data appears to be transparent and is corroborated by neighboring countries.

I just read this, posting the reference in another reply, seems to be a good enough summary:

"One of the reasons Vietnam was able to act so quickly and keep the case count so low is that the country experienced a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 and human cases of avian influenza between 2004 and 2010. As a result, Vietnam had both the experience and infrastructure to take appropriate action. Vietnam makes many key containment decisions in a matter of days, which may take weeks for governments in other countries to make. Although Vietnam is a highly centralized country, a number of key decisions were made at the local level, which also contributed to the swift response."

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam

you say this as if the covid exists

No horse in this race - but

If you have any indication that the numbers are fabricated you're better off posting them (or any references at all). Otherwise you just sound like you're appealing to prejudices, like as if "south-east asian" countries couldn't possibly have had an effective epidemiologic response.

(It might not have - you might be right - still, the form of your argument is completely wrong for fruitful discussion)

For an example of a reference that is a counter-argument to your point, see - https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-vietnam

I've spent time studying abroad in Vietnam so I think I can answer honestly.

One day, I went camping with some friends. We then returned to the capital and 2 days later I saw the high rise she lived in on the news. She lives in a high rise that's about 38 floors, with around 30 units per floor, so that's about 1000 units. Someone who lived somewhere in that high rise had tested positive for covid so they placed the building under a police barricade. A couple days later they limited the restrictions to only the floors the patient (zero) had been to.

Right now they're experiencing a really bad covid outbreak, and I'm not entirely confident that this isn't the big one that will lead to non-stop community transmission like in the US.

There are a ton of foreigners in the country, I know maaaany people working for embassies from western countries, if there are shady stuff going on you would hear it from them.

A recent development is that they aren't publishing the schedules of an infected person anymore. Before they use to say:

J.S who works at the Samsung Plant on 14 Main St. on the 14th of May visited the Starbucks from 2pm-3pm on Xuan Dieu street, then he visited the au co flower market from 3pm-4:30pm, and then went to Karaoke with colleagues at 54 Blueberry Lane from 5pm-9:30pm, afterwhich he took a cab home whose driver has not yet been identified.

And they would do that for every day since their suspected time of infection. So it was extremely privacy invasive but it helps with contact tracing. Now they will just announce the locations, I presume it's because there's too many new cases.

Recently in the news there was a couple who tested positive for covid but wouldn't come out of their house for 2 or 4 hours against police & health worker's demands. If you have covid, you are forced into hospitalization so you can be monitored by doctors and not infect others.

If you so much as went to the same grocery store at the same time as a covid patient you're going to get sent into centralized quarantine.

They know they can't handle millions of cases so they have to crack down hard on any cases. The death toll last week was only 30, it's these part few weeks that it's been steadily going up.

Do you believe widespread and aggressive quarantine and contact tracing are an effective tool against COVID-19? 50 does seem suspicious. I am skeptical of the data. And yet, if a government (and popluation) actually went along with contact tracing and (real) quarantine, I truly believe it would be relatively straight forward to contain and stop the spread of the virus.

Last year there was a story that Vietnam had spearfished the chinese health ministry and got an idea how bad covid is in real time. That's why they locked boarders pretty fast and got away rather lightly.

Yes, absolutely. They have an authoritarian though somewhat benevolent government, and a culture of following public health advice.

Yes. Vietnam had experience in dealing with a possible pandemic before: SARS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Urbani

To quote wikipedia:

> Urbani realized that Chen's ailment was probably a new and highly contagious disease. He immediately notified the WHO, triggering a response to the epidemic (principally isolation and quarantine measures) that would end it within five months. He also persuaded the Vietnamese Health Ministry to begin isolating patients and screening travelers, thus slowing the early pace of the epidemic.

The minister didn't cover up anything, did anything they could to stop the new deadly virus. Urbani later died of SARS and was hailed as a hero: https://www.who.int/neglected_diseases/news/Fifteen_years_af...

Vietnam maybe is a third world country but they are very serious about deadly flu pandemic.

More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/05/05/v...

> But by the end of the two-hour meeting, the vice minister of health, Nguyen Van Thuong, had agreed to allow WHO to summon an international team of experts. He also promised to organize a task force at the ministry that would review the situation daily.

> It was, Brudon said, a "turning point."

> Vietnam's response contrasted with that of China, which for weeks tried to conceal the extent of its outbreak. But a health official in Vietnam, Le Thi Thu Ha, said her country made a simple calculation: "We needed that technical assistance," she said.

> ...

> That week, the Health Ministry set up a task force. Days later, a dozen epidemiologists and pathologists had arrived from Britain, the United States, Sweden, Germany, France and Australia.

They asked for help when they needed help, not saving face like China's handling of COVID in 2019.

This seems like a flame. Anyway, strategically speaking, US COVID-19 deaths had little impact on the country's fighting strength. So they're not really comparable to North Vietnam's war losses.

Attributing south Korea's success after 1980 to US intervention in 1950 is disingenuous.

South Korea had an economy that was similar to or slightly worse than North Korea until the 80s.

This is a classic example of "white man's burden" where south Korean success in 1980 is being attributed to white intervention in 1950, which was followed by decades of poverty. Apparently Koreans can't build a country without American help. Perhaps north Korea would also have been in much better shape without US sponsored world wide sanctions.

If you want to know the consequences of American intervention, latin America is impossible to ignore. Especially Haiti.

Winning a war and living with the consequences are two very different things. Vietnam won the war. At great cost. Things might have been different if they lost.

But the US did lose the war, come out of the region and its primary objective of preventing a socialist govt. in Vietnam could not be achieved.

Was it worth it for Vietnam to win the war, that is a totally different question. Was it worth it for US to lose the war? Definitely not. The mightiest nation on earth could not overcome a peasant nation with guerrilla fighters and outdated equipment. That is a slap in the face.

People in the pictures are all pretty skinny. It looks like they must have a healthy diet.

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