Armistice Day: Korea A thought on fighting communism

[Hanuman]

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a pretty conservative Republican. By default (as kids tend to do) I became the opposite, a pretty liberal democrat if not socialist. In time, my views have moderated substantially and I now find myself what people here might call a moderate.

But when I was growing up, in my teens and early twenties, my dad and I got into thrashing political debates about virtually all the issues. One issue that shut him up was the issue of Vietnam. I argued that it was really a terrible, senseless war. 55,000 Americans died. We didn't keep the country from going communist. It was their own civil war and we had no business interfering. (Of course, the concept that France helped us win OUR revolutionary war and secured OUR freedom and liberty didn't occur to me at the time, but it does now).

At any rate, my dad failed to answer me adequately- what was the point of the Vietnam war?

Until a few years ago, that is.

We got into a less heated debate and the subject came up. He said he'd been thinking about this issue for several years and this was his hindsight assessment:

Vietnam showed the world that the United States was willing to commit vast resources and the lives of it's fighting men to oppose the spread of communism. We may have not always been successful in this endeavor, as seen in Korea and Vietnam, but the people who NEEDED to witness our opposition and resolve, the leaders of China and the Soviet Union for example, took note of how far we were willing to go. If we were willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Americans to stop the spread of communism in small, third world nations half a world away, we were certainly ready to put it ALL on the table to resist communism closer to home.

He believed this was one of the reasons America never directly fought the Soviet Union or China. They knew we were deadly serious and were AFRAID to have a go at us. He believed that sometimes foreign policy doesn't necessarily make perfect sense at the MOMENT it happens- but in this case, the policy to fight communism yielded it's benefits later, throughout the years.

This is what he believed. I'm still thinking about it. Do you have comments or opinions?

[Giverney]

1. nice

An excellent summation, and well written.
However, you can try (though the media seems to leave it out most of the time) I've found that Vietnam, though fought on principle like your father said, was origionally started on this:

1. How many know it was a FRENCH colony? They had enormous rubber plants, and the people were badly paid slaves (sound familiar?)
2. Due to horrible (slave like) conditions, the common workers labor-unioned and started revolting. This is what got France into Vietnam first.
3. Ho Che Min acutally came to the US first, before going to China and Russia in a desperate bid or plea to help them stop the oppression of their workers.. (france did this all over the world througout the last 200 years).
4. The United States, after WWI and WWII taught our sad pathetic CEO's that millions and millions of dollars could be made on wars, for some sad reason decided to back the 'businessmen' of France and not the Vietnamese.
5. Vietnam turned it's labor north to China and Russia, refusing to put up with the French opression.

France went to war with Vietnam, with some of our backing (not much at the time)
They lost, and then we went in. Sadly, under Kennedy. What caused us to go in, was that the North went way overboard, and murdered many from the South, and nearby countries... pupet governments were put in the south by us, and civil war started.

It's a horrid tale. all in all, just horrid.

If anyone can find evidence that the above is not ture, please by all means rebuke.

[EAMcClure]

3. Civil War

The north killed many in the south because the south was a local western-funded paramillitary that routinely assassinated and tortured members of the northern government and press. Operation Phoenix and whatwhat. The initial revolution in Viet Nam that fomented French involvement was by no means peaceful, but farms were not burnt, and mass graves were not filled with millitary and civilian bodies.

Eric

[EAMcClure]

2. Garbage thinking

The U.S. had a standing policy, via NATO, to use the nuclear option if the Communist threat invaded any aspect of interest, such as the Middle East. USSR was very familiar with the threat. It was the nuclear option on both sides which kept the war cold.

Viet Nam is often chalked up under the idea of containment. The U.S. had an obligation to contain any country that veered to sharply leftward and thereby enter the USSR sphere of influence.

The U.S. decided to enter Viet Nam in order to establish a functionary pro-West government in the southern state capable of redacting and ultimately defeating the leftist threat. Once Viet Nam was unified under pro-west (codeword: moderate) leadership, then Vietnamese resources could be plundered for cheap, as they were under French colonization.

In other words, Viet Nam was a colonial war designed to keep the entire country dependent on the colonizer. France could no longer afford the bill, and the U.S. offered to come in and used the USSR as the convenient scapegoat. Once committed, there was no easy way to back out. There never was a stable southern government. In fact, south Viet Nam was the territory most brutalized by U.S. arms. To this day children die from unexploded ordnance in southern Viet Nam.

To say the U.S. was willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of blue-collar children in order to intimidate the commies is a sick and evil argument. No less sick and evil than the real reason. Don't let your daddy use Hawk logic to steer you away from the truth of the matter.

Reccomended reading: A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn

Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

Eric

[Hanuman]

5. With all due respect...

please don't call my father "daddy." Because you do not agree with his politics is no reason to belittle him, or my relationship with him.

Perhaps I did not articulate his position adequately for you: He didn't believe he was necessarily sending a message to the Polit Bureau while he was fighting in country in 1964 thru 1966. He believed he was helping people who did not want to be ruled under communism to remain free.

Later in life, he reflected on the issue and realized that while we might have failed in that immediate goal- we succeeded in a less-obvious goal, that is: proving that America would fight and sacrifice to oppose communism.

And of course the nuclear threat was also a massive deterrent, but possessing weapons doesn't necessarily mean you have the will to use them. Our use of nuclear weapons in WWII, coupled with America's history of opposing fascism and eventually communism created a track record that was intimidating and undeniable. His theory is a piece of the puzzle- not necessarily the puzzle itself.

I'll let others comment now and read without comment.

[EAMcClure]

7. Daddy is not belittling

If you take it that way, I apologize.

This is not the first time I have heard that argument. One of my uncles was a Vietnam vet, he stuck around the marines until he was a Lt. Colonel. He's told me that the U.S. could not turn back because the USSR and China would see this as a lack of resolve... the only way to intimidate the communists power is through the display of resolve.

I simply don't agree with it. The nuclear policy was THE factor. I don't necessarily like hearing anyone use the argument that just because we have them, doesn't mean we'll use them. It was national security policy and NATO policy to initiate globothermal nuclear war if interests were threatened. This is the underpinning of MAD... both sides steered clear of the others sensitive spheres of influence because the consequences to the world were obvious. That's what Cuban missile crisis was all about. If there had not been diplomatic brocade, there would have been nuclear war. Sending in warm bodies to get shot at had nothing to do with overarching policy. It's an excuse in the future to send more troops to die for wars the public does not fully understand.

Eric

[tomp]

4. a quick thought and then i have to go

your dad's view is typical simplistic american brainwashed thinking.

first, even if we don't like "communism" we have no right to tell other countries they can't have the system they want.

second, "communism" is a total bogeyman. the u.s. and all capitalist countries maligned and distorted communism form the word go because capitalists (imperialists, really) will allow not one iota of infringement of their right to control all labor and production. they lied and made up stories about what was happening in the soviet union to sway public opinion against the emerging new system. they went all out to sabotage the soviet system, creating instense antagonism and prompted natural defensive policies from the soviet union, based on survival, which continued to escalate right up through the cold war. in a real sense, world imperialism created the evils of "communism". what communism would have been without being beseiged by virtually the entire rest of the world is an unknown quantity.

the same thing is happening now with "terrorism", the new "communism". imperialism has to have a bogeyman to justify its actions.
gotta go.

[Fixated]

6. ...

The French helped us in our war to secure their own interests and defeat the British, not free us.

The Soviets were willing to commit resources, too, they just had less. We were afraid of going to war with them, too. A war betweenn The U.S. and the Union/China would have been tragic.

[Snow]

8. Since Korea was mentioned in your title,

I'll bring it up. Very nice exposition, by the way. Someone recently, I think it's in the Hiroshima/Nagasaki thread, just wrote a pretty darn good precis of the 19th century expansion of Japan. Korea, if you'll check a map, makes a very nice bridge from Japan to the mainland. Consequently, from the mid 1800's on, they were constantly at Korea (which stretched all the way north to Manjuria, China & Russia at that time) for various 'agreements' that would in essence annex Korea to Japan. The rulers at the time, those who were actually trying to rule and not engaging in inter-family feuds (sorry, all you Andong Kims out there, but it's true!) tried desperately to balance this. King Kojong was put in place by his father, titled Taewongun (he wasn't ever king himself; Korean succession is not a direct patrilineal thing or even necessarily male) and was thought to be pretty weak until his wife, Queen Min, gave him a backbone. Taewongun favored trying to compromise with the Japanese and there's some indication he would have been installed as king under Japanese rule. Queen Min tried to balance that with overtures to China and especially, Russia. For her (fairly successful) efforts she was assassinated by the Japanese, and Kojong took cover in the Russian embassy. Not too long after, Japan did take over, with Teddy Roosevelt's blessing ("The Korean rulers seem to be making a botch of ruling, and a more enlightened country -ie Japan - would help bring them into the modern world"). The US had tried to do an Admiral Perry thing to Korea in Inchon some years previously, and Kojong's naval forts had thoroughly blown away the US gunboats. The US was pissed with Korea. Anyway, the Russo-Japanese War developed not long after; Japan came out of that the big winner, completely took over Korea and started on the rest of Asia, and there we went until 1945. Now, at this point, the end of WWII, Russia was moving in fast, so Yalta gave them some goodies, among which was Korea from the 38th parallel up. There were still a number of Korean who, following Queen Min's lead, preferred Russian and Chinese sponsers to Japanese. This said <U>nothing</U> of communism or capitalism - it was more about straight power politics and historic geographic ties. When we entered the Korean War, we knew nothing of this, it was all 'stop the commies!' rhetoric. This despite Queen Min's nephew having come to the US during the 1920's to explain the whole situation to whomever he could get to listen. He eventually suicided, so you can guess how successful he was (or maybe the BFEE offed him!).
Long post for a short point - in any situation where the US has stuck its nose in that I can think of since WWII, and quite a few before, we 1) have an appalling lack of understanding of the culture and history of the region and its problems 2) invariably simplify matters to a dichotomy, always to our detriment. By the way, sources: my wife is of the Min family, and knows an astonishing amount of untold history.

[Brian Sweat]

9. This is simply more after the fact, rationalization

Similar to the Bush regimes attempts to find new reasons to justify the invasion of Iraq after the previously given reasons turned out to be false.

The Soviets were never going to attack us. The idea that they were was simply paranoia on our point.

[Giverney]

10. wow

I'm not exactly in favor of what Bush is doing or ANYTHING, but happen to be friends with a couple of Russia gals who recently moved here, who would disagree with that the Soviets would never attack us.

Now, if you mean 'The Soviets' being the common people, I agree with you. They could care less.

However to think some in the governemnt didn't want this is foolish. It's WIDELY rumored that Stalin was assassinated by his own KGB becuase of exactly THAT, he wanted to just get it over with and start a war with the US.. and some thought this was a bad idea.

His (and our) 'land grab' after WWII and massive slaughter of his own people beg to differ.

As far as Vietnam, trying to say that the North only killed in response to the South is a stretch.

[EAMcClure]

11. North did not kill in reaction to South

But South was funded and establish by Euro-Western influence and dollars. Without Euro-Wsstern influence, the Veitnamese revolution would not have turned into the nightmare it became.

The overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese, north and south, wanted to unify under the Minh government. Minh was a staunch supporter of agrarian land reform, using the state to assume control over land used for agriculture and giving it to to the unionised labour... collective ownership, in other words. Many in Viet Nam were not fighting U.S. over communism, but over their land and resources.

Eric

[Giverney]

12. ya

true true.

Have a friend here at work who was there.. his stories are scary. He's from Southern Vietnam, elder guy who was there during the war.. he was a 25 yeard old at the time. He's fled and wont go back from fear of what the government will do. crazy stuff.