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Hindsight clarifies that Vietnam was a really bad war

Czar Nicholas was crushing down on the Russians throughout WW1 comparatively harsh (Russia had always been authoritarian). Then in 1917 a popular revolt overthrew the Czar.
 
NWO Sentryman said:
Czar Nicholas was crushing down on the Russians throughout WW1 comparatively harsh
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Not really all that much harsher than his father or grandfather (who was actually assassinated - by a conspiracy involving Lenin's brother, no less) did. And, arguably, his great-grandfather, Nicholas I, was even harsher (especially since under Nicholas I, most Russians were still serfs).
 
NWO Sentryman said:
As well as that, if Diem was so unpopular, where was the Popular Revolution? Why did millions not revolt en masse? Many people hated the Czar in Russia, which led to the revolution there, why not in South Vietnam?
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To see how silly that argument is, if you measure popularity contests in whether they revolted against one or the other, you do realize that they didn't revolt en masse against Ho Chi Minh either, right?

Plus, if we're talking the October Revolution in Russia, even that was a lot less en masse than you seem to think.

1. The grand total of forces fighting against the Czar for the whole duration of the Russian Civil War was about 3 million. Out of which about 1.2 million died. That's it. That's all.

By comparison, the population of Russia had already passed 100 million in 1900. So that grand, en-masse revolution you imagine, actually meant only 3% of the population fighting against the Czar.

By comparison, Vietnam's total population in 1950 was 29 million people. North and South together. And while it's hard to find a total number of combatants quickly, the casualties for the North Vietname and Viet Cong included over 1.1 million dead and 600,000 missing. That is, in addition to the about two million dead civillians.

I.e., per capita, that was actually a _more_ en-masse revolt than the one in Russia. They had comparable casualties at less than a third of the total population. Depending on whether you count the missing or not, per million inhabitants between 3 and 5 more people fought against the USA and the puppet Southern Vietnam regime than Russians fought against the Czar.

So there you go. If the Russian revolution is your yardstick for popular dissent, here you have something even worse.

Even if you take just strictly the volunteers from South Vietnam, enrolment in the Viet Cong had passed the 300,000 members mark in 1962, out of a total population of 12 million. While again it seems hard to find a total number of volunteers on short notice, by the end of the war, some 250,000+ such volunteers from South Vietnam had died. (And that's not counting those assassinated by the CIA: over 40,000 between 1968 and 1971 alone. And somehow that still didn't make them love the USA;)) Again if you do the maths per million inhabitants, it's about twice as en-masse as the revolt in Russia.

2. But there's an even more damning aspect in that comparison you push for. In the Russian Civil War almost as many fought _for_ the Czar's regime. Yep, about 2.4 million. And again they got 1.2 million dead. Even as unpopular as the Czar was, there were still people who volunteered to fight to preserve the status quo and/or who kept fighting to restore it long after they could have said "ah well, it's over" and went home.

Where is the comparable population fighting for South Vietnam? Where are the people volunteering to fight the Viet Cong? Any volunteers numbers I can find are at best in the tens of thousands, while the vast majority of South Vietnamese soldiers were conscripts and large numbers of them apparently very unmotivated to fight the North.

Again, it actually paints an image that it's actually bleaker than the Russian Civil War.

And, in a nutshell, that's what you get when you actually look at history as it is, as opposed to some uninformed mis-conceptions about what an "en-masse" revolt like the one in Russia looked like.
 
Also, if you insist on measuring nastiness in deaths, the CIA Phoenix plan for South Vietnam in 1969 called for 1800 commies per _month_ to be "neutralized". Quick maths, that's 21600 people a year. Again: out of a population of 12 million.

By comparison Stalin's quota for the NKVD for 1937 was for 75,950 people to be killed. Out of a population of 162.5 million, as per the 1937 USSR census. (The era of the great purges added about 1 million executed, but outside that burst of frenzy, the above is about the normal quota they had.)

The "defenders of democracy" actually had a higher quota of political opponents to kill, per million inhabitants, than Stalin's NKVD "troikas", for crying out loud. So, you know, saving them from _what_?

(And if that's not clear, that's just the CIA plan. The killings on the side by the local dictator and his clique are extra.)

Also, an errata to the previous post. Looks like I could find better data for Russia's population. In 1911, Russia had 167,003,000 and in 1920 it had 137,727,000 people. Taking a rough median estimate for 1917, it would make the Russian revolution actually just 2% of the population, not 3% as I previously said. _That_ "en masse" ;)
 
I was talking about the February revolution, not the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Czar Nicholas was already deposed by that stage. The Whites were not primarily motivated on restoring the Romanovs, as they were killed by the bolsheviks.

The Phoenix programme was in the context of an ongoing war. Had Stalin committed his purges in WW2, the number dead would have been a LOT higher.

And i wouldnt call terrorists and francs tireurs "political opponents". They were combatants fighting against South Vietnamese and US forces. You take up arms against the state in favour of another, and you are considered a legitimate target.
 
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Now you got me confused. Exactly in what way was the February Revolution "en masse", by any way you want to define that term? We're talking 5 days total and a single city, most of which was a local mass strike rather than anything you'd call mass revolt. They didn't even get anyting sent against them for the first 3 days. Then a clash with the police in that single city, plus 1 (ONE) battallion of soldiers. Followed by basically a coup d'etat, in which the Czar's train was diverted and they arrested him.

Heck, Diem's deposition was more "en masse" than that.
 
The February Revolution was en masse whenever a bread protest metastasised into an anti-czarist demonstration, eventually including the Cossacks. It was en masse in terms of the key cities of Petrograd and Moscow.
 
Actually, mostly Petrograd, and mostly for reasons far more complex than just "damn, we really don't like the Czar's mug, let's get shot over that."

For a start there was the plain old economic reason. In a addition to the obvious part about unchecked capitalism demanding more and more hours for less and less pay, Petrograd had inflated very rapidly and really didn't keep up. There were apartments where 16 workers were not as much room-mates in one apartment, as hot-bunking. Prices were high, infrastructure was crap, and shortages were common stuff.

The war-weariness over WW1 also didn't help, and WW1 didn't help with the shortages either, if you get my drift. About 37% of all males in Russia were already mobilized in the army, and in a war which really wasn't going well, which had the obvious effects on both dissent and the economy.

Half a century or so of failures in the international arena, also didn't help the image of the government.

Then there was the issue of the Czarevich's (prince's) illness, which may have been at least as big a factor as dissatisfaction with the current czar. Suddenly the expectation was to go from a long line of inefficient czars to an outright cripple who can barely do more than be disabled in bed most of the time.

At this point, you may ask why that was a problem for Russia, while for example America had no problem with the FDR at a comparable point in time. We're talking about a country that was barely out of the middle ages and where for a millenium the idea was that "the devil marks his people" and that an infirmity would flat out disqualify one from ruling. (They may have inherited it from the Byzantines, actually, where somehow disabling an opponent -- castrating him would do, for example -- was a convenient and widely practiced way to prevent someone from challenging your throne.) Briefly, the Czarevich's disabling illness was a bigger issue than we can really imagine in the west these days.

And in a nutshell, it was the combination of all that crap at the same time that triggered that uprising. You can't reduce it to basically just they revolted because they didn't like the Czar.
 
ddt said:
Guatemala post-Arbenz.

Suharto in Indonesia. Killed one million alleged "communists" during his first year alone. Killed another half million in East Timor.

And apropos Chile: the US wasn't directly involved in the Pinochet coup, but it did finance campaign against Allende before he was elected, and it financed various actions to destabilize Allende's government.
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Yeah, Suhartos move into East Timor was, to put it mildly, extremely unpopular in Australia, especially after Balibo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balibo_Five
 
What's even sadder though is that the purges of "communists" even in Indonesia were really thinly veiled ethnic cleansing. You know, the same stuff we bombed the Serbs for half a century later. Except in Indonesia when suspiciously the ethnic Chinese and a few others ended up dead, hey, it was something to praise because surely they must have been sympathisers of commie China.
 
As far as the "US supported Stalin" questions, I think Churchill summed it up when he said,

"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
 
During the Iran-Iraq war, as far as I remember, Israel aimed to prolong the war by supporting the losing side. (citation needed).

The US certainly did look more favourably on Iraq than Iran, compare the aftermath of the USS Stark Incident, where Iraq apologised, and nothing else seemed to happen.
 
bit_pattern said:
LMAO, the Viet Cong WAS a Popular Revolution! :p
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if that were the cae then why:

- were they completely destroyed by Tet?

- Did they not succeed?

- Were they liquidated by their "grateful" communist handlers?

- did they have to resort to attacking civilians? So much for a Popular revolution!
 
You are aware that the word "popular" and the word "victorious" are not synonyms, correct? You are literally asking "If they were popular, then why were they defeated in a series of battles?".
 
B_P was arguing that the VC was a Popular Revolution, which implies such a thing would be unstoppable.
 
No it doesn't. Popular does not imply unstoppable. Why would you say that 'popular implies unstoppable' when "popular" does not imply "unstoppable"?
 
ThunderChunky said:
Don't forget that retard Lyndon Johnson. History will shame those responsible for getting the US involved in Vietnam.
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what should the US have done? Yell DIAF to an ally that was being attacked by Terrorist groups that were being supported by a hostile neighbour? Yeah that will really go down well in American and world Politics given that the Us had been involved in defending East Berlin from a Blockade and defending South Korea.
 
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