Nationalism Vs. Communism: A Rebuttal

I am going to break from the credibility gap today to answer the following comment posted on YouTube. Normally I hesitate to respond to commentators who fail to cite their sources, however, it is time to set the record straight.

The following was directed at me (I lined thru it so you know I did not write this:

"+@VietnamWarMyths You don't know what you are talking about.
South Vietnamese nationalism is precisely what you were fighting to crush. The Viet Minh nationalists fought the French, then the Japanese, the French again, and then the United States after the US installed its dictatorship in the South which attacked the nationalists.
It was the Vietnamese nationalists who were fighting for the liberation and independence of South Vietnam from the US and its installed military juntas.
The idea that a defenseless third world country in Indochina was going to take over the world is simply ludicrous."

I am not sure where you got the (ludicrous) idea that I said North Vietnam was trying to take over the world, but let’s clarify that right off the bat.

The Vietnam War (American War from the Vietnamese point of view) was one of dozens of “wars of liberation” the Soviet and Chinese leaders were attempting to use to take over the world[i]. As I said in my first comment, the Soviet Communists and Chinese Communists were trying to take over the world.

That clarified, I will now respond to the issues from the beginning:

“You don't know what you are talking about.”

I have spent decades studying the Vietnam War. 3 years of that time was spent in full-time graduate level academic research, studying original & secondary source documents from the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Chinese, the Vietcong, the Australians, the Americans including both government, media and antiwar sources. I have hundreds of pages of notes collected from this research. The index alone for those notes is fifteen pages long. Also note that I cite my sources.

"South Vietnamese nationalism is precisely what you were fighting to crush. The Viet Minh nationalists fought the French, then the Japanese, the French again, and then the United States after the US installed its dictatorship in the South which attacked the nationalists."

You are right about the French, and about the Japanese, more or less. Your level of accuracy fails miserably after that.

It was North Vietnam that was trying to, and succeeded in crushing South Vietnamese nationalism. Note that South Vietnam no longer exists as a nation. We, Americans, did not crush it, the North Vietnamese did. We were trying to protect South Vietnam from communist aggression & forced unification under communist rule.

The peoples of North and South Vietnam were two very different peoples. The southerners did not want to be dominated by or unified with the North.

If you don’t believe that, ask these descendants of South Vietnamese nationals still lamenting the loss of their county due to communist aggression http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ff-south-vietnamese-flag-20141228-story.html 

Next, I will call your attention to the organizational documents of the National Liberation Front (NLF or political arm of the Vietcong) known as the Manifesto and Program of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam[ii]. The South Vietnamese did not create this document; the North Vietnamese created it. Observe the second paragraph opens with the statement, “Our compatriots in South Vietnam[iii]” (RVN). This is one of many indicators that show that the South Vietnamese did not create the Vietcong.

The Vietcong (VC) was a puppet organization created by the Communists in North Vietnam (DVR). After the non-communist government in the South surrendered, the Northern government took control of South Vietnam away from the Vietcong (by this time the NLF had morphed into the Provisional Revolutionary Government or PRG) leadership, systematically squeezing the Southerners out of the government until the North controlled the entire nation. Truong Nhu Tang, the Vietcong Minister of Justice, while discussing the aftermath of the fall of Saigon stated,

Truong Nhu Tang

“My administrators began claiming that they had to carry out orders from their superiors in the Northern government rather than the directives they received from us. ... My guests (Northern leaders) succeeded in conveying to me the fundamentality of the North’s resolve to control the Provisional Government ... I had no illusions about what was happening, and I knew that neither I nor my colleagues would be in office long”[iv].

Even though President Diem may have been repressive, very few South Vietnamese chose to escape to the north, because they knew Diem was less oppressive than the Ho regime. Those that did migrate north were primarily Communists.

However, when the DVR was forming in the mid 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens voted against communism with their feet. They chose to leave the north because they were quite aware of the repressive controls imposed by the Communists in the north. The South Vietnamese did not want a communist government!

"The US and its installed military juntas."

A Constitutional Assembly of 118 men and women was elected by 85% of the people, in spite of the fact that “communist guerrillas attacked voters, polling places and even candidates. One of those who was elected was murdered by the Vietcong immediately after the election”[v].

Nguyen Cao Ky

Through early 1967 the South Vietnamese Constitutional Assembly and the South Vietnamese Directorate met in Saigon and drafted a constitution[vi]. This was a combined effort of their military and civilian officials, not Westmoreland, not Taylor, not Johnson.

Diem’s eventual successor, President Thieu was elected in a nationwide election where over 75% of the population turned out to vote in spite of continued Communist reprisals against anyone who voted[vii]. That’s a higher percentage turnout than any election in the history of the United States and we don’t risk death for voting. The Vietnamese people installed President Thieu, not the US.

This is evidence of two things: First, by 1967 the Vietcong did not control the hearts and minds of the people. Second, in most instances, the Vietcong did not have the capability to carry out their threats because the elections were held with large turnouts in spite of those threats. If the VC had the capability they would have closed down the polls.

Premier Ky stated, “The Vietcong positioned themselves as liberators ... (However) after Tet it was plain that the Vietcong were mistaken, that as much as people found fault with their government, they did not want to live under communism”[viii].

By the middle of 1968 the Vietcong were so unpopular among the South Vietnamese that 70% of the VC ranks were filled with Northern conscripts[ix], and many of the remaining 30% were teenagers stolen from their villages.

After returning to III Corps from the hospital in Japan, I was a guard on the Dau Tiang bridge platoon for about a month. We had daily contact with the villagers in Dau Taing. On three occasions, against regulations, we hid teenagers from the village (two of which were 12-year old boys) on the bridge because the VC were in the village drafting these kids for their army. I repeat the VC were kidnapping children to fight!

If the VC were as popular as the media claimed they were, they would have no need to draft anyone, they would have plenty of volunteers.

"It was the Vietnamese nationalists who were fighting for the liberation and independence of South Vietnam from the US."

Now, you may have gotten the mistaken idea that the VC were fighting for Vietnamese nationalism because many of the rank and file VC, who were Southerners by birth or ancestry believed the same thing. They, like you were duped by communist propaganda.

Truong Nhu Tang, the VC Minister of Justice, himself a former communist, admits, that under direction from the northern honchos, they specifically did not mention communism to the rank and file VC members because if they had, most would have deserted because they were anti-communist. This does not mean that the VC were in fact fighting for “nationalism”.

While it is true that they believed they were fighting to remove foreign invaders from their land, they were unwittingly fighting for forced unification under communist rule. The claim, that the US was a foreign invader, was, after all, a main point in the communist Dich Van propaganda program. 

Speaking of Vietcong training for the Southerners, Truong stated, "As a general rule there was no political indoctrination; Marxist subjects, for example were never touched on. ... Northern troops ... (received) a steady infusion of Marxist precepts and class analysis. Had we attempted similar indoctrination of the Southern peasant guerrillas, they would have considered it worse torture than the regime could possibly devise for them"[x]. 

Many of the higher echelon of the VC leadership were well aware that the organization was a communist organization, but they also took great pains to ensure that the rank and file Southerners did not know this fact[xi]. Because all the previous foreign occupiers were colonialists, it was easy to dupe Southern nationalists into believing the Americans were colonialists as well.

The Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) were the true South Vietnamese nationalists. The VC only thought they were. All the Vietcong’s efforts only succeeded in costing them their county to communist aggression. Those that did not die in the struggle paid an unexpected price when they found their sovereignty stolen from them by the Northern invaders[xii].

---

[i] See Domino Theory below.

[ii] Truong Nhu Tang, Chanoff D., & Doan Van Toai (1985). A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, pp. 319-322.

[iii] Ibid, p. 319.

[iv] Ibid, pp. 266-267, parentheses added.

[v] Cao Ky, N., Wolf, M. J., (2002). Buddha’s Child: My fight to save Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 231.

[vi] Ibid., p. 232.

[vii] Ibid., p.  

[viii] Cao Ky, N., Wolf, M. J., (2002). Buddha’s Child: My fight to save Vietnam. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 283-284.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Truong Nhu Tang, Chanoff D., & Doan Van Toai (1985). A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, pp. 164-166.

[xi] Ibid., p. 164.

[xii] Truong Nhu Tang, Chanoff D., & Doan Van Toai (1985). A Vietcong Memoir. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers