Was the Vietnam War pointless?

>The only reason they pulled out was because the media was telling the public it was some stagnant gorilla war.
But it was.

USA never addressed the problem by invading NVA and putting an end to it. But they can't because China and USSR will turn it into Korean War 2.0 all over again.

Peace is pointless.
Veeky Forums more than anyone should know this.
>hey let's discuss of this time when nothing happened

>The only reason they pulled out was because the media was telling the public it was some stagnant gorilla war.
Stop paying attention to Prager

Who is prager?

Awesome post mate.
Happy veterans day.

The political situation of South Vietnam was untenable. It was a completely artificial state rotten with corruption to its core that most of its population was against which wouldn't & couldn't exist without large and sustained outside assistance both financially and militarily. In short it was a puppet state of first the French and then the USA who made their cause a fight for 'freedom' and 'democracy' (ironically considering an actual democratic election would have resulted in an overwhelming victory for Ho Chi Minh and US advisors admitted as much).

Nam sucked

True.

>It was a completely artificial state rotten with corruption to its core that most of its population was against which wouldn't & couldn't exist without large and sustained outside assistance both financially and militarily.

And exactly how much aid and support did North Vietnam receive from China and the USSR?

No it wasn't, it saved Vietnam's people and freedom form the American menace

Too many to list?

>No it wasn't, it saved Vietnam's people and freedom form the American mena-

Ah, it was the US that was on the side of freedom. Cimmunism is inherebtly anti-freedom.

Receiving foreign money doesn't explicitly mean corruption. Whatever problems the Viet Minh may have had its corruption paled in comparison to the South. The way the South Vietnam entire political structure worked was a boss on top who controlled the vice industries by placing loyal allies in important government positions that directly managed the trade and who managed their own graft as long as they kicked up the ladder to the boss who then distributed his largess to buy votes and loyalty. Corruption was at the core of the entire South Vietnamese political structure, it literally depended on corruption to operate. Consider that North Vietnam eradicated the sale and production of poppy within its borders whereas the most powerful political entities in South Vietnam fought each other over control of opium trade.

yeah now charlie lives here

this.

As ethical moral and political judgements are incapable of rational reconciliation, necessarily yes. Like all other historical occurrences "the Vietnam war" was necessarily pointless.

Fuck off back to

No shit, South Vietnam was a fucking post-colonial state trying to get its shit together (without going down the "everyone share's a toothbrush" route of glorious communism). That view was a major problem with dumb burger journalists like Halberstam and Sheehan projecting American developed-nation expectations on a culturally-alien nation.

>Consider that North Vietnam eradicated the sale and production of poppy within its borders whereas the most powerful political entities in South Vietnam fought each other over control of opium trade.

North Vietnam also murdered thousands of landlords and "class foes", encouraged the slaughter of civilians tangentially associated with the SV government during the Tet Offensive, and even sent their own fucking South Vietnamese allies to "re-education camps" because they were "just as corrupted by capitalism" as SV bureaucrats and ARVN officers, anyone taking North Vietnam as an ethical paragon needs to get their head examined

Damn look at this faggot nerd boy.

No. We liberated the people of southern Vietnam from a corrupt western puppet government and defended our homeland against American imperialists.

>liberated
lmao, is that why so many were so eager to escape the north vietnamese that they literally got on a bunch of rickety ass boats and fucked off across the pacific.

*embraces capitalism and American geopolitical aspirations because FUCK CHINA*

Lyndon "my wife totally isn't a major stockholder in Bell Helicopters" Johnson

Just defending against Chinese imperialism.

>a small underdeveloped nation humiliates a world power and wins their freedom
a truly inspiring story

yep, especially when you consider it was all owing to the Eternal Franks autism about MUH COLONIES that they fucking promptly lost anyway, and which popular culture doesnt even remember. What pr department do I need to hire to get that good?

It wasn't a nation, it was the communist faction. And they were backed by USSR and China.

>invading NVA

Have a quick rethink, Bruce my old mate.

>South Vietnam was a fucking post-colonial state trying to get its shit together
There's little to expect this was on the horizon. Corruption was endemic to the system and 'stability' in that present system depended on a robust surveillance and police state funded by the profits from the opium trade. There was no South Vietnam without corruption and that understandably alienated enormous portions of the population, many of whom would fight for the Viet Minh.

Nobody said "North Vietnam is an ethical paragon", but there's a strong argument to be made that it was seen as the much lesser of two evils by the Vietnamese people.

Nam sucked

Lesser of n evils. Remember the cults, urban Buddhists, catholic landlords.

And it didn't even have to be the Northern VWP. The southern VWP had three front groups iirc other than the NFL-PRG (VWP) all of which appealed to different rural proletarian and petitsbourgeois sentiments which legitimised their conscription taxation and local governance of the liberated areas.

gfy

Will some more learned user please outline my post in more depth with nuance, because my memory is failing me.

North Korea was more orderly and more sympathetic to America than the south. If I remember correctly, many of Johnson's advisers told him so and tried to make him change the final decision. But the truth remains, the North was communist, and all of their merits and sympathies towards the U.S. meant nothing because of the narrative.

By the time Johnson entered office, things were already on the downward slope

>French had turned Ho into a hardline anti-Western communist
>16,000 US advisors in Vietnam
>South can't keep it together

Literally the entire cabinet except for one guy told Johnson to send in troops, and unlike Kennedy, Johnson wasn't the kind of guy who overrides a unanimous decision of his advisers because something doesn't smell right.

Well, assuming the country your business is based in isn't the one getting the shit bombed out of it.

True.

Vietnam
Truman

PraguerU. Some meme Conservative Toutube channel that /pol/tards get their history from.

They had some black lady say the South’s flip to the Republican Party wasn’t motivated by the Civil Rights Act because Nixon(invented the Southern Strategy) didn’t win the Deep South in the 1968 election. What they didn’t mention was that George Wallace, an Independent candidate, was running too and he took all them sweet Southern votes by being a rampant racist.

>killing the enemy means you're winning
Tell that to Hannibal
War is only an extension of politics

>Was the Vietnam War pointless?
you misspelled Syria

What are you babbling about? The Tet Offensive was a massive failure that crippled the Vietcong. The goal was to spark a popular uprising, sieze control of the cities and drive the US military out by force - not 'change US public opinion on Vietnam by needlessly wasting manpower and resources in an abortive uprising'

I thought you meant the publisher whose works are vastly more abysmal due to the pretension to promulgate original scholarly knowledge.

Prior to Tet the VWP(n) had already restored Giap who told them what a pigs breakfast general offensive/general uprising would be because of the premature urban conditions due to US occupation. Giap's favoured strategy of general offensive proved effective in 1972 and 1975 by not needlessly frittering away NFL-PRG assets.

Nice picture. Fucked both.

Sure. LOL

Go on... I do realize that the conflict did not start with Johnson, but please actually give my mind something to mull over.

Kind of on or off the topic, but the book Devil's Guard about the "real," story of the SS joining the French Foreign Legion and going to Vietnam is a real hunk of shit.

Yea in the end 58,000 US servicemen died trying to pull another Korean War just to pull out and let the south get fucked two years later.
Im American but im not gonna sugar coat it, even if it was one of our only lost wars, it was a pretty emberrassing one to say the least.

Prager is also the name of an intelligence consulting firm that publishes geopolitical analyses for Wall Street firms.

Consider the liberation of the DRVN from France in its own terms rather than in the context of "the american war". Then consider the "red river campaign" and the disciplining of the ultras by the VWP majority.

Basically read anything out of VWP / DRVN archives.

Spotted the Nam.

>says america should never be in Vietnam
>protested vigorously to get the troops out
>expressed unrestrained disgust for the US government for not leaving
>US decides to leave
>suddenly the us leaving is literally the worst thing to ever happen and he is ashamed that we abandoned south Vietnam
>america should have fulfilled its commitment to south vietnam

Just what the fuck was this guy standing for? Watching him speak during the last two episodes of the Ken Burns documentary was infuriating.

The North Vietnamese were nearing a breaking point. After all the only reason the signed the peace agreement which was heavily in their favor was ironically because if they didnt the knew the US was going bomb them into nonexistence.
They certainly won the war, after all there is a united Vietnam and it was united under the communist regime, but to say that they defeated the Americans to do it is blatantly not true.
On the other hand though, its not like the US was in a position to unite Vietnam the other way around, so you cannot say the US won in any way.
So although i agree that militarily and frankly in a lot of ways (despite how the media loves to portray the war) politically the US was succeeding, it was a waste

Lyndon "oh noooo, the president has been shot by a lone nut" Johnson

I think Mardi Gras: Made in China sums up the war pretty well. Why else would they work in factories for 13 cents an hour during the best years of their life so we can get cheap pieces of plastic?

Every action you claimed North Vietnam did, they will claim happily, every person who supported the South Vietnamese government was a traitor.

Communists see the bourgeois class as the greatest evil, and those who do not cooperate are too dangerous to keep alive.

Pure Communism is inherently more "Moral" than pure capitalism.

South Vietnam industries resembled 1900s pseudo slave labor, and those who managed or controlled such industries were easy targets.

get hurt without health insurance in the US and
you'll be turned into a wage slave.

$10,000+ to set an arm and put a cast on.

Yes we should have just countered the soviets with given Uncle Ho a big grant to modernize their country and export so industry in exchange for switching sides.

>Hey this country just stood up to fight back colonism just like us! They even copy some lines in their declaration of independence!
>Yeah let's fuck them up because French is our best ally

And exactly how did they survive without aids after relations with China gone sour and the Soviets collapsed

>China stopped sending aids after that border skirmish fiasco and Pol Pot
>USA slammed embargo
>Vietnam somehow didn't suffer from famine and not become the second north korea

>le americans intervened in Vietnam to help France
You do realize that France had withdrawn in 1954, right? At best the U.S. had volunteered some bomber squadrons, but their later reasons for interfering against communism than it ever was about standing up for France. And the U.S. strongly disliked France in the 1960s.

>natd20 in diplomacy rolls

...

>ctrl+f Soviet Union.
>0 Results.
The Viets also followed China's lead in the "lol we r communist but we also do capitalism" schtick.

Unlike North Korea's retarded Juche policies.

The absolute state of Veeky Forums.

Truman should have worked a financial deal with Ho to rebuild Vietnam and turn it into a modern, independent nation. Ho was a communist because he was anti-imperialist.

The US already bombed them into nonexistence. Vietnam is still a backwards ass country that is just now truly modernizing because we turned the entire northern part of the country into the surface of the moon. Yet they still kept going, digging ditchside bomb shelters and underground tunnels, raising new armies, and taking the battlefield initiative.

The fact is that we entered Vietnam without a clear cut strategy because McNamara thought measured escalation and systems analysis would bring about eventual victory, and Kennedy/LBJ were very concerned with their elections so they nodded their head yes on any policy on Vietnam that wouldn't make them look like a warmongerer or commie appeaser. It was an utterly retarded way to strategize and Nixon knew there was nothing left to be gained by staying in Nam.

It would have brought the US in direct confrontation with France who had immediate interest for the time being in maintaining indochina and then south vietnam as client state.

No, but we should have finished the job. We've got how many million Hmong split between camps in Thailand and here in the US because they have no home to return to, because all their countries became communist dictatorships?

Vietnam isn't a dictatorship.

This is true. All of this can be traced back to the French setting up a nigger-tier colonial regime and then screaming like a monkey when they demand their exploitative colonies back after WW2. They should've just pulled out a few years earlier and all the garbage could've been avoided.

It wasn't pointless, but it definitely was a huge mistake. It did shocking damage to Johnson's Great Society plans and left lasting political damage. If the war hadn't happened, universal health insurance would almost certainly be an irreversible reality in the US.

No. Here are the main points of my argument

1.Killing gooks is never pointless

2.We killed more of them then they did of us so we win by K/D ratio.

3.Bitchin soundtrack, bitchin style, cool guns, also a lot of baby boomers got killed so it was good.

4.If we didn't stomp them out then they might have went back in time and trained the confederacy in Guerilla tactics forcing us to lose our own civil war.

>The US was winning in Vietnam. The only reason they pulled out was because the media was telling the public it was some stagnant gorilla war.
Military victories are pointless tactical dead ends if there is no clear strategic goals or political goals for the war. The fact that US won 90% battles is irrelevant.

>The Tet Offensive was a huge failure and huge mistake by the VC. Charlie lost so much manpower in that offensive they were screwed.
The Tet Offensive was a huge success for North Vietnamese. They got massive propaganda victory and got rid of unruly guerillas in South, after Tet Offensive they could replace them with better trained and politically disciplined soldiers.

Dank u 4 ur cervix.

There is difference between tactical, strategic and political victories. US public, media and politicians decided to lose the war, not soldiers. After US combat troops were withdrawn, US supplied South for a while, but 'murrican commies in congress defunded military aid to ARVN. North won after ARVN ran out of ammo and fuel.

Goal might have quite different for North Vietnamese political elite.

Listening to It ain't me by Fortunate Sons.

>Didnt suffer from famine
That's wrong tho. They just siphoned so much rice from Cambodia that famine took hold there instead.

...

>same number of panels spent on WWII and Bay of Pigs

no bias here

I think he was talking about the US reducing its aid to South Vietnam and ending aerial bombardment of North Vietnamese forces violating the terms of the treaty.

One of the major reasons North Vietnam launched the final invasion was the absence of American air support for the ARVN - with that gone, the air advantage of the South Vietnamese military was drastically limited

Otherwise I think a certain amount of cognitive dissonance is unavoidable when you've been through an experience like that

To be fair, those were promises that Nixon made personally to Thieu. Not signed and sworn to on the peace accords. The mistake was that Nixon didn't have enough political clout to call for more bombing of North Vietnam to make them break and sign better terms on the accords. Also, the ARVN really needed to crack down on the corruption, because even my grandpappy had problems with his officers stealing pay/pretending they didn't get fuel shipments/etc

I think he was trying to say that the US should have fulfilled its financial commitment to supply the ARVN while the Soviets supplied the PAVN. Instead, they left the ARVN out to dry.
The ARVN was being sent into battle with 20 rounds for M16s because that's all they were able to afford.

>some asshurt eurangutan got so mad at america he took the time to make this
lmao

t. Westmoreland

I was more sickened by the vets who cheered the fall of South Vietnam. Who the fuck cheers for the victories of their enemies, and the death of their allies? Even if they didn't choose to fight that war, why would they be happy that the people shooting at them won?

That's how the Hmong have lived for hundreds of years before gommunism

>The Tet Offensive was a huge success for North Vietnamese. They got massive propaganda victory and got rid of unruly guerillas in South, after Tet Offensive they could replace them with better trained and politically disciplined soldiers.

Except that didn't happen, and the Viet Cong were hardly used the rest of the war.

>people flee the country during a regime change
who wouldve thunk
and the Americans only didn't let South Vietnam vote on reunification because they knew they would vote to become communist so

not if your point is killing gooks...otherwise, probably

>Country got bombed back to hell and shit
>Got into embargo
>Got into war with neighbors
>We should run to another place where there's no war fuck this country

>being this buttmad about the US

Yes you need to follow occupy democrats instead and bernie's dank meme stash