In the sense you are using the word, there is not and never was any such thing as "Communism."

The word does refer to something real, but the "something" is a political and economic philosophy, which, just like any other philosophy, is incapable of "trying to take over" a country. Or, really, trying to do anything else. The only kernel of truth to what you said is that Ho Chi Minh was, to some degree, a Communist. However, he was also a Vietnamese nationalist and a believer in democracy. Those three things are not mutually exclusive.

The treatment of "Communism" as a rival power instead of as what it was (and remains), namely a philosophy, is the core illusion that blinded Americans during the Cold War. It led to further illusions such as the "domino theory," which was the belief that if Vietnam "fell to the Communists" (an impossibility of course, as there was nothing properly called "the Communists" to which it could "fall"), then "Communism" would be emboldened by this "conquest" and go on to threaten the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps even Japan and Australia. The fall of South Vietnam -- not to "Communism" but to North Vietnam, which unlike "Communism" actually was a nation capable of conquering -- led to no such dire result, Japan and Australia remained serenely unthreatened (which anyone who actually understood Communism could and did predict), and so the domino theory was disproven.

In addition to this, Cold Warriors also tended to make the error that I call the Demonic Possession Theory of the Enemy: the idea that one's adversaries are possessed by demons, controlled by aliens, or for some other reason likely to behave in ways outside human nature. Thus you got silly notions such as that once a nation went Communist, it could never change that status from within, that Communist countries completely lost their nationalism and no conflicts among them were real, or that Communist countries moved and operated as a monolithic bloc, cooperating with one another perfectly in an inhumanly seamless strategic harmony. Of course, none of these things were remotely true, and anyone who understands anything about human nature (or recognizes that even Communists are still governed by it) knew from the beginning that none of them could possibly be true. And yet, after one Communist regime after another has been overthrown by its own people, often without a drop of blood spilled, and after observing splits between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, China and the Soviet Union, Vietnam and Cambodia, and Vietnam and China, the latter two actually erupting into war, you can still find people who believe this sort of ridiculous nonsense.

To be completely fair, there were plenty of people on the other side of the Cold War who made the same sort of stupid mistake, attributing things to "Imperialism" or "Capitalism" as if those words described rival powers instead of abstractions, diplomatic tendencies, or economic systems. We weren't the only idiots.

War is the enemy of liberty. Had the Hanoi government unified the country as a result of the promised election in 1956, the democratic elements in Ho's philosophy would have been stronger. Whether it would have resulted in something truly "democratic" by western standards is another question; I honestly doubt it, as there has in fact never been a democratic government in Vietnam, not even during the U.S. occupation. But it certainly would have been gentler and less extremist than the unified government that was ultimately forged in years of terrible war. Perhaps more like the regime Vietnam has today, having largely recovered from the war.

WHat is a civilian? And the charge wasnt made about total civilian deaths, it was made about deaths caused by the US. That number is somewhere around 100k, which is still regretful.

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http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

The 2 million civilian casualties were indeed caused by the US. We dropped more bombs in Vietnam than all the bombs dropped in Europe and Africa in WWII.

Edit: I forgot to mention that that figure includes Laos and Cambodia.

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Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

--Hunter S. Thompson

1954: Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, an agreement is reached splitting Vietnam at the 17th parallel into a Communist North and a non-Communist South, pending nationwide elections in 1956.
1955: Ngo Dinh Diem proclaims the Republic of South Vietnam and becomes its president.
April 1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower commits the United States to maintaining South Vietnam's independence

Diem refused to hold the reunification election, the US rationalized strategic interference based on the Domino Theory. Recognizing S. Vietnam's independence without a Vietnamese vote was no different than the situation in Iran, the US backing a dictator for control of a country, which also eventually blew up in our face.

Because Diem blocked the vote for reunification.

Diem was as oppressive and corrupt as the host of other puppets we seated for control under various rationalizations.

So we had him whacked. Problem solved.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

under what context?

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We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

no actually it made things infinitely worse, there are many new sources , that have surfaced over the last 5-10 years from north Vietnam; politicos, generals, information gathered and cataloged from gov. agencies etc. and meetings mong Ho's advisors etc. that has some re-thinking how and where we went wrong there, that is other than considering we where there at all. Diem being offed, was an unmitigated disaster.

One of the larger points being the same mistake we have made in Iraq, we didn’t go there with an understanding of their culture, what they as the natives wanted and how they operated historically vis a vis differences in western outlook as applied to them, and with any clear plan other than toppling in once case and building ion another a gov. that would last.

__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

Here's a little example from the S. Vietnamese 'election':

Diem recorded 98.2% of the vote, including 605,025 votes in Saigon, where only 450,000 voters were registered. Diem's tally also exceeded the registration numbers in other districts.[14][12] Three days later, Diem proclaimed the formation of the Republic of Vietnam, naming himself President.

The typical beginning of a banana republic only at that time in SE Asia.

yes and?

__________________
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile....

From the US point of view, far worse. After Diem was killed with US support the S. Vietnamese government was nothing but a series of coups as military generals looted the massive US military aid effort to the S. Vietnamese military flooding the country like jackals on a kill. Ho Chi Minh said it was perhaps the stupidest move the US made while in Vietnam, Diem being the only central figure with public support of US efforts.

You requested corruption information or was it something else? Perhaps if you fleshed your sentences out they might be more to the point.

Show me a source for your numbers.

__________________
http://www.fairtax.org

Elminate all taxes on income and replace with a national sales tax.

Yes, I know it was a king-sized blunder. I was being flip.

Figured I would a nasty response from the Lefty to which I could remind him that his icon BlunderBoy JFK was behind it.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

"What is a civilian?" is a good point. Why should the death of a soldier count for less in our minds than the death of a civilian? Because he is armed and can fight back? He's still just as dead in the end.

The rest of your post is not. If you want to talk about deaths "caused by the U.S." you need to include, not only those directly inflicted by the U.S., but also those inflicted by the enemy who would not have been killed absent the war that was caused by the U.S. presence.

(Actually, even if you're limiting it to deaths directly inflicted by the U.S., your "what is a civilian?" question suggests we should include military deaths, and that pushes the toll up a long way.)

Who do you think killed those civilians? Who else was carpet bombing South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and targeting anything that moved?

Don't confuse the 2 million figure with the Killing Fields in Cambodia because that happened after we quit the war. That's a whole nother genocidal killing spree.

If you know anything about the Vietnam war then you understand that we didn't have the support of the rural population of South Vietnam, which meant that they were the enemy.

To give you an idea of how these civilians were viewed by the policy gurus, here's a quote by Professor Samuel Huntington, who in 1968 was the chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Writing in Foreign Affairs, "The Vietcong is a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from it's constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist."

So, do you really think there's any doubt as to who is responsible for the civilian casualties, and if so, why?

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Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

--Hunter S. Thompson