The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano

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СКАЧАТЬ French troops “in order to subjugate the native population of Vietnam.”²⁸ In a stunning shift in history, U.S. vessels brought French troops to Vietnam so they could join recently released Japanese troops to support France’s attempt to crush the Vietnamese independence movement. The sailors’ action was the first organized antiwar protest against Washington’s policy, twenty years before campus protests began in 1965.

       The French-Indochina War and U.S. Involvement

      Vietnamese resistance against the returning French expanded, and by early 1946, “under their own government and without assistance from any foreign country, the people of Northern and Central Vietnam were free of famine and colonial taxation, and on the way to universal literacy.” But these accomplishments did not matter as the French began to retake Vietnam, calling its aggression fighting Communists. The United States presented its alliance with France as protecting the “free world” and defending against the spread of totalitarian Communism. This language was necessary to hide the real purposes of U.S. support. Historian Marilyn Young contends that the American public did not look “directly at the [French] army receiving this aid,” which included thousands of French Foreign Legionnaires who had fought for the Nazis.²⁹ How many Americans knew that these former Nazi troops were part of the French colonial forces attempting to reconquer Vietnam? How many today know this fact?

      Gabriel Kolko and H. Bruce Franklin stress the powerful impact of these U.S. decisions to help France in Vietnam. Kolko argues that U.S. support for French colonialism after the war was “logical as a means of stopping the triumph of the Left … not only in that nation but throughout the Far East.” When de Gaulle visited President Truman in August 1945, he was told that the United States “favored the return of France to Indo-China. The decision would shape the course of world history for decades.” Franklin points out that the White House and the Pentagon “tried from the very beginning to keep their actions secret. When they decided to send Americans to fight in Vietnam, they conspired at first to wage war covertly, later to conceal how the war was being conducted, and finally to expunge the memory of the entire affair or bury it under mounds of false images.”³⁰

      There was a temporary pause in the French-Viet Minh conflict in March 1946, when France signed an agreement with Ho’s government that “recognized the Republic of Vietnam as a Free State … within the … French Union.” This government, therefore, was the only legal one in Vietnam. But France quickly withdrew its recognition and set up a client regime in southern Vietnam. The betrayal led to armed conflict when the French navy shelled Haiphong harbor in November 1946, killing an estimated six thousand civilians; a month later, France occupied Hanoi, and the war soon spread throughout all of Vietnam. From the moment the Vietnamese declared their independence in September 1945, and certainly after a free and general election throughout Vietnam in January 1946 resulted in an overwhelming victory for Ho Chi Minh and his supporters, any U.S. involvement against this independent state, whether by supporting the French or setting up a separate regime in the South, was an act of aggression deserving of resistance.

      The propaganda from Washington and the mainstream media portrayed the Vietnamese as tools of the Soviet Union, even though the latter did not recognize or aid the Ho government for five years after it declared independence. This is another inconvenient fact that contradicts the story of the Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow. The Vietnamese did not even have strong support from the French Communist Party. Although the French CP was to become the largest political party in France, it was afraid of losing votes if it “acquiesced in the liquidation of France’s overseas empire.” It remained in the French cabinet and aided the effort to regain control over Vietnam. This support continued until late 1949 “when the party finally adopted a policy of demonstrations and strikes aimed at obstructing the movement of troops and supplies to Vietnam.”³¹ The claim of an international and monolithic Communist solidarity on behalf of the Vietnamese struggle against the French, therefore, is wrong.

      According to historians Michael Hunt and Steven Levine, at the close of the Second World War the United States was far and away the most powerful nation in the world, “approaching the [peak] of their domination in eastern Asia” at the same moment as the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945. But Washington did not listen to the vast majority of Vietnamese who had great expectations that it would support their anticolonial struggle against France. What happened in Vietnam, as earlier in the Philippines and South Korea, was that the United States “would take the place of one colonial power and set to work with collaborating in yet another exercise” to maintain the empire. When it came to policies that enhanced national self-determination, the rhetorical “support for independence movements was so blatantly violated by on-the-ground U.S. policies that it generated damaging charges of hypocrisy.”³²

      Hypocrisy is a mild term, however, given the death and destruction caused by French colonialists and the refusal of the United States to support the Vietnamese resistance. Whether it was Woodrow Wilson’s championing of “democracy” at the same time that U.S. authorities at the Versailles Peace Conference refused to hear Ho’s plea for recognition of the Vietnamese, or opposition to nationalist movements after the Second World War, one should never listen to what American officials say about colonialism and nationalism. Rather, one should always see what they actually do.

      According to Gabriel Kolko, it was the Chinese Revolution in late 1949 that caused the United States to reconsider the importance of the French-Vietnamese conflict, even though Washington had supported the French from the end of the Second World War. His view is that Vietnam was a “global” concern for Washington; and it was for this reason that after 1950 it “became the most sustained and important single issue.… Victory rather than a political settlement was necessary because of … other basic and more permanent factors in guiding U.S. policy.” U.S. officials were “convinced that the ‘domino’ theory would operate should Vietnam remain with the Vietnamese people,” that is, other countries in Southeast Asia would collapse if the Vietnamese independence struggle won.³³ The dominant perspective thus allowed powerful U.S. officials and their corporate media allies to accuse the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of being controlled and directed from Moscow, a false assertion.

      A CIA report, however, revealed that the Viet Minh army represented the “vast majority” of Vietnamese, including “a majority of the generally anti-Communist Catholics” who supported Ho Chi Minh against the French. This report had no influence on U.S. policy, because early in the French-Vietnamese war, leaders in Washington became “wholly convinced” that the Soviet Union was behind the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle and other revolutionary nationalist movements around the world—and would subvert Washington’s “attainment of its political and economic objectives of a reformed, American-led capitalist world order.”³⁴

      The long struggle for liberation from French colonialism ended at the battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, when the Vietnamese, led by the Viet Minh, crushed the French forces and gained a historic victory for the independence movement, the first major battlefield defeat of a European colonial power after the Second World War. Through a powerful nationalist appeal the Communist-led Viet Minh “had organized and inspired a poor, untrained, ill-equipped population to fight and ultimately win against a far better equipped and trained army.” On the fifth anniversary of the battle at Dien Bien Phu, General Giap, who led the revolutionary forces, wrote about its “great historic truth: a colonized and weak people, once it has risen up and is united in the struggle and determined to fight for its independence and peace, has the full power to defeat the strong aggressor army of an imperialist country.”³⁵

      Almost a hundred thousand French soldiers—including colonial troops from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—died in what the Vietnamese call the Anti-French Resistance War, as well as an estimated 300,000 Viet Minh soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished.³⁶ This staggering human toll was a prelude to an even greater loss of life in the American war. The end of the colonial war also affected the French empire, as Algerians СКАЧАТЬ