The Vietnam War

[derspiess]

Flip chicks are subhuman.

I've run across a couple that were really cute (looked Polynesian more than anything), but that's about it.

[dps]

Communist ideology aside, from the US point of view in 1946, helping Vietnamese nationalists against French attempts to re-impose colonial rule wouldn't have really been any different than helping Polish or Hungarian nationalists oppose Soviet attempts to turn eastern European countries into Soviet satelites.

How so?

Surely not in terms of power.  France was crippled in 46 and wholy dependent on Marshall Plan money to fight its colonial wars.

In that in both cases, we would have been backing the right of various ethnic or national groups to self-determination against outside interests. 

And to answer Ide's question, in general we didn't do jack shit to help eastern Europeans against the Soviets.  About the only exception would be Greece, but A) that was more the Brits than us, and B) one of the reasons that the non-communist forces won there was that Tito closed the Yugoslav border to the Greece communists.

As an aside, this is precisely what Enoch Powell (among others) was worried about the US doing to the British (especially re: India) at the end of WWII.

And that wasn't an unreasonable worry.  The US was opposed to colonialism;  we wanted the European powers to give up their colonies, though generally we thought it would be better for them to spend a time preparing the colonies for independence (like we did in the Philipines) rather than just immediately cutting them loose.

It's likely that the US wouldn't go along with this as it was against French interests, and also because of the growing rift between Communist ideology and the non-Commies.

Even by '48 or '49, it was probably too late due to the beginning of the Cold War.  But before that, we wouldn't have given a shit that it was against French interests.  Don't believe me, just ask DeGaulle.

I think Ho was enough of a pragmatist at that point that he didn't particularly care if he was a leftist dictator or a rightist one.

No, he was going to be a leftist dictator, but he could have been our pet leftist dictator.

What arrangement could NV and the US have come to other than throwing South Vietnam under the bus, and what could NV possibly have given to the US that would have justified the price?

If we're still talking 1945-47, what is this South Vietnam of which you speak?  The division of Vietnam into North Vietnam and South Vietnam was a product of US and French policy positions taken from 1946-54, not a pre-existing situation.  That's not to say that there weren't some differences between the 2 parts of the country, but the political division as such didn't exist in 1945.  (Technically, under French rule before WWII, Vietnam was actually divided into 3 parts.)

I regret starting this thread. It was supposed to be a discussion of the Vietnam War, not whether we should have allied with Ho Chi Minh roughly two decades before the war ever got cranking.

Well, the actual question you asked is a lot less interesting.  By the mid-50's, the choices had pretty much boiled down to either standing aside and letting the Communists take over the whole country (which we did 20 years later anyway), or intervening militarily.  And in hindsight, it's pretty clear that intervening militarily without being willing to actually fight to win (i.e., invade the north) was a stupid move.

[Admiral Yi]

If we're still talking 1945-47, what is this South Vietnam of which you speak?

Fine.  Let's use it as shorthand for that part of the Vietnamese population who was not enthusiastic about living in a workers' paradise then.

[dps]

If we're still talking 1945-47, what is this South Vietnam of which you speak?

Fine.  Let's use it as shorthand for that part of the Vietnamese population who was not enthusiastic about living in a workers' paradise then.

OK, fine.  We threw part of the population of eastern Europe that didn't want to live in a communist dictatorship under the bus, so why not do the same in southeast Asia?

[alfred russel]

Ide shouldn't be allowed to review movies, and Dorsey4Heisman shouldn't be allowed to talk about Communist history, since both are usually talking out of their asses.

I see your macroaggression and I'm moving past it.

[alfred russel]

He has a point.  I mean, if I started a thread wanting to discuss Allied strategy in WWII and some Texas dude who shall remain nameless blurted out that we should have killed Hitler when he was a baby I'd be kind of annoyed.

Thanks Marty.

Valmy, I wasn't so much calling you out as stupid (though I don't think the alliance idea was necessarily well thought out). And I don't really mind a hijack. But look where this has gone. "Alliance" is rather vague--not sure what that means in practical terms here, but one side is mostly arguing for some sort of even more vague engagement short of that, while the other is arguing that an alliance is impossible/impractical. We are covering time periods from the mid 40s to the late 70s and have gone beyond just Vietnam to touch on Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China, with free world public opinion tossed in the mix.

This is so high level and poorly focused that even by languish standards seems to be pointless. Which is too bad because unlike WWI, WWII, and the ACW this seems like a somewhat fresh topic.

[mongers]

I along with grumbler, who presumably served during a good chunk of the period, actually remember the Vietnam war. (must be a few others here who remember it)


Not claiming any special insight, but given I was born a few weeks after Diem was wacked, I literally grew-up in step with growing US involvement/escalation and can remember running home from school to see history being made on tv.

On the very threshold of becoming a teenager, the war ended.

[Admiral Yi]

Vietnam was the first news that caught my attention.  The Stars & Stripes had a daily (weekly?) map showing the current battles and territory controlled. 

I think this was the first Northern invasion.  Might have been the second.

[Ideologue]

Ide shouldn't be allowed to review movies, and Dorsey4Heisman shouldn't be allowed to talk about Communist history, since both are usually talking out of their asses.

I see your macroaggression and I'm moving past it.

I dunno.  If Money's take on communist history is like his take on movies, he's very well-versed in all the important developments of the Cold War, all the way from the mid-1970s to maybe even the late 1980s.

[CountDeMoney]

You both should be purged.

[Ideologue]

Hey, you're the landlord here.

[derspiess]

Vietnam was the first news that caught my attention.  The Stars & Stripes had a daily (weekly?) map showing the current battles and territory controlled. 

I think this was the first Northern invasion.  Might have been the second.

My first memories of Vietnam were mostly of it being a taboo subject.  Then in the 80s you had the flood of movies & documentaries.

[grumbler]

I along with grumbler, who presumably served during a good chunk of the period, actually remember the Vietnam war. (must be a few others here who remember it)

I think you are taking the jokes about me serving in the Roman Army a little too literally.  I was serving in high school when the war ended.

[Capetan Mihali]

I along with grumbler, who presumably served during a good chunk of the period, actually remember the Vietnam war. (must be a few others here who remember it)

I think you are taking the jokes about me serving in the Roman Army a little too literally.  I was serving in high school when the war ended.

Hmm, I thought from your comments (several years ago) about trying marijuana when it was decriminalized in Ann Arbor that you were in college already by 1972-74.  But I see that they actually kept the civil infraction ordinance intact until 1990.

[celedhring]

Vietnam was the first news that caught my attention.  The Stars & Stripes had a daily (weekly?) map showing the current battles and territory controlled. 

I think this was the first Northern invasion.  Might have been the second.

My first memories of Vietnam were mostly of it being a taboo subject.  Then in the 80s you had the flood of movies & documentaries.

Films about Vietnam are a fascinating subject. You get traditional war films like Green Berets while it's still raging on, dry anti-war fare like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, etc... right after it ends in the 70s, and cap it with Rambo re-winning the war in the 80s alongside the more potsmodern and quasi-celebratory anti-war films like FMJ and Apocalypse Now.

It's one of those cases where you can really trace the evolution of a society through the art it produces, all in two decades.