Why Did The United States Fight In Vietnam? - Alternative View

Why Did The United States Fight In Vietnam? - Alternative View
Why Did The United States Fight In Vietnam? - Alternative View

Video: Why Did The United States Fight In Vietnam? - Alternative View

Video: Why Did The United States Fight In Vietnam? - Alternative View
Video: Why didn't Britain fight in Vietnam? (Short Animated Documentary) 2024, March
Anonim

One way or another, but we watched American films about Vietnam. There are many of them, the whole sea. Serious part of cinematography. And machine guns crack, and shell casings fall, and huts burn … It's fun and interesting to watch this with a bottle of beer, sitting in front of the TV. If you have a snack, it's generally fun. And gorgeous in these same films shows the tragedy of a simple American guy, by the will of fate, abandoned in the jungle of Southeast Asia. You sympathize with him and his difficult fate. You involuntarily begin to empathize, because the actor plays well, tries … He's aiming for Oscar, rascal.

And as a matter of fact, the Vietnamese themselves and their fragile huts constitute, as it were, the background, the entourage of everything that happens. And everything around so beautifully burns, explodes, people (or rather, the Vietnamese) fall as if decimated. Probably they (the Vietnamese) like to participate in such a show …

In fact, the Vietnamese in the 20th century were unlucky, very unlucky. At first they were part of the French colonial empire. Then, during the war in the Pacific, they were occupied by the Japanese, against whom they were partisans, then the French returned and they began to partisan against the Franks, then Dien Bien Phu and the departure of the French, the arrival of the Americans and the war with the Americans, then, after the unification, the invasion of the Chinese into the northern provinces … In short, you can write books about this, not articles.

And here the point is not in some special "belligerence" of the Vietnamese. The thing is that they wanted to live in a single, independent "Vietnamese" Vietnam. And everyone actively interfered with them. And they were forced to fight. And they had to fight for a very long time, very hard and with very heavy losses. But the stubborn devils survived. You involuntarily start to respect.

The longest and fiercest confrontation between the Vietnamese people and the United States. The problem was precisely this: the Vietnamese wanted to have a united and indivisible Vietnam under the control of the Vietnamese government. And the Americans were categorically against it. Here are some of us, out of thoughtlessness, admire: they say, what stubborn Marxists these Vietnamese are, what militant communists. The Americans also fought the commies, according to their propaganda.

It just coincided. The Vietnamese needed an ally in the struggle for the unification of Vietnam, and this could only be the USSR / PRC at that time. The Vietnamese would not have fought for so many years for the ideas of Marx and Engels who were unfamiliar to them. It's impossible. And here, just, I found a scythe on a stone: the Americans categorically did not want to surrender South Vietnam to the “communists”, and they categorically wanted to unite the country and enjoyed full popular support.

Such is the "asymmetrical" war. Paradoxically, the Americans saw Ho Chi Minh as a "Soviet puppet" just like their own "leaders" in Saigon. So Ho Chi Minh's strength was precisely in the fact that he was by no means anyone's puppet. Not a symmetrical situation. After the flight of the Americans from Saigon and the unification, Vietnam became an independent state. And by no means a Soviet puppet regime.

It's just that we also view this war through the prism of the USSR-USA confrontation and do not always take into account the deep interest of the Vietnamese people themselves, which, first of all, consisted in the unification of the country, and not in the worship of Marx. That is why the Americans lost. After fleeing Saigon, the Americans were surprised to discover many new things for themselves. Firstly, the Vietnamese communist regime was not and did not want to become a "Soviet puppet", the United States killed everyone they could and burned everything they could, that is why they were enemies, and by no means on orders from Moscow. Why lay so many people and fight in the jungle for so many years?

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Secondly, the Vietnamese communist regime was, first of all, Vietnamese, and only then, to some extent, communist. In this sequence. That is, it would be quite possible to work with him if it were not for the very “ten-year war”. It is absolutely incomprehensible: why did the Americans fight there at all?

Thirdly, there was no "spread of communist ideology" in Southeast Asia, for the neighbors the Vietnamese were and remain, first of all, Vietnamese, and not communists. This is what the American Xperds feared most of all.

As a result, I would like to ask: “what was that?”. Yes, yes, that's all, what was it? For what was the whole war fought by the Americans? Severe, prolonged, protracted, bloody. The war that brought America itself to the brink of political chaos. A war in which defeat called into question the role of the United States as a superpower. The war that completely reshaped the American national consciousness … In fact, it was not needed at all. The war, in fact, went against the completely natural processes of the unification of Vietnam.

Uniting Vietnam, that was what was important for the Vietnamese (hello, Captain Obvious!), And under what ideological sauce, it was not so important. Ideology is just a beautiful flag. No more. But the Americans refused to understand this and stubbornly fought the "commies" … And stubbornly continued to destroy the Vietnamese.

Were there other options for work? Certainly! But for this it was necessary to decisively abandon the idea of a puppet South Vietnamese government. And the United States could not agree to this. Categorically. They were ready to work with any Vietnamese government if it was their puppet. Such layouts. It was this reluctance to acknowledge objective political realities that led them into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

Could Kennedy / Johnson agree with Ho Chi Minh? Why not? They just didn't want to negotiate with him about anything. That is, first of all, it was the US colonial war against Vietnam, and in the second place … something about Karl Marx. "I studied Marxism-Leninism, the conclusion is: Vietnam should be free!" - something like that. Such an interesting interpretation of the classics, which most Vietnamese will agree with.

And by the way, yes, why did Mao defeat Chiang Kai-shek? Perhaps because Mao and his associates were not anyone's puppets. Such is the "democracy". You can't fool the people! It's just that many people, mentioning the United States, like to emphasize that the United States is defending freedom … Well, like yes. Protect. Of course, South Korea has made huge strides in the economy, but the problem is precisely that South Korea has been ruled by puppet military dictators for a very long time.

Approximately the same problem is observed in Japan's “economic superpower yesterday” - extremely tight external control. And so please: sushi, geisha, haiku - in all fields … But serious political decisions will be made in the United States. This is somehow strange from the point of view of "freedom apologists". The problem is that the United States has no friends - only six. Of course, this position has both positive and negative sides.

But the US doesn't trust anyone. That is why there was an endless, bloody, unpromising war for the United States in the jungles of Vietnam. So they "defended freedom." If Ho Chi Minh had to abandon Marxism in order to unite Vietnam, he could have done it, but he could not refuse to unite the country. This was the root of the insoluble contradiction between Vietnam and America.

Why did the United States fight in Vietnam?