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Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

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Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#101

Post by emkoemko »

rudolfwinestock wrote: post #16
tjpnz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#102

Post by neither_color »

ncfausti wrote: post #58
nguyenkien wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war

I lived in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of months (before the pandemic). Vietnam is probably my favorite country I have ever visited. I hope to come back soon. When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill. I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about…

I've been to that same museum and also the Cu Chi tunnels. I thought they were neat examples of Vietcong ingenuity and resourcefulness but I'm not ashamed of the US at all. War is complicated and in the case of communist uprisings, internal purges follow "victories" that are just as atrocious as anything outside assistance can do. See Stalin's Great Purge, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, etc.

Right now, it's very popular on sites like Reddit and increasingly here to fill threads with bad historical takes that list everything bad the US has ever done, as if its acting in a vacuum where no other countries exist. In nearly every case of US intervention, you'll find that other countries were intervening on the other side. That's what the cold war was about. Domino theory was valid and rational. Large marxist countries exported revolution, allied powers supported governments resisting revolution. You might enjoy the underdog story of ethno-nationalists defeating the "empire" but on the other side of that story is always millions of families who lost lives and property to shitty redistribution schemes afterwards. My parents are from a latin american country that suppressed its marxist rebellion(with US help), but I have Cuban-American friends whose grandparents weren't so lucky.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#103

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #74

There's a lot of people in the comments saying that Vietnam didn't really "win" the war. Their political and military objectives were ultimately successful, those of the US/South Vietnam were not. That's what a victory is. The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.

I think if you're talking about the acute win/loss of the Vietnam war, then absolutely the North Vietnamese won. If the USA really wanted to win the war then they could have done it outright in 1967. But that would have been very ugly. Not an option.

Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#104

Post by germandiago »

pirate787 wrote: post #9
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #4

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 likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has be…

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.

Noone wants a unified Korea, except Koreans. Japan is not interested in having such a powerful economic mix nearby and China the same. Noone wants. If someone wanted, it would be the Koreans only.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#105

Post by trs8080 »

emkoemko wrote: post #92
lightgreen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

USA took Iranian independence and that didn't do anything but give them a dictator who gave/sold oil for cheap to the US/UK; Afghanistan was better of before US took it... now Taliban controls more territory then they did before US came in... list of countries that depended on the USA that got totally screwed over is larger then the list of a few that USA let become rich and prosperous.

people like the person you're replying to never want to understand why these countries became "shithole countries" in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#106

Post by Aloha »

platinumrad wrote: post #64
throw0101a wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

You are aware that Vietnam was eventually reunified under the North right? And that it's nothing like North Korea today?

Different leaders, different flavors of communism, different time.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#107

Post by AzzieElbab »

stolen_biscuit wrote: post #74

There's a lot of people in the comments saying that Vietnam didn't really "win" the war. Their political and military objectives were ultimately successful, those of the US/South Vietnam were not. That's what a victory is. The cost of victory was very high, but it was a pretty unambiguous success for the Vietnamese.

50 years of misery ongoing, Vietcong won bigly.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#108

Post by jimmies »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #4

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 likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has be…

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.

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.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#109

Post by lightgreen »

bavent wrote: post #91
lightgreen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"shithole countries" - clearly you have never been to Vietnam.

No I haven't been to Vietnam specifically, but I've been to other countries.

Also, you don't need to visit a country to learn what it's GDP per capita compared to other countries in the region. And you don't need to visit the country to learn that it's citizen are used as a source of cheap unskilled labour, in the country and abroad.

Vietnam is not doing too bad though, they are gradually switching to proper market economy.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#110

Post by random314 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #4

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 likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has be…

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.

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