The Vietnam War: Defeat or Betrayal?

a revisionist account of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is different. It practically makes no fucking sense, especially if we compare it to other 20th century conflicts like the Korean War or World War II. If we are to look at the numbers, we would see that North Vietnam lost 14 times more soldiers than the US.

So, we would think that this war was a victory for NATO while quite the opposite was the case, the Vietnam War represents the greatest defeat of the United States. But how can this be? How can you lose a war where the enemy loses 14 times more men than you do?!

Most wars are decided on the battlefield, however, in Vietnam this is not the case.

Vietnam was at its core a political affair, not a military one and one of the central components of this war was the greatest and the most effective anti-war movement in history. 

This essay will first state the objective facts of the Vietnam War, and then I will take a revisionist approach to explain the astounding success of pacifism in the 60s to try to figure out what the hell happened in Vietnam.

Vietnam from hindsight

Vietnam marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. The Vietnam War was perhaps the most important event in the lives of the young baby boomers that later went on to make the world that we live in.

Since it is still a conflict that has a great emotional impact for the people that were there, I think that we can hardly say that our Collective idea of the Vietnam War is objective. 

If we were in the 1920s and we wanted to talk about World War I, we could hardly be objective. Most people would see it as the crusade of civilization against the Hun and his barbaric ways.

However, in the hundred years since then, we have been able to cut through the propaganda that once defined this conflict. But we have to understand why the people in the twenties were not able to do so, they were too involved and had too little hindsight on the conflict to see through their own bullshit. 

Due to our current high number of Boomers per capita, I think that that is also our problem. We still see the Vietnam War with a heavy layer of propaganda; in our Collective imagination, we have the image of a liberated youth protesting against an unjust and unwinnable war. And this is exactly the image that I believe is a myth.

So first we will state the objective facts that you, me and the Boomers can agree on, later we will see what we can make out of them. 

The Timeline

So, let's make a timeline of what I consider to be the relevant facts about the Vietnam War, starting in 1954 and ending in 1975.

In 1954 Vietnam is partitioned into two countries, one communist under the influence of China and the USSR and one capitalist under the influence of NATO aka the US.

The north is led by Minh and the south is led by Diem. Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the resistance against the French, so he was exceptionally popular, while Diem was a Catholic that actively discriminated against the Buddhist majority and was generally a corrupt idiot. 

Both countries have no Illusions about each other and start positioning themselves for a future War: the US begins military assistance of South Vietnam in 1955 and the North invades Laos in 1958 in order to have a land route to supply a future Insurgency inside South Vietnam.

In 1959 the National Liberation front or the Viet-Cong were founded and began to wage a guerrilla war Inside South Vietnam with North Vietnamese help. The South Vietnamese government attempted to implement the Strategic Hamlet program, however, failed miserably and effectively alienating the rural population. 

The attempts to defeat the Viet-Cong ended in humiliating defeats because the South Vietnamese Army was mainly led by incompetent officers with political connections. With which leads me to the worst part of South Vietnam which was the coups, since everybody could see that Diem was an idiot, the Army tried to kill him three times.

They succeeded in the third try. So, the situation by 1963 was that Diem was dead, the South Vietnamese Army was badly losing the war and after Diem's death South Vietnam had another four coups that further destabilized the country.

In 1964 the situation was dire for south Vietnam, and it took a turn for the worse when north Vietnam began to support the VCs with their own troops. According to McNamara and the North Vietnamese politburo, the south was expected to collapse soon.

This put the US in a difficult situation where they had to intervene to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam. If the US could not rescue South Vietnam, it would send a message to its other allies that they could not count on the US for support if attacked. However, they needed a pretext to intervene and this pretext came with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. 

The Americans got to work to try to prevent the fall of South Vietnam through military means. In March 1965 the first troops entered South Vietnam and Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, began.

The first anti-war marches begin in April 1965 organized by the SDS. The public opinion was mostly positive, according to a Gallup poll, 24% believed that the war was a mistake.

By the end of 1965 there were 125,000 soldiers in South Vietnam, this number was further expanded to 385,000 in 1966 and the troop presence peaked in 1968 with a total of 540,000. 

During this combat phase, the government of South Vietnam was finally able to stabilize itself under a military junta. Collapse was averted and the phase between 1965 and 1969 was marked by intense combat.

The Americans were able to inflict serious casualties on the Viet-Cong and to defeat them at almost all critical engagements. Based on the success, the American administration promised repeatedly that “Victory was just around the corner”.

The Americans measured their success based on inflicting large amounts of casualties against the Viet-Cong, and indeed, the US Armed Forces managed to decimate the guerrillas. However, they constantly replenished their losses with fresh North Vietnamese soldiers. By 1970 over 70% of all units fighting in South Vietnam War regular soldiers from North Vietnam.

While the combat was raging in South Vietnam, the American opinion of the war was turning towards the negative. In August 1968 most Americans (53%) believed that the war was a mistake. The event that most impacted this opinion was the Tet Offensive, it was a large and unsuccessful Military offensive. However, it was a symbol that the enemy was not yet defeated and that the war would drag on.

Meanwhile, the anti-war movement grew exponentially, staging huge protests and attracting many political figures such as Martin Luther King, athletes such as Muhammed Ali and large amounts of support from the music industry and Hollywood. 

Interestingly, they were also large protests all around the world against American intervention in Vietnam.

The anti-war movement was not only about marches in the street and speeches, young men that could have been conscripted burned their draft cards in protest and many other soldiers refused to go to Vietnam.

In 1968 the presidential election was won by Richard Nixon, who advocated for the end of US intervention through his policy of Vietnamization. The idea was that American troops would gradually withdraw, leaving the combat to the South Vietnamese Army. In 1973 when the last American soldiers departed the South.

The American withdrawal was formalized with a Paris conference that, other than giving Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize, did effectively nothing and the war continued as South Vietnam was fighting a desperate last stand against an overwhelming North Vietnamese offensive.

This last stage of the war was a conventional conflict, where the North had a decisive advantage in military aid and morale. This lasted 2 years and ended with the fall of Saigon.

After the war, North Vietnam annexed the South and, in order to remove their political rivals, they sent 300,000 people to re-education camps. The withdrawal of American Support in Southeast Asia also led to a communist victory in Laos and Cambodia. 

The Vietnam War had war crimes on a massive scale, they were committed by both sides. The most famous of these is the American massacre at My Lai, however, the North Vietnamese committed atrocities to even a larger scale in Hue and the post-war repression led to the migration of 3,000,000 people, the so-called boat people, with some 200,000 deaths at sea.

The morality of the war

The post-war perception of the war was, and still is, that the Vietnam War was a terrible mistake. That it was an unwinnable war that was morally bankrupt and that America should have stayed out of it.

I, however, disagree with this marvel-level analysis of maybe the most complex war of the 20th century and will spend the rest of this essay disproving this claim and later putting my own conclusions forward.

I think that the claim that it was an immoral war is incorrect because in the minds of most people the war started because of US intervention, but they don't realize that it was a civil war that started 6 years before the first American soldier arrived. So, this idea that the US is responsable for the war is wrong because the war began without the Americans and continued without the Americans. 

The fact is that South Vietnam was attacked by North Vietnam and the United States had an obligation to assist its ally, in that sense the Vietnam War is no different from the Korean War and also the War in Ukraine. If the Americans did not defend South Vietnam, what would that mean for other allies like South Korea?

But when people talk about the immorality of the Vietnam War, they're not thinking about it in geopolitical terms, they are thinking about it in emotional terms. They are thinking about the shocking pictures of civilian suffering that have come from the Vietnam War.

However, the only difference between American and North Vietnamese war crimes is that American war crimes are documented and the perpetrators were prosecuted. The North Vietnamese government did not photograph their war crimes, so the approx. 150,000 that they executed did not receive a Pulitzer Prize, instead they got an unmarked grave.

So, I think to talk about the Vietnam War in moral terms as if there was a good side and bad side is stupid and childish, both sides were very morally Gray. 

Was the war winnable?

The common perception is that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable war, however, it is my opinion that the United States won militarily. Their objective was the defense of South Vietnam and as long as US soldiers were present, they succeeded.

During the combat phase, the Americans inflicted terrible casualties on the North Vietnamese and the Viet-Cong and practically won every engagement. 

However, the United States lost at a political level because they did not only defend South Vietnam, they also tried to destroy the Viet-Cong, which was impossible due to the support it received in manpower and weapons from North Vietnam.

The US lost 58,000 men (Plus some 300,000 South Vietnamese soldiers), while according to their own statistics, North Vietnam lost 850,000. I think it is indisputable that and a military level that the United States were winning, however, the North Vietnamese had an unbreakable determination to continue the war that prevented the victory that the US government promised.

The war was not lost because of military defeat, but because it became unpopular and most of the population favored a withdrawal.

The objective of Defending South Vietnam was accomplished as long as American troops were present, when they were not present South Vietnam could not keep up with the North Vietnamese offensives. 

So, the most important factor in the war was not the military strength, but instead the willingness to stay in the fight. This willingness was absolute in North Vietnam, however, wavered and ultimately withered inside the US. The change in public opinion led to the election of Nixon and his policy of withdrawing from the war, which represented a death sentence to South Vietnam.

There were two reasons for the change in popular opinion, first that the government promised a quick victory that did not happen, which damaged its credibility.

But the main driver of popular opinion during the war was the anti-war movement. Through marches, protests, and concerts they were able to influence public opinion against the intervention in Vietnam, and they did such a good job that their talking points still dominate the way that we look at the Vietnam War.

The anti-war movement

I think that the most interesting part of the Vietnam War is the success of the anti-war movement. Never before in history had there been such a large movement against a war as in Vietnam, we don't see similar movements in similar wars such as in the Korean War. So that leaves us with a question, why was the anti-war movement so large and successful in the Vietnam War?

Now, if you ask your Boomer grandparents why they were against the Vietnam War, their answer will be that it was an unjust war full of war crimes and bloodshed. While it is certainly true that the Vietnam War was an incredibly brutal war, but so was the Korean War and World War II for that matter. 

However, we do not see similar movements and these similarly bloody wars. This leads us to the conclusion that it could not have been for them amount of violence of the Vietnam War.

The 20th century is full of terrible wars and genocides, however, none of them had such a response as the Vietnam War. This means that while the cruelties of this war might be a factor, there must be something else.

In order to try to find what this other factor might be, we will look at the case of Jane Fonda. She was one of the most important actresses of the '60s and '70s and was deeply involved in the anti-war movement.

The case of Jane Fonda

She was born to Henry Fonda and had a successful acting career starting in 1960. Fonda won an Oscar in 1969 and 1971 and was overall one of the highest profile personalities in Hollywood. 

Her anti-war activism started in 1970 with organizations that supported the anti-war cause inside the army. However, her most infamous action was that in 1972 she received an invitation from the North Vietnamese government to have a tour of the country. (Although it has to be said that she was not the first celebrity to go.)

Fonda was given a tour of the American bomb damage. Later, she also made radio broadcasts from Radio Hanoi addressing the American soldiers in order to demoralize them by telling them that they have been lied to and are war criminals.

The infamous photo of Jane Fonda sitting in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun is the most recognizable result of this trip.

Another thing that particularly surprised me is that she named her son Troy, in the honor of Nguyễn Văn Trỗi a member of the Viet-cong that tried to assassinate McNamara.

When I read about all of this, I was thoroughly perplexed, and that's when I knew that the Vietnam War was something else.

Now we could just say that maybe Jane Fonda was a communist radical, however, that would still not explain that there were no major consequences to her actions.

Imagine what would happen if an American actress like Rita Hayworth decided to go to bombed out Dresden in 1945, take a photo of herself in an 88 mm, proceed to broadcast to American servicemen that they actually war criminals and finally name her son Reinhard in honor of Heydrich.

I think it is fairly certain that if Rita Hayworth tried to go to do a photo op in Dresden and did propaganda broadcasts for the Germans, she would be arrested for treason. Of course, her career would be over because she would be seen as a Nazi collaborator. (Like Lord Haw-Haw, a british nazi that who was hanged for his pro-German broadcasts)

However, that did not happen to Jane Fonda, her career did dip after the Vietnam visit, but she was not blacklisted and her career took off again 5 years later. 

Because there were no serious consequences to her tour, we can conclude that during the 60s and 70s open collaboration with the enemy was acceptable, while anything similar would have been unacceptable in the 40s.

Pacifism?

So, what does being anti-war mean?

The people who are anti-war disagree with the morality of a conflict in which their nation is involved. Normally the people that are anti-war call themselves pacifists, however, I do not believe that pacifism exists.

This is because pacifism is never absolute, you will never find a person that is 100% pacifistic. Everybody has something that they care about and when this something is threatened, they are willing to fight for it.

You will find that some people are pacifists in some Wars but not in others because they agree with some wars and not with others. 

Most people nowadays agree that slavery is wrong, and by extension most people would not be pacifists in the American Civil War. If somebody was anti-war in the American Civil War, this would mean that this person thought that abolishing slavery was not a worthy cause to fight a war.

Following this logic, what sort of person would be anti-war in World War II? Well, it might be a person with, say, National Socialist sympathies. Maybe even a member of the German-American Bund. (Indeed, I found this on Wikipedia:

(“Congress enacted a peacetime military draft in September 1940. The Bund counseled members of draft age to evade conscription”)

This is because being anti-war just means that you believe that your country should not intervene in the affairs of another country. However, everybody is willing to interfere when they consider that another country is doing something immoral, so being anti-war just means that you consider the actions of another state to be moral:

Being anti-war in the American Civil War meant that you thought that slavery was moral, and therefore no intervention is needed. This would make you pro-slavery.

Being anti-war in the Second World War meant that you thought that the actions of the Axis were moral and that we should let them do whatever they want. This would make you a Nazi sympathizer.

Then it follows that if you were anti-war during the Vietnam War, you considered the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam (+ Laos & Cambodia) to be morally justified and that the US should not defend South Vietnam. This would make you a were a communist sympathizer.

And indeed, a very active minority of the anti-war movement was made up of left-wing organizations like the SDS, the TWLF and Weather Underground.

For example, the first protests were organized in 1965 by the SDS and I think it is fair to state that these organizations were ideologically aligned with North Vietnam, and they not have any problems flying the Viet-Cong flag at their protests. 

The reason for the success of these student organizations was that the post-war intelligentsia became decidedly left wing. This trend had its origin in the shock of World War II that pushed many people away from the right and into the left. (To see how ideological the intelligentsia was, check out the North Vietnamese funded “Russell–Sartre Tribunal“)

These student organizations were a key part of the anti-war movement and established new disciplines like ethnic studies, while there were no equivalent right-wing student organizations, which signifies a shift towards the left.

But there we stop at another problem, we can explain the sympathy of these organizations with the Viet-Cong, however, it would be too simplistic to close the issue McCarthy-Style by calling everybody a communist. 

The hippies were no red guards and Jane Fonda was obviously not a communist. She is a rich Hollywood actress that lives in the lap of luxury. So, how can we explain that non-communists were supporting a communist country?

A large part of the anti-war movement was not there for ideological reasons. Instead, the reason for the massive participation of boomers in the anti-war movement was simply that it was cool. 

Being anti-war was cool because it was a form of rebellion against the established order, and this resonated with the boomers because the whole identity of their generation is rebellion.

The Boomers practically broke with the traditions of their parents on every single level; music, sex, social norms, fashion and especially politics.

The men of the previous generation cut their hair short, so Boomers let their hair long, their parents' generation was sexually repressed, so they embraced free love and, at a political level, their parents were generally in favor of the war, and they obviously were against it.

So, this idea that the anti-war movement was a bunch of communists is stupid because most people were not there for the liberation of the workers, but instead, for the fun of being a rebel.

For example, the famous “March on the Pentagon” began with a concert by Phil Ochs that attracted a significant crowd and after this performance, the organizers just moved the crowd from the concert to the Pentagon to conduct the protest.

The government also used and similar strategy when they funded the rock festival Vortex I to draw attention away from Nixon's visit to Portland, and even promised to turn a blind eye to public nudity and the use of marijuana. And it worked.

The other major factor why it was cool to be anti-war was that the people that tended to have more social influence were more likely to be anti-war, for example, the people that had higher levels of Education tended to be more anti-war so being anti-war was a way to show that you were sophisticated and not “square”.

This also extends to the great impact that celebrities had on public opinion, almost all celebrities, actors, musicians and intellectuals were anti-war. Because all these sophisticated people were against the war, the anti-war movement was seen as something that humane and what intelligent people did. This made it an attracive cause for young people to join.

Indeed, that is the reason why I think that Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam. It was never about the vietnamese people or communism, it was about making a statement to show what a sophisticated humanitarian she was.

I really doubt that she, or any of these “peace activists“, were losing sleep over the hundreds of thousands of vietnamese that drowned trying to escape communist persecution. The true motivation of these “Humanitarians” is what we at the Court’s Sense like to call “moral masturbation”.

They go to some place that is full of misery, make a couple statements, take a couple of pictures and then proceed to fuck off to their luxury condos without dedicating a further thought to what ended up happening to those far-off people.

So, these two factors; the influence of left-wing causes in universities together with the rebellious Spirit of the Boomers, were the two reasons for the great success of the anti-war movement. 

The victory of the anti-war movement

With the success of the anti-war movement, public opinion shifted against the war and for the withdrawal from South Vietnam, and for many that is how the story ends. They had fun listening to some rock, stopped a war and felt good about themselves.

In the end, the Vietnam War was over in the minds of Americans after 1973, however, the consequences of the American retreat were not over in Southeast Asia. 

Hundreds of thousands died in the last two years of the Vietnam War as South Vietnam collapsed, at least a million Vietnamese were relocated to so-called New Economic Zones, in actuality they were deported to the jungle and told to clear it. Approximately 100,000 died working in the jungle, this is one of the main reasons why the Vietnamese boat people that tried to escape their country for the next two decades.

Another consequence of the North Vietnamese victory was the victory of communist insurgents in Laos and Cambodia. Laos remains a communist country to this day, and the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia killed around 2 million people and only ended when Cambodia attacked Vietnam and caused another War.

However, the humanitarian attention of the anti-war movement did not extend to these tragedies, quite the opposite, many western intellectuals including Chomsky even defended the Khmer Rouge regime and Cambodia. But for the average person it was simply uninteresting, and that tells you that it was never about the well-being of the Vietnamese people.

So, what lessons can we learn from analyzing this war from hindsight?

The biggest lesson to take from the Vietnam War is that war is, like Clausewitz said, fundamentally a political affair. Political ideas are what determine the actions of a nation, and whoever can control the narrative can also control the conduct of the war itself.

This leads us to the main problem; if you want to have an attractive political narrative that will become popular, it has to be easily digestible.

If you make a political campaign based on a geopolitical analysis of the region and try to take an objective stance towards the facts, you will be ignored by 90% of the population because they would find it boooring.

Not to mention that the majority of the population don't know where Vietnam is they cannot point it out in the map. (36% could point out North Korea and only 17% Afghanistan, so Vietnam cannot be higher.)

The sort of political campaigns that and do work use marketing strategies:

You need a situation that is easy to understand and evokes strong emotions. Atrocity propaganda works the best, you need to stir emotions like pity, anger and fear to move a large crowd.

Once you have the emotions of the crowd, you need to have a narrative with a good guy and a bad guy so that the crowd can get emotionally involved:

In Vietnam, the pro war side crafted a narrative where South Vietnam is this innocent little puppy invaded by the evil communist North Vietnamese and if the reds are able to take over South Vietnam, they will take over other countries and soon enough you will be next.

This narrative Stokes the crowd's fear, and it worked perfectly from the first World War to the fifties. The only change is that they switched the Hun for the Reds. 

The anti-war side crafted a narrative where the United States invades Vietnam because of “genocidal imperialism” and show images of Napalm victims and war crimes to evoke the crowd’s emotions. Then they would say that the only way to stop this is to withdraw from South Vietnam. (Let North Vietnam do whatever it likes)

Objectively, all of these narratives are absolutely idiotic, they make a mockery out of war and turn it into a Marvel movie. The great shame is that the anti-war narrative was so successful that most people still believe it to this day.

War is inherently a political affair, propaganda will inevitably be used by both sides, so you can bet that the official narrative is always oversimplified and, in many cases, straight-out false. 

I have no doubts that the people that were against the Vietnam War just wanted to have a better world. In reality, the consequence of the success of the anti-war narrative was to make a terrible situation even worse. 

So, what conclusion can we draw from this? My personal conclusion would be that the great amount of suffering that happens in war does not come from the cruelty of people. It would be easy to blame war on people who are evil and just want others to suffer. However, these people don't exist. 

Everyone fundamentally wants to live in a better world, but these positive wishes become corrupted when people believe oversimplified propaganda. This is because the situation is always more complex than what the propaganda implies, so the solutions of the propaganda will make everything worse.

As long as political propaganda exists, the good intentions of people will be turned into terrible solutions that will lead to more suffering. Propaganda will stop existing the day that people stop believing in it, but this can only happen when you have people that are not looking for easy solutions to make themselves feel good.

But that is the biggest problem of them all, easily digestible narratives work. They sell newspapers, drive popular movements and win elections. That is because in politics quality does not matter, quantity is everything.

The conclusion that you should not take from this essay is that the Vietnam War was a great war until it was subverted by communists. The Vietnam War, like everything else in this world, has no good guys and no bad guys. 

If this essay should come to any conclusion, it should be that in politics things are never simple and if something is simple it is fake and you fell for it. 

So next time that you engage in politics don't be one of the many idiots that fell for it and instead demand quality, demand complexity.