Reliving My Lost Youth

Having been in Vietnam recently, I have also been reading, as I mentioned recently here, A Popular History of the Vietnam War, bought on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, written by an avowed Marxist, Jonathan Neale. Coming, as it does, from a Marxist, such comments as the following have added credibility:

- The Viet Minh was not a bunch of peasants or proletarians. “Its members were mostly, like Ho Chi Minh, the educated sons and daughters of landlords and government bureaucrats.” (p. 18). “Vo Nguyen Giap, for instance, was …the son of a mandarin.” (p.20). “In North Vietnam, … party bureaucrats, not workers, ran the state.” (p. 109).

- The Viet Minh was, indeed, popular among the peasants. Beyond the traditional deference to social superiors, in particular to those with a better education, this was because of their promise to take the land from the landlords, and give it to the peasants. Not hard to understand the appeal.

- They were not popular, though, among the proletariat. So much for Marxism properly speaking. The leader of the Communist underground in Saigon during the Tet offensive later admitted publicly that the organization of the workers was “worse than bad.” (p. 107) “The Communists did better at organizing the managers… [who were] the same sort of people with the same sort of education.” (Neale, p. 109).

This seems true everywhere. Communism does worst in terms of gaining power in industrialized countries, and best in feudal countries. This is the opposite of what Marx predicts.


- “[Conventional] wisdom says that anti-Communism was invented and led by Senator Joe McCarthy, when in fact it was organized by President Harry Truman and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover…. It was in fact started by Democrats.” (p. 50). Neale cites Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson as especially cold Cold Warriors. He does not mention the young Robert Kennedy, but might have. He claims that McCarthy was scapegoated, and that the scapegoating of McCarthy came once the liberals had become “ashamed of what they had done” (p. 57).

Maybe; at a minimum, "liberals" do seem to have changed their "principles" faster than principled people are usually inclined to.


- “Those who believe that Kennedy had said America should not be involved in Vietnam need to explain both why he sent troops there and why all his senior advisors except Ball wanted to send more troops.” – p. 67.


- Neale points out that the domino theory was perfectly reasonable in historical terms. “There are many examples of how the domino theory has worked in great social movements.” The Russian Revolution led to copy-cat revolutions in Hungary, Germany, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia. Fascism’s victory in Italy led to copycat governments in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Spain. The defeat of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique meant the days of white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa were numbered. Dominos all.

- “Overall blacks accounted for 12.6 percent of combat deaths in Vietnam, roughly equivalent to their share of the [US] population” (p. 129). It was not, as often claimed, a case of black people made to fight a white man’s war, or of blacks being sent disproportionately into the line of fire.


- “Until 1970, blacks, low-income families, and the over-sixties were the only sections of the population in which greater numbers favoured withdrawal rather than escalation.” – p. 131. The higher the education level, the more likely people were to support the war.

It was actually the rednecks and the old fogies who were against the war. The young and the college educated were for it.