Vietnam

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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.

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Delusion: The war in South Vietnam was a popular uprising against an unpopular minority government

Reality: The outcome of the Tet offensive proved this idea conclusively wrong. We now know that the North Vietnamese did really believe they had wide popular support in the South and that, if they could just seize control of enough of the country, the oppressed people of the South would rise up in mass to join them, making it impossible for America to maintain control. That did not happen. Not only did the people not rise up but the people actively rebelled against the Viet Cong, especially after the Viet Cong began mass executions and atrocities in the areas they controlled.

By the time the “peace” movement became a major player circa 1970, only a small minority of South Vietnamese wanted to live under communist rule.

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[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives]

There was opposition to both starting and continuing the Vietnam war that had nothing to do with the self-described “Peace” movement.

Eisenhower, for example, thought we should avoid such conflicts and concentrate only on vital choke points across the world. Eisenhower, like many critics of the initiating and continuing the war, argued from the perspective of a realistic and practical strategy. They did not believe that the war revealed America as evil. That type of opposition to the war did not spring from a delusional narrative but from practical concerns over the best strategy for containing and defeating communism. They believed that America had limited resources and limited political will and that we had to pick our battles.

The “peace” movement, by contrast, did not make practical arguments and they did not believe that communism needed to be contained or defeated. Instead, they based their arguments on the premise that the war resulted from America’s internal corruption and that in essence America was the cause of the conflict. Their goal was to get America to abandon the people of Indochina completely and not to simply reform the way America fought communism there. They argued that the people of Indochina wanted to be communist and that they would be much better off under communist rule. When they did succeed in bringing about the abandonment, they cheered the fall of the non-communists.