View attachment 409237Picture of U.S.
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) troops with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam when Ho’s Viet Minh liberation front was fighting Japanese imperialists.
We could have chosen to fight on the winning side. Instead we supported and financed the French re-colonization of the country after WWII ended. After the French were defeated we supported the corrupt Catholic Diem family in the South, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars, advisors and ultimately millions of troops into the country.
Eisenhower admitted Ho Chi Minh would have won some 80% of the vote had scheduled elections been held in 1955. Instead twenty years and three million deaths later, Vietnamese Communist soldiers took Saigon by force.
Remembering Ho Chi Minh’s 1945 Declaration of Vietnam’s Independence
This is just DUMB. You really should read some real history instead of liberal mythology. Yes, the Communists likely would have won that election because North Vietnam's population was larger than South Vietnam's and because the Communists would have ensured that every every North Vietnamese citizen voted for them. Furthermore, at that time, South Vietnamese Communists controlled parts of South Vietnam and likewise would have ensured that everyone in the areas they controlled voted for the Communists. Even Senator John F. Kennedy opposed holding that election precisely for these reasons.
Any nationwide election in Vietnam in 1955 would not have been a "free and fair" election.
And the Diem family, for all their faults, were not nearly as bad as the murderous thugs who ran North Vietnam, but you liberals never want to talk about the mass killings and labor camps in North Vietnam, not to mention the mass impressment of North Vietnamese as forced labor workers, many of whom died under their harsh labor conditions.
You should Geoffrey Shaw's book
The Lost Mandate of Heaven The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam
The “DUMB” history article I linked to was from just about the most bourgeois “Establishment” source available — the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
The CFR was founded 99 years ago under the Republican Harding Administration and was headed by Teddy Roosevelt’s ex- Secretary of State. It was funded by the greatest American capitalist families.
Prominent CFR leader John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State under Eisenhower in 1953 and Ike filled his cabinet with CFR luminaries (Kissinger started there too). 1953 also was the year a special CFR committee was formed to investigate the French War in Indochina. A report given by CFR asst. exec. sect’y, Mobil Oil executive & political scientist William Henderson regarding the ongoing conflict argued that Ho's cause was primarily
nationalist in nature and that Marxism had "little to do with the current revolution." Further, the report said, the United States could work with Ho to guide his movement away from Communism. Dulles and his State Department officials, however, opposed this approach and killed the idea.
Of course the Yugoslavian Stalinist Tito had already proven that even long-term communist partisan movements could break from Stalin and follow their own independent foreign policy.
As Secretary of State, Dulles concentrated on building and strengthening Cold War alliances. He was architect of the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, helped instigate the
1953 Iranian coup d'état and the
1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, and advocated support of the French in their
war against the Viet Minh in Indochina. He of course rejected the Geneva Accords between France and the communists in 1954 that proposed holding a nationwide election.
It is impossible to know what would have occurred if elections were allowed in 1956, except that the Viet Minh national movement would certainly have come to power
relatively peacefully as a CP-led United Front movement. With minimal U.S. assistance it might have evolved into something unique given the exceptional period of “de-Stalinization” then occurring in the USSR, and the special conditions of Vietnam.
I firmly believe that movement would have adopted a Titoist stand after WWII had the U.S. followed different policies. Early errors over land reform in (North) Vietnam after the French were beaten and their lands taken over never went nearly so far as they did in China. There was no famine in Vietnam under Viet Minh rule. Land reform made the CP popular in most of rural Vietnam. Mao’s disasterous “Great Leap Forward” sidelined and discredited him until the Great Proletarian Revolution period began in 1966-7. Ho early feared being crushed by the Guomindang generals occuping parts of Vietnam after WWII and later feared being controlled by Mao’s victorious PLA. He needed to stay on good terms with his giant communist neighbor, but Ho Ch Minh’s own movement’s independent cadre, his source of power and appeal, always required he remain absolutely loyal to winning full national independence, North and South.
Ho’s brutality toward diverse opponents is undeniable, but usually just reflected their brutality toward his partisan movement, or his
real politic appreciation of his options. The non-communist nationalist struggle in Algeria showed how violent anti-colonial movements can get on both sides, and how destructive such wars can be to democracy in modern post colonial societies. Ho was already famous before the mass United Front rally in 1945 where he declared Vietnamese Independence, and his national liberation movement then contained many non-communists. But it is certainly true he consciously destroyed the significant independent Trotskyist movement in the crucial Red River Valley because, while he respected its leader, he needed to keep on reasonable terms with Stalin and Mao in that early period. Again, ugly
real politics.
There have not been ANY “free elections” in MANY nations the U.S. staunchly befriends, e.g. Gulf Oil sheikdoms. Vietnam today receives ever-increasing U.S. and Chinese investments, is developing rapidly but with many problems, and of course remains a one-party state. Vietnam’s leaders are still fearful (with good cause) that allowing democratic elections might mean their country is torn apart by foreigners fighting for control over their nation, particularly nearby and powerful China.
