"...but a group of vietnamese under a man named Ho Chi Minh wanted freedom under their own rule."While Ho Chi Minh's resistance against the Vichy French and the Japanese during the second World War was very much on the right side of history, it stretches credulity too far to suggest that the world Ho Chi Minh was fighting for involved freedom in a sense that would be meaningful to the Americans Julian Bond was addressing.
"The second world war was over and Japan was beaten..... [Next Panel] The Vietnamese ruled the country. They has an election and Ho Chi Minh was elected President"For starters Ho Chi Minh styled himself as the Chairman of the Provisional Government then Premier of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and he was not elected to either position in any recognizable sense of the word. While his provisional government did actually meaningfully include other stake holders, such that NLP members were a plurality but not a majority, and it is honestly unclear whether it could have lead to an unaligned and democratic middle ground; it gained power when the Japanese arranged for them to take over government buildings before the French they agreed to surrender to arrived. That Truman fucked up by not respecting Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter and recognizing this government in that brief moment as a stepping stone to something that could have maybe been legitimately democratic if everyone but Stalin got lucky is not a hard case to make. To say that it was itself, much less what quickly followed, a democracy however is just rank bullshit.
"Some people here called it the "Viet Cong" like people who don't like Negroes here call us "Niggers"This is probably an honest misunderstanding, but its still wrong. The word Việt cộng is a contraction of "Việt Nam Cộng-sản", which just literally means Vietnamese communist. He was probably confused by the fact that it was sometimes also used as a contraction of Việt gian cộng-sản, which means literally "Traitor to Vietnam who is a communist." Regardless there really isn't much of a salient connection between the Vietnamese civil war and the American Civil Rights struggle unless you erase the millions of anti-communist Vietnamese, like Bond seems to do to everything else that isn't convenient for him to acknowledge.
"but the national liberation front says it wants fee elections representing all interests, land reforms, and all democratic freedoms."And they seem to have found someone gullible enough to believe them. The NLF only had one real purpose, to eliminate all opposition to the government in Hanoi, which was indeed mostly us and a profoundly fucked up South Vietnam, everything else was empty window dressing.
"We say we fight in Vietnam to fight against communist Chinese aggression in South Viet Nam. But there are no Chinese troops fighting in Vietnam North or South."The Chinese were providing weapons since the early sixties and in 1965 they sent anti-aircraft units and engineering battalions - they would only begin to withdraw from Vietnam in 1968, a year after this comic was written, and only in response to Hanoi's refusal to cool relations with the Soviets after their invasion of Czechoslovakia. They would only be totally gone three years later in 1970. This also neglects to mention the thousands of Soviet, North Korean, and Cuban military personnel who participated.
"We say that the North Vietnamese Government will not negotiate with us, but they have tried to talk with us seven times since September, 1964."The North Vietnamese Government had no interest in the compromise that honest negotiation means, they bet correctly that they could outlast the American people and with us gone topple South Vietnam getting the whole pie to themselves. This was a lie, aimed largely at people like Bond and he fell for it.
"The people of Vietnam are fighting their own war for independence [NEXT PANEL] They want to run their own country, and don't want anyone - Americans, French, Chinese or Russian - to tell them how to do it."This again erases the 1 to 2 hundred thousand Vietnamese who would be executed and the 1 to 2.5 million Vietnamese who would be sent to 're-education' camps after the war as well as the 3 million who fled. The government in Hanoi was very careful to maintain its independence from other Warsaw Pact and obviously NATO nations, but to say that this independence was fought for by 'the people of Vietnam' is an absurd lie when so many were so excluded from it.
"What do you think? Should we be fighting in Vietnam, or should we be let the Vietnamese people - Catholics, Buddhists, Communists and Democrats - settle their own problems their own way?"This obviously benefits significantly from hindsight, but we now know what allowing the NLP to settle its own problems its own way actually meant. Bond does make plenty of salient and valuable points about the war's effect on America, but the lengths he goes to trying to bullshit over the profound fucked-up-edness of the North Vietnamese and assorted puppets are pretty inexcusable.
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Good reading for my teenage daughter when I get home tonight.
posted by incandissonance at 6:57 AM on January 9