Vietnam

[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

Delusion: The war was fought on the Vietnamese side by militarily outmatched but plucky and determined peasant soldiers who fought with no significant support or direction from the communist superpowers.

Realty: The fighting in the last 7 years of the war post-Tet was carried out by large-scale, highly trained, regular North Vietnamese army units. The involvement of communist superpowers was massive in terms of money, materiel and personnel. In 1969 the Soviet Union had an estimated 65,000 troops in North Vietnam and Mao had 160,000-180,000. The Chinese troops served as Ho Chi Min’s internal security force to prevent internal revolt. It would turn out that Soviet personnel had manned almost all the anti-aircraft missile defenses that shot down American planes.

The North Vietnamese army was well equipped with state-of-the-art communist tanks, artillery, planes and anti-aircraft defenses but North Vietnam had zero industrial base to build anything. It is doubtful they could even feed themselves. North Vietnam supplied nothing but cannon fodder.

Without the massive and continuous support of the communist super powers the communist Vietnamese would never have come into power, stayed in power or been able to launch the invasions of the South.

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Delusion: The US “expanded” the war into Cambodia in 1970 and did so “illegally”.

Reality: In this delusion, the US overtly launched operations into eastern Cambodia in 1970 merely to expand its imperialistic designs on Indochina in general. The “intellectuals” of the “peace” movement claimed that there were no significant North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.

The legal reality of this delusion is best summed up in this article about the Kent State shootings [h/t Instapundit].

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the angry students – as so often was the case throughout the war – had their facts wrong. Going into Cambodia was not “illegal.” Like South Vietnam, Cambodia was one of the “protocol states” the United States had solemnly pledged to defend against communist aggression when the Senate in 1955 consented to the ratification of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization agreement with but a single dissenting vote. Cambodia, like South Vietnam, was similarly incorporated by reference in the 1964 statute, by which 99.6 percent of Congress authorized the use of military force to carry out our SEATO obligations.

This “expansion” delusion could be refuted at the time by anyone who could read a map and see where the battles were being fought. When you see large-scale battles occurring in the Southmost corner of Vietnam, right up against the Cambodian border, you don’t have to be Napoleon to see that the North Vietnamese army had to be supplying and basing itself in eastern Cambodia. Clearly, the North Vietnamese had violated Cambodian neutrality on a massive scale. This justified the incursion into Cambodian on both strategic and legal grounds.

Again, post-Cold War evidence would show the “Peace” movement was dead wrong.

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Delusion: There were no North Vietnamese army units operating in either South Vietnam or Cambodia.

Reality:In order to maintain the delusion that the war was a popular uprising against imperialists, the “peace” movement could not admit that the war post-1968 was one of invasion from the outside. They labeled as lies any US assertions of invasion. Post-Cold War evidence proved the “peace” movement conclusively wrong. Post-Tet, all major combat was carried out by regular units of the North Vietnamese army.

[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

Delusion:The Tet Offensive proved the US military had lied about the strength and scale of support in South Vietnam for the Viet Cong.

Reality: The Tet Offensive achieved surprise for the same reason Hitler’s offensive in the Battle of the Bulge achieved surprise: The plan was based on a delusional narrative and had no chance of success. In both cases, the US military found it impossible to predict that the enemy would do something so incredibly stupid and self-destructive.

The Tet Offensive was a staggering tactical defeat for the communists that led to the destruction of the Viet Cong as a fighting force. From that point on, all of the major fighting for the communists would be carried out by successive waves of invasion of North Vietnamese regular army units from North Vietnam. Post-1968 the war ceased to be an insurgency and became one of outright external invasion.

[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

Delusion: Ho Chi Min was really just a non-ideological Vietnamese nationalist who was driven to seek support from the communist superpowers by the ignorance and racism of America and France.

Reality: This myth is so ridiculous it is almost gigglingly funny. It is difficult to imagine how Ho Chi Min’s life story could have more marked him as a doctrinaire communist. He left Vietnam for France in 1912, joined the communist party in 1917 and did not return to Vietnam until ordered to do so by Stalin himself in 1944. He spent the intervening 32 years in Europe and the Soviet Union, living as a Westerner, speaking French and Russian and working for various communist organizations and Stalin’s regime. He was himself an unrepentant Stalinist who considered himself a close personal friend of Stalin. Ho Chi Min so admired Stalin that he ordered that Stalin’s portrait appear beside his own in public buildings in Vietnam up until his own death in 1977.

Nor did he act like a nationalist once in power. The French lost control of Indochina not to the communists but to a broad-based coalition of various nationalistic groups that only included the communists. After the defeat of the French, Ho Chi Min used his superpower backing to gain internal military control of North Vietnam. Then he either killed the non-communists or drove them into exile. He founded a Stalinist regime in the North complete with secret police and gulags. In 1955, he even massacred 15,000 of the Vietnamese equivalent of the Kulaks, apparently for no other reason than to emulate Stalin.

The “peace” movement, however, ignored Ho Chi Min’s actions and instead, as hard as it is to believe now, pointed to the mere statements of a Stalinist as proof of his non-ideological nationalism. They even went so far as to compare Ho Chi Min to Washington and the other founders of America.

Instead, from his youth he was a doctrinaire communist who believed in subordinating the people of Vietnam to a world communist state and replacing its native culture with that of an industrialized communist utopia.