Bond James Bond wrote:Droopy wrote:Ho was a totalitarian socialist revolutionary seeking the enslavement and subjugation, not only of the people of North Vietnam (which he accomplished) but of the people of South Vietnam, and independent, sovereign nation the vast majority of who's peoples, according to opinion polls taken there in that era, wanted nothing to do with Ho's worker's paradise.
I quote Melvyn Leffler's (one of the great Cold War scholars) epic national security tome
A Preponderance of Power (pg. 258-259):
"During 1948
U.S. diplomats in Indochina reported that Ho Chi Minh's Communist-dominated Viet Minh had the overwhelming support of the local population . Ho "is the strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina," acknowledged the State Department. The French could not defeat him militarily."
Leffler sourced the obviously communist U.S. State Department as well as communist dupe Sec. of State Marshall's private memos.
Leffler went on to rhetorically ask America's foreign policy community (pg 381):
"What could be done in a place like Indochina, where
the Communists embodied the nationalist aspirations of the Vietnamese people and where...non-Communist nationalists were poorly organized and bereft of charismatic leadership?"
onward to pg 433:
"U.S. officials knew Stalin and Mao bore little responsibility for the successes of the Viet Minh. The amount of aid coming from the Soviet Union was miniscule. Until 1950 Chinese assistance was believed to have been negligible...
The real source of Ho's success , as everyone freely acknowledged, was his nationalism. 'It is ironic but...true,' wrote Charlton Ogburn, a young foreign service officer..."that Asians fighting on the Communist side...have the inspiring sense of fighting for national freedom."
moar (same page):
Donald Heath, America's top diplomat in Indochina said that the "fact is
Ho Chi Minh is [the] only Viet who enjoys any measure of national prestige" and that "Acheson privately agreed".
even moar (from the conclusion, pg 508):
"
U.S. officials exaggerated the ability of the Soviet Union to capitalize on the rising tide of nationalism in the Third World and
incorrectly assessed the relationship between most Third World Communists and Moscow...Nowhere was that more true than in Indochina, where the case for Ho Chi Minh's subservience to the Kremlin was always assumed rather than proved."
by the way Leffler said Chinese aid to Ho's army was far more substantial than any Soviet aid (all of which was dwarfed by American aid to first France and then Bao Dai/Ngo Dinh Diem.)
Pure, unalloyed, and long discredited pap. This is nothing more than the standard, formatted, decadent Western intellectual buffoonery that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and delivered South Vietnam into the nightmare hell of a savage totalitarian slave state. We
know what life in Ho's North Vietnam was like, Bond. We
know what life was like under communist rule in the South, Bond. We
know what life was like under Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, Bond.
What you have just essentially said is that a small group of fanatic, totalitarian ideologues ("a gang of cruel and paternalistic half educated theorists," according to former Viet Cong Colonel Pham Xuan) attempting to completely restructure their society according to the abstract ideals of a 19th century German political theory in which all personal, political, speech, and religious freedom are utterly denied and dissent from political orthodoxy is ruthlessly repressed, represented the "nationalist aspirations" of the Vietnamese people. That is what you and your carefully cherry picked sources are asking me to accept.
You insult my intelligence, rape history, and the oceans of blood on your hands and the hands of numerous leftist apologists for slavery and human degradation on a scale unlike any experienced in any other century like you will eventually stand as a witness against you, and your names will be damned by history for your inexcusable, self serving knavery.
Ho Chi Minh was a creature of the Soviets, a member of the Comintern, and a dedicated Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who used "nationalist aspirations" as a mask and front for his and his disciples actual aims - the totalitarian enslavement of Vietnam and its people, and the expansion of communism into other regions of Southeast Asia.
John Paul Vann, the highly decorated Vietnam officer you mentioned as a staunch critic of the war, was also, as you carefully failed to mention, dedicated to the winning of that war. He also said that "The basic fact of life is that the overwhelming majority of the population - somewhere around 95% - prefer the government of Vietnam to a Communist government of the government that's being offered by the other side."
Don't make my laugh till my gut pops with pointing to the opinions of American state department officials and diplomats. This is among the greatest collection of stooges, dupes, starry eyed sycophants of utopian collectivism, leftist political pilgrims, and ignoramuses in all modern political history, and has been since at least the Roosevelt administration, when it was already alive with fellow travelers, useful idiots, and unabashed traitors.
Like the modern CIA, its a cornucopia of general incompetence peppered with leftist anti-American sentiment that now and then, like a blind squirrel, finds a nut, but as often as not is following red herrings and its own internal ideological focus.
Ask the Boat People and the million Vietnamese who passed through Ho's gulag about their "nationalist aspirations."
I wonder what they'd tell you?
You could also ask the some two million of the politically incorrect who perished in Pol Pot's killing fields about their new society, but that would take one hell of a Ouija board.
