[Written on Reddit in response to a poster who still believes all the 60's myths of the Vietnam War perpetrated by the war opposition. They fall apart on the slightest examination, but very few Boomers ever undertake that - too painful. This particular poster emphasized the 'popularity' of Ho Chi Minh, Eisenhower's oft misquoted statement about the likelihood of success in elections in 1956, etc.]
I always ask people with that view point - why, if that's the case, did no one ever flee North? Because no one ever did. The flight from 1957 on was always South, away from the Communists, and ultimately into the open sea, which is amazing when you think of it.
Why, if Ho Chi Minh was so popular, did the Communists never suggest holding a national referendum between 1960 and 1975? The United States and South Vietnam would have agreed to that like a shot.
For that matter, there has never been an election in Vietnam from 1975 to this day. In 1978, a group of liberal activists, led by Joan Baez, took out full page ads in newspapers across the country, begging the Vietnamese regime to justify the war resistance by conducting such an election and other reforms. (Instead, there were re-education camps.) Why not? Why no election, even in referendum style?
The short answer is that the 'popularity' of Ho Chi Minh is a complete myth, a triumph of Soviet propaganda. Like Stalin in 1945, he was popular for a window of time in 1956 directly after the victory over the French. But the Communists then began a Kulak-style land reform, imposed barbaric religious oppression against both Buddhist and Roman Catholic Vietnamese, and the great flight began - more than a million between 1957 and 1960, voting with their feet. The savagery of the regime, publicized in a series of books written by Dr. Tom Dooley in the late 50's, was an international scandal. JFK joined a Senate study group on the issue back then.
In short, the reason no referendum was staged, or election held, is that the Communist Party would lose cold.
So much for the popularity of Ho Chi Minh. Somehow the war opposition managed to obscure all the known history of the late 50's and the self-evident status of the Vietnamese state at the time.
There is more than a little racism in this as well. No one would ever describe a European satellite state as the free choice of the people. The regimes were always imposed by force. But somehow our little yellow brothers accepted that mode of government. The reality is that they were as resistant as the Poles. No free people EVER adopted a Communist regime consensually. All of them were imposed by force. Vietnam is no exception.
The US fought a lousy war, with poor tactics, poor leadership and a President who was unable to communicate the rationale effectively. But we were the good guys. The bad guys were the North Vietnamese, seeking successfully to impose a tyranny on an unwilling people. There were no elections because Ho Chi Minh was actually a Stalinist thug who couldn't have won an election anywhere after 1957.
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