Communist lies about the Vietnam war
The Vietnam war will forever remain a traumatic memory for Americans.
50'000 American men lost their lives, tens of thousands were severely wounded, even crippled. 450'000 Vietnamese people lost their lives during the war, including Vietcong and civilian victims.
The worst part was that those who had been forced to fight in Vietnam were received with scorn and open hatred at home - they had been demonized although they had no part in the decision to go to war.
Blame the French
The actual history leading up to the war is complex - there's no question about the fact that France had caused immense harm in every possible way - as colonial force and as source of communist propaganda.
What most people don't know is that all of Mao's lieutenants and practically the entire Vietcong leadership as well as Pol Pot and his thugs had studied in France, where they were indoctrinated with communism - France has been one of the worst vectors of far-left ideology on the planet. This has been far, far worse for the planet than their colonialism.
The war in Vietnam cannot be understood without the war in Korea, where the US, China and the USSR clashed directly on the battlefield for the first and so far last time - especially as the USSR no longer exists.
Without the US / UN intervention, South Korea would be just as miserable as North Korea, today. While the toll of that war was horrible - more than 3 million deaths - the North Korean regime murdered at least as many people directly through mass murder and concentration camps and through its policies that caused horrendous famines.
So the lesson was clearly: "Do not allow communists to take over countries".
A "moderate communist regime"?
The US definitely missed innumerable occasions to establish better relations with Vietnam and push for the withdrawal of the French. Ho Chi Minh had actually reached out to the US many times. He claimed that he wanted to be a "moderate" communist, but that's a fictional idea - communism can never be "moderate". The very concept of Communism is criminal. It can only be imposed through violence and Ho Chi Minh's actions after the war showed that he was just as brutal and bloodthirsty as all the other communist dictators.
The idea behind the idealization of a possible "moderate" Ho Chi Minh is based on the assumption that he was somehow a "legitimate ruler" - an absurd claim. The immense majority of the Vietnamese people did not want to live under his rule or communism in general.
Ho Chi Minh finally won against the French with support from Mao's China - one of the worst genocidal regimes. And he didn't hesitate to get help from the USSR where he had lived for years as well, although he had claimed that he was "critical" towards that regime.
It is unquestionable that it was Ho Chi Minh's attempted to conquer all of Vietnam militarily, with help from China, then the USSR, which got the US involved. The stories about the US setting up false flag attacks etc. are a red herring - the South Vietnamese government did ask for US help and the US would have gotten involved no matter what, at that point. They did not need any fake narratives. It is entirely possible that the US did set up events for the media, but they were not what caused the war, they would merely have been a method to convince the public to support the war they were going to engage in anyway.
The US were genuinely worried that if Vietnam fell to communism, it would lead to a domino effect. The fear was perfectly rational - communism was spreading and the absolute terror of those regimes ensured that anyone not indoctrinated with communist propaganda was horrified at the thought of seeing them gain more power.
Did the US lose the war?
The official narrative is still that the US lost the war, that the Vietcong managed to defeat them, militarily. That's not just factually incorrect, it's absolute nonsense!
The last military attack the Vietcong launched, the Tet offensive, was their last-ditch effort - it cost them 50'000 men, the majority of their remaining forces, while the US lost merely 2'000 soldiers. A 25:1 victory for the US, which is almost unheard-of in military history. It was a stunning victory, all the more so as the US were caught completely by surprise.
At that point, the US had a genuine chance of actually winning the war. They had just bled the Vietcong like never before, but the 2'000 US losses were exploited to the hilt by the leftist media at home.
The reason the US withdrew had nothing to do with a military defeat - it was entirely a matter of US internal politics.
There was the valid criticism of the draft, which forced men to go fight in a war they did not have the slightest connection with. That was a massive problem since the very beginning of the war and it persisted the entire time.
If the US leadership had been smart, they should have made enlisting voluntary, as they did after the war. It would have been infinitely much better - most of the problems the US military faced were due to unmotivated, untrained, unfit soldiers who had no desire to fight that war.
If they had recruited a motivated fighting force with the most competent men they could find and top notch equipment, they would have massively reduced their casualties, incurred a much lower cost and been much more efficient.
That would also have cut down on all the psychopaths who were given a weapon and who ended up shooting civilians just for fun. Horrible things always happen, in any war, from all sides, but professionals usually tend to be more balanced and goal oriented. Psychopaths tend to cause problems for their units so they get expelled.
Communist propaganda in the US
Meanwhile the media - already very much on the far left - ran a continuous propaganda war in support of the Vietcong. Among the worst scum was Jane Fonda, who praised the Vietcong and even went to support them and created propaganda material for them:
https://thevietnamwar.info/hanoi-jane/
"During the trip, she also posed for photographs while sitting on an anti-aircraft gun set up in a rural area near Hanoi. Her pictures taken when she applauded and smiled with an NVA anti-aircraft gun crew, who attempted to shoot down American planes, outraged a large number of American soldiers and civilians."
Laughing about enemy soldiers trying to shoot down US planes ... what could possibly be wrong with that picture? But that was not the worst...
"In 1973, she even accused the returning POWs, who affirmed the torture policy of the North Vietnamese, as “hypocrites and liars”. In an interview with The New York Times in the same year, although she confirmed that there were some incidents of torture, she did not believe it was systematic."
Telling victims of torture that they are "liars" is always endearing.
Ultimately, the rising death toll and the impression that the war was totally pointless, as the media only reported on the setbacks and never on the successes, plus the liars such as Hanoi Jane, convinced Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam.
The fallout from the US withdrawal
During the Paris conference, hundreds of Vietnamese people showed up and vehemently attacked Kissinger - but not for the US going to war. They were angry that the US abandoned them and allowed the Vietcong to take over.
The war cost a total of 500K lives, including 50K Americans, but after the US withdrew, the Vietcong massacred more than 1 MILLION Vietnamese people, while the Khmer Rouges went on a rampage in Cambodia, slaughtering more than 3 million people. So withdrawing cost about 8x more lives than the entire war. And almost no one ever mentions this fact, because it destroys the narrative of the "pointless war" and the "dumb Americans" who "stuck their noses where they didn't belong".
The exact same thing could have been said about the US intervention in WWI and WWII.
Admittedly, it might have been much better if they had not gotten involved in WWI and instead had let the Europeans sort out their own problems. The outcome of WWI might have been a few months more war, but ultimately a more balanced peace, no Hitler and no WWII.
Woodrow Wilson could expand the US government through the war and caused massive harm to the US and internationally - he was one of the worst statists in US history. His role in the Paris peace conference and his unwillingness to stop excessive French demands were largely what led to WWII.
All good and well, but if the US had not intervened in WWII, the Nazis might have been able to hold on to their power. There might have been a stalemate between the Nazis and their former "socialist brother" Stalin. Without the US forces attacking them, it is hard to see how they would have been displaced.
No excuses for bad leadership
Again: the US committed massive errors, no question about it. A better US leadership might well have been able to prevent a war and a communist take-over in Vietnam. Failing that, once the war was engaged, not using conscription and better communication with the public might have given them the backing they needed to actually win the war.
Imagine the state of South Korea if there had been no international, US-led coalition to defend them? I'd say almost 52 million South Koreans and their $2.2 trillion economy, which added immensely to the prosperity of our planet, would not be happy - if more than half of them were still alive...
The wife of a close friend is a refugee from Vietnam. She witnessed the execution of her parents at the hands of the Vietcong. She suffered horrendous trauma. Non-intervention against evil regimes might seem tempting - "just let them deal with their own problems".
Except that the victims of those regimes are very real human beings. Ultimately, allowing evil regimes to take over will affect people in still-free countries, too.
The USSR didn't just commit horrendous genocides totaling more than 60 million victims, they had an absolutely nefarious influence on the entire planet.
This role has now been taken over by the CCP - the Chinese communist regime that adopted a capitalist economy which made them rich. They then used this wealth to subvert western countries. The US cultural war, the Biden coup and his China puppet regime, the worldwide Wuhan virus lockdowns etc. are all a consequence of the failure of western powers to help the Chinese people fight the communist take-over.
Now thanks to the indoctrinated leftists in the US and Europe we might end up watching as China destroys the free nation of Taiwan.
A strong coalition against the CCP is possible - India, Australia and Japan are determined not to let China take over and will defend Taiwan. Chances are that Russia would not want to see a stronger China, either. They had been in a very uneasy relationship even in the days of the USSR.
Under President Trump, there was no question about the will of the US to defend Taiwan militarily - and for now, China does not stand a chance in a war against the US. They may have a large army, but that won't matter. The inability of China to build a large aircraft carrier that could rival with those that are the backbone of the US fleet is the most obvious sign of their weakness. To have at least one aircraft carrier, China bought an old hull from Ukraine, built it up and added a flight deck.
That is why they removed Trump from power and set up a puppet regime. They attacked the US where they were the weakest, exploiting the greed of the Democrats, the media and Big Tech, then fired up a cultural, racial and gender war and the American left totally fell for it. Lies about Vietnam are just an early piece of a prolonged communist propaganda war.
There are a lot of Hanoi Janes in the modern US and Europe!
References
A communist propaganda article that accuses everyone else of spreading propaganda:
To sum it up: "All Ho Chi Minh wanted was to be a nice guy, free Vietnam from foreign control, impose his own rule and murder 1 million Vietnamese people so they would not try to oppose his nice, non-fascist regime"
https://www.globalissues.org/article/402/media-propaganda-and-vietnam