Some idle speculation about some recent history: NPR is running

[hedgehog]

a series looking back at the fall of Saigon during All Things Considered. With the caveat, that I'm dumber than I look, here's what I think is so:

1. a lot of people who felt themselves at risk got out with the US Navy at the very last minute.

2. in the following years, a lot of people got themselves out to refugee camps, then to the US.

3.Now, the Vietnamese did set up "re-training" camps for former officers of the South Vietnamese Armed forces. However, I am unaware of any massacres or mass executions as happened in Cambodia.

So, was the new government relatively humane because of something specific to the culture, or did enough "enemies of the state" escape that the new government felt no need to take reprisals?

[mdmc]

1. They won

The "enemies of the state" lost big time. I think that is why there was so few reprisals..

[Taverner]

2. Mixed bag - I've been to Vietnam a few times

The SVA Officer Corps were pretty much blacklisted from any government job. Being a Socialist state, that was pretty much every job.

There weren't the mass killing, but the NVA didn't integrate the two states bloodlessly either. They had the reeducation camps, and if you survived them you lived.

Most of the SVA, being jobless, went into either organized crime or menial labor.

Then - after the end of our embargo on Vietnam, Hanoi needed English speakers - BAD. Suddenly dirt poor Persona-non-grata folks were being recruited for their English skills.

The Cyclo drivers were mostly ex SVA. Their English was flawless, and talking to them you felt you were talking to someone from San Jose.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. There were westerners doing humanitarian work in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon.

A DUer who knew some of them personally had a thread about it awhile back. Lots of people were incredulous about it.

[xchrom]

4. Recommend for interest. Nt

[Igel]

5. The two "lots" differ by orders of magnitude.

Millions left, many by sea. Many died in the attempt: I'd assume some judged the risk of death less than the risk of dying in reeducations or being shot for sabotage. But not all.

Cambodia was not like Vietnam. Pol Pot et al. killed based on an ideology with a rather wider net. The Vietnamese were interested in establishing their order on society. 10s of thousands were executed, in all likelihood. How many is an open question. However, death in the reeducation camps wasn't an uncommon event.

I was friends with a former "boat person." His family was forced to flee because they weren't poor--his father was a doctor. His uncle was shot as an enemy of the people; he was a dentist who had, among other clients, Westerners.

Then there was economic dislocation, which probably accounts for another dollop of "boat people," and curtailment of the rights even extended under the horribly oppressive S. Vietnam "regime."

So the government wasn't as oppressive as the Pol Pot regime that it had helped for a while, but that's setting the bar awfully low.