There is nothing outlandish in claiming that instituting a socialist revolution on a conquered province involves killing large masses of people.
First you have to remove the entire previous ruling glass, either killing them or enslaving them. Vietnam did the later, with its "re-education" camps, where the former ruling class became slave labor with a high death rate.
Then you have to forcibly expropriate all privately held land and factories, which has the side effect of removing all the people who actually know how to produce food from the business of doing so.
Third, you have to deal with the acute shortages created by Step 2.
Fourth, in the case of Vietnam, you have to enlarge your army to prepare for the next war with China, which came in 1979. So shortage turns into famine, which causes a huge exodus of desperate people who have nowhere to go.
No, my claims are not so outlandish at all. Just history that people don't want to see. Now it's true that I don't know if the Vietnamese dead actually reached a million, but in a country of 80 million undergoing forced collectivization, the figure is scarcely outlandish. If I kept looking (why don't you look too?) I'm sure someone has done an estimate.
Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982 (Paperback)
by Nyuyen Van Canh (Author
amazon.com |
