If you ask the average woke idiot about the Vietnam War, they’ll usually ramble something about American imperialism, and honestly, even sensible folk don’t know much about what it was really about. You have to look at this through a post-WW2, Cold War lens.
Take the French. Even though their own country was completely beaten by the Germans in exactly six weeks during World War II, they desperately clung to their colonies in Indochina—where, let’s be real, nobody had invited them. But hey, why bash France when you can bash the US instead? I mean, they are cultured Europeans with good coffee and that idiot, drunk commie Sartre.
So, communist leader Ho Chi Minh – who, I kid you not, has a shiny gold statue of himself standing right between a Cartier and a Rolex store in Ho Chi Minh City – takes over North Vietnam. Boom, classic communist “land reform” kicks in. The regime split villages into arbitrary class categories, branded people as landlords or class enemies, confiscated their land, staged public denunciation sessions, jailed folks, and executed them. The exact death toll is disputed, but serious estimates put the executions well into the tens of thousands.
Because of this, nearly one million people fled from North Vietnam to the South. A huge number of Vietnamese looked at communist rule and decided they wanted out before the big American war had even fully unfolded!
And that right there ruins the childish formula that this was simply America versus Vietnam. No. It was Vietnamese against Vietnamese. It was a civil war over what kind of country Vietnam would become.
Was South Vietnam corrupt and flawed? Yes. Did the Americans commit horrible, horrible atrocities? Yes. They didn’t really go after the perpetrators, and I’ve had tears in my eyes reading about the massacred civilians—old people, women, and children. It is an immense stain on US glory and might very well render the whole adventure a terrible one. I am just trying to explain the reasoning here: So many people in the South still fought on that side because they did not want to live under a regime that had just shown, in the North, exactly what communist power looked like.
When the US finally pulled out, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese begged for asylum. Others became the “Boat People,” risking their lives on tiny, rickety boats with absolutely nothing, just to avoid living in commie Vietnam. And rightfully so. Well over a million people were thrown into the “Bamboo Gulag.” What did that look like?
- Brutal sentences: Up to 18 years of backbreaking hard labor in “re-education” camps.
- The vanished: People simply disappeared into the jungle, leaving families without answers.
- Silent deaths: Thousands died from starvation, untreated malaria, and being forced to clear landmines by hand.
Never heard of that? Neither have the commie tourists in Vietnam who buy the official Vietnamese state version as the whole truth. And while they’ll fight for democracy everywhere else, they happily ignore it when it buys them some cheap anti-American polemic.
