If North Vietnam were the communists, what was South Vietnam?

Question

please help me ! thank youuu !

Answer 1

South Vietnam was the Republic of Vietnam. We were fighting to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam. We started out in the Mid-50's with advisors until about 1964, when our ships got into a fight with North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Then we started bombing North Vietnam in 1965, as well as deployed ground troops that same year. This was the way we fought until 1969 when we started Vietnamization, which was getting South Vietnam to protect itself. We used advisors, invasions into Cambodia and Laos to choke off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and bombed North Vietnam without restriction, all of which led to the 1973 cease-fire.

Answer 2

Theoretically, South Vietnam at the time of the Vietnam War was a democratic republic much like the US. They even had a constitution that the US Embassy staff helped to draft. However, graft and corruption were so widespread and rampant with election rigging and vote-buying that it might be more accurate to call it an Oligarchy (rule by the Wealthy.) Throw in the alarming propensity for military coups and you have a recipe for disaster. No matter what it says on paper it was money and power that chose who would lead the South Vietnamese government not the people.

Answer 3

The parallel of our participation in VN and our participation in Iraq are at ultimate minimally comparable. the biggest assessment is that the two are quagmires and to succeed might take greater time and supplies than the yank people are prepared to furnish. The advantages are debatable, the justifications are debatable, the outcomes will maximum probable be comparable. And to the responder: to declare we weren't struggling with Communist governments in VN is ludicrous. The Communist social gathering governed North VN, their best supporters/providers have been the U.S., governed by ability of their Communist social gathering and the chinese language, governed by ability of their Communist social gathering. possibly you experience the "purity" of the government tactics do no longer meet some idealized definition of Communism is only stupid notice video games. All those international locations had a sort of Communist government that integrated forms of Socialism. using a similar technique that is pronounced the united statesisn't a democracy. We use a representative democracy instead of a organic democracy. So what? A rose by ability of the different call...

Answer 4

Non communists....

Answer 5

anti-communist

Answer 6

This explanation of Vietnam is one of the most objective and through. It was from another person so I can't take credit for it. It should clearify it for you. It is rather long but if you want a good answer, it's worth the effort.

The Geneva accords removed the French from northern Vietnam and recognized the Bao Dai government in the south for the two years the French had been given to depart from there. Then an election was supposed to unify the country. This temporary concession of southern territory by the Vietnamese to the French was a response to strong pressure from the Soviet and Chinese representatives Molotov and Zhou Enlai. The French left on schedule but were replaced in May 1955 by the United States and its military support for South Vietnam. Bao Dai was replaced by the pro-American dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, who refused to hold elections because the Communists would have won. Diem re-established the landlords who had been removed by guerrillas for supporting the Japanese and the French. The peasants of the Viet Minh rebelled, and guerrilla fighting spread. Diem violated every article of the constitution and had thousands of people imprisoned in camps. By 1959 United States military "advisors" were being killed in Vietnam, and in 1960 the guerrillas formed the National Liberation Front (NLF). The Second Indochina War had begun.

Most of the NLF were southern Vietnamese. Very few northern troops entered South Vietnam until the American troops had arrived in force. The Americans were attempting to hold back a revolution more than prevent an invasion; it was primarily a civil war. On December 20, 1960 the National Liberation Front formulated the following Ten Points:

1. Overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists and the dictatorial power of Ngo Dinh Diem, servant of the Americans, and institute a government of national democratic union.
2. Institute a largely liberal and democratic regime.
3. Establish an independent and sovereign economy, and improve the living conditions of the people.
4. Reduce land rent; implement agrarian reform with the aim of providing land to the tillers.
5. Develop a national and democratic culture and education.
6. Create a national army devoted to the defense of the Fatherland and the people.
7. Guarantee equality between the various minorities and between the sexes; protect the legitimate interests of foreign citizens established in Vietnam and of Vietnamese citizens residing abroad.
8. Promote a foreign policy of peace and neutrality.
9. Re-establish normal relations between the two zones, and prepare for the peaceful reunification of the country.
10. Struggle against all aggressive war; actively defend universal peace.

In the full manifesto each of these points included several specific means of implementation. The text of Point 2 is a good example:

2. To bring into being a broad and progressive democracy,
promulgate freedom of expression, of the press,
of belief, of assembly, of association,
of movement and other democratic freedoms.
To grant general amnesty to all political detainees,
dissolve all concentration camps dubbed "prosperity zones"
and "resettlement centers,"
abolish the fascist 10-59 law and other anti-democratic laws.4

The Twelve Points of Discipline for the People's Liberation Army suggested that soldiers be fair and honest in business with civilians, never taking even a needle from the people. When staying in civilian houses, they should take care of them as if they were their own. They should be courteous with people and love them. With these ideals as standards, it is not surprising that the NLF made such successful inroads in South Vietnam.

By 1961 more than half of South Vietnamese territory was under Communist control. Over the next two years President Kennedy sent sixteen thousand American soldiers as advisors to the South Vietnamese army. In May 1963 the Buddhists rebelled against Diem's tyrannical government, and monks began setting themselves on fire in protest. The United States hinted that changes in the government were needed. On the first day of November a military coup deposed Diem, and he and his brother Nhu were assassinated. Over the next year and a half the government of South Vietnam changed hands among the generals several times. In February 1964 President Lyndon Johnson issued public warnings to North Vietnam and ordered the covert bombing of Laos near the border of North Vietnam.

In August 1964 the USS Maddox was attacked while patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin, probably in retaliation for a South Vietnamese Navy attack on an island in the north two days before. The Maddox fired back; two days later another attack was reported, though there was never any evidence that this second attack actually occurred. The US ships were not damaged nor were any Americans hurt, while they had sunk three or four of the attacking torpedo boats. Nevertheless, Johnson ordered sixty-four bombing sorties over four North Vietnamese bases, and he requested approval from Congress to use armed force. This excessive response has been considered a violation of the rules of civilized warfare as interpreted in the Nuremberg trials. Senator Wayne Morse, who had been informed by a Pentagon officer that the Maddox had been involved in covert raids of North Vietnam, objected that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave the President war-making powers without a declaration of war, and he lamented it as a historic mistake.

President Johnson was overwhelmingly elected over Goldwater's militaristic and reactionary programs, and on February 7, 1965 he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. The next day the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued a statement of outrage, saying that the US was supporting dictatorship, not freedom, and was intervening in a civil war, not a war of aggression. SDS called for a march on Washington in April and protested,

We are outraged that $2 million a day
is expended for a war on the poor in Vietnam,
while government financing is so desperately needed
to abolish poverty at home.
What kind of America is it whose response to poverty
and oppression in Vietnam is napalm and defoliation?
Whose response to poverty and oppression in Mississippi is-
silence?
It is a hideously immoral war.
America is committing pointless murder.5

A graduated bombing program was begun in March, and in April the United States began sending thousands of combat troops to South Vietnam. On April 17 the SDS march brought 20,000 people to the capitol. That month Hanoi offered its proposal for a settlement consisting of four points in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreements:

1. Recognition of Vietnamese independence and territorial integrity by withdrawal of all US forces, bases, and weapons;
2. no foreign military bases or troops in Vietnam and no military alliances for the two zones;
3. settlement of South Vietnamese affairs according to the program of the NLF; and
4. peaceful reunification of Vietnam without any foreign interference.

This proposal was rejected in Washington out of hand, because they assumed the NLF program would exclude other groups. In 1965 the Catholic Worker, the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), the Student Peace Union (SPU), and the War Resisters League (WRL) published the "Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam," which was signed by 6,000 people including David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy, Bradford Lyttle, A. J. Muste, Robert Swann, James Bevel, John Lewis, Robert Moses, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Kenneth Boulding, W. H. Ferry, Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, Linus Pauling, and Straughton Lynd and which read as follows:

Because the use of the military resources of the United States
in Vietnam and elsewhere suppresses the aspirations
of the people for political independence and economic freedom;
Because inhuman torture and senseless killing
are being carried out by forces
armed, uniformed, trained and financed by the United States;
Because we believe that all peoples of the earth,
including both Americans and non-Americans,
have an inalienable right to life, liberty,
and the peaceful pursuit of happiness in their own way; and
Because we think that positive steps must be taken
to put an end to the threat of nuclear catastrophe and death
by chemical or biological warfare,
whether these result from accident or escalation-

We hereby declare our conscientious refusal
to cooperate with the United States government
in the prosecution of the war in Vietnam.
We encourage those who can conscientiously do so
to refuse to serve in the armed forces
and to ask for discharge if they are already in.
Those of us who are subject to the draft ourselves
declare our own intention to refuse to serve.
We urge others to refuse and refuse ourselves to take part in
the manufacture or transportation of military equipment,
or to work in the fields of military research
and weapons development.
We shall encourage the development of other nonviolent acts,
including acts which involve civil disobedience,
in order to stop the flow of American soldiers
and munitions to Vietnam.6


During Thanksgiving weekend there was another peace march in Washington, and the anti-war leaders urged the Communists to respond to American peace initiatives. Ho Chi Minh replied that the four points still held, and that the US must ease its criminal war of aggression against Vietnam. At Christmas the US temporarily halted the bombing, hoping for some capitulation from North Vietnam. Hanoi replied that the United States was thousands of miles away and had no right to invade South Vietnam or to impose conditions on the DRV.

On December 21, 1965 the United Nations passed a resolution declaring that no state has the right to intervene in the affairs of another state and condemning armed intervention, because "every state has an inalienable right to choose its political, economic, social and cultural systems, without interference in any form by another state." A Citizens' White Paper by Schurmann, Scott, and Zelnik, studying nine critical periods from November 1963 to July 1966, concluded that efforts toward a political settlement were usually retarded or broken off by American military interventions, which often resulted in escalation. The Pentagon Papers later revealed that the expanded bombing of North Vietnam was against the judgment of the US Government's own intelligence advisors, who did not believe that it would stop Hanoi's support for the Vietcong insurgency in the South.

By 1967 nearly half a million American soldiers were fighting in South Vietnam, but at home the Spring Mobilization Committee called for a bombing halt, a US-initiated cease-fire, negotiations, and a phased withdrawal of American troops. About 200,000 people marched from the United Nations building to Central Park, and in San Francisco 50,000 gathered. Some 150 conscientious objectors burned their draft cards in a public protest. Young men were encouraged to turn in their draft cards on October 16. In Oakland, California after nonviolent demonstrators were arrested, thousands of people tried to close down an army induction center; the reaction of the police resulted in a riot. Violence also occurred in Madison, Wisconsin; so SANE, SDS, and other groups declined to sponsor the Washington rally that consequently on October 20 drew only about 100,000 people.

Six days later Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan, Rev. James Mengel, Tom Lewis, and David Eberhardt poured their blood on the selective service files in the Baltimore Customs House and then waited to be arrested. On May 17, 1968 Phil and his brother Daniel Berrigan with Tom Lewis and six others used home-made napalm to burn 378 draft files of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board. In their statement to the press they explained that napalm had killed and burned so many people in Vietnam, and they noted that US nuclear and conventional weaponry exceeds that of the rest of the world. They were sentenced to three years in prison. In September 1968 fourteen people burned about 10,000 draft files in Milwaukee, and various other actions against draft files occurred around the country.

In November 1967 General Westmoreland announced that troop withdrawal could begin in 1969 if the bombing and military progress continued. However, on the Vietnamese holiday of Tet at the end of January 1968 the Vietcong (NLF) launched a massive attack on the major cities of South Vietnam. Within three weeks about 165,000 civilians had been killed, and there were two million new refugees. American forces bombed hamlets that the Vietcong occupied. A US major, looking at the devastated village of Ben Tre, said, "We had to destroy it in order to save it." The offensive, which included an invasion of the US embassy in Saigon, came as a great shock to Americans. The huge size of the action and its surprise to the Americans and South Vietnamese Army indicated that most of the people in the country were more loyal to the NLF than to the Government.

When Westmoreland and chief of staff General Wheeler asked for 200,000 more troops, President Johnson was visibly shaken and began to doubt seriously for the first time the military policies he was following. In March 1968 Senator Eugene McCarthy won a victory in the New Hampshire Presidential primary running against Johnson's Vietnam war policy. A few days later Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy. On March 31 President Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, and to begin de-escalation of the war he limited the bombing to a small strategic area. The war and the anti-war movement that had been aroused to protest it had ruined the Johnson presidency, which on domestic issues had been rather successful. In May formal negotiations began in Paris.

If Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated on the night he won the California primary on June 5, he probably would have gained the Democratic nomination and if elected, could have ended the war. Instead, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who followed Johnson's war policy, gained the nomination even though he had not won a single primary. Frustrated people protested this miscarriage of the popular will at the Democratic national convention in Chicago in August but were suppressed by the brutality of Mayor Richard Daley's police. Richard Nixon won a narrow victory over Humphrey, and under his presidency American military intervention in Indochina would drag on for five more years.

In February 1969 Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, began arranging the secret bombing of Communist bases in Cambodia in violation of the US Constitution, which requires Congress to declare war before attacking another country. To hide these crimes, bombing pilots were ordered to bomb South Vietnam and then had their targets changed; but they still filed false reports that they had bombed South Vietnam when in reality they had bombed Cambodia. By March 1969 there were 541,000 US troops fighting in South Vietnam. From March 1969 to May 1970, the United States conducted 3,630 bombing raids on Cambodia, killing about 600,000 people there. Another 350,000 civilians were killed in Laos by US bombing.

The peace movement continued to grow and affected Nixon's policies. President Nixon wanted to strike a "savage blow" against North Vietnam in the fall of 1969 by mining Haiphong harbor and perhaps even using nuclear weapons, but the demonstrations were so large in October and November that he changed his mind for political reasons. The paid staff of 31 for the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC) had been infiltrated by CIA informers. Local rallies brought out about a quarter of a million people to protest the war on October 15. On November 9 a full-page ad appeared in the New York Times signed by 1365 active duty GIs, saying, "We are opposed to American involvement in the war in Vietnam. We resent the needless wasting of lives to save face for the politicians in Washington."7 The story of the massacre of over seven hundred civilians at My Lai was exposed to public outcry. On November 15 three quarters of a million people gathered in Washington while one quarter of a million marched in San Francisco.

After Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970, student strikes were called on American college campuses. On May 4 at Kent State University in Ohio four protesting students were shot to death by national guard troops, and many other students were wounded. Within a few days over four million students at about 350 college campuses were on strike. In June the Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and barred future US military operations in Cambodia without Congressional approval. By 1970 the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had become active with creative actions such as a mock search-and-destroy operation in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They also testified that atrocities such as the My Lai massacre were not isolated cases but part of a pattern of war crimes for which they held the commanders responsible. After testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations committee in April 1971, 700 veterans angrily stated their names and flung their medals and ribbons back at the Capital. On April 24 about 300,000 demonstrated peacefully at the same time as 125,000 rallied in San Francisco. In Washington 30,000 people remained in West Potomac Park on May Day in an attempt to shut down the government. On May 2 before dawn police warned people to leave because of the use of drugs and began making arrests using plastic handcuffs. About 12,000 stayed, and by the end of the day more than 7,000 had been arrested. The arrest total for three days was about 13,000, the largest mass arrest in US history.

In June 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had secretly commissioned a detailed study of the war in Vietnam by 36 Pentagon bureaucrats. In eighteen months they wrote 1.5 million words of narrative history and collected a million words in documents that covered US involvement in Vietnam from World War II to May 1968 when peace talks began in Paris. An employee of the Pentagon named Daniel Ellsberg made a copy of all this and gave it to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, which began publishing a summary on June 13, 1971. After three installments the US Justice department got a restraining order from a Federal court. The Times and the Washington Post took the case to the US Supreme Court, which on June 30 voted 6-3 to allow publication of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was prosecuted under the Espionage Act; but after the judge discovered that Nixon had ordered the office of his psychiatrist raided, he was released.

Adapting to public pressure, President Nixon began withdrawing US troops, but he kept the war going by bombing Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. The "Vietnamization" of the war was doomed to fail without US support. Running against the peace candidate George McGovern in 1972, Nixon promised peace. Using various illegal political tricks against his opponents that were later exposed in the Watergate scandal, Nixon gained an overwhelming electoral victory. After his 1972 Christmas bombing, several peace groups and ten religious peace groups formed the Coalition to Stop Funding the War (CSFW). A cease-fire agreement was signed in January 1973. However, it was only when the Watergate scandal began to weaken the Nixon presidency that Congress, on July 1, 1973, finally cut off all funds for any military activity in Indochina. Without American troops fighting their civil war, the government of South Vietnam could not last long. On August 9, 1974 Nixon resigned the Presidency in order to avoid being impeached. On April 21, 1975 President Thieu resigned and fled, followed a week later by his successor. On April 30 Vietnam became a unified country as US helicopters completed the evacuation of 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese, abandoning their embassy in Saigon.

all the days that will "live in infamy" in American history, two stand out: Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941.

But why did Japan, with a 10th of our industrial power, launch a sneak attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, an act of state terror that must ignite a war to the death it could not win? Were they insane? No, the Japanese were desperate.

To understand why Japan lashed out, we must go back to World War I. Japan had been our ally. But when she tried to collect her share of the booty at Versailles, she ran into an obdurate Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson rejected Japan's claim to German concessions in Shantung, home of Confucius, which Japan had captured at a price in blood. Tokyo threatened a walkout if denied what she had been promised by the British. "They are not bluffing," warned Wilson, as he capitulated. "We gave them what they should not have."

In 1921, at the Washington Naval Conference, the United States pressured the British to end their 20-year alliance with Japan. By appeasing the Americans, the British enraged and alienated a proud nation that had been a loyal friend.

Japan was now isolated, with Stalin's brooding empire to the north, a rising China to the east and, to the south, Western imperial powers that detested and distrusted her.

When civil war broke out in China, Japan in 1931 occupied Manchuria as a buffer state. This was the way the Europeans had collected their empires. Yet, the West was "shocked, shocked" that Japan would embark upon a course of "aggression." Said one Japanese diplomat, "Just when we learn how to play poker, they change the game to bridge."

Japan now decided to create in China what the British had in India – a vast colony to exploit that would place her among the world powers. In 1937, after a clash at Marco Polo Bridge near Peking, Japan invaded and, after four years of fighting, including the horrific Rape of Nanking, Japan controlled the coastal cities, but not the interior.

When France capitulated in June 1940, Japan moved into northern French Indochina. And though the United States had no interest there, we imposed an embargo on steel and scrap metal. After Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Japan moved into southern Indochina. FDR ordered all Japanese assets frozen.

But FDR did not want to cut off oil. As he told his Cabinet on July 18, an embargo meant war, for that would force oil-starved Japan to seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies. But a State Department lawyer named Dean Acheson drew up the sanctions in such a way as to block any Japanese purchases of U.S. oil. By the time FDR found out, in September, he could not back down.

Tokyo was now split between a War Party and a Peace Party, with the latter in power. Prime Minister Konoye called in Ambassador Joseph Grew and secretly offered to meet FDR in Juneau or anywhere in the Pacific. According to Grew, Konoye was willing to give up Indochina and China, except a buffer region in the north to protect her from Stalin, in return for the U.S. brokering a peace with China and opening up the oil pipeline. Konoye told Grew that Emperor Hirohito knew of his initiative and was ready to give the order for Japan's retreat.

Fearful of a "second Munich," America spurned the offer. Konoye fell from power and was replaced by Hideki Tojo. Still, war was not inevitable. U.S. diplomats prepared to offer Japan a "modus vivendi." If Japan withdrew from southern Indochina, the United States would partially lift the oil embargo. But Chiang Kai-shek became "hysterical," and his American adviser, one Owen Lattimore, intervened to abort the proposal.

Facing a choice between death of the empire or fighting for its life, Japan decided to seize the oil fields of the Indies. And the only force capable of interfering was the U.S. fleet that FDR had conveniently moved from San Diego out to Honolulu.

And so Japan attacked. And so she was crushed and forced out of Vietnam, out of China, out of Manchuria. And so they fell to Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. And so it was that American boys, not Japanese boys, would die fighting Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese to try to block the aggressions of a barbaric Asian communism.

Now Japan is disarmed and China is an Asian giant whose military boasts of pushing the Americans back across the Pacific. Had FDR met Prince Konoye, there might have been no Pearl Harbor, no Pacific war, no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki, no Korea, no Vietnam. How many of our fathers and uncles, brothers and friends, might still be alive?

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.'" A few thoughts as the War Party pounds the drum for an all-out American war on Iraq and radical Islam.
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