National Observer Home > No. 62 - Spring 2004 > Article

Perspectives on the Vietnam War and the Iraq War

Quy Nh Dao

There is now dissatisfaction, to put it mildly, at the way the Vietnam War was and still is wrongly projected and understood by some influential people in the Western media. I wish to share with you the other side of the story and an updated account about Vietnam, the Vietnam that I know. Many public figures have drawn analogies between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq situation. Before making comparisons, before drawing lessons about the Vietnam War in any meaningful way, it is important to understand the Vietnam War from a factual and up to date perspective.

The Opposition leader Mr. Mark Latham recently referred to Vietnam when articulating his Iraq policy. He said that the West became involved in the Vietnam War to prevent communism spreading, but that it turned out to be a civil war involving nationalists who wanted unification. He echoed Jim Cairns, the Labor leader of the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium movement during the 60s. The whole of the anti-Vietnam war movement arose from the claim, that the Vietnam War was essentially a national revolutionary movement against the South Vietnamese regime, not one fomented or directed by the communist North which, in turn, was being instructed by communist China.¹ 

Well, the anti-war protesters got their facts wrong. Jim Cairns was wrong then. Mr. Latham is wrong now.

The Vietnam War was about preventing communism spreading. The Vietnam War was fomented by the communist North. The communist North was instructed and abetted by communist China and supported by the rest of the communist bloc.

This is not merely my view. It has now been admitted by the Communist Party of Vietnam. I quote from the Communist Party of Vietnam's official biography on Ho Chi Minh: "Ho Chi Minh . . . felt the need for active propaganda and organizational work in order to step up the revolutionary movement in colonial countries, including Vietnam. He deemed it his task to spread communist doctrine in Asia in general and in Indochina particularly."²

In its internal party directive, the Chinese Communist Party declared its task to be "to assist in every possible way the Communist parties and people in all oppressed nations in Asia to win their liberation".³ That is why, from 1950 to 1978, China gave North Vietnam at least 15 to 20 billion U.S. dollars in economic aid, and sent at least 300,000 military and other personnel during the height of the Vietnam war. The famous battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was fought largely with Chinese weapons and under Chinese direction.⁴  The Soviet Union also poured billions of rubles into Vietnam. By the 1970s Soviet aid amounted to one billion rubles or more annually, without which the Northern communists could not have continued the war.⁵

In his autobiography, Lee Kuan Yew noted that Singapore and other Asian countries were saved from communism by the Vietnam war:⁶ 

Time and again, events in Vietnamese history proved that Ho and his communist cohorts used the patriotic feelings of the Vietnamese people only to further their ends.

In the early 40s, Ho founded the Vietminh front, ostensibly to unite all anti-French forces to fight for independence. But in fact it was under the strong influence and direction of the Indochinese Communist Party, whose role was carefully disguised to alleviate the concern of non-communist elements.⁷ 

The moment independence was within reach, the first people that Ho eliminated were other anti-French nationalist and religious leaders who refused to place themselves under communist command, such as the founder of the Buddhist Hoa Hao branch, the Most Venerable Huynh Phu So, the scholar Pham Quynh, and the nationalist leader and novelist Khai Hung. The method of eliminating these figures varied in its brutality. Many were bound hand and foot and thrown into a river. Some were buried alive.8  After the declaration of independence in 1945, Ho's troops also placed "at least two hundred opposition figures . . . in detention camps".⁹ 

During the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement supported the The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam or the Vietcong, thinking it was a national uprising of South Vietnamese dissatisfied with what was perceived by them as the unpopular South Vietnam regime. The communist sympathizers in the West actively promoted it as "quite independent from Hanoi".¹⁰  It was in fact a product of the Communist Party, led by a Party veteran, placed under the Party command and was first mentioned publicly in an address in the Party's Third National Congress by the Party elder Ton Duc Thang. Again, the Party directive was very clear that there would be no mention of communism.¹¹

As such, the members of the anti-Vietnam war movement let themselves be deceived by the communists. As such, the whole of the anti-war movement was based on a fallacy. And there were influential people in the West who were willing to propagate that fallacy.

Novelist Graham Greene wrote The Quiet American in 1955 in which he denounced America and non-communist South Vietnam as engaged in acts of terrorism against the Vietnamese people. He could not provide any specific, verifiable detail about one such alleged incident on which the whole book was based and which he asserted was a true incident. At the time he wrote that book, thousands of people in the North were killed in the so-called "Land reform" campaign initiated by Ho. Graham Greene was happy to ignore that campaign. But what happened is as follows.

In 1954, Vietnam was divided into communist North and non-communist South. The first thing Ho did when he took control of the North was to launch the "Land reform" campaign. Under this campaign, people deemed wealthy were summarily executed. In the communist mentality, being wealthy or successful is a sin because one can only be wealthy or successful by exploiting the labourers. Wealthy means one belongs to the exploiting class, enemy of the working class. In war-torn, impoverished, backward Vietnam, wealthy might involve merely owning a few blocks of land, a brick house or a fabrics shop. This campaign was carried out following the Chinese Maoist model, under the directives of Chinese communist advisors, using Chinese statistics,¹² which set a quota of people who must be declared "class enemies". So there were people who were killed just so that the quota was reached. Estimates of people killed in this campaign ranged from tens to hundreds of thousand, including several thousand people who were Vietminh supporters.¹³

Noam Chomsky is the leading anti-war, anti-American intellectual. He was described by his like-minded admirer John Pilger as "a humane, thoroughly moral man" , someone "who [is committed ] to the principle of free expression".¹⁴  With these views, Chomsky and Pilger saw it as their mission to support the Northern communists who persecuted Vietnamese intellectuals, who imprisoned poets and novelists, who silenced anyone who dared to speak out against the Party line.

In 1966, when Chomsky passionately avowed "to speak the truth and to expose lies" as a reason for his anti-American, pro-Vietnamese communist stand,¹⁵  North Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien was imprisoned for doing just that, writing the truth and exposing lies by the communists. For this Nguyen Chi Thien was imprisoned for a total of 27 years. Intellectuals in the North had been silenced well before that. In the late 50s, intellectuals within the Communist Party's own ranks, those who fought with the communists against the colonialists, thinking they fought for freedom and national independence, were crushed in a movement known as the "Nhan Van Giai Pham" affair. "Nhan Van" and "Giai Pham" were the names of two literary publications, in which contributors spoke out against the bloody killing during the "Land reform" campaign and the oppression in the North, and were themselves subsequently denounced, terrorized and imprisoned.

In the meantime, To Huu, the Party's favourite poet, was elevated to the rank of Politburo member with such literary gems as:

The Western media turned what was a military success on the part of the non-communist forces in the South to a political victory for the communists in the crucial propaganda front in the West.

During Tet 1968 (the Vietnamese New Year) the communists conducted a surprise attack in South Vietnam's major provinces and capitals. Arnaud de Borchgrave, at the time Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and in charge of the Tet Offensive coverage, reported that it was an unmitigated disaster for Hanoi. They lost some 50,000 and at least as many wounded. The South Vietnamese side had some 6,000 casualties.¹⁶ 

Yet the Western media publicised the carnage of American bodies to a war-weary home audience. They also showed, ad nauseum, the picture of a South Vietnamese soldier shooting a Vietcong, in civilian clothing, point blank. The message was loud and clear – this is the kind of atrocity that the South Vietnamese army did to its own people, with the backing of America. The Western media did not report the massacre of some 4,000 unarmed civil servants and civilians in the old imperial city of Hue committed by the communists, or other similar massacres. Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote, "Several mass graves were found with some 4,000 unarmed civil servants and other civilians, stabbed or with skulls smashed by clubs."¹⁷ The Western media did not show the human carnage which occurred daily in South Vietnam due to the terrorist acts of the communists.¹⁸ 

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese soldier in the picture, passed away in 1998. Neil Davis, the courageous Australian war correspondent killed on assignment in Thailand, set out the background to the killing when interviewed for David Bradbury's 1980 documentary, Frontline. The Vietcong shot by General Loan had, not long before this picture was taken, led a team of communist terrorists in a killing spree, killing the whole family of a South Vietnamese officer in the process - including his 80 year old mother, his wife and his small children. How often is the background of this photo explained? Eddie Adams, the Pulitzer-winning photographer who took that picture, apologized in person to General Loan and his family for the irretrievable damage it did to his honor when he was alive. When General Loan died, Adams praised him as a hero of a just cause.

Another picture comes to mind every time the Vietnam War is mentioned: that of a naked girl running away from a napalm bomb. In her biography,¹⁹ Kim Phuc, the girl in the picture, described how the communist regime brought her on its money-begging expeditions for her value as a perfect live display of American war atrocities and as a guilt trigger for the West, the way the Elephant Man is valued in a freak show. Kim Phuc escaped from Vietnam and now lives in Canada.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, in his memoirs, admitted that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that followed the Tet Offensive surprised him. Communist colonel Bui Tin was among the North Vietnamese delegates who accepted the surrender of South Vietnam. He made clear that "the anti-war movement in the United States, which led to the collapse of political will in Washington, was essential to our strategy". Bui Tin defected to the West and now lives in America. He is now among the most outspoken critics of the Vietnamese communist dictatorship.

In 1975, while the anti-war camp cheered on the communist victory, North Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien, in his dark cell, wept:²⁰ 

When the so called "Liberation army" of the communists came to South Vietnam, their first act of "liberation" was to conduct mass arrests and mass persecution of South Vietnamese. They put more than one million of their "unified brothers" in the horrible concentration camps. ("Over the past three years, we have liberated more than one million people who were guilty of collaborating with the enemy one way or another": interview of the then Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong by Jean-Claude Labbe.²¹) Millions of South Vietnamese women and children suddenly became husbandless and fatherless. In 1979, a B.B.C. news bulletin reported that Vietnam held more political prisoners than any other country in the world. The "Liberation army" appropriated people's properties, shops and factories, nationalized all means of production and evicted people from their own homes in the name of the revolution. The authorities conducted two surprise money-exchange operations to ensure people were stripped of all their lifesavings. No matter how much one was worth before the communist invasion, the maximum amount of new money one could exchange in the first money exchange operation in 1975 was 200 Revolutionary Dong or 400 kilos of rice at official prices. A ration card regime was introduced: one could only buy one's starvation ration at designated state-owned stores; the only place one could legally stay overnight was the address on that ration card. With that piece of paper, the authorities controlled your stomach and your every movement.

When North Vietnam was put under the control of the communists in 1954, one million people fled the North to the South. When the whole country was taken over by the communists in 1975, nearly two million Vietnamese refugees from both the North and the South fled the country by boat and caused shock waves around the world. An estimated half a million people, or even more, perished at sea in their desperate journey for freedom. I am among the survivors of those perilous journeys.

Before the communist invasion, South Vietnam was far from a fully-fledged democracy, but a framework for democracy was established, with the four governing institutions - constitution, executive, legislative and judicial - operating independently. With all the difficulties, the limitations and the set-backs of a country at war, even in times of most political unrest, South Vietnam's free market economy was growing and the right to private property was respected. Society was guided by the rule of law. There were basic freedoms, including freedom of information and freedom of the press. Several dozen newspapers were privately run: Chinh Luan, Saigon Times, Le Journal D'Extreme Orient (French for Far Eastern Journal) were known for their independence. An army of foreign correspondents was given full freedom to cover the war. Political freedom was allowed, a pluralistic, multiparty system was in place, and parties other than the ruling party were allowed to operate. But a clear line was drawn in relation to communism: communist activities were outlawed and communist elements were harshly dealt with. The Western media did not like this. The communist sympathizers in the West made much of it. The anti-war protesters saw it as an excuse to denounce the South Vietnam government as repressive. They disregarded the fact that South Vietnam was in a life or death battle with a most dangerous and ruthless enemy. Those were harsh but necessary measures in times of war, where national security is of utmost priority. Freedom does not include freedom to engage in terrorism.

Now after thirty years, what has communism brought to the Vietnamese people?

Vietnam has now declined to the rank of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world. Before the end of the war, South Vietnam was on a par with other developing countries in the region. Its annual per capital income was $500, worth $4,000 in 2004 dollars. Now, after 30 years of "liberation", the annual per capita income has declined to $470. Hanoi has money to send two military divisions to Laos to crush anti-communist uprisings but has no money to feed children. Unicef has reported an alarming number of Vietnamese children forced into prostitution, some as young as five or six years old.

After thirty years of peace, intellectuals, artists, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, religious followers, tribal people, and even communist veterans are subject to summary arrests, torture, killing, harassment and imprisonment for their peaceful demands for freedom. The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam has been banned from operation, church properties are confiscated, the church's 84 years old patriarch, the Most Ven. Thich Huyen Quang, was arrested and has been in internal exile for over twenty years. Thirty-two year old journalist for The Journal of Communism, Nguyen Vu Binh, was sentenced to seven years in prison for advocating democracy and individual liberty. During Easter this year, 280 Christian highlanders were killed in a peaceful mass prayer protest for religious freedom and for the return of their ancestral lands appropriated by the authority.

The voice of protest against the grave violations of human rights in Vietnam can now be heard around the world. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Rome, Pen International, Journalists without Frontier, the Montagnard Foundation, the U.S. Congress, Australian parliamentarians with their recent M.P.s for Vietnam initiative, the European Parliament, the German Parliament and the Italian Parliament, are amongst those expressing horror at what is occurring. Amid all these voices of protest, the silence from the anti-Vietnam War camp is deadening. The heartfelt sentiments expressed in the anti-war protests – to fight for freedom from oppression, to put an end to exploitation – are nowhere to be heard, now that the most brutal acts of oppression and exploitation are committed by the communists.

Those who supported the communists during the war out of ignorance still refuse to acknowledge the stark evidence stacked right in front of them. Their doggedness is astonishing.

Communist Party members, even communist war-time leaders such as General Tran Do, former Ho Chi Minh's bodyguard Tran Dung Tien and former Director of the Marxist-Leninist Institute Hoang Minh Chinh have been locked up, persecuted or put under house arrest for advocating real democracy. They are typical of the life-long revolutionaries who have come to regret the policies of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the wasted sacrifices for the war and socialism. Duong Thu Huong was a Communist Party member until she started writing novels on government corruption and the abuse of power. She was imprisoned and now is an outspoken dissident. This is what she had to say about the communist government in an interview with A.B.C. television's Foreign Correspondent's reporter:²² 

In the meantime, Philip Noyce, Australian film maker and a self-confessed "dyed-in-the-wool" leftist, went to Vietnam in 2002 to a red carpet treatment from the Vietnamese dictatorship for his remake of the film The Quiet American, with its deceptive, out-of-date and out-of-place propaganda sanctifying the Vietnamese communists as their nation's saviour.

In the meantime, Amnesty International's request to visit hundreds of P.O.C.s in Vietnam has been consistently rejected.

It was the pressure from the anti-war movement that forced the U.S. administration to pull troops out of Vietnam. Largely because of their action, 80 million Vietnamese people are now doomed to oppression. Are we going to let this happen to Iraq? There must be a responsible exit strategy for Iraq. Any troop pull-out should be a process that happens gradually, and not before the Iraqi national security is built up and its governing institutions are strengthened.

Building a democracy is not an overnight undertaking. It should not be subject to a deadline. After decades under Saddam Hussein's brutality, after so much destruction from the war, the Iraqi people deserve something better then a society run by fundamentalists. The escalation of violence in Iraq means that more help is needed so that the Iraqi people can build a society which respects freedom and human rights and is based on the rule of law. These are universal values which should rise above the traditional left-right division and should not be caught between the simplistic pro- or anti-American labelling in political discourse.

The recent Iraqi prisoners scandal is a disgrace, the way the My Lai massacre in Vietnam was a disgrace to the American army. Are these acts excusable in any way? No. Are they justifiable in any way? No. But should this incident shake the belief in a free and democratic system in any way? No. It is thanks to that system that these details are aired in public: this is a confirmation that we have freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and that we have a justice system to hold those responsible accountable. We extend justice even to our enemy, the kind of justice Saddam Hussein and the Vietnamese communists denied their own people.

This system of ours is not perfect, human beings are not perfect, but under our system there is the chance for progress, for improvement, for rectification. An Iraqi society based on the principles of freedom, human rights and the rule of law will allow the Iraqi people to progress.

For the Vietnamese people, the My Lai incident and the rest of the smear campaign conducted by the anti-Vietnam war camp against American involvement in Vietnam cannot blight the truth: that our struggle against communism is a just cause. To strive for freedom, democracy and human rights is a worthy aspiration. The Vietnam War against the communist invasion was a just war.

50,000 American soldiers, 504 Australian soldiers and 185,000 soldiers from the South Vietnamese army died in a just cause. They are heroes in the heart of the Vietnamese people. They died to defend the yellow flag with three red stripes, the flag of free Vietnam. Statues to commemorate their sacrifice have been erected in the United States and in Australia by the Vietnamese community.

After so much suffering, the Vietnamese people deserve some happiness. That is why the Vietnamese communities are joining hands with human rights organizations around the world to demand human rights and to continue our struggle to reclaim freedom and democracy for the Vietnamese people. We are fervent believers in freedom and democracy. Because we have experienced the alternative.

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 1. Paul Strangio, Keeper of the Faith: A biography of Jim Cairns (Melbourne University Press, 2002), page 141.

 2. Communist Party of Vietnam's website at www.cpv.org.vn/hochiminh_en/biography/docs/chapter3.htm

 3. Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-1975 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), page 21.

 4. Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 1995), pages 795-96.

 5. Spencer C. Tucker, Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (ABC-CLIO, 2000), page 415.

 6. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965-2000 (Harper Collins, 2000), pages 467 and 573.

7. William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh (Allen & Unwin, 2000), page 245.

8. James Banerian, Losers are Pirates : A close look at the PBS series "Vietnam : a television history" (Phoenix, Arizona: Sphinx Publishing, 1985), page 69. Duiker, op. cit., page 376.

9. Duiker, op. cit., page 386.

10. Robert Manne, The Shadow of 1917 (The Text Publishing Company, 1994), page 86.

11. Duiker, op. cit., page 527.

 12. Duiker, op. cit., page 477.

 13. Duiker, op. cit., page 476.

 14. John Pilger, Distant Voices (Vintage, 1992), page 341.

 15. Noam Chomsky's February 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", referred to in his American Power and the New Mandarins, (The New Press, 2002), foreword.

 16. Arnaud de Borchgrave, "A mini-Tet Offensive?", The Washington Times, 16 April 2004.

 17. Arnaud de Borchgrave, ibid.

 18. Dr. M. W. J. M. Broekmeijer, The Vietcong Passed By and South Vietnam: Victim of Misunderstanding (Voorburg, Netherlands: Asia Publishing, 1971).

19. Denise Chong, The Girl in ihe Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, (Viking Press, 1998).

 20. Nguyen Chi Thien, The Flowers of Hell (VCANA, 1996), page 397.

 21. Paris Match, September 1978.

22. Transcript of ABC television's Foreign Correspondent programme: "Daring to speak out".

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National Observer No. 62 - Spring 2004