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Who won the Vietnam War?

Who won the Vietnam War?

  • The French

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The British

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Americans

    Votes: 6 6.1%

  • The Canadians

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Chinese

    Votes: 3 3.0%

  • The Russians

    Votes: 3 3.0%

  • The Japanese

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • The Vietnamese

    Votes: 46 46.5%

  • No one

    Votes: 23 23.2%

  • Other

    Votes: 18 18.2%
  • Total voters
    99
cpwill said:
ah, and the south would have collapsed much quicker to the victorious nothern communists.

like in China.

how'd that work out for them?
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This is assuming that all Communist regimes are the same. They are not.

The Communist eventually came to power, after the initial purge and everything has stablised, Vietnam got itself together and is now growing at a phenomenal rate. If the war was shorter and smaller in scale, then they could have stablised faster.

Even China now has the second highest GDP in the world, and very soon will overtake the US.

on the same vein, it occurs to me that fewer southerners would have died if the North had let them succeed after the first battle of Bull Run. fewer Japanese would have died if we had just let them have China. fewer Germans would have died if we had just let them have france and spend themselves duking it out against the USSR.
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So the South Vietnamese are aggressors like the Japanese and the Germans?

If America had succeeded in keeping the South from falling under the North, than I would not say that American involvement might have worsen the killing, but that's not what happened. The South fell under the North and the revege killing might have been worsened by continued resistence.

It's like cancer surgery/therapy. If after going through it you're alive, then it's worth it. If you still die after all the surgery and chemo and what not - then the patient sufferred more for having gone through the surgery/therapy than if we left the patient alone. Of course, when we decide to go through the surgery/therapy, we always hope for the best and won't know that the pain would be for nothing.
 
LookingGlass said:
It does, however, beg the question as to why there are still those who are communists in spite of its dismal failure.
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Because we humans have a tendency to continue to believe what we want to believe regardless of consequences and of any facts in evidence. There are examples of that tendency on this very forum.

Take, for example the belief in the so called "domino theory", that the whole of SE Asia would "go Communist" if we were to let the Vietnamese control their own destiny. Nearly two decades of war and a stinging defeat later, followed by nearly three decades of peace , not only is SE Asia not Communist, but not even Vietnam is Communist.

Yet, you can still find people who will maintain that the US defeated Communism by having invaded Vietnam. That's how difficult it is for people to change their belief systems to conform to reality.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Because we humans have a tendency to continue to believe what we want to believe regardless of consequences and of any facts in evidence. There are examples of that tendency on this very forum.

Take, for example the belief in the so called "domino theory", that the whole of SE Asia would "go Communist" if we were to let the Vietnamese control their own destiny. Nearly two decades of war and a stinging defeat later, followed by nearly three decades of peace , not only is SE Asia not Communist, but not even Vietnam is Communist.

Yet, you can still find people who will maintain that the US defeated Communism by having invaded Vietnam. That's how difficult it is for people to change their belief systems to conform to reality.
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There is nothing harder than trying to teach (or convince) someone something they already think they know.
 
cpwill said:
so you consider the hell that was unleashed following the fall of SVietnam to have been 'needful killing'? i have a Hmong buddy whose family (what's left of it) might take exception to that.
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Excellent reason for our never having gotten involved, we killed as many Vietnamese as did our enemy, doubling the total number of Vietnamese deaths and sacrificed 58,000 of our own in the process, all for nothing as the rest of the world didn't fall to communism as was hyped. In fact Communist Vietnam has been our trading partner since the early 90's.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Because we humans have a tendency to continue to believe what we want to believe regardless of consequences and of any facts in evidence. There are examples of that tendency on this very forum.

Take, for example the belief in the so called "domino theory", that the whole of SE Asia would "go Communist" if we were to let the Vietnamese control their own destiny. Nearly two decades of war and a stinging defeat later, followed by nearly three decades of peace , not only is SE Asia not Communist, but not even Vietnam is Communist.

Yet, you can still find people who will maintain that the US defeated Communism by having invaded Vietnam. That's how difficult it is for people to change their belief systems to conform to reality.
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But had South Viet Nam fallen to the Communists in 1954, the situation in Southeast Asia could have been VERY different. The entire region was FAR MORE vulnerable to Communism in 1954 than it was in 1975. In 1954, the Domino Theory was have been FAR more likely to play out than it was in 1975. Just take a look at what was going on in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines in the 1950s and 1960s if you question this... or you can simply ignore it as it was last time this point was made...
 
ludahai said:
But had South Viet Nam fallen to the Communists in 1954, the situation in Southeast Asia could have been VERY different. The entire region was FAR MORE vulnerable to Communism in 1954 than it was in 1975. In 1954, the Domino Theory was have been FAR more likely to play out than it was in 1975. Just take a look at what was going on in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines in the 1950s and 1960s if you question this... or you can simply ignore it as it was last time this point was made...
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as we can see from the current state of communist china, falling prey to communism would have retarded those countries' economic and social development [/sarcasm]
 
justabubba said:
as we can see from the current state of communist china, falling prey to communism would have retarded those countries' economic and social development [/sarcasm]
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Not even China is really a Communist country any more. It would be a lot easier to compete with in international trade if it were, but it's not. Communism is dead.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Not even China is really a Communist country any more. It would be a lot easier to compete with in international trade if it were, but it's not. Communism is dead.
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but notice how it was not positioned to be able to compete internationally until its experiment with communism
 
justabubba said:
but notice how it was not positioned to be able to compete internationally until its experiment with communism
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Not until its experiment with Communism ended. Communism died because it does not work, not because of any wars we fought during the cold war.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Not until its experiment with Communism ended. Communism died because it does not work, not because of any wars we fought during the cold war.
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but without its employment of communism, red china would not now be positioned to assume the role of the world's dominant economic power
 
justabubba said:
but without its employment of communism, red china would not now be positioned to assume the role of the world's dominant economic power
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Had they never been Communist, they wouldn't now be a world economic power? How did you come to that conclusion?
 
Dittohead not! said:
Had they never been Communist, they wouldn't now be a world economic power? How did you come to that conclusion?
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one huge nation under one government, with the marshaling of national assets to create an infrastructure capable of competing internationally

without communism china would still be mired in third world status

this is an inconvenient truth that many will want to deny
 
justabubba said:
one huge nation under one government, with the marshaling of national assets to create an infrastructure capable of competing internationally

without communism china would still be mired in third world status

this is an inconvenient truth that many will want to deny
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Why is that? The US became a world power without Communism. Singapore, Korea, Japan, all prospered without any experience with Communism. China is growing so fast because of its demography and the adoption of Capitalism. It helps that the government is behind the growth by building infrastructure, but the government can do that without being a one-party autocratic system. And it can also be a one-party autocratic system without adopting Communism. Objectively, they don't have causal relationships.
 
nonpareil said:
Why is that? The US became a world power without Communism. Singapore, Korea, Japan, all prospered without any experience with Communism. China is growing so fast because of its demography and the adoption of Capitalism. It helps that the government is behind the growth by building infrastructure, but the government can do that without being a one-party autocratic system. And it can also be a one-party autocratic system without adopting Communism. Objectively, they don't have causal relationships.
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... China seems, under the direction of its Communist Party, to be at last in the process of installing a capitalist system and of permanently reversing the extraordinary economic decline the country witnessed between 1850 and 1978 (Maddison, 1995). ...
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and here is your question, followed by a cite with the answer:
... how did a Communist Party that rejected all forms of a market economy during its first 30 years in power succeed in establishing capitalism in China when so many attempts had failed after the mid-nineteenth century. Instead of relying on the traditional economic explanation based on labor, capital, and productivity that is favored by economists and that has been well discussed in the economic literature, we will focus more on the political and social factors that explain this acceleration of history. ...
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The emergence of capitalism in China: an historical perspective and its impact on the political system | Social Research | Find Articles at BNET
 
justabubba said:
and here is your question, followed by a cite with the answer: The emergence of capitalism in China: an historical perspective and its impact on the political system | Social Research | Find Articles at BNET
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So, it was the Communist Party that installed a capitalist system, or it was the Communists that united China? Neither one seems to make a lot of sense.

Wasn't China pretty unified before the Communists took over?

Why would a Communist government institute capitalism?
 
Dittohead not! said:
Not even China is really a Communist country any more. It would be a lot easier to compete with in international trade if it were, but it's not. Communism is dead.
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China is pretty hard-core neo-mercantilist with heavy state control today...
 
Dittohead not! said:
So, it was the Communist Party that installed a capitalist system, or it was the Communists that united China? Neither one seems to make a lot of sense.

Wasn't China pretty unified before the Communists took over?

Why would a Communist government institute capitalism?
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No, it wasn't. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, there was a short period of time when Yuan Shikai led the country, but after his short bid to make himself emperor ended with his death, China largely fell into warlordism. Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists were able to take control of large parts of the country by the late 1920s, but many areas were still out of his control and by the 1930s, there was a full scale civil war with the Communists. Then, the Japanese sheared off a large chunk of the northeast n the early 30s before launching an all-out war against China in 1937. Following WWII, the Civil War resumed, puncuated with a Communist victory in 1949 and their unification of China was completed when they took Hainan island (at that time part of Guangdong province) from the Chiang Nationalists in 1950.
 
Bodhisattva said:
Only because of politics... otherwise we could have and would have killed every single one of them, as well as invade and conquer that dinky little island 90 miles to the south...
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Obviously you are too young to have been involved in that illegal one way or the other. The Koolies, NIPS, VC, Gooks, whatever you want to call the bendly legged, little, yellow skinned, bsatards doesnt matter. The excuses you put forward are wrong to say the least. The USA was DEFEATED and HUMILIATED by them.

It was the USA's second major defeat. The first being the glorious voctory of FIDEL CASTRO and the CUBAN people at the bay of Pigs.
 
Yukon said:
Obviously you are too young to have been involved in that illegal one way or the other. The Koolies, NIPS, VC, Gooks, whatever you want to call the bendly legged, little, yellow skinned, bsatards doesnt matter. The excuses you put forward are wrong to say the least. The USA was DEFEATED and HUMILIATED by them.

It was the USA's second major defeat. The first being the glorious voctory of FIDEL CASTRO and the CUBAN people at the bay of Pigs.
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ohh... we have a *live* one here.... this could get interesting...
 
Vietnam won of course. To say anything different would be lying to yourself. What some people don't want to admit is that the world, the United States, and Vietnam probably would have been much better off we never got involved in the first place.

Just as communisms failure to account for human nature represents an inherent design flaw in the system, so too does any military strategy that fails to account for the effects of domestic politics. We lost Vietnam, yep, say it yourselves. "We lost a war." You can debate the causes all you want, but you can't change the facts.
 
Vietnam was a victory for the wroking man over imperialist yellow dogs.
 
cpwill said:
:shrug: you could say that their allies (the north vietnamese and the chinese) won also; but they actually had to wage another - seperate - campaign, which i consider to be their victory.
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The countries who sold them the weapons are the real winners...

ricksfolly
 
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