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Vietnam / Dien Bien Phu Discussion

dien bien phu war Vietnam morality history discussion vitenam debate

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#1
theroadstopshere

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This forum topic is specifically for discussions not related to the manga. Discussions of Vietnam as a war or Dien Bien Phu specifically as a historical military situation are best suited to go here, where posters can be notified of replies, text is not compressed into the smaller text blocks, and it will not bother future readers looking for recommendations or reviews on the manga.

 

Thanks in advance for your cooperation.


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#2
Purple Library Guy

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Funny that it was this huge thing on the front but then it never was responded to at all back here.

But I'll put in a cent or two.  To me, the whole discussion on the 'front page' was fundamentally misleading in that it talked about a war between the South and the North.  But there never really was such a war.  It was a war of independence between Vietnam and the US.  The US successfully occupied one part and got themselves some satrap quislings to try to administer it for them, but the population of the occupied section never considered themselves part of a country one could refer to as "South Vietnam"; nearly all were in favour of the US leaving and reunification and many fought to achieve that.

This is the fundamental reason there were so many atrocities:  The American forces and leadership saw the South Vietnamese as the enemy, which they basically were, and so the logic of engagement inched inevitably in the direction of genocide.  If they had been in a position where they were fighting for the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese, they would have been much more secure in their position and would certainly have been able to prevail at least to the extent of keeping the country divided (as happened in Korea). 



#3
Giantess

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Also, the most important thing to understand about the war from the US perspective is the Pentagon Papers, which revealed that Johnson's reasons for escalating the war were, according to his own internal documents, 70% about avoiding a humiliating US defeat -- in other words, to protect his own political reputation or, at best, the reputation of the country.  That is the absolute key to understanding anything about Vietnam.  None of the other reasons people gave for the war are true; or, at least, they're not the primary reason the US was there.

 

The primary reason the US was involved in Vietnam was because Johnson was terrified of becoming known as the only president to lose a major war.  Theories about the political or tactical implications of a loss there were not a major factor; the Domino Theory was never something that actual US policymakers believed, just something they used to justify devoting more resources to the conflict and to rally domestic support in order to avoid a politically humiliating defeat.


Edited by Giantess, 07 September 2013 - 01:28 AM.


#4
jindo90

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Funny that it was this huge thing on the front but then it never was responded to at all back here.

But I'll put in a cent or two.  To me, the whole discussion on the 'front page' was fundamentally misleading in that it talked about a war between the South and the North.  But there never really was such a war.  It was a war of independence between Vietnam and the US.  The US successfully occupied one part and got themselves some satrap quislings to try to administer it for them, but the population of the occupied section never considered themselves part of a country one could refer to as "South Vietnam"; nearly all were in favour of the US leaving and reunification and many fought to achieve that.

This is the fundamental reason there were so many atrocities:  The American forces and leadership saw the South Vietnamese as the enemy, which they basically were, and so the logic of engagement inched inevitably in the direction of genocide.  If they had been in a position where they were fighting for the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese, they would have been much more secure in their position and would certainly have been able to prevail at least to the extent of keeping the country divided (as happened in Korea). 

 

Well, guy, you forgot about the millions of Vietnamese fleeing from VN before, during and after 1975, VN Unite Day. They fled their home country for a (few) reason. Just because they supported the lost cause of the war and fled doesn't mean they were not part of the population.

I'm not going to say anything about why the US failed and VN Communists won. But coming from a family that supported or worked for either side, I can kinda understand why some wants the US out of VN, AND why some wants the US to stay. The situation has been neither black nor white.

Some said they were doing it for the future generations so just let the future generations judge their actions. And years later the contemporaries can't judge the actions of their fathers and grandfathers. Because the contemporaries don't live in the time of their fathers and grandfathers, the contemporaries can't possibly understand why previous generations did what they did.



#5
Purple Library Guy

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Ah, well then, let us by all means treat the past as an entirely alien country and learn nothing, ever.

 

However, there is nonetheless a reason the US bombed South Vietnam harder than North Vietnam.  Any regime has some supporters or it doesn't last a day; with massive outside support, the South Vietnamese regime/s lasted for a few years.  But they certainly never had enough local support that they would have lasted long without US presence even if the North never made a move.  Still, yes, surely there were some people who were supporters or implicated in the regime and might have wanted to leave on that basis.

But I think it's awfully facile to say "Person X ran away from a place that had been bombed to smithereens and poisoned so nothing would grow.  He must have supported the people who did it!"  Most refugees from Vietnam were refugees from war, not political refugees, and the war's destructiveness to civilian lives came mainly from the US.

Y'know, Ho Chi Minh was originally friendly to the US.  He assumed that the place with the original war for independence from foreign colonial rule (British) in the name of freedom, who spent so much of their time talking about freedom, would support his people's aspirations to independence from foreign colonial rule (French) in the name of freedom.  He was mistaken.  Accounts suggest the reality came as something of a shock to him.


Edited by Purple Library Guy, 11 September 2013 - 05:47 AM.


#6
Natureboy

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Whether Ho Chi Minh was a great democrat or a nasty Stalinist, it's hard to deny that he was the most important leader in late colonial French Indochina. The Vietnamese people were represented at the peace talks that ended World War I and led to the Treaty of Versailles, among their delegation was the young Ho Chi Minh. (Finding that out shocked me when doing research at the Library of Congress for a history term paper, as the US-Vietnam War was still raging.) Unlike many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe, the imperial power in Vietnam was one the 'winning' side of WWI--so no support from the infant League of Nations and "no dice" for independence that round.

 

Graham Greene's The Quiet American was fiction, but I does provide some contemporaneous insight into the kind of forces that led to a separate government in the south--capable of signing a cold-war mutual defense treaty with the U.S. Historically the south was also an independent country for much of the time the north was part of or tributary to Imperial China (See Champa.). That said, the north had come to politically and culturally dominate the south well before French colonial rule.


Edited by NatureBoy, 01 October 2013 - 06:11 AM.