Comments by "yessum15" (@yessum15) on "The Life Guide"
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@NeilLewis77 It would take too long to go through all the lies and omissions. However, I will leave you with these 3 points as a sample:
1) It is impossible to discuss the Vietnam war without first discussing the concept of white supremacy. The French's entire claim to Vietnam is based on the racial superiority of white Europeans and the idea that the non-white nations should be organized into slave states for the service of the White race.
At the time, the United States was a white supremacist nation, and supported this view as well. The United States' entire objective in Vietnam, was the re-establishment of Vietnam as a French slave state. This is what a colony and colonialism is. Literally no one, including the United States, disputes this.
2) The United States did not establish a "free" Vietnam in the South. It was a monarchy from the very start. Elections were never held. The United States spoke quite openly (in the Pentagon Papers) that South Vietnam was essentially a fictitious invention of the US and that if Democratic elections were allowed to take place, Ho Chi Minh and the Southern communists would win.
3) People did not "flee" Northern Vietnam spontaneously upon establishment of the partition. The CIA launched a covert operation to force people out of their homes by publishing fake laws supposedly from Ho Chi Minh, and fake reports that China was invading the region and killing and raping captors. They supported this with forged documents. They then sent undercover agents to convince the local populace that the area they lived in was marked for nuclear annihilation by the United States and it was imperative to flee North Vietnam. They lied about the nature of South Vietnam claiming it was a democratic paradise and that refugees would be given wealth and property upon their arrival.
All of this is openly admitted to by the CIA and is now a matter of public record.
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There are plenty of other lies. This video is not an appropriate source to learn about the Vietnam war.
Read the description of the video. The uploader admits that all information for this video was taken from a Ken Burns documentary about the war.
That documentary has been criticized by Vietnam war scholars specifically due to its focus on healing and reconciliation instead of the truth. The Burns documentary perpetuates the myth of "two Vietnams" that the US invented in order to justify invasion. It omits any reference to racism and American imperialism. It overly relies on the testimony of US architects of the war, military personnel and intelligence agents, who are presented by their names but not their military titles and ranks.
It is propaganda.
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@NeilLewis77 It's conciliatory propaganda. But propaganda no less.
The US position at the time was that the establishment of slave states on the basis of racial supremacy was a legitimate foreign policy position. This is racist.
The film takes for granted that "domino theory" was both:
a) race neutral
b) the dominant political idea at the time
It was neither. "Domino Theory" was a racist policy pushed by the US that most of the world did not agree with. The entire theory was premised on the racist notion that white Western European countries like Switzerland could have their neutrality respected, however, the nations of the inferior races must be a vassal state of one of the great powers. They have no right to neutrality.
You are pretending that a foreign policy position must either be based on anticommunist prejudice or racial prejudice. When in actuality they are the same thing. Anti-communism in someone else's country is racism. You can't insist that you have the right to overthrow a foreign country and establish it as slave state if you disagree with their internal economic policy decisions unless you are already operating under the assumption that these people do not have any right to self determination.
Worse still, it was unclear precisely how "communist" North Vietnam even was. The land redistribution policy was less a communist policy than it was an anti-racist policy. Since the entire purpose of the previous regime was to siphon wealth from Vietnam into French hands, most land and resources were obviously still controlled by the agents of the empire. So obviously they would have to be seized and redistributed as part of the independence process. This would be a bit like saying when the allies repatriated the gold the Nazis stole they were engaged in "communist seizures of property." Weird that the video would conceal this element of it.
Furthermore, the final configuration of the North Vietnamese economy was still an open question. Would it be communist, socialist, or some kind of mixed system? Would it choose to ally with the US or China or Russia, or would it be neutral (since this too is a separate question)? Would it be a democracy or authoritarian? All of these are open questions.
If you consider a people equal to you, you let them make a decision. Or you ask them what you can do to influence that decision (as the US asked the French). But if you believe them to be your subjects anyway, you just go ahead and kill them.
Consider that when the French, by their own admission, stated that they were under risk of becoming communist the US response was not invade and topple a government under risk of turning communist, but rather to ask if they could do anything for them to change their minds? Perhaps capture some yellow slaves for them?
But when the US see the risk of Vietnam becoming communist, the response is not "What can we do to convince you otherwise?" but rather, to take away their freedom.
Domino theory was a fundamentally racist theory because it:
a) Was premised on the assumption that certain people did not have a right to self-determination
b) Didn't reject communism in favor of free economic systems, but rather, almost exclusively insisted on preserving racist colonialist economic relationships.
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On a separate note I should also repeat what I said before. The decision of the documentary (and this video) to perpetuate the myth that there were 2 Vietnams is an intentional decision to obfuscate the truth on the single most critical aspect of the entire conflict. Voila! We've turned an invasion into a Civil War.
This is downright villainous.
I agree that modern propaganda is not as blatantly heavy handed as the older stuff, but it's still quite bad.
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@NeilLewis77 "They never invaded Cuba or El Salvador or Columbia and enslaved anyone. "
Accepting the legitimacy of colonialism as an international order doesn't necessarily mean you find it strategically advantageous for yourself. Given the that the US itself consisted of a series of large, sprawling, underpopulated, resource rich, relatively recently conquered or acquired territories that were insulated from the rest of the world, the US did not pursue the same colonialism heavy foreign policy.
However, it has indeed invaded multiple Latin American countries (Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.) and did have its own colonies (Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc.) and client states (eg: Cuba). Thereafter it pursued a neocolonialist policy of acquiring proxy sates that consisted mainly of repressive authoritarians installed by the US who were ultimately answerable to the US (eg: Chile, Indonesia, Cambodia, etc.).
"This idea that American anti communist rage was to do with race is strange."
Only to Americans. The rest of the world is pretty clear on what it was.
It's not like the US was concerned that communism was a threat to a free and fair international economic order. They were concerned that communism would interrupt a racist colonialism and neocolonialism based economic order. Their intervention was not targeted at moving people away from communism and towards freedom, but rather, away from communism and towards colonialism or neocolonialism. That's pretty racist.
I'm glad you brought up Germany, because this illustrates the point well. Germany had just finished launching two existential wars against the US and Europe. They were already conquered and occupied. And yet still, it was never on the table for the US to enslave Germany as a French colony. Why not? Or failing that, to establish a repressive authoritarian regime in West Germany that would operate as a US vassal state against the wishes of the German people. Nope, not an option.
However, in Vietnam these were the only options considered. Why was Germany treated as an equal and Vietnam as a subject? Seems particularly odd. Why the kid gloves? (Hint: it's because they're white Western Europeans, so they're still considered equal).
We're dealing with a United States that at the time still had segregation, hadn't passed the voting rights act yet, and still had laws barring interracial marriage or black people buying homes in white neighborhoods. It's not surprising that there wasn't a seat at the table for Vietnamese allies, but there was for German enemies.
"To say America was happy to go kill brown people but wouldn't go kill white people is just silly. Especially considering the gap between WW2 and the viatnam war was just 9 years."
Well, no. Being racist doesn't mean there are no circumstances where you wouldn't go to war with people of your own race. I mean, the US fought the British while they sill had slaves. Pretty sure that didn't make them less racist.
"Also you surely know that Bao and many other south viatnamese people wanted independence based on western systems. And Ho wanted independence based on communist eastern systems."
Lol no. Now you're just being silly.
Bao Dai was the puppet monarch that administered the enslaved colony of Vietnam for the French. After Ho Chi Minh freed Vietnam from the French, Bao Dai was obviously ousted from that position. He tried to make himself relevant again by claiming that he supported a "French sponsored Vietnamese Independence from France", whatever the hell that means.
At the first opportunity, he signed the Ha Long Bay Agreements (1947) which recognized French interests in Vietnam without committing France to granting Vietnamese independence or transferring any authority to Vietnam.
In short, he was a weak colonial puppet monarch who tried to re-establish French colonialism. Both sides of the Vietnamese independence movement ended up hating him, communist and anti-communist alike. Eventually in 1950 he admitted himself that what he proposed as the "Bao Dai" solution was just a rebranded French solution.
The fact that you would even bring this guy up as a legitimate counterpoint is a joke.
Ho Chi Minh on the other hand, attempted to establish a democratic independent Vietnam with a Constitution and Bill of Rights modeled on that of the United States. Contrary to the video above, he actually reached out to the United States (Truman) 8 times for support. Hell, he had been reaching out to the US even before he took power having lobbied Woodrow Wilson(!) for assistance in establishing civil rights in Vietnam in accordance with the charter of the League of Nations.
After WWII he invited the Allied powers into Vietnam and cited the United Nations charter as his guidance in establishing the new state.
It was only after the US rejected supporting him and he witnessed the United States successfully work with China to return nearby Northern Indo-China to French colonial rule while the English occupied and return Southern Indo-China to the French that he realized the only option the Allied powers (& the US) were offering was a return to race-based subjugation.
Given all of that, it seems obvious that Minh was looking to establish an independent free Vietnam that was a pawn of neither super power. The issue was that the US simply would not accept a world order where the lesser races were treated as equals and allowed self-determination.
"You seem to be suggesting America just made up the 2 opposing parties and everything was fine till they came and tore the country in two. "
I am not suggesting that. The US itself admitted that. In the Pentagon Papers the US Department of Defense characterized Ho Chi Minh as the only leader in Vietnam with a true national following. They acknowledged his overwhelming popularity.
When the French withdrew the Geneva Accords established South Vietnam as a temporary entity, with the condition that elections for reunification would be held within 2 years. The US then plucked Diem Bien Phu from New Jersey, installed him as the dictator of South Vietnam and told him not to hold the promised elections. The US had Phu cancel the reunification election multiple times, stating outright that if he held elections Ho Chi Minh's would win all of Vietnam.
In the Pentagon Papers the US itself declared outright:
"We must note that South Vietnam (unlike any of the other countries in Southeast Asia) was essentially the creation of the United States"
Thus the need for the CIA operation to artificially populate the country by pushing people out of their homes in Northern Vietnam under threat of nuclear annihilation and Chinese invasion.
Knowing that he was the puppet head of a fictitious country and widely disliked, Diem proceeded to replace all locally elected chiefs and officials with military men loyal to him, further entrenching his repressive dictatorship.
So yes, like every country there was more than one political party in Vietnam. However, the public was overwhelmingly in support of Ho Chi Minh's party and there was no widespread support for the fictitious political entity known as South Vietnam or for a civil war.
"If this is propaganda to make America feel better, then it fails on every level"
Not quite. When the reality is so much worse, propaganda is quite successful if it at least mitigates your villainy to a certain extent.
That's how you can end up with Youtubers who delusionally create video documentaries with horseshit lines like, "The Vietnam war begin in good faith by good people with good intentions." That is a propaganda success.
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