Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War
From: Chuck Searcy <chuckusvn@gmail.com>
Subject: [Vsg] Fwd: Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War
Date: May 8, 2017 at 9:27:38 PM PDT
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
MAY 5, 2017
BY MARK ASHWILL
As we reflect on the 42nd anniversary of the merciful and jubilant end of the American War in Viet Nam, I have good news to share with US Americans, especially those who remember, or came of age in, that turbulent era: Viet Nam is alive and well and, indeed, prospering in many respects. In fact, it’s faring better than the superpower it defeated in terms of optimism, dynamism, and hope.
This leads me to my second message. Contrary to what you may have heard from the US media, overseas Vietnamese, or other sources, each with its own ax to grind, the United States lost the war even though Viet Nam now has a free market economy. Sadly, this is a message that has not penetrated the hearts and minds of most, including those who should know better, among them a public intellectual whom I deeply admire for his courage in speaking out about important issues of the day and his sober recognition that he is a refugee not an immigrant.
Last December, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a chaired professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, described by Amazon as “thrilling, rhythmic, and astonishing, as is the rest of Nguyen’s enthralling portrayal of the Vietnam War,” made the stunning pronouncement in a TV interview that “the US won this conflict” (8:03) because Viet Nam adopted a capitalist system, what is officially referred to as a socialist-oriented market economy.
I could see many viewers nodding their heads in solemn agreement. “Yes”, I could hear them proudly and confidently saying to themselves, chests puffed out and hearts beating red, white, and blue, we belatedly yet ultimately triumphed because Viet Nam acquiesced and became like US. Wasn’t that our goal from the beginning?
The Big Lie
This is a line, a fairy tale, a lie that I’ve heard many times. It somehow makes US Americans feel good that the “commies” finally came around and saw the light. It’s a psychological and emotional salve that reassures the gullible, the uninformed, and the nationalists that the sacrifices on their side were not in vain. The problem is it’s dead wrong.
3.8 million of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fellow Vietnamese and over 58,000 US Americans did not die in a war of economic systems or ideologies. The world is not binary and the cause for which they gave their all was not about a free market vs. a centrally planned economy. It was about Vietnamese governing Viet Nam without continued foreign interference, occupation, and war. Viet Nam won the war because it expelled yet another foreign invader.
Despite what embittered Vietnamese-Americans and diehard veterans who desperately want to believe, and want you to believe, that the loss of limbs, life and sanity were not in vain, it’s really that simple.
The “hardline communists” of whom you spoke, Mr. Viet, were also pragmatists – out of necessity. They made the fateful decision to bend rather than break with the Đổi Mới (renovation) reforms of 1986, which began to bear fruit in the mid-1990s during my first visit to the country of your birth. Viet Nam has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and is considered to be one of the great success stories of the developing world. It also ranks 5th among countries sending their young people to study in the US.
In spite of extremes of wealth and poverty that are characteristic of any rapidly developing economy, Viet Nam’s government has been praised for converting wealth into national well-being, i.e., helping to create a rising tide that raises all boats, certainly not a claim the US can make, where extreme wealth concentration and a resulting oligarchy are the order of the day. (20 US Americans own as much as wealth as 50% of the population.)
The Communist Party is not a monolith, as you know. In fact, there’s probably more diversity of opinion within this one party than in the US in which “there is only one party… the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”, as another US writer and public intellectual, Gore Vidal, once described the US political system. I know this because Viet Nam is not a country I visit from time to time; I have lived here for over a decade.
Of Errand Boys (and Girls)
Have you ever been to Hàng Dương Cemetery, where about 2,000 independence fighters are buried, most in unmarked graves, on an island used by the French, South Vietnamese, and US Americans as a penal colony in which 20,000 Vietnamese died? Many US Americans who lived through that era know Côn Sơn, part of the Côn Đảo Archipelago off the coast of southern Viet Nam, a melancholy and now peaceful island, as the place where the tiger cages were “discovered” by Tom Harkin and Don Luce in 1970.
In this memorial cemetery is the grave of national heroine Võ Thị Sáu, a Vietnamese schoolgirl who fought against the French colonialists, was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, becoming the first woman to be executed at Côn Sơn Prison. Every night, a throng of people, mostly Vietnamese, along with a few curious tourists, make the pilgrimage to her grave to pray, burn incense, pay their respects, and leave offerings.
Before her execution in March 1952 at the tender age of 19, Sáu spoke of “the colonialists who stole Viet Nam and the errand boys who sold it to them,” in reference to fellow Vietnamese who did the bidding of the French and, later, the US Americans. You know that the official country of your birth, “South Vietnam”, would have ceased to exist in 1956, four years after Sáu’s death by firing squad, if the US had not intervened and ignored calls for a national election, as stipulated by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Those who supported the Republic of Viet Nam and US patronage in thought, word, and deed, especially in deed, were the “errand boys” of whom Sáu spoke.
It is said that on the morning of Sáu’s execution the prison chaplain offered to baptize her and “wash away her sins” to which she replied “I have no sins. Baptize the people who are about to kill me.” …I ask only for one thing. When you come to shoot me, don’t cover my face. I am brave enough to look down the barrel.” If you know this part of your country’s history and understand it, you understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that the war was not about capitalism vs. communism.
Reality Check
The myth that the war was a battle of diametrically opposed ideologies is so pervasive that even some young Vietnamese studying in the US have internalized it. In a summer 2016 essay entitled What Vietnam Can Teach Us About a Divided America the author – on the occasion of Remembrance Day, July 27th, a national holiday in Viet Nam for remembering those who died and were wounded in the service of their country, a Vietnamese undergraduate enrolled at a southern university and a graduate of one of the top high schools in Viet Nam, remarked that while listening to her grandfather’s wartime stories, she “couldn’t help admiring and yet pitying my grandfather, a soldier risking his own life and sacrificing everything he had for the ideology he believed in.”
Reality check: Her grandfather and millions of others who courageously fought against the US military, its allies, and that of its client state did so for the noble cause of independence not on behalf of an ideology. From a Vietnamese perspective, the war was not about competing economic and social systems. He doesn’t need his granddaughter’s pity; he needs her understanding, deepest respect, and eternal gratitude. He has mine, and I am neither a relative nor am I Vietnamese.
The US was not ultimately victorious because there are now Starbucks, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Popeyes dotting Viet Nam’s commercial landscape. The US didn’t win because Pepsi and Coca-Cola are battling for the palates and wallets of thirsty, sugar-deprived Vietnamese, or because prominently displayed Amway advertisements greet visitors as they exit the Nội Bài (Hanoi) and Tân Sơn Nhất (HCMC) international airports.
Viet Nam won because its cause was just, its sacrifice supreme, and its military leadership brilliant. While April 30, 1975 was the day Saigon fell for the US and those locals who hitched their collective cart to the South Vietnamese client state, it was a day of liberation and celebration for most Vietnamese. It was the day Viet Nam became a unified, independent, and sovereign nation.
Mark A. Ashwill is a Hanoi-based international educator who has lived and worked in Viet Nam for over a decade. He is the author of Vietnam Today: A Guide to a Nation at a Crossroads.
FORWARDED BY:
===============================================
CHUCK SEARCY
International Advisor, Project RENEW
Co-Chair, NGO Agent Orange Working Group
On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 7:53 PM, Hollis Stewart <hollisstewart90042@gmail.com> wrote:
Chuck,
Thank you for this great article on Viet Nam. I have traveled, too, over much of VN as well as teaching there at two university campuses on two occasions for several months. Many people in the US have trouble understanding that this was an anti-colonial war by the Vietnamese and they won. If the US had recognized VN independence in 1945, there wouldn't have been the French War or the American War. Now they are constructing their own country the way that they choose and opening up to investment from outside was a considered decision made in the interest of the people of VN. Many in the US still are not aware that the US continued to blockade VN into the mid 1990s hoping to bring Vietnam to its knees -- it didn't work.
When we have traveled in VN we have stayed in small towns and villages (in the mountains of the north and in the south) as well as big cities (Hue, HCMC, Hanoi, De Lat, Con Tho .... ), talked with locals with the help of very good interpreters, visited Con Dao prison and too the prison on Phu Quoc, etc. Every where we met Vietnamese folks who love their country and treat US travelers with kindness and open arms even after what we inflicted on their country but all were clear, they will not have foreigners dominate and re-colonize their country: they paid the heavy price of self determination and liberation.
Hollis
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 3:45 PM, Deo Huu <deochienhuu@gmail.com> wrote:
The Counterparts column about who “won” the war in Viet Nam merits at least some commentary.
First, there’s the statement that the Geneva Accords stipulated a national election, which was somehow prevented by American intervention. The Accords were a contract between France and the Viet Minh as then run by Ho Chi Minh and the Lao Dong Party. No one else signed them, so the Republic of Viet Nam (South Viet Nam) had zero obligation to take part in any elections and the USA had no obligation or right to dictate to RVN what they had to do in that regard.
Secondarily, the only mention of general elections in the Accords occurs in Article 14, with no specifics provided. However, in the Final Declaration, which was not signed by anyone, in section 3 general elections “by secret ballot” are mentioned, and in section 7 of the Declaration they are specified to be “under the supervision of an international commission”.
In the numerous subsequent discussions between South and North Vietnam about an election, the North declined any supervision by the UN. Given the traditional 99+% approval votes in communist countries where voting was always “supervised” by the Party, that meant that the larger population of the North would make such an election a charade, essentially the suicide of the South. President Diem needed no input at all from the USA or anyone else to refuse to agree to such an election.
In terms of the basis for the war, one can only ask why we went to Korea, where we had zero investment, other than as part of the Containment Doctrine? Or were the North Koreans just about “liberating” the South there, and we were the foolish Bad Guys who got in the way? How can anyone demonstrate that had RVN survived, they too would not be further ahead economically than a separate North? How could it be a simple anticolonial war when we were gone by late ’71, and it was only Vietnamese fighting Vietnamese after that? How can anyone prove the soldiers of the South who fought so long and hard and fought bigger, bloodier battles than any US forces were in, were not as sincere about protecting what they considered their country as the NVA draftees coming down the HCM Trail were about their cause?
As far as anyone “coming around” to the USA style economy, both China and Viet Nam have adopted a controlled capitalism (a kind of crony capitalism with corruption built in) simply because Marxist economics were finally recognized, after the suffering, starvation, and death of many millions, to simply not work. This was no victory for the USA or anyone else, it was a necessary adaptation for a workable economy.
Yes, the Vietnamese people are a wonderful bunch overall, but there is very serious unemployment, rampant corruption, widespread pollution, and slowly increasing unrest. The recent seizure of police and officials by villagers protesting the unfair grab of their lands is one example.
Lastly, if it was never about ideology, then why was Ho a founder of the French Communist Party, why did he spend 30 years away from Viet Nam working for Moscow, and why when he was dying did he look forward to seeing in the afterlife not Phan Bo Choi or other famous nationalists, but V I Lenin?
R J Del Vecchio
Independent Researcher
From: Hollis Stewart <hollisstewart90042@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Fwd: Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War
Date: May 10, 2017 at 7:12:34 PM PDT
To: Deo Huu <deochienhuu@gmail.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Why were Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, ... members of capitalist parties? Ho Chi Minh had the right and privilege to join any party or organize and found any party that he cared to. Inexplicably some folks think that the Vietnamese should let France, Portugal, the USA or others tell them what are acceptable parties -- that is colonialism.
From: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Fwd: Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War
Date: May 10, 2017 at 8:06:14 PM PDT
To: Hollis Stewart <hollisstewart90042@gmail.com>, Deo Huu <deochienhuu@gmail.com>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
In my opinion, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon were members of capitalist parties through an accident of birth first, and by choice later.
Ho Chi Minh chose the communist party long before any of those men knew of him or had any possibility of influencing his choice of parties. Truman was a haberdasher in Kansas City when Ho joined the French Communist Party. Eisenhower was an Army Captain testing long distance Army convoy transportation. JFK was three years old, and Nixon was seven.
What I think you've missed is that the Vietnamese did not choose communism. Ho Chi Minh did. And then he forced it upon his native country through assassinations and betrayals until there were no nationalists left to oppose him. His long record of eliminating his foes is well documented. His record of taking territory by force (South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) is well documented.
There is no question that the French tried to reinstate their colonial control of Vietnam after WWII, but the US opposed it. That too is well documented.
I agree with you that the Vietnamese should have been able to choose their own form of government without undue influence from outside forces, but that was never the case and is not the case today.
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who
reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer the truth than he
whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." - Thomas Jefferson
Paul Schmehl (pschmehl@tx.rr.com)
Independent Researcher
On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 2:19 AM, Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au> wrote:
The problem is once the communist is in power then no other folks can have the right to join or found any party that they want or care for.
That is the problem right now in Vietnam and the key to solve many abuse of power, corruption, arbitrary judicary problems
Cheers
Hiep
Atmospheric Scientist,
Office of Environment & Heritage NSW
--On May 11, 2017 at 3:06:43 PM -0400 Thi Bay Miradoli <thibay.miradoli@gmail.com> wrote:
Just as a side note, as a general statement "The problem is once the
communist is in power then no other folks can have the right to join or
found any party" may not be completely accurate. Italy has a
communist party, as do other European nations. It has been in power in
the past (through a coalition system) and coexisted just fine with other
parties, including borderline fascist opposition. On the other hand,
aside from the two main parties in US politics, how many other parties
have had a comparable presence/influence in daily politics? To bring it
back to the original discussion, I'm not sure Ho Chi Minh followed a
specific party to prevent the establishment of other parties or
ideologies. Or rather, it is purely speculative to assume he did. In my
opinion, countries who have had to fight off American invasion,
occupation, embargoes or very intrusive overt and covert intrusion in
sovereign affairs have given up some liberties in the pursuit of others.
It can be debated endlessly which is morally superior, but we do need to
look at the history of Vietnam, the war and beyond, within an optic of
geopolitical positioning (ie. China) and US interference, military and
economic. Indeed (I am aware I'm speculating here) I can think of 4
communist countries (Vietnam, N. Korea, Cuba and Venezuela) that have not
allowed ample space to the opposition, but also happen to have been
challenged repeatedly by US military intervention (Vietnam and North
Korea) or heavy US intelligence meddling into domestic affairs, such as
elections (Cuba, Venezuela). On the other hand, European countries that
have been relatively less bothered by US interference have
demonstrated that a communist party can coexist peacefully with its
political counterparts. My point is not to defend/demonize any particular
party, but to invite Vietnam-related historical prespectives that look at
the wider context and in the process gain insight over an interest of
mine which is the convergence and diverge of the chosen political paths
by Vietnam and Cuba in responding to US (attempted) dominance.
Respectfully
Thi Bay Miradoli
Unaffiliated
From: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Fwd: Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War
Date: May 11, 2017 at 1:57:38 PM PDT
To: Thi Bay Miradoli <thibay.miradoli@gmail.com>, Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
I am not convinced that your comparison holds up. Communist parties that share power with other parties in countries with established systems of government are substantially different from communist parties that achieve complete control of the governmental apparatus of a country. Once in control, all opposition is crushed relentlessly to maintain party "purity".
You state, "I'm not sure Ho Chi Minh followed a specific party to prevent the establishment of other parties or ideologies. Or rather, it is purely speculative to assume he did."
Ho Chi Minh was a paid member of the Comintern, the protege of Dmitry Manuilsky, who was both Lenin and Stalin's right hand man, who was trained in Moscow for years and then was sent back to Southeast Asia for the express purpose of establishing a communist government that would control Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. He founded the ICP in 1930 and pursued his assigned task until his death, after which his fellow party members completed it.
To accomplish his goal he purged every Vietnamese nationalist leader he could, either by assassination or through duplicity with the French (Phan Boi Chau being only the most prominent example), including many of the Trotskyites, until there was no one left to oppose him. Then he rid himself of the intellectuals and ruling classes through land reform and assassinations until he had complete control.
His followers did the same in South Vietnam after invading and conquering that helpless country in 1975.
It therefore does not seem to me to be speculation that his goal was what actually happened in Southeast Asia. He was a master of disguise, and donned the clothes of a nationalist as easily as he did a patriot, purloining the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc for that purpose when he was only beginning to serve his communist masters. His creation of the National Liberation Front, controlled completely by Hanoi, is another sign of his ability to fool naive westerners.
I also disagree that there is a debate about which system of government is morally superior. The numbers of people killed under Communist rule far exceeds that of such morally reprehensible systems as Nazi Germany, which I doubt anyone would argue was morally equivalent to liberal democracy, constitutional republicanism or even the draconian rule of demagogues in African nations.
I think Dr. Rummel's work on Democide settles that question definitively, whether you agree completely with his numbers or not.
From: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] TThe Korean War (Was Re: Fwd: Just Because the Golden Arches are in Vietnam Doesn’t Mean the US Won the War)
Date: May 11, 2017 at 2:10:46 PM PDT
To: Thi Bay Miradoli <thibay.miradoli@gmail.com>, Hiep Duc <Hiep.Duc@environment.nsw.gov.au>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: Paul Schmehl <pschmehl@tx.rr.com>
I also take issue with your characterization of the Korean War as "US military intervention". North Korea invaded South Korea, with the support of both the Soviet Union and China, and the subsequent war was a UN-authorized action led by the United States with the support of twenty other countries.
If you want to say that the UN intervened in Korean affairs, I suppose an argument can be made for that, but so did the Soviet Union and China.
Perhaps you're referring to the fact that US troops were in South Korea after WWII? But the US did not invade North Korea or intervene it its affairs until it was legally authorized.
Perhaps the US should have sought UN authorization for the 2nd Indochina War, but that's a different subject.