Quote:
Originally Posted by Taxi
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So you completely ignored my posting of the vietnamese declaration of independence after saying that this "crap" was still floating around and that lol, please find me an "academic" source to back that up. Good job.
Im done for the night, dishonest interlocutor.
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No, I didn't completely ignore you. You just lack any touch of subtlety. I've read the speech before (probably before you were born); I don't deny it's authenticity.
The 'crap' I was referring to was the interpretation of that document which you apparently accept. Said interpretation being that Ho was a great admirer of American democracy and wanted to form a government allied with the western powers after the end of the war until he was rejected and only then turned to the communists (that's pretty much precisely what we all believed in the 60's). It's hard to believe that interpretation still has any currency, what with Wikipedia and all.
It was a great speech, but it was not primarily directed towards the Vietnamese people; it was directed towards the western powers, and in particular the U.S., in hopes that they would a) grant Vietnam its independence and b) recognize Ho's Viet Minh as the legitimate government.
This was less than a month after the end of the war; there were still Japanese troops in Vietnam. There would shortly be British, French and Chinese troops in Vietnam and things were about to get complicated, but at that moment they were just confused. Ho seized the opportunity to declare his party the legitimate government of Vietnam and issue his declaration. He was well aware of what was happening half way around the world - that the Western powers, plus Russia, were in the process of deciding the face of the post-war world. It was a nice speech and it was a political ploy.
I remain disappointed that we (not meaning just the U.S. but the western powers in concert) gave Vietnam back to the French after the war (of course I am somewhat disappointed that we gave FRANCE back to the French after the war); there was considerable sentiment among many in power in the U.S. to grant Vietnam its independence. But the perception at the time was that we 'needed' France in post-war Europe, since they were the biggest country on the continent (outside the emerging communist bloc) that had not been an axis power during the war.
France had dictated the terms at Versailles after WW I (against U.S. objections) and had in the process almost guaranteed an eventual WW II. This time we had a different plan and we, for reasons I still don't comprehend, thought we needed the French and thus the French immediately became a major speaker in brokering all the crap that followed. We got the Western Europe we wanted (which didn't turn out too badly for them - compare and contrast Eastern Europe), and France got back its colonies, including Indochina. And France continued and continues to do exactly what France wants. They have never been anyone we could rely on, then or now.
So we should have granted Vietnam its independence, but we were never going to hand the country over to Ho. There were a lot of political factions in Vietnam - Catholics, Buddhists, and various non-religious factions that were not communist. The advantage that the communists had was that they were unified (well, after Ho killed off the opposition) and organized. But they NEVER represented anything close to a majority of the population.
You could look some of this stuff up yourself if you would go somewhere besides your radical websites (Wikipedia actually does at least a reasonable job on most of it). Suffice it to say, that the history of post-war Vietnam is complex and I'm tired of typing.
Bottom line: Nice speech which was a calculated political maneuver. i.e. Ho was not a fool. And, Ho was still a communist long before World War II. I covered it in my initial response. I just thought you knew a little more than you did.