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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.
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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.
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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.
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It wasn’t a war of independence from the US, it was a civil war the US was dumb enough to get involved in.
It was always a war of independence, first from France and then from the US. It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
Here's a factoid I recently learned: something like 80+% of Vietnamese refugees were ethnic Chinese (Hoa people), despite constituting a minority of the population from which they fled. Rarely discussed in American history, except perhaps in in-depth treatises, is that ethnic Chinese were the merchant and ruling class in Vietnam for generations, including during colonial periods. That's why the French favored them. It's a classic colonial/imperial techniques to favor a minority group, though AFAIU France basically kept class divisions as they found them. And such minority groups tend to disfavor complete independence as it leaves them more vulnerable. Indeed, continued ethnic conflict after the U.S. departed instigated China to invade Vietnam a few years later.
If the U.S. had fully appreciated the ethnic divisions, it may have made different decisions. State-side the choice to prop up the wealthy, Catholic Diem is well known, but the usual characterizations of that choice completely gloss over the deep and substantial ethnic divisions. (Almost all Vietnamese Catholics were ethnic Chinese, though only are minority of ethnic Chinese were Catholic.) They make the U.S. seem merely tone deaf as opposed to tragically mistaken about the underlying social dynamics. The push for socialism in Vietnam wasn't about political ideology; it was about wrestling control of capital away from a discrete minority ethnic group. Those ethnic enmities ran deep. Without pursuing some of the social reforms sought by Ho Chi Minh a U.S.-backed South Vietnam was always destined to fail.
The irony is that as Vietnam has modernized the same social dynamics have crept back. Ethnic Chinese once again control much (or most?) of the private assets in Vietnam. I have no idea if the ethnic animus has returned to its prior levels, though. Maybe it doesn't matter as much anymore.
The photo https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-StC-dVAdOns/YK081DEgPdI/AAAAAAAAd... is probably a captured M16 since, AFAIK, Vietnam used AK-47. What impressed me the most: "Using home-brewed chemicals, they developed their pictures in the open air or in underground tunnels" if by chemicals to develop photos in open air means no need for a dark room, that is really not something easy to do with then available technology. It is…
I don't think that's what it means. They presumably developed the photos in near darkness, either during the night (open air) or in those tunnels.
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To add to the above, as much as some people want to mock America's involvement in Vietnam, one must note that The Domino Theory (used to justify that involvement) came true. Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam. And anyone who…
Tell your neighbors come and talk with people from Mỹ Lai
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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…
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…
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 dev…
Vietnam, on the other hand, only really began to reform its economy after the collapse of the soviet union. If anything, North Vietnam's victory emboldened communist leaders in the aftermath of the war.
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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 ov…
IIRC. It was primarily the USSR which backed the North Vietnamese. By the early 70’s the communist block had split between the USSR and China. Vietnam was USSR not Chinese ally. Not long after the end of the Vietnam war, China attacked Vietnam ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War ) ostensibly as the Vietnamese had attacked Cambodia, by this stage supported by China (and the US) to dispose the Khmer R…
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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?
But it's also no South Korea or Taiwan as far as development.
The Vietnamese people are smart, clever, hard-working, and I really do appreciate them and I hope their government gets out of their way so they can shine.
The script uses the Image Colorization API from DeepAi.
Here's the repo for the colorizing model itself: https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify
I don't think the DeepAi API allows you to adjust the model parameters, but you definitely can if you run it yourself from the repo above or a colab instance (e.g. https://colab.research.google.com/github/jantic/DeOldify/blo...). MyHeritage also offers this API as a service with tunable parameters.
If you want some quick results on your own BW images, just set your own DeepAi API key as an env var and run this script: https://github.com/skzv/colorize-photos