Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That said, the facts and stories presented in the article are themselves interesting and enlightening.
Unfortunate to see Vietnam turning into a new China.
First google hit.
As far as invaders go, both sides invited so many vistors and advisors its hard to say who that is.
As you can see, most of these divisions were short-lived and that idea that Vietnam was one unified country for a long period of time before being arbitrarily split by warring politicians is not correct.
Framing the Vietnam war as a communist struggle against Western invaders is naive and incorrect. South Vietnam was governed by a nationalist but anti-communist government that sought aid from the US and others, while North Vietnam was a communist government that was aided by the USSR and China.
It's well on it's way to becoming South Korea.
Tho' they don't hide their political bias, and it is often interesting reading same news stories in the Guardian (left leaning UK paper) vs lets say the Telegraph (right leaning UK paper) for differing view points and then making up ones own mind.
The history of the war is plainly relevant to Vietnam's economy today. At the very least it is crucial to supporting the article's thesis that capitalism is providing an incentive and engine for the suppression of this historical memory.
It makes one believe Capitalism means Coca-Cola, Microsoft and other corporations taking over the world, corrupting local governments and destroying local businesses.
At its best, this is a form of 'Crony Capitalism', but far from what Capitalism genuinely is.
I really think that nearly all political theory (up to and including Marxism and Libertarianism/Objectivism) belong to the pre-complexity-theory era. Complexity science and all its related fields (evolutionary dynamics, etc.) are just devastating to those theories. One big meta-lesson of these fields is that our intuition is calibrated for dealing with small scale local systems and simply falls apart in these arenas. You have about as much intuition for what happens in an economy of 300+ million people as you have for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole.
We seem to have yet to produce a post-complexity political philosophy. Most political thinkers seem to still be in denial and clinging desperately to their 19th century (and earlier) notions of human behavior and social dynamics.
The author uses stories of war crimes and American military destruction to paint the Vietnam War as USA (with the help of a puppet government) vs. the people of Vietnam. This narrative is naive and ignores the historical and political complexities of the time:
1. Modern Vietnam was only unified in 1802, and then quickly colonized (and separated into three zones) by the French less than 50 years later. It is incorrect to think that Vietnam was always one country and the 1954 Geneva Accords arbitrarily split the country for the good of the West.
2. The Viet Minh, who fought and expelled the French were a multi-ideological group that included non-communist nationalists. Ho Chi Minh systematically eradicated the non-communist factions and consolidated power. Some of the fanatical anti-communists that arose later in South Vietnam were those that had had family members murdered by the communist faction.
3. This narrative ignores the Republic of Vietnam as a true sovereign state. It is incorrect to describe RVN as simply a puppet of the US. True, the Vietnam war was a proxy war, but its involved nations had agendas of its own and ignoring these is patronizing and false. People vote with their feet. In the 300-day grace period after the 1954 division that allowed open migration between the two Vietnams, 600,000 people migrated south compared with around 150,000 to the north. Around 1975, those who could scrambled to escape the country. Over the next 20 years, over two million less fortunate people would risk their lives on rickety boats to flee the communist regime. It's a very naive picture to paint that the US was bombing all the of the poor Vietnamese who just wanted independence into submission.
Aside from the lack of historical nuance, the author goes on excuse the communist regime from blame, with incredibly disingenuous passages like this:
"The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people."
The US did not leave Vietnam in ruins. War, two-sided war did. In Saigon, where did war widows and orphans come from? From the North killing the fathers and husbands in war. Who created the refugees and destroyed two thirds of the villages? The North, when it invaded the South. War is complicated, and obviously both sides are complicit in this tragedy, but not in the author's eyes. (Unsurprisingly, he doesn't mention the scores of summary executions and systematic torture of ARVN veterans in "re-education camps" post 1975).
The US made plenty of blunders and ill-conceived and unwarranted political plays during the course of the Vietnam War, but North Vietnam does not get away blame free here. And while our standard history narrative in the US mostly half-apologetically describes Vietnam as a mistake and tries to forget about it, few people stop to consider if perhaps the US was on the side of "good" (or at least, the better of the two) in this case.
How might Vietnam be different today if it had gone the way of South Korea (which, at the time, was even poorer than Vietnam)? When looking at its Cold War era allies (USSR, PRC), it's no surprise that Vietnam ranks so poorly on corruption. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
There is a reason for that huge number of people migrating south:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Passage_to_Freedom#Pr...
Those anecdotes read like someone who never read "Fire in the Lake". The article anecdotes sound less corrupt than BAU in in the urban areas during the war.