Generational Dynamics World View

[Bob Butler 54]

(11-02-2020, 03:47 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: The mainstream view of the Vietnam War, as defined by the antiwar left, is that South Vietnam never really existed as a coherent government, that the people in southern Vietnam really wanted to be governed by the North Vietnamese Communists and were only prevented
from doing so by the evil policies of the evil presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.  Furthermore, the mainstream view is that once the Americans withdrew in 1975, then North and South Vietnam were joined together in a reunion and lived happily ever after.

I don’t know where you got that from. It is more a right wing view of what the left wing believes that allows you to discredit the left easily. It reflects your inability to understand motivation, your habit of badly misunderstanding any ideology other than your own. My own view is a bit more complex than that.

If you view the Vietnam War as a local war, it is between the Catholic elite minority and the Buddhist commoner many. The elite as usual were well established, corrupt, and unpopular, pretty much as Marx would say the were. You would expect the people to win, to displace the elites. The good guys would be the people.

If you view it as part of the communist - capitalist conflict, in the west the knee jerk reaction would be to favor the capitalists, to look at things through the prism of the Domino Theory. Ike, Kennedy and LBJ bought into that perspective. They were not evil. They were perhaps misguided. Willing to commit lives to support a corrupt government? Willing to support the remnants of a lost colonial imperialism? The peace people had a more realistic view, supporting the cause of the people. They did not know of the genocidal tendencies, and would not support it if the had. If I view anyone as evil it was Nixon with his secret plan, which turned out to be to claim victory and surrender. He could have done that sooner.

As is, the war has to be viewed as a muddle between the two perspectives.