6 ms·

Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption

54 points by primroot 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ghayes 11y ago
This article seems to have a strong objective and anti-Western bias. For instance, why does an article about "Vietnam 40 years on" spend the first third discussing American tragedies during the U.S. invasion? It then discusses each problem in Vietnam in terms of Western actions and dedicates little if any space to the full spectrum of the issues the article is discussing. That said, the facts and stories presented in the article are themselves interesting and enlightening.
- mercurial 11y ago
  I agree. It is well-written and engaging, but its focus on American atrocities somewhat detracts from the main point (and conveniently forgets to mention that Vietcong forces were no stranger to mass executions and torture themselves). It does bring home the extent of the destruction the war inflicted, though. Unfortunate to see Vietnam turning into a new China.
  - reallyoldguy 11y ago
    Agreed, the piece has a very distinct bias, and it's sad to see what Vietnam has become, especially considering what it could have been had history gone a little differently (South Korea is a reasonably analogous case).
    - mercurial 11y ago
      It is? When was South Korea under commercial embargo? I agree that the piece is extremely biased, but it's pretty clear that the US were about as keen on helping post-war Vietnam developing its economy as they have been with Cuba.
      - g960 11y ago
        Well for what it is worth, Christian missionaries are flooding Vietnam. It's well on it's way to becoming South Korea.
      - chinhodado 11y ago
        I think what he meant was, had South Vietnam won, it would have become a second South Korea.
        jbjohns 11y ago
        What are you talking about? There was no "South Vietnam"... There was Vietnam and there were places the invading forces were occupying.
        reallyoldguy 11y ago
        The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was absolutely a country that had a right to its own sovereignty. Framing the Vietnam war as a communist struggle against Western invaders is naive and incorrect. South Vietnam was governed by a nationalist but anti-communist government that sought aid from the US and others, while North Vietnam was a communist government that was aided by the USSR and China.
        DanBC 11y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam First google hit.
        VLM 11y ago
        It existed in the sense that the Confederate States of America existed. A bunch of politicians unhappy about the countries government went into rebellion, coincidentally in the south, and then the fireworks began. But as a cultural concept, neither the CSA nor South Vietnam existed before their respective political rebellions aka they weren't "real countries". And after the rebellion was crushed they don't exist anymore in any real cultural/political fashion. If they won, they would have developed into real distinct countries eventually, but they never got the chance. As far as invaders go, both sides invited so many vistors and advisors its hard to say who that is.
- yc1010 11y ago
  It is The Guardian a left leaning UK newspaper, that should give you an idea of why the article might appear unbalanced. One does not read the Guardian to get a balanced story for the very same reasons one would not watch Fox News Tho' they don't hide their political bias, and it is often interesting reading same news stories in the Guardian (left leaning UK paper) vs lets say the Telegraph (right leaning UK paper) for differing view points and then making up ones own mind.
- abalone 11y ago
  Perhaps you see it that way because you have a strong pro-Western bias and have placed the fulcrum of "objectivity" thusly. For instance you use the word "tragedies" to refer to systematic civilian slaughter by U.S. and allied forces (the article notes the U.S. secretly confirmed over 300 cases). This reveals your bias. Compare this with someone referring to Pol Pot's actions as "communist tragedies". The history of the war is plainly relevant to Vietnam's economy today. At the very least it is crucial to supporting the article's thesis that capitalism is providing an incentive and engine for the suppression of this historical memory.
reallyoldguy 11y ago
This is an un-nuanced analysis of Vietnam's history that basically blames the United States for Vietnam's rampant corruption and the failure of the communist model (can you name a country where this has worked?). The author uses stories of war crimes and American military destruction to paint the Vietnam War as USA (with the help of a puppet government) vs. the people of Vietnam. This narrative is naive and ignores the historical and political complexities of the time: 1. Modern Vietnam was only unified in 1802, and then quickly colonized (and separated into three zones) by the French less than 50 years later. It is incorrect to think that Vietnam was always one country and the 1954 Geneva Accords arbitrarily split the country for the good of the West. 2. The Viet Minh, who fought and expelled the French were a multi-ideological group that included non-communist nationalists. Ho Chi Minh systematically eradicated the non-communist factions and consolidated power. Some of the fanatical anti-communists that arose later in South Vietnam were those that had had family members murdered by the communist faction. 3. This narrative ignores the Republic of Vietnam as a true sovereign state. It is incorrect to describe RVN as simply a puppet of the US. True, the Vietnam war was a proxy war, but its involved nations had agendas of its own and ignoring these is patronizing and false. People vote with their feet. In the 300-day grace period after the 1954 division that allowed open migration between the two Vietnams, 600,000 people migrated south compared with around 150,000 to the north. Around 1975, those who could scrambled to escape the country. Over the next 20 years, over two million less fortunate people would risk their lives on rickety boats to flee the communist regime. It's a very naive picture to paint that the US was bombing all the of the poor Vietnamese who just wanted independence into submission. Aside from the lack of historical nuance, the author goes on excuse the communist regime from blame, with incredibly disingenuous passages like this: "The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people." The US did not leave Vietnam in ruins. War, two-sided war did. In Saigon, where did war widows and orphans come from? From the North killing the fathers and husbands in war. Who created the refugees and destroyed two thirds of the villages? The North, when it invaded the South. War is complicated, and obviously both sides are complicit in this tragedy, but not in the author's eyes. (Unsurprisingly, he doesn't mention the scores of summary executions and systematic torture of ARVN veterans in "re-education camps" post 1975). The US made plenty of blunders and ill-conceived and unwarranted political plays during the course of the Vietnam War, but North Vietnam does not get away blame free here. And while our standard history narrative in the US mostly half-apologetically describes Vietnam as a mistake and tries to forget about it, few people stop to consider if perhaps the US was on the side of "good" (or at least, the better of the two) in this case. How might Vietnam be different today if it had gone the way of South Korea (which, at the time, was even poorer than Vietnam)? When looking at its Cold War era allies (USSR, PRC), it's no surprise that Vietnam ranks so poorly on corruption. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
dataker 11y ago
Articles like these are well-intentioned, but it's part of a quite ignorant and manipulative trend. It makes one believe Capitalism means Coca-Cola, Microsoft and other corporations taking over the world, corrupting local governments and destroying local businesses. At its best, this is a form of 'Crony Capitalism', but far from what Capitalism genuinely is.
- api 11y ago
  I'm not aware of any political system that turns out, in practice, the way its theoreticians envision it "genuinely" being. Our mental simulations of what should happen in a human society ordered by some principle usually turn out to be abysmally wrong, since complex systems are full of negative feedback loops and other intuition-destroying things. I really think that nearly all political theory (up to and including Marxism and Libertarianism/Objectivism) belong to the pre-complexity-theory era. Complexity science and all its related fields (evolutionary dynamics, etc.) are just devastating to those theories. One big meta-lesson of these fields is that our intuition is calibrated for dealing with small scale local systems and simply falls apart in these arenas. You have about as much intuition for what happens in an economy of 300+ million people as you have for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. We seem to have yet to produce a post-complexity political philosophy. Most political thinkers seem to still be in denial and clinging desperately to their 19th century (and earlier) notions of human behavior and social dynamics.
- mercurial 11y ago
  Crony capitalism? How many "genuinely capitalistic" corporations show moral qualms when it comes to exploiting (or even engineering) weak regulatory frameworks in under-developed areas and engaging in the time-honored tradition of buying local officials?
  - dataker 11y ago
    I'm not sure there'd have many corporations and, if so, buying local officials would be useless, as they'd have limited power in the first place.
VLM 11y ago
"gave way to capitalist corruption" Those anecdotes read like someone who never read "Fire in the Lake". The article anecdotes sound less corrupt than BAU in in the urban areas during the war.

54 points by primroot 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

This article seems to have a strong objective and anti-Western bias. For instance, why does an article about "Vietnam 40 years on" spend the first third discussing American tragedies during the U.S. invasion? It then discusses each problem in Vietnam in terms of Western actions and dedicates little if any space to the full spectrum of the issues the article is discussing. That said, the facts and stories presented in the article are themselves interesting and enlightening.

mercurial 11y ago
I agree. It is well-written and engaging, but its focus on American atrocities somewhat detracts from the main point (and conveniently forgets to mention that Vietcong forces were no stranger to mass executions and torture themselves). It does bring home the extent of the destruction the war inflicted, though. Unfortunate to see Vietnam turning into a new China.
- reallyoldguy 11y ago
  Agreed, the piece has a very distinct bias, and it's sad to see what Vietnam has become, especially considering what it could have been had history gone a little differently (South Korea is a reasonably analogous case).
  - mercurial 11y ago
    It is? When was South Korea under commercial embargo? I agree that the piece is extremely biased, but it's pretty clear that the US were about as keen on helping post-war Vietnam developing its economy as they have been with Cuba.
    - g960 11y ago
      Well for what it is worth, Christian missionaries are flooding Vietnam. It's well on it's way to becoming South Korea.
    - chinhodado 11y ago
      I think what he meant was, had South Vietnam won, it would have become a second South Korea.
      - jbjohns 11y ago
        What are you talking about? There was no "South Vietnam"... There was Vietnam and there were places the invading forces were occupying.
        reallyoldguy 11y ago
        The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was absolutely a country that had a right to its own sovereignty. Framing the Vietnam war as a communist struggle against Western invaders is naive and incorrect. South Vietnam was governed by a nationalist but anti-communist government that sought aid from the US and others, while North Vietnam was a communist government that was aided by the USSR and China.
        DanBC 11y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam First google hit.
        VLM 11y ago
        It existed in the sense that the Confederate States of America existed. A bunch of politicians unhappy about the countries government went into rebellion, coincidentally in the south, and then the fireworks began. But as a cultural concept, neither the CSA nor South Vietnam existed before their respective political rebellions aka they weren't "real countries". And after the rebellion was crushed they don't exist anymore in any real cultural/political fashion. If they won, they would have developed into real distinct countries eventually, but they never got the chance. As far as invaders go, both sides invited so many vistors and advisors its hard to say who that is.
yc1010 11y ago
It is The Guardian a left leaning UK newspaper, that should give you an idea of why the article might appear unbalanced. One does not read the Guardian to get a balanced story for the very same reasons one would not watch Fox News Tho' they don't hide their political bias, and it is often interesting reading same news stories in the Guardian (left leaning UK paper) vs lets say the Telegraph (right leaning UK paper) for differing view points and then making up ones own mind.
abalone 11y ago
Perhaps you see it that way because you have a strong pro-Western bias and have placed the fulcrum of "objectivity" thusly. For instance you use the word "tragedies" to refer to systematic civilian slaughter by U.S. and allied forces (the article notes the U.S. secretly confirmed over 300 cases). This reveals your bias. Compare this with someone referring to Pol Pot's actions as "communist tragedies". The history of the war is plainly relevant to Vietnam's economy today. At the very least it is crucial to supporting the article's thesis that capitalism is providing an incentive and engine for the suppression of this historical memory.

reallyoldguy 11y ago

This is an un-nuanced analysis of Vietnam's history that basically blames the United States for Vietnam's rampant corruption and the failure of the communist model (can you name a country where this has worked?). The author uses stories of war crimes and American military destruction to paint the Vietnam War as USA (with the help of a puppet government) vs. the people of Vietnam. This narrative is naive and ignores the historical and political complexities of the time: 1. Modern Vietnam was only unified in 1802, and then quickly colonized (and separated into three zones) by the French less than 50 years later. It is incorrect to think that Vietnam was always one country and the 1954 Geneva Accords arbitrarily split the country for the good of the West. 2. The Viet Minh, who fought and expelled the French were a multi-ideological group that included non-communist nationalists. Ho Chi Minh systematically eradicated the non-communist factions and consolidated power. Some of the fanatical anti-communists that arose later in South Vietnam were those that had had family members murdered by the communist faction. 3. This narrative ignores the Republic of Vietnam as a true sovereign state. It is incorrect to describe RVN as simply a puppet of the US. True, the Vietnam war was a proxy war, but its involved nations had agendas of its own and ignoring these is patronizing and false. People vote with their feet. In the 300-day grace period after the 1954 division that allowed open migration between the two Vietnams, 600,000 people migrated south compared with around 150,000 to the north. Around 1975, those who could scrambled to escape the country. Over the next 20 years, over two million less fortunate people would risk their lives on rickety boats to flee the communist regime. It's a very naive picture to paint that the US was bombing all the of the poor Vietnamese who just wanted independence into submission. Aside from the lack of historical nuance, the author goes on excuse the communist regime from blame, with incredibly disingenuous passages like this: "The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people." The US did not leave Vietnam in ruins. War, two-sided war did. In Saigon, where did war widows and orphans come from? From the North killing the fathers and husbands in war. Who created the refugees and destroyed two thirds of the villages? The North, when it invaded the South. War is complicated, and obviously both sides are complicit in this tragedy, but not in the author's eyes. (Unsurprisingly, he doesn't mention the scores of summary executions and systematic torture of ARVN veterans in "re-education camps" post 1975). The US made plenty of blunders and ill-conceived and unwarranted political plays during the course of the Vietnam War, but North Vietnam does not get away blame free here. And while our standard history narrative in the US mostly half-apologetically describes Vietnam as a mistake and tries to forget about it, few people stop to consider if perhaps the US was on the side of "good" (or at least, the better of the two) in this case. How might Vietnam be different today if it had gone the way of South Korea (which, at the time, was even poorer than Vietnam)? When looking at its Cold War era allies (USSR, PRC), it's no surprise that Vietnam ranks so poorly on corruption. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

dataker 11y ago

Articles like these are well-intentioned, but it's part of a quite ignorant and manipulative trend. It makes one believe Capitalism means Coca-Cola, Microsoft and other corporations taking over the world, corrupting local governments and destroying local businesses. At its best, this is a form of 'Crony Capitalism', but far from what Capitalism genuinely is.

api 11y ago
I'm not aware of any political system that turns out, in practice, the way its theoreticians envision it "genuinely" being. Our mental simulations of what should happen in a human society ordered by some principle usually turn out to be abysmally wrong, since complex systems are full of negative feedback loops and other intuition-destroying things. I really think that nearly all political theory (up to and including Marxism and Libertarianism/Objectivism) belong to the pre-complexity-theory era. Complexity science and all its related fields (evolutionary dynamics, etc.) are just devastating to those theories. One big meta-lesson of these fields is that our intuition is calibrated for dealing with small scale local systems and simply falls apart in these arenas. You have about as much intuition for what happens in an economy of 300+ million people as you have for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. We seem to have yet to produce a post-complexity political philosophy. Most political thinkers seem to still be in denial and clinging desperately to their 19th century (and earlier) notions of human behavior and social dynamics.
mercurial 11y ago
Crony capitalism? How many "genuinely capitalistic" corporations show moral qualms when it comes to exploiting (or even engineering) weak regulatory frameworks in under-developed areas and engaging in the time-honored tradition of buying local officials?
- dataker 11y ago
  I'm not sure there'd have many corporations and, if so, buying local officials would be useless, as they'd have limited power in the first place.

VLM 11y ago

"gave way to capitalist corruption" Those anecdotes read like someone who never read "Fire in the Lake". The article anecdotes sound less corrupt than BAU in in the urban areas during the war.