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Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

rarehistoricalphotos.com

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Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#291

Post by uchiga »

ufo wrote: post #206
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The CDC currently rates Vietnam's covid levels as "Low" 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.

you say this as if the covid exists

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#292

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jollybean wrote: post #243
abrookewood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is pretty unambiguous: "Following Vietnamese victory against the French in the First Indochina War, which ended in 1954, the nation was divided into two rival states: communist North and anti-communist South. Conflicts intensified in the Vietnam War, which saw extensive American intervention in support of South Vietnam, while the Soviets and the PRC supported the North, which ended with North Vietnamese vic…

I'm doubtful that this is really the best way to put it. The US escalated it's involvement until the early 1970's when via strategic bombing of the North (which the US was unwilling to do previously), decisively destroyed the North Vietnamese ability to fight. Then, the Americans left. A couple of years later, the North Vietnamese rehabilitated their forces, and invaded the South. The reality is such different perspe…

"and the folks back home lost interest in a miasma of populism"

Or, maybe they didn't like their children being draft into the army and coming back crippled?

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#293

Post by contriban »

skzv wrote: post #267
nsonha wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about photos that were taken in colors but then get edited to look a certain way (most of photos on the internet)? and what about those space photos?

Even every photo you take with a smartphone these days is altered by a machine learned model, put through some filter, and tuned in some way, even if it's subtle.

I think that there’s a general understanding that cameras don’t match 100% what the eye sees. That’s different from a white golden gate.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#294

Post by steve76 »

jollybean wrote: post #243
abrookewood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is pretty unambiguous: "Following Vietnamese victory against the French in the First Indochina War, which ended in 1954, the nation was divided into two rival states: communist North and anti-communist South. Conflicts intensified in the Vietnam War, which saw extensive American intervention in support of South Vietnam, while the Soviets and the PRC supported the North, which ended with North Vietnamese vic…

I'm doubtful that this is really the best way to put it. The US escalated it's involvement until the early 1970's when via strategic bombing of the North (which the US was unwilling to do previously), decisively destroyed the North Vietnamese ability to fight. Then, the Americans left. A couple of years later, the North Vietnamese rehabilitated their forces, and invaded the South. The reality is such different perspe…

[dead]

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#295

Post by kyle_morris_ »

Anyone looking for context of what it was like as a soldier fighting for the north in the Vietnam war, I highly recommend The Sorrow of War[0].

I read it in college in a Vietnam and the US History class and it was blown away.

This book, along with The Things They Carried[1] are worthwhile reads.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrow_of_War

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Things_They_Carried

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#296

Post by badmadrad »

dundarious wrote: post #289
badmadrad wrote: post #255

The US was fighting a proxy war with the soviet union. We had no interest in defeating the vietcong as much as stopping the spread of communism. Ho Chi Minh was a KGB agent and the communist revolution was largely born of soviet agitprop. So there is another layer to this conflict. Even though vietnam "won" they really were just puppets in a shadow war and it came at a huge cost for them. Much less than US.

My understanding is that Ho Chi Minh was agitating for French socialists to join Lenin's 3rd International in the 1910s. I don't think he was a Soviet "agent" in any way, and had his own beliefs, aligning with Bolsheviks, certainly. However, you can definitely argue Vietnam was a client state of USSR.

Ho Chi Minh was trained at Lenin's "Comintern" with the expressive goal of training foreign assets to spread Soviet communist interests. These assets would be funded and supplied by the soviets to agitate revolution in their countries. This essentially is an agent.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#297

Post by open0 »

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.

That's not how anyone who matters thinks of "winning". For the people pushing these wars, who I could name very specifically, "victory" happened when they made a boatload of money, and that's it.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#298

Post by azernik »

vmception wrote: post #78

I saw a French movie about a French soldier in Vietnam set in 1945 I was also in France at the time when viewing the movie, it was very surreal in so many ways to be empathizing for a protagonist on one of the enemy sides - from an American perspective as I am an American. But I had never seen anything depicted about that war decades before the US got involved. I had never seen a war movie produced outside of Hollywo…

War movies produced in Israel are also a distinctly different experience from American ones.

They tend to be made by veterans of those wars, after the ~20 year gap that seems pretty standard for the PTSD barrier to crack. e.g. the best ones made about the Lebanon War (what Israel calls its intervention 1982-2000 in the Lebanese Civil War) all came out within a couple of years of each other:

* Lebanon (2009)

* Waltz with Bashir (2008)

* Beaufort (2007)

And the first of the good Yom Kippur War (1973) films is probably Kippur (2000), with the long-development-time miniseries Valley of Tears (Sha'at Ne'ila) only coming out last year.

Not quite enough time has passed for films about the heaviest fighting of the 2nd Intifada to be made - the closest thing I can think of is the TV show Fauda (2015-present) but that's a somewhat different genre.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#299

Post by dundarious »

refurb wrote: post #133

The sourcing of these photos is terrible. Several are from before the US involvement, namely the Plain of Reeds photo which is from the French War in Indochina. Plus, many of these photos are staged propaganda photos, in particular the battle scenes. After an enemy surrendered, POWs would often be told to “recreate” the battle. Actually battle photographs from the north are blurry and a bit more chaotic.

I only see one other battle scene (NVA soldiers dash) aside from the Plain of Reeds photo.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#300

Post by caf »

nine_k wrote: post #168
ska wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impressive how deep some of these psychological things run nearly 50 years on. It was such a blow to self-image that, let alone all the related domestic political fallout, people still have a hard time accepting what happened. The sheer amount of ink and celluloid spent trying to come to terms with this is awesome, and a little depressing.

How many wars did the US win (as in "achieved the political goals") since WWII? Korean war: half won, half lost. Vietnam war: lost. Grenada invasion: sort of won. Gulf war 1991: I'd say won, despite Saddam staying in power. Gulf war II: I'd say lost, despite Saddam deposition. Afghanistan: lost, despite the killing of bin Laden. Syria: can't tell yet. It's a pretty depressing tally. With that, I'd say that the US was…

Kosovo?
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