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These are some great photos! But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likel

• tjpnz 5y ago
  Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.
  • alephnan 5y ago
    Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season. There is growing wealth disparity with the people at the top enjoying modern luxuries, yes.
    • tjpnz 5y ago
      >Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season. Same thing can be said about parts of Tokyo during the typhoon season.
      • alephnan 5y ago
        That's funny because I actually live in Tokyo. My family also owned a property next to a guy in Vietnam who owned a collection of 30 Ferraris. To suggest Tokyo's flooding problem is anywhere close to Saigon is disingenuous.
        • tjpnz 5y ago
          I'm guessing you don't live near the Tamagawa River then. Granted this was 18 months ago but I remember there were evacuations and road closures in Setagaya. Things were a bit more dire on the Kanagawa side. I recall something similar happening the year before too.
          • alephnan 5y ago
            As seen in the movie Parasite depicting the stark contrast between rich and poor South Koreans, there is a scene where the entire neighborhood is flooded My point being, you can cherry pick and see every city gets flooded. The difference with Saigon is flooding occurs throughout the city in critical areas. Government funds and projects exists to address these issues but the whole amount never gets allocated to properly developing the sewage infrastructure. Instead, hotfixes such as building the roads higher. This is a never ending back and forth with civilians building barriers or building their house higher so the water floods back into the streets. That's just one example of lack of infrastructure
            • mthoms 5y ago
              Are you trying to convince us that Tokyo has better infrastructure than Saigon? Because I don't think anyone was arguing otherwise. The person you replied to merely said the poverty in Vietnam wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm not sure how you went from that to flooding.
        • mthoms 5y ago
          To be fair, to suggest widespread flooding in SE Asia during monsoon season is proof of anything at all is kind of disingenuous.
          • alephnan 5y ago
            It's an infrastructure problem that money can mitigate.
            • 5y ago
      • rickspencer3 5y ago
        New Orleans?
        • mthoms 5y ago
          See also: Miami.
          • alephnan 5y ago
            See also: Atlantis
  • rudolfwinestock 5y ago
    As the parent post noted, that development comes from having American jobs exported there (e.g., those Nike factories). Being a socialist society, the wealth disparities are far more stark than what we have in the West.
    • mthoms 5y ago
      In regards to income inequalities, "socialist" literally means the opposite of what you are implying. See, for example "As Vietnam Gets Wealthier, Economic Inequality Also Gets Worse" - https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/17029-as-vietnam-gets-wealthier,-economic-inequality-also-gets-worse https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/17029-as-vietnam-gets-wea...
    • emkoemko 5y ago
      so USA is a socialist state? because it has a very large wealth disparities "The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation." socialist society would be the other way around... unless you think Scandinavian countries are capitalists because they have lower wealth disparity
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  • dcolkitt 5y ago
    I wouldn't say it's abject poverty. But it's certainly far less developed than South Korea or Taiwan, which is the most likely counterfactual for a free South Vietnam. OTOH you could possibly argue (though far more speculatively) that North Vietnam would've turned into North Korea from the paranoia, isolation and humiliation of a loss.
    • alephnan 5y ago
      Vietnam did not have a derivatives market until 5 years ago with liquidity being a fraction of other capital markets. It's hard for long term growth when farmers can't hedge an off season Additionally, you can look at food scarcity rates and the unbanked population.
    • platinumrad 5y ago
      Those two countries were impoverished military dictatorships for the first few decades as well. They also received significant economic support from the United States. Vietnam is still developing.
  • robocat 5y ago
    I definitely saw it years ago up north. And it still occurs today: “In some areas stunting is as high as 75 percent. I don’t recall coming across such high rates anywhere else in the world. The average in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai is 40 percent, almost twice the national average in Vietnam.” - https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/visiting-nutrition-programmes-in-vietnam-part-one/ https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/visiting-nutritio... That sentence implies the national average for stunted growth was 20% in 2015 - malnourishment is most definitely a sign of extreme poverty. Although I assume much of that is historical overhang?
    • alephnan 5y ago
      I was hanging out a billiards establishment in a remote village ( population less than 10,000) a decade ago. There were these elementary-school aged kids smoking cigarettes, cussing, etc. Eventually I realized they were 17.
  • knowaveragejoe 5y ago
    It's a wealthy country because they've continually moved away from their brand of "communism". https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/inequality-01/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...
  • germandiago 5y ago
    They are developing and have for eating. They have some problems like the pollution... in Hanoi it is terrible. But the country is in better shape than Laos and Cambodia by far, but not at the level of BKK in Thailand for example. I lived in Vietnam for almost 10 years, and one in Singapore and I plan to come back. I have mixed feelings when I get there, but overall, it is a lovely country, my second home, literally. I left a big chunk of my life there. I will never forget how Vietnam changed my whole life, literally. For the good. Even with the negative things it has. I am spanish and Spain also has negative things (and positive). All countries do.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Vietnam is similar to China - the cities have a small middle class, a few very wealthy yet most of the country is quite poor, some of them brutally poor.
• idlewords 5y ago
  Leaving aside the question of whether anyone won that war, have you been to Vietnam? The country is developing extremely rapidly.
  • JCharante 5y ago
    My jaw dropped the first time I went to Royal City in Hanoi. I hadn't seen anything like that in the US.
• trhway 5y ago
  >But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It is well beyond winning and losing sides in such wars. There is a foreign invader and the local population fighting against the invader tooth and nail with the invader losing it despite better/bigger weapons, economy, army. In many such wars one could make an argument that giving in to the foreign invader may have been a better option, at least in the long run, yet the deep guttural tribal drive to defend the Motherland takes over any of the rationality. I mean for example the Russian peasants, being by all the parameters slaves of Russian nobility, were fighting French in 1812 only to return to the same slavery like position after the war.
• pirate787 5y ago
  China, which intervened in the Korean War at the moment of North Korea's complete military collapse, has not been held to account for the horrific North Korean regime it saved and still protects. China doesn't want a unified Korea and the North Korean people pay the price.
  • temp8964 5y ago
    China fought in the Vietnam war too, just not as directly as the U.S. Without the U.S. supporting the south, the north will easily win with the full resource support from China. People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing. The world will look totally different today. Got downvoted on this. LOL.
    • pmoriarty 5y ago
      "If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw over government one after another, millions and millions more people will die in civil wars and communist cleansing." This sounds like the Domino Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory
      • temp8964 5y ago
        Chinese Communist government got involved in the communist evolutions in all the neighbor countries. And international communists did help each other in different countries to over throw legitimate government. Takeover the whole world was the goal of the international communists. Those are all facts, not a theory.
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    • 5y ago
• kureikain 5y ago
  You are confused two thing though. First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win. Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.
  • throw0101a 5y ago
    > First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords North Vietnam then broke that agreement: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensive * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_camp_(Vietnam)
    • nguyenkien 5y ago
      Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war
      • throw0101a 5y ago
        No doubt. And without the US and the UN the people in South Korea would be living in the same conditions as North Korea IMHO. I'm honestly curious how a non-socialist/communist South Vietnam would look like. (I speak as someone whose family is from Central/Eastern Europe: so while I was not born in a totalitarian system, I visited family a few times while it was still around.)
        • platinumrad 5y ago
          You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?
• yongjik 5y ago
  Well, during and after the Korean War, South Korea was under a corrupt dictator who killed several hundred thousand civilians for being communist. Its economy didn't improve until 60s, and it couldn't be really called a democratic country until mid-90s. So it's a bit of a stretch to claim that South Korea became today's South Korea because it survived the war in 1953. One could equally say that Vietnam's economic development in 2000s validates North Vietnam's victory.
  • tasogare 5y ago
    True, and North Korea current poverty is totally made by the international sanctions lead by the US. Vietnam is a great example that a communist country can open slowly if not bullied into a antagonistic position by the US.
    • germandiago 5y ago
      Do not defend communism, man... you have too many history records to know it is a failure in all senses: poverty and lack of freedom. For the record, China and Vietnam is not what I would call communist. That is more North Korea or Cuba. In Vietnam even foreigners can buy property already nowadays. I do not recall the exact conditions but I know people who did it. It is a capitalist system, actually. With a lot of control sometimes, but with market rules. It is not about the sanctions. It is the system chosen. Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that. There is a lot of literature about the problem of economic calculation in socialism systems proved by how russians did theirs, for example (black markets and copying countries budgets, the U.S. army compared to the russian one is an example of such a thing). And do not make me started on the repression, that is the worst part. But all go hand in hand at the end. Vietnam is developing, and I am glad it is. But what they are doing is not communism at all, do not sell us that. I have been living there for almost 10 years and I hope I can come back. It is a lovely country.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "Everyone that has intellectual honesty knows that" If we are into intellectual honesty, then North Korea does not match any features of Socialism or Communism I've ever read or heard of. Tt is a totalitarian absolute monarchy bordering on "worship god emperror"
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  They won, but the cost was enormous. We grieve 58,000 deaths, but they lost more than a million (the figures are very fuzzy). Their soldiers lived rough as hell, and weren't particularly well-equipped. We bombed the living hell out of them. We used napalm. Being an NVC was a tough gig. From what I can see, Vietnam is actually starting to thrive, and I sincerely wish them the best.
  • jimmies 5y ago
    To put that into perspective, the US has lost more than half a million people due to the Coronavirus. Vietnam lost 50 people. And there was no war.
    • VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      How do you know that Vietnam has only lost 50 people?
      • jimmies 5y ago
        Let's just say the government is super evil and they covered up 99 deaths every 100 deaths for some reason, although we have no evidence that they did. They lost 50,000 people. The US lost half a million. Are you happy now?
        • VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
          Let me ask you something. Do you think a south-east asian country with ~100,000,000 people only had 50 people die from the COVID-19 virus? Answer honestly
          • ufo 5y ago
            The CDC currently rates Vietnam's covid levels as "Low" https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-vietnam https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-vie... It's generally seen as having as effective response against the pandemic. They closed borders early and have employed an effective testing and tracing strategy. Their data appears to be transparent and is corroborated by neighboring countries.
• random314 5y ago
  Attributing south Korea's success after 1980 to US intervention in 1950 is disingenuous. South Korea had an economy that was similar to or slightly worse than North Korea until the 80s. This is a classic example of "white man's burden" where south Korean success in 1980 is being attributed to white intervention in 1950, which was followed by decades of poverty. Apparently Koreans can't build a country without American help. Perhaps north Korea would also have been in much better shape without US sponsored world wide sanctions. If you want to know the consequences of American intervention, latin America is impossible to ignore. Especially Haiti.
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  Winning a war and living with the consequences are two very different things. Vietnam won the war. At great cost. Things might have been different if they lost. But the US did lose the war, come out of the region and its primary objective of preventing a socialist govt. in Vietnam could not be achieved. Was it worth it for Vietnam to win the war, that is a totally different question. Was it worth it for US to lose the war? Definitely not. The mightiest nation on earth could not overcome a peasant nation with guerrilla fighters and outdated equipment. That is a slap in the face.