u/Consistent_Hippo4658

[On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam, the second such declaration that year, counting the one issued by Bao Dai back in March.]

The references to the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were a strategic maneuver intended to win over or otherwise placate the Allies, including OSS representatives present for the occasion. Ho insisted on them to keep his ties to global communism under wraps, as well as to suggest that Vietnam intended to maintain close connections to the United States, France, and other Western countries after independence. In fact, he had no intention of doing so. The Soviet Union and its allies would be his and the DRVN’s friends moving forward, not the capitalist Westerners who had made life miserable for the Vietnamese for so long. In formulating Vietnam’s second Declaration of Independence as he did, Ho was merely pandering to policymakers and public opinion in France and the United States with a view to preempting the resumption of French colonial rule. Archimedes Patti of the OSS, in Hanoi for the occasion, was completely duped by Ho’s ruse. He was pleasantly stunned when he read the draft text of the Declaration handed to him by Ho himself. In its tone and substance, it exulted freedom and self-determination and made no allusion to class struggle or social revolution, tell-tale signs of allegiance to communism. The effort to conceal the ideological leanings of the country’s new masters also included appointing the former Emperor, Bao Dai, Supreme Adviser to the DRVN government.

Patti and other OSS staff on-site applauded Ho’s Declaration of Independence and his new regime. Largely unaware of the existence of some two dozen other Vietnamese parties and movements embracing competing political ideologies, partly because the OSS never actively engaged them, they thought that marked the triumph of the nationalist cause in Vietnam. They mistakenly concluded from all this that Ho was first and foremost a patriot and a nationalist whose known attachment to communism was only skin-deep and self-serving at best. Scholars since have perpetuated that misconception, attesting to the importance of academic due diligence.

As documentary evidence from Vietnam makes clear, Ho and the Indochinese Communist Party understood that Paris would not give up that easily and that the Americans were their best chance to stymie French efforts to recolonize Indochina. They also knew President Roosevelt had vociferously opposed French colonialism and assumed his successor, Harry Truman (in office 1945–53), would do the same. Essentially, Ho felt he could exploit the good relations forged with the United States during World War II to satisfy his postwar objectives. He was playing the Americans in the fall of 1945; he had neither the inclination nor the desire to work with them on a long-term basis, much less formally aligning with Washington. After World War II, the ICP devotedly adhered to the Soviet “two-camp theory” - formalized and announced in 1947 by CPSU theoretician Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) - that the postwar world was divided into two competing sides, a progressive and peace-loving one guided by the Soviet Union and an imperialist and warmongering other commanded by the United States. Besides, Ho had not spent years studying Marxism-Leninism and then working as a Comintern agent just to disavow his comrades in the ICP and around the world at this, their moment of apparent triumph. Patti and his OSS colleagues saw none of this because Ho outsmarted them. And so, they remained persuaded that Ho was a nationalist, not a communist, at heart.

The more discerning French authorities at the time paid no heed to and in fact outrightly rejected Ho’s Declaration of Independence, much as they had ignored Bao Dai’s earlier proclamation to the same effect. The Provisional Government of the French Republic under de Gaulle had no desire whatsoever to simply hand Indochina over to the Indochinese, much less to Ho and the communists. Colonies attested to France’s big power status; in light of the national humiliation suffered in World War II, France could not afford to lose its empire. American policymakers, upon whom Ho counted to keep the French from returning, privately objected to de Gaulle’s decision but made no effort to dissuade him from acting on it. Before his death in April 1945, Roosevelt had made an about-face on Indochina and dropped the international trusteeship idea largely because the British vehemently opposed it and he did not want to offend London. Truman, for his part, preferred appeasing de Gaulle in hopes of securing his cooperation in restructuring postwar Europe and, perhaps more importantly, checking postwar Soviet ambitions there and elsewhere. The nascent Cold War and, specifically, concerns about the Soviet occupation of East Europe, the future of Germany, and the spread of communism in the West soon consumed the Truman administration and conditioned its policy vis-à-vis France and Indochina.

The indifference of the Americans plus de Gaulle’s intractable stance unnerved and disappointed Ho but did not surprise him. Theirs were capitalist countries, after all. More unsettling, no government recognized the sovereignty and legitimacy of the DRVN, not even the Soviet Union. Stalin had his reasons for withholding recognition, but Ho did not comprehend them. But all that was nothing compared to the challenges confronting the DRVN at home. The national economy was in ruins. Besides starvation and flooding in Tonkin, commodities were in short supply and stores were empty. Most problematic, prominent noncommunist nationalists and their followers, including elements of the VNQDD and the Dai Viet parties, mobilized and organized active resistance against Ho’s new government. Unlike the Americans, they were not fooled by Ho: they knew the so-called August Revolution was in fact an opportunistic communist power grab. In acting as they did, some of these men and women transitioned from being or identifying as noncommunist nationalist activists – committed to political pluralism, including reconciliation with the communists, and republicanism – to becoming resolute anticommunists – hellbent on undoing the communist power grab of August 1945 and eradicating the Marxist-Leninist footprint in Vietnam. Ho and his comrades had always had their detractors, especially since Ho’s alleged betrayal of Phan Boi Chau. However, it was not until the August Revolution that that opposition crystalized, and Vietnam witnessed the emergence of groups and organizations whose primary raison d’être became fighting communists and communism, and which saw no hope for reconciliation between their two sides. Historian Stein Tønnesson is absolutely right to contend that Ho and the ICP claimed the mantle of national power in the late summer of 1945 without ever securing support from or having defeated actual and potential rivals, foreign and domestic. Ho and his comrades had not, after all, won the support of the nationalist aspirations of all Vietnamese, and his 2 September 1945 Declaration of Independence did not satisfy everyone, far from it.

Unsurprisingly, in light of all this, the communist August Revolution unraveled faster than it could consolidate itself. The DRVN existed in name only within days after Ho proclaimed it. The feebleness of the new regime was especially evident in the lower half of Vietnam, in Cochinchina and Southern Annam. Far from producing national unity under a single authority, the August Revolution left Vietnam and the Vietnamese even more divided. Communists were now at odds with not just noncommunist nationalists, but a growing faction of hardcore anticommunists willing to use violence to meet their purposes and convinced that a political compromise with Ho and his loyalists was impossible. A new internal struggle for the soul of the nation – another decades-long civil war – was about to begin.

Pierre Asselin (2024). Vietnam's American War: A New History. Cambridge University Press.

Disclaimer: This extract is shared for discussion and educational purposes only; all rights remain with the copyright holder.

The post title and photos are not from the book.

For too long the Vietnam War has been popularly understood as a conflict primarily between the United States against a unified Vietnamese nation, presumed to have been led by Hồ Chí Minh. The underlying Vietnamese ideological and political clash, in which the United States played a shifting role over a thirty-year period, has often been obscured by scholars who exaggerate American importance on the one hand, and assume overwhelming Vietnamese support for the communists on the other.

But new scholarship since the end of the Cold War reveals that North Vietnam's leaders were often motivated more by communist doctrine than pragmatic nationalism, contrary to what many opponents of the American war effort presumed.¹⁵ Conversely, historians have traced the emergence of republican constitutionalism, championed by many of South Vietnam's diverse political groups, back to the early twentieth-century colonial era.¹⁶ No mere Cold War proxy struggle, the communist/republican schism in Vietnam was irreconcilable long before American intervention began in earnest, and it lingers among Vietnamese across the globe even today. The South Vietnamese state struggled to overcome its dependence on U.S. assistance, and its republican nation-builders drew from long-standing intellectual traditions and vehemently resisted foreign interference, not least of all from Washington. Given the deep historical and ideological roots of the civil war in Vietnam, and the critical role played by South Vietnamese actors in shaping its outcome, it is no longer possible to ignore the impact of Vietnam's republican heritage to the origins and the outcome of the war. We welcome readers to join us in exploring that experience in the rest of the book.

* The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building. Tuong Vu and Sean Fear, editors. Cornell University Press, 2020.

* Việt Nam Cộng Hòa 1955–1975: Kinh nghiệm Kiến quốc. Vũ Tường và Sean Fear chủ biên. Văn Học xuất bản, 2022.

Điểm sách:
https://vietbao.com/p301418a310924/kinh-nghiem-kien-quoc-trong-thoi-chien-cua-viet-nam-cong-hoa-1955-1975

The Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. However, 30 years after the war's end, the reasons for its outcome remain a matter of dispute.

The most popular explanation among historians and journalists is that the defeat was a result of American policy makers' cold-war-driven misunderstanding of North Vietnam's leaders as dangerous Communists. In truth, they argue, we were fighting a nationalist movement with great popular support. In this view, "our side," South Vietnam, was a creation of foreigners and led by a corrupt urban elite with no popular roots. Hence it could never prevail, not even with a half-million American troops, making the war "unwinnable."

This simple explanation is repudiated by powerful historical evidence, both old and new. Its proponents mistakenly base their conclusions on the situation in Vietnam during the 1950's and early 1960's and ignore the changing course of the war (notably, the increasing success of President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization strategy) and the evolution of South Vietnamese society (in particular the introduction of agrarian reforms).

For all the claims of popular support for the Vietcong insurgency, far more South Vietnamese peasants fought on the side of Saigon than on the side of Hanoi. The Vietcong were basically defeated by the beginning of 1972, which is why the North Vietnamese launched a huge conventional offensive at the end of March that year. During the Easter Offensive of 1972 -- at the time the biggest campaign of the war -- the South Vietnamese Army was able to hold onto every one of the 44 provincial capitals except Quang Tri, which it regained a few months later. The South Vietnamese relied on American air support during that offensive.

If the United States had provided that level of support in 1975, when South Vietnam collapsed in the face of another North Vietnamese offensive, the outcome might have been at least the same as in 1972. But intense lobbying of Congress by the antiwar movement, especially in the context of the Watergate scandal, helped to drive cutbacks of American aid in 1974. Combined with the impact of the world oil crisis and inflation of 1973-74, the results were devastating for the south. As the triumphant North Vietnamese commander, Gen. Van Tien Dung, wrote later, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam was forced to fight "a poor man's war."

Even Hanoi's main patron, the Soviet Union, was convinced that a North Vietnamese military victory was highly unlikely. Evidence from Soviet Communist Party archives suggests that, until 1974, Soviet military intelligence analysts and diplomats never believed that the North Vietnamese would be victorious on the battlefield. Only political and diplomatic efforts could succeed. Moscow thought that the South Vietnamese government was strong enough to defend itself with a continuation of American logistical support. The former Soviet chargé d'affaires in Hanoi during the 1970's told me in Moscow in late 1993 that if one looked at the balance of forces, one could not predict that the South would be defeated. Until 1975, Moscow was not only impressed by American military power and political will, it also clearly had no desire to go to war with the United States over Vietnam. But after 1975, Soviet fear of the United States dissipated.

During the war the Soviets despised their North Vietnamese "friends" (the term of confidential bureaucratic reference, rather than "comrades"). Indeed, Henry A. Kissinger's accounts of his dealings, as Nixon's national security adviser, with President Thieu are models of respect when compared with the bitter Soviet accounts of their difficulties with their counterparts.

In secret internal reports, Hanoi-based Soviet diplomats regularly complained about the deceitfulness of the North Vietnamese, who concealed strategic planning from their more powerful patron. In a 1972 report to Moscow, the Soviet ambassador even complained that although Marshal Pavel Batitsky, commander of the Soviet Air Defense Forces, had visited Hanoi earlier that year and completed a major military aid agreement, North Vietnamese leaders did not inform him of the imminent launch date of their Easter Offensive.

What is also clear from Soviet archival sources is that those who believed that North Vietnam had more than national unification on its mind were right: Its leaders were imbued with a sense of their ideological mission -- not only to unify Vietnam under Communist Party rule, but also to support the victory of Communists in other nations. They saw themselves as the outpost of world revolution in Southeast Asia and desired to help Communists in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and elsewhere.

Soviet archives show that after the war ended in 1975, with American power in retreat, Hanoi used part of its captured American arsenal to support Communist revolutions around the world. In 1980 some of these weapons were shipped via Cuba to El Salvador. This dimension of Vietnamese behavior derived from a deep commitment to the messianic internationalism of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Vietnam today is not the North Vietnam of 1955, 1965 or 1975. Like post-Mao China it has retreated from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. It has reformed its economy and its foreign policy to become more integrated into the world. But those changes were not inevitable and would not necessarily have occurred had Mikhail Gorbachev not ascended to power in Moscow, and had the Soviet Union and its empire not collapsed. Nor would these changes necessarily have occurred had China not provided a new cultural model for Vietnam to follow, as it has for centuries.

Precisely because Vietnam has changed for the better, we need to recognize what a profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime we faced three, four and five decades ago. And out of respect for the evidence of history, we need to recognize what happened in the 1970's and why.

In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hundreds of thousands of our Vietnamese allies were incarcerated, and more than a million driven into exile. The awesome image of the United States was diminished, and its enemies were thereby emboldened, drawing the United States into new conflicts by proxy in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. And the bitterness of so many American war veterans, who saw their sacrifices so casually demeaned and unnecessarily squandered, haunts American society and political life to this day.

Op-Ed Contributor Stephen J. Morris, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is writing a book on the Vietnam War in the Nixon years.

Đồng chí nào kể tên được các liệt thánh cộng sản treo hình ở pic 3 ta sẽ ban thưởng. Chư hầu là phải biết nhớ ơn thiên triều.

Why are there so many soccer fans in Vietnam and the diaspora? One way to approach this question is to study an international tournament in South Vietnam.

Between 1961 and 1974, the Republic of Vietnam organized and hosted an invitational tournament called the Independence Football Cup for a total of nine times. Depending on the year, there were as few as three participants (including the RVN) and as many as eight. Not surprisingly, all were anticommunist countries.

That invitational of eight nations took place in 1967. Frequent participant Indonesia somehow missed out this edition. Absent, too, was the Philippines after the initial draw of the group stage. On the other hand, the 1967 tournament saw the first and only time that Australia (the eventual winner), Hong Kong, New Zealand, and South Korea played in this Cup. (The flag of British Hong Kong was somehow missing from the poster below.) It was in fact the first time that New Zealand, who made this year's World Cup, played in an international tournament. Rounding up participation were Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and, of course, South Vietnam.

As indicated by its name, this Cup was supposed to be an annual event. But it didn't take place in 1963, 1964, 1968, and 1969, which were among the most turbulent years of the Vietnam War. Then it took place every year during the 1970s until the fall of Saigon. This fact suggests the steady growth of soccer in South Vietnam, whose largest stadium, Sân Cộng Hòa (Stadium of the Republic) could hold some 30,000 spectators in the 1960s. However we'd think about the Vietnam War, it's rather impressive, don't you think, that soccer was growing big time in a society facing devastating warfare?

I'd guess that there are documents and publications held at Archives II and other depositories about this invitational and, more generally, soccer in South Vietnam. Will someone at Fulbright University Vietnam, the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, or another institution explore these topics? Please, pretty please. It'd help to explain, if partially, the popularity of soccer in present-day Vietnam and the diaspora.

[Fb Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University]

Thật là một cô gái thú vị.

Tao chợt nhớ hồi học cấp 2 thằng học cùng lớp chế bài thơ:
Đêm nay Bác không ngủ
Vì thèm ăn đu đủ
Bác để ở trong tủ
...
Hết mẹ câu cuối rồi vì bị con nhỏ ngồi cạnh nó cú quá đòi đánh.

Hồi bao cấp có câu ca về Phạm Tuân:
Dân đang thiếu gạo thiếu mì,
Mày lên vũ trụ làm gì hở Tuân?

Bọn mày có những câu thơ hài hước nào trong dân gian chia sẻ thêm.

Nhà báo người Úc Carl Robinson giải thích về cụm từ bò đỏ cho các độc giả tiếng Anh:

https://carlrobinson.substack.com/p/explaining-red-cows

>Một meme Việt Nam hóa ra lại là cách mô tả chính xác nhất cho cuối tuần đụng độ xoay quanh hai lá cờ mà tới nay vẫn chia rẽ bên thắng và bên thua trong Chiến tranh Việt Nam.

>Mãi về sau tôi mới nhận ra, phần nhiều vì còn đang tự bật cười trước sự "ngạo nghễ" của chính tiêu đề do mình đặt “Những Chú Bò Đỏ ở Melbourne”, rằng cụm từ đó có lẽ chẳng mang nhiều ý nghĩa đối với độc giả bên ngoài góc nhỏ của "vũ trụ meme" của người Việt, nơi tôi tình cờ bắt gặp nó cách đây khoảng sáu đến tám tháng.

>Việt Nam không thiếu sự tuân phục tập thể, nhưng ít có cách diễn đạt nào phơi bày về điều này như "Bò Đỏ", một phát minh của Internet Việt Nam trình bày về đất nước này nhiều hơn bất kỳ khẩu hiệu chính thức nào. Ban đầu, nó chỉ là một từ đùa giỡn, một kiểu châm biếm trên Facebook nhắm vào đội quân 'yêu nước' ồn ào luôn tràn vào phần bình luận mỗi khi Việt Nam được nhắc đến. Giống như nhiều từ bông đùa thú vị khác, nó tồn tại được vì nó đúng.

>Bò đỏ không phải là một phạm trù chính trị. Nó là một kiểu hành vi.
“Đỏ” đến từ lá cờ.
“Bò” đến từ tâm lý bầy đàn.

>Thuật từ này được đặt ra bởi những người châm biếm chống nhà nước trên Facebook vào cuối thập niên 2010, thời kỳ cao trào của các "cuộc chiến bình luận" trên mạng. Mỗi khi một bản tin liên quan đến Việt Nam xuất hiện, từ Trung Quốc, vấn đề Biển Đông, một vụ bắt giữ, cho tới scandal của người nổi tiếng, những tài khoản quen thuộc ấy liền lập tức xuất hiện, giương cờ, bảo vệ nhà nước và lấn át mọi tiếng nói khác. Có người gọi họ là "bò". Người khác tô màu đỏ cho họ. Thế là một meme ra đời.