But, at the risk of repeating something widely known, he was more of a nationalist than a Communist. Yeah, he studied in the USSR. But, just as China wasn't a Soviet client and wasn't "communist" in the same way as the USSR, so was Vietnam
Look at the track record of all the Soviet satellite states. How many leaders got running room to run things their own way? Tito, a little? Ho may have been astute but the USSR was not about nationalism, but obedient client states.
I don't know what the China example is supposed to prove. China was too big to be controlled like the states of Eastern Europe. Vietnam wasn't. And China was certainly as communist as anybody else in its own murderous ways. New biographies of Mao assert that his body count was bigger even than Stalin's.
The Dulles brothers (and their followers, a fair portion of the country at the time)were too nuts about communism to have permitted it, seeing "It" as a giant blob-like "thing" spreading across the world. It was a false and self-destructive view, both of communism and the USSR
That is a caricature of their view, which is that communism was being spread quite deliberately by Moscow to extend its sphere of influence, which it was. Calling it a 'blob' makes it sound like fears of a Communist Southeast Asia were ridiculous. Clearly they weren't, since Laos and Cambodia went Communist as a result of Vietnam going Communist in 1975. Who is to say that it wouldn't have happened if Vietnam had been allowed to go Communist in 1955? |
