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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (12164)	8/27/1998 3:04:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Obviously nobody can present evidence of what anyone would or would not have done. It has nothing to do with the point being made. Nobody is arguing that Ho would have ceased to be a communist. The point is that if the Americans were thoroughly ensconced as a necessary ally, and the Vietnamese were permitted to get a good look at what the other way could do for them, they would be a great deal more likely to move away from Ho. Without an enemy, extremists seldom keep popularity for long. The Russians didn't drop communism because they were afraid of our bombs. They dropped it because they wanted Levis and rock & roll. The Chinese and Vietnamese are moving the same way. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and the carrot is more effective than the stick. It is important to note that after Ho defeated the French, he was the sole and unquestioned leader in North Vietnam, and carried considerable weight even in the south. The communist party was victorious and dominant. This derived from their defeat of the hated French. It was not the case in 1945. At that time Ho and the communists were the leaders, but there were numerous others waiting in the wings. The question is simply whether we could have steered the car more effectively from inside it than we did from outside it. I expect that we could have. We certainly didn't do a very good job of steering from the outside. At the end of World War II, most anti-colonial movements were barely beginning to coalesce. Leadership of those movements was largely socialist or communist, but those leaders were not nearly as entrenched as they were later, and their ideology had not yet spread beyond the inner circle. By siding with the hopeless effort to restore colonial powers, the US surrendered the moral high ground and lost a huge amount of influence. I still think that if the US had moved in as a cooperating partner in these movements, moderate elements could have been encouraged and protected, and the extremists gradually eased out. It would have required only a little subtlety, which unfortunately has not been a prevalent trait in American foreign policy. It should also be noted that many of these societies were locked at the time in an externally imposed feudal system. In many cases radical social change really was necessary. In countries like the Philippines, the feudal caste still largely rules, and is the single biggest obstacle to true democracy and an operating free market. I'm not convinced that a judicious and temporary dose of socialism would have been a bad thing here. It's amazing what some close-range viewing will do. I've taken hardcore US right wingers on tours of the sugar fields of Negros, and they came away pretty close to being raving revolutionaries. To be repetitive, revolution occurs only when evolution is deliberately obstructed. Take away the oppressor, the revolution withers on the vine. Squashing the revolutionary is much more destructive than removing the obstacles to evolution that generated the revolution in the first place. Without the pathetically inept despotism of the Romanovs, the Bolsheviks would have gone nowhere. Not that they wouldn't have been communists. But nobody would have listened to them. Steve