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Another Vietnam – Unseen images of the war from the winning side
- golergka 11y agoSo, this article not only retranslates Vietcong propanagda, but the only commentary it seems to offer is by Vietcong themselves, with phrases like "resistance to foreign invasion". How isn't this article isn't considered a propaganda piece by itself? It's one thing to present interesting historic material; it's another thing entirely to glorify a marxist dictatorship.
- fsloth 11y agoBut Vietnam war was essentially an effort to resist foreign invasion. It effectively started when "On 23 September 1945, with the knowledge of the British Commander in Saigon, French forces overthrew the local DRV government, and declared French authority restored..."[1] It was one of the awful proxy conflicts of 20th century. I have no idea which is better - to be a colony in a market economy (the dominating effect is that profits from capital leak into the owning country) or a marxist dictatorship. Most dictatorships are kinda shitty - Marxist or not - but I have no calculus to compute is being a colony any better [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Indochina_War
- classicsnoot 11y agoWhat is more, they did it with the weapons taken by the British from the Japanese who surrendered to the Vietminh.[1] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz8H_oi1ck0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz8H_oi1ck0
- pearjuice 11y agoAs always there are two sides of a story. That what the oppressors want their citizens to believe to gather moral support and that what the suppressed want their citizens to know so they resist. By putting those two sides together, only then we can approximate truth.
- golergka 11y ago> By putting those two sides together, only then we can approximate truth. Absolutely agree. And this is exactly where this article fails, which is precisely the point of my comment.
- cariaso 11y agoThe article does not fail. It does it's part beautifully. You're abdicating your responsibility.
- golergka 11y agoWhat responsibility are you talking about?
- detaro 11y agoProbably the responsibility to do the comparison yourself. The article doesn't claim to present a balanced view or "the truth" (which propaganda would), it is clear about showing one perspective. There is more than enough documentation for the other perspective available, as is material contrasting the two. It would be bad if this article stood alone as the only source of information available, but it doesn't.
- pearjuice 11y agoHow so does it fail? Are there any useen images of the American side of the war they are hiding?
- golergka 11y agoWhy unseen? They're presenting this images without challenging them, without providing any historical context at all.
- alan_cx 11y agoReading your initial comment, its very hard to believe that. It reads like someone who only believes one side of the narrative.
- nness 11y ago"Resistance to foreign invasion" is essentially accurate, is it not? I find the quotes interesting. They help to illustrate the rhetoric which likely motivated much of North — that there were foreign countries intervening in what many locals considered a country's own struggle and not just another battlefield for a proxy war. I think pieces like this are important. Whilst you can disagree with it, it still makes you consider the views held by millions on the other side.
- golergka 11y agoWell, this is exactly my point: this piece is presenting only one point of view, without even an attempt to put it into context of a conflicting worldview.
- mmustapic 11y agoWell, the point of the article is how NV photographers saw the war. You don't need any extra context since it's explicitly stated that this is from one particular point of view. If you want a different point of view, there are thousands of articles, books and photographs.
- DanBC 11y agoI've had decades of the US point of view.
- arethuza 11y agoThe only reference to "foreign invasion" that I can see in the article is in a direct quote from one of the photographers who had witnessed US bombing of his country - not sure what other reaction you would expect him to have.
- fensipens 11y agobut the only commentary it seems to offer is by Vietcong themselves Yeah, nobody cares about the point of view of a 60kg Vietcong soldier. They are not supposed to have a face and keep quiet beneath that 2+ million bodycount. The brave war stories are reserved for the american GIs.. and hollywood.
- golergka 11y agoYou seem to argue against an imaginary strawman instead of a point I was trying to make.
- stingraycharles 11y agoI think OP was implying that this argument also holds for American soldiers talking from the American perspective, but wouldn't be labelled propaganda.
- Wintamute 11y agoYour comments are being down voted to oblivion. The prevailing narrative of our time is pretty anti-western. Anything the west does is auto-bad, whereas the activities of other cultures, current and historical, are (re)presented as heroic struggles against evil imperial forces. I agree with you, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It seems like it should be an uncontroversial stance doesn't it? Welcome to the modern era where shades of gray don't exist, and the best way to accrue Twitter followers it to kick your own culture apart.
- SolaceQuantum 11y agoI don't think the downvoting of a comment claiming it's nothing but propaganda means anything about shades of grey not existing. I mean, that comment was pretty black and white itself.
- madaxe_again 11y agoThis is sure to be confusing to many, as a majority of Americans believe the US won the war on Vietnam, or won it but were forced to declare defeat by Congress. The VC won fair and square against the occupying and invading forces, and despite all the doom predictions of the time, they appear to still be a functioning state.
- cageface 11y agoThis was also my perspective on the war before I moved to Vietnam. However, after living here for five years and talking to people all over the country my opinion is much more nuanced. To this day many, or even most, southern Vietnamese view the northern Vietnamese as the invaders and occupiers, not the USA. It's a difficult war to understand because it was not only a struggle to end colonialism in Vietnam but also a land and power grab by the northern communists.
- paganel 11y agoThe only war which has been strategically won by the US after WW2 was the Cold War, and possible a tie in the Korean War. It's a f.ucking huge win, don't get me wrong, but this puts into perspective the huge US military budget which has been consumed in countless other wars with almost nothing to show for it. And, as an anecdote, as a guy how grew up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s things like Michael Jackson's music or Coca Cola bottles had a lot more lasting effect on "winning" the Cold War for the US then the nuclear warheads from North Dakota or the Nimitz-class carriers. Too bad that know-how has not been translated into trying to "win" over the hearts and minds of the Arab people.
- Ono-Sendai 11y agoSome of these photos are probably staged: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/44dwib/astonishing_photo_of_vietnam_war_from_the_other/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/44dwib/aston...
- arethuza 11y agoThat wouldn't surprise me at all - a lot of wartime photos are "staged" or "recreated": http://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/09/25/famous-fakes-10-celebrated-wartime-photos-that-were-staged-edited-or-fabricated/ http://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/09/25/famous-fakes-10-cel... The article even says "this wasn't staged" - making the question of authenticity very obvious. Still, even if some of these were staged it's still a fascinating set of pictures.
- reledi 11y agoMaybe, but at the moment that reddit thread doesn't provide any convincing evidence.
- Ono-Sendai 11y agoThere's no firm evidence that they are staged, agreed. However if you spend enough time looking at combat photos and videos, you get a good feel for what kind of situations are captured during combat. This situation is just too perfect (too well composed), and at too close range.
- sangnoir 11y ago> However if you spend enough time looking at combat photos and videos, you get a good feel for what kind of situations are captured during combat I strongly disagree with this armchair analysis, 'gut feel' isn't good enough! Some photos happen serendipitously (not sure if that's the correct word for combat photographs). I'll be damned if the Saigon Execution[1] or the burning monk[2] were staged - yet the framing and timing could not have been any better. 1. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XwjZTVlnghk/U3Jv5jqOpBI/AAAAAAAAJFM/Mf6WVCThdZM/s1600/Saigon+Execution+Murder+of+a+Vietcong+by+Saigon+Police+Chief,+1968.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XwjZTVlnghk/U3Jv5jqOpBI/AAAAAAAAJF... 2. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ul72G5EX-Pc/VYjrTroozbI/AAAAAAAAJ54/b-fLE0bNd9Q/s1600/The%2Bburning%2Bmonk%252C%2B1963%2B%25281%2529.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ul72G5EX-Pc/VYjrTroozbI/AAAAAAAAJ5...
- vkazanov 11y agoYeah, Vietnamese had no Hollywood to force their point of view onto the global society. I lived in Hanoi for two years, and been attending a local climbing club. A friend of mine, an American climber, once shared his thoughts on the war, and the way Vietnamese don't hate modern Americans despite having a war veteran in every family - it was a bit of surprise to him. I think what he did not realize is that the US lost the war, and retrieved the forces, and Vietnamese are really proud of that, and it's very different to, for example, modern situation in the Arabic world, where the US just can't get enough of it.
- tyingq 11y agoThe rest of your comment is interesting, but this... >>Vietnamese had no Hollywood to force their point of view onto the global society Sort of implies that Hollywood was reinforcing some view that the US won in Vietnam, or that the reasons for the war were noble, or? I can't think of any Hollywood produced Vietnam centric movies that follow that sort of theme.
- rawfan 11y agoYet something must have gone wrong. As a European, I've met many Americans who only learned of the US losing the Vietnam war, when they were in Europe. Some of them might not have been that bright, though. I remember an exchange student protesting a poem we read in English class because she thought it implied the US lost the war. There was complete silence in class and our teacher just said "well, they did lose." She actually said "No, we won it when we threw the bomb on Hiroshima."
- brianwawok 11y ago* Just because have facts in textbooks, does not mean that students will actually learn them. Take the most average person you know. 1/2 of people in the world are dumber. Surprised someone doesn't know who won Vietnam?
- detaro 11y ago
- ap22213 11y agoWe're still glorifying war? Even on HN?
- adekok 11y agoI'm reminded of an article I read in one of Jerry Pournelle's anthologies. It was written by a Vietnamese man who had agitated against the Americans during the Vietnam war. At one point, he was in jail for resisting the Americans. His father visited him, and asked "What the heck are you doing?" He answered "Fighting against the oppressor Americans!" His father responded "It's true that they're oppressors, but the communists are worse." He didn't believe his father. When the Americans left, there was a victory parade through Hanoi. Which was composed only of communist regiments. He asked the other people involved in the resistance "Where are all the non-communist regiments, which were the majority of the fighters?" The answer was "On exercises in the country." It turned out that the communists had infiltrated all of the non-communist resistance groups (of which there were many), and taken them over from the inside. A few years later, with his life in danger from the communists, he fled Vietnam, became one of the boat people, and immigrated to America.
- narutouzumaki 11y agoThanks for this bit, very interesting! This shows how even though difficult, it is very important to keep in mind that conflicts like these are most of the time very multidimensional. 'The communists' might be the ones that surfaced at the end of the war as leaders of the new country, yet the vast majority of the battle was fought on the shoulders of young men and women believing in fighting for their independence. They probably didn't give two cents about communism.
- pessimizer 11y agoIf it weren't for the American retreat, Vietnam would be as beautiful and egalitarian as Afghanistan or Iraq.
- Paradigma11 11y agoOr even South Korea.
- pessimizer 11y agoSouth Korea did manage to maintain the human rights standards of other US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel until 1987; hopefully a little northern belligerence will get them back in line. What I'm trying to say is that I'm really inspired by this on-the-nose third-hand bit of propaganda, and believe that if we hadn't lost our nerve at just 1.3 million deaths, we may have been able to save Vietnam from the evils of communism.
- j_r_f_b_n 11y agoJose Rocha Ferreira Bastos Neto - That wouldn't surprise me at all
- narutouzumaki 11y agoI think it is crucial to understand the motivations and principles of the people involved, in order to shed more insight unto the matter. Regardless of the political overhead, from my personal experience the vast majority of the Vietnamese people at the time, already being Spartan like in certain manners and living in times of turmoil, saw the 'war of Resistance against America' (as the Vietnam War is called in VN)as the continuation of resistance against foreign superpowers, dating back thousands of years. The US, after, Japan, France, the Mongols, China was seen as yet another invader in a long line, albeit arguably the one with the most overwhelming strength. The average North Vietnamese person did not care about Communism, Capitalism, Political theories or world politics. They only cared about them in so far how they could help them achieve their goal: To be free! Sovereign in their own land. This mindset coupled with the history of Vietnam is important to understand where the dermination of these units came from. Yes, the US military would 'win', as in being the last party to remain with living soldiers in an all out war until the very end no discussions, hands down. That is because, similar to the Japanese the morals of these Vietnamese guerilla peasants fighting would fight till the end. In that regard, especially when seeing discussions here and mostly on reddit going back and forth about who 'won' the war, people forget that they might talk with completely different defnitions of winning in mind. (Or they are just American kiddos that cannot accept their great US ever loosing ever.) It is a great tragedy in the end, because in the end, absurdly in a certain way, both sides fought for the same thing: Freedom. The US won the battle, but lost the war.
- whelp 11y ago> ... both sides fought for the same thing: Freedom. Not really. The US government doesn't give a crap about freedom. What they want is influence and hegemony. Freedom/democracy are only PR excuses for american public consumption when it's convenient. Ordinary american people are nice people though.
- seivan 11y agoThat's not always true. I agree that pure altruism isn't the modus operandi, but you're ignoring a lot of non-Americans who're appreciative of any help in the past.
- classicsnoot 11y agoFirst off, these pictures are amazing, and the stories of the photographers are hard to describe with words. Reading through the comments, I see a lot of purportedly european folk who believe that many, if not most, people in the US are unfamiliar with the Vietnam conflict. If we discard children (15 and younger) I would be very surprised to find that half of the country is unaware of the war. I think the confusion here is coming from the Idea that the US lost the war. They did not. There were two groups of winners and losers. On the winning side, you have Vietnam, Thailand, the US, and Japan. On the losing side you have France, Laos, Cambodia, and China. The last one was the true "enemy" the US was confronting. Given the recent developments in the Spratly's and Cam Ranh Bay, i think it is even more clear that the US, losses notwithstanding, gained much from the Vietnam Conflict. Another point brought up by another comment was that the US does not fight at "home". This is intentional and the US has been very successful in this regard. Even if the US is forced to abandon policy aims as well as territory, it is hard to see it as a loss when it continues to economically prosper. Wars are not like sporting events; there is no official scorecard. Body counts and capital losses play a role, but so do evolving narratives and cultural identity. Only time tells us who wins and loses. The French definitely lost. The Vietnamese definitely won. All other participants, direct and indirect, occupy a gray area.
- vlehto 11y ago>Given the recent developments in the Spratly's and Cam Ranh Bay, i think it is even more clear that the US, losses notwithstanding, gained much from the Vietnam Conflict. I don't understand. U.S. controls neither, Vietnam controls Cam Rang Bay. Given recent developments there, it looks like U.S. gained nothing from the Vietnam war. Edited, I mistook about Vietnam controlling Spratly.
- mikerichards 11y agoThe Vietnamese people didn't win the war. The people lost when the communists won. They realized that a couple decades later..after the communists had inflicted their brutal tyranny on the people. Neighboring Cambodia lost a seventh of their population because of Communist evils. By the way, despite leftist gleefulness of "American loss ". The US militarily won almost every battle and had a kill ratio of 134:1.
- rangibaby 11y agoI wouldn't conflate the communists in Vietnam (USSR ally) with those in Cambodia (Chinese ally). Vietnam fought wars with both of the latter countries. Winning battles doesn't count for much if you don't meet your strategic objectives (if you even have any). The same story has played out many times since then; the Soviets dominated the Afghans in every possible way, but accomplished nothing of note. Iraq now is much the same.
- vkazanov 11y agoTrue. Losses in "Afgan" (Russian slang name of the country) weren't too high (15k either killed or died from wounds), even compared to American losses in Vietnam (58k KIA), and technically there were no major battles lost. Vietnamese were backed by the USSR, Afgans - by Saudis and the US. But from a political point of view it was a clear loss, similar to Vietnam for the US: no pro-USSR government established, anti-war movement back home, further deligitimisation of the Party, etc. Unfortunately for the Soviets, this strongly resonated with other problems at the time resulting in... The collapse.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- arca_vorago 11y agoThere are two larger points about Vietnam that I think are often overlooked. 1) Vietnam was, as others wars are, a most profitable venture for the military industrial congressional complex. Even with the draft, the upper elite usually wiggled their way out it in some form or another. 2) The war was started, as were other wars, on false pretenses and lies. Now this is where you may expect a rambling about the gulf of tonkin, but the more sinister angle is that of the created enemy: communism. Through the Yale in China group, a front for an intelligence group, the Maoists were trained and put into power against Sun Yat-Sen who wanted to actually modernize the country. The supranational elite use the hegellian dialectic in order to control the outcome. It's nowhere as direct as maany theorists would say, buts thats how its done, for whatever the enemy is, be it facism, communism, terrorism, and soon cyberterrorism. No ones learns any of this in their heavily controlled history textbooks though.
- tim333 11y agoIt's striking that we're only seeing these 40 years after the war. If people saw both sides earlier on we might have less conflict. (Typed from Saigon which is booming at the moment).