Gambit you're back to arguing the degree of victory the communists achieved in the war, something we agreed upon earlier. The US/South Vietnam's political objective in the war was to prevent the country from being unified under a communist government. Vietnam was unified under a communist government in 1975.
And you continue to deny the truth that there are distinctions between the political goal versus military objectives. Your entire argument rests upon this denial because you know that if it is acknowledged, North Vietnam's insistence upon war was immoral. The NVA as a military force was no match for the USA/ARVN as proved by their repeated defeats on the battlefields. Giap, the supposedly military 'genius' of the war, was consistently embarrassed by his counterparts, even by some of the ARVN's generals.
What the Vietnamese communist party did after 1975 is irrelevant to whether or not they had large popular support from 1955-1975. How do you know the South Vietnamese continued to support the war? Were they volunteering en masse for the ARVN? Were they forming their own guerrilla movement against the communists? South Vietnam was not a democracy so actions of the government did not necessarily represent the people. North Vietnam wasn't a democracy either but as I've shown throughout this thread the very nature of their fight shows they had strong popular support throughout the country.
Right...But this is another denial...That SVN continued to resist. You cannot explain this away by pointing out that the ARVN was also consisted of conscripts, or asking why were there no guerrilla movement after reunification, or that the SVN government was corrupt. Hitler never had more than %40 of popular vote, more like high 30s, and look at how Germany turned out later.
If the Party were to say: in the future you will be a laborer, your land will be collectivized, you will no longer own any farm animals or buildings, but will become a tenant farmer for the Party or the socialist state -- if the Party were to say that, the peasants would not need them...Indeed, Party cadres are instructed never to mention these things, because, according to the teachings of Lenin, the peasant is the greatest bourgesois of all: he thinks only of himself. Say one word about the collectivism, and he is already against you.
That was the admittance of a VC defector on how the VC lied to the people, along with holding families hostages, and I know at least one person who had a difficult time with the context, along with nationalistic rhetorics to recruit and conscript. If you have to hold familites hostages and lie about your political motives, that mean you had no popular support. If the VC had the popular support as you naively believed, there would have been no Vietnam War in the first place. The Catholic minority would have been overrun in the first year. But like the CIA, the Catholic and Chinese minority in South Vietnam were endowed with supernatural powers when rhetorically convenient. Many of the people in the outer provinces, the ones most vulnerable to VC intimidations, came from North Viet Nam and carried with them the memories of the famine resulting from the disastrous land reform program. Telling them that after reunification their current farms will be taken away will certainly turn them against the VC recruiters. If intimidation works, use it, if not then lie, else use brute force. What popular support? You swallowed the communist lie wholesale.
The imbalanced refugee flow is interesting but consider this: if you're a Vietnamese citizen in the south, angry at the government, there was a viable alternative to fleeing north. They could join the Viet Cong. And they did, tens of thousands of them. Moreover, it's well-documented right after the partition that the CIA led propaganda efforts to get Vietnamese in the north to flee south, and provided planes to do so. Diem was happy to take them as it boosted his power base.
That does not explain the refugee flows
AFTER the American military involvement. Once again...the CIA is given near-omnipotency whenever convenient. You cannot explain the 'reeducation camp' or the 'boat people'
IF there was such widespread support for the communists. There were no celebration by the South Vietnamese, other than what was staged by the communists in Sai Gon.
When the Viet Cong launched their Tet Offensive, they were hoping not only to overrun a lot of bases and show the West they were still a force to be reckoned with, but also spark a general uprising. This didn't happen but indicates the poor strategic thinking of the Viet Cong leadership rather than a lack of popular support. The VC was at its best when it executed classic guerrilla warfare: hit-and-run attacks, slowing bleeding the enemy, melting away, and avoiding pitched battles. Then the Tet Offensive put the bulk of their fighters into the open where they were all killed. It was foolish to hope for an general uprising at the time, not only because such things are extremely rare in history even when the people support a rebellion at heart but because those rising up would have been slaughtered along with the VC.
Wrong...It was the NVA who launched the 1968 Tet Offensive and ordered the VC to lead that hoped for but never materialized uprising. The VC, wherever they held territories during the time of the offensive, committed atrocities so great that they lost the majority of whatever support they had, which was not so considerable as you gullibly believed. Most the VC units were either destroyed or driven
AFTER the offensive, not during the offensive as you gullibly believed. Viet Cong units were exposed by those who originally sympathized with them.
Time Magazine
October 31, 1969
What triggered the Communist slaughter? Many Hue citizens believe that the execution orders came directly from Ho Chi Minh. More likely, however, the Communists simply lost their nerve. They had been led to expect that many South Vietnamese would rally to their cause during the Tet onslaught. That did not happen, and when the battle for Hue began turning in the allies' favor, the Communists apparently panicked and killed off their prisoners.
The Saigon government, which claims that the Communists have killed 25,000 civilians since 1967 and abducted another 46,000, has made negligible propaganda use of the massacre. In Hue it has not had to. Says Colonel Le Van Than, the local province chief: "After Tet, the people realized that the Viet Cong would kill them, regardless of political belief." That fearful thought haunts many South Vietnamese, particularly those who work for their government or for the Americans. With the U.S. withdrawal under way, the massacre of Hue might prove a chilling example of what could lie ahead.
That belief proved true after reunification.
Similarly, how were south Vietnamese sympathizers supposed to suddenly drop everything and join the VC whose offensive had surprised them as much as the Americans? And where were they going to get weapons and get organized? The VC had all the weapons and had taken years to get organized. It was a strategic mistake for the VC but turned out alright for them in the end, as it exposed the US military's deception in its reports to America on progress of the war, and really turned the American against the military leadership and war.
Talk about a feeble excuse. Even though the VC was largely a guerrilla organization, I do not need to wield a rifle or plant explosives to part of the movement. Insurgencies have never won wars but they can help the main army at creating disruptions in the daily lives of the enemy. And that internal conflict did exist in South Vietnam. But the VC as an insurgency movement never had the scale of popular support you believe. Many of the South Vietnamese came from the North. Landsdale's propaganda did mattered only if the atrocities committed in North Vietnam by the communists, Viet and Chinese, were untrue. But...Those atrocities were true. Landsdale's saying that Holy Mother Mary and Baby Jesus left North Vietnam became comical at best compared to seeing my family members starving because of no food despite a fertile land. So if I decide to leave, it will not be because I chose to follow the CIA and the Good Lord but because my nose tell me there is food in the south.
Currently...Over %50 of Viet are under 30 and they have no emotional ties to the Vietnam War. Even so, when they see the gross differences in basic human freedoms and economic prosperity Viet Nam has compared to what ordinary Japanese and South Koreans has, they now care even less for communism than many communist sympathizers on this forum. They laugh at people like you. Once as an experiment, on a bus I asked for direction on how to get to Ho Chi Minh City, and there was no doubt that I was a Viet Kieu, the entire bus, including the driver, derisively laughed. Even when these people has next to no emotional ties to the Vietnam War, to them the city is still Sai Gon.
I personally met retired NVA and VC veterans and in private, all of them believe that South Viet Nam was better off under the corrupt regimes of Diem and Thieu compared to these men's conditions under communist North. When Boris Yeltsin flew over New York City, he looked out the window and reportedly said to a reporter: 'They lied to us.' Viktor Belenko said the same thing thirty years earlier after his defection to the West in a MIG-25. Now NVA and VC veterans are admitting the Party lied to them. And to you. France was out of Indochina after Dien Bien Phu. Here is the US position...
I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country-thirty million inhabitants for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.
As a matter of interest, I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and by Marshal Stalin. I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter. The only reason they seem to oppose it is that they fear the effect it would have on their own possessions and those of the Dutch. They have never liked the idea of trusteeship because it is, in some instances, aimed at future independence. This is true in the case of Indo-China.
Each case must, of course, stand on its own feet, but the case of IndoChina is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.
Had Roosevelt remained alive to see the end of WW II as US President, Indochina -- Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam -- would have been semi-independent without France and communism. When the Viet Minh and France colluded, under the Ho-Sainteny Agreement, to return France to Indochina, the US had no choice but accept that agreement. It is hilarious to see more foreigners supporting the Vietnamese communists than the Viets themselves.
