how was the US far more successful at establishing an actually popular democratic president in South Korea and actually winning hearts and minds to capitalist democracy, while failing horribly at the same task in South Vietnam?
Both nations faced a powerful northern communist rival, backed by Chinese and Soviets, and yet in Korea there was no insurgency or local support for guerrilas. Where did we go wrong and how could it have been fixed so there'd be a DMZ in nam today.
South Koreans aren't niggerdogs, let's start there.
koreans are smarter.
I’ve known both Koreans and...other Asians, shall we say.
China, Korea, and Japan seem to have the entire regions intelligence wrapped up into them, and the rest of that place may as well be Zimbabwe but really good at math.
Specifically when you start going to the islands.
>an actually popular democratic president in South Korea
The phrase you meant to type is "de facto authoritarian dictatorship followed by multiple military dictatorships." SK has only been a functional democracy for 30 years.
In that case, how did we make it work in SK while in the south Diem was brutally murdered by his own military with US passive acceptance.
There was no massed tunnel network complex from north korea to south korea backed up by thousands of local villagers pissed off at the South Korean dictatorship with each villager digging a cubic meter of dirt a day for example.
Because Koreans aren't literal subhumans.
Southeast Asia, Africa, the middle east, they have no hope. India and Iran have the slightest shot in hell at one day being competent but it's pretty unlikely.
I'm not sure where you are getting the idea of a popular democracy in South Korea. SK's government was a shitshow of autocrats and political repression until the 80's. Korea was "annexed" by Japan in 1910 and were glad that the Japanese got their shit kicked and expelled, while Vietnam was a French colony that did not like our support of France during their move for independence.
Also it's not like it's still not batshit.
Last year it was revealed the president of South Korea was in fact the puppet of a shadow government headed by a cult's shaman.
That's not a thing I made up or the plot to a budget 90s rts game. That's real life.
This, it boils down to the US supporting the French, who had royally pissed off the locals, then left us holding the bag.
We should have supported uncle Ho from the beginning.
The Viet had been fighting for vietmenese independence since before WW2
We supported them against the japs then fucked them over in favor of the frogs.
Not surprising they turned to communism.
The SK dictators were at the very least good at running a country. Sure, they would brutally repressed dissent and would turn a blind eye to anything that would benefit them, but they also prioritized economic growth, quality of life, and expected competency out of their underlings. Diem played favorites, pissed off his country's religious majority, and his domestic policies and their implementation were a mess.
Pretty much this. Though I'd be against ascribing undue competence to daddy Park. The South Korean elite just generally seemed to keep themselves in line and didn't tend to destroy their own legitimacy with quite the same drive as the Vietnamese.
Aside from the fact that while the Norks were definitely pulling plenty of shit, they weren't underwriting a countrywide insurgency in the South.
>SK
>1950's
>democratic
LEL
>SK has only been a functional democracy for 30 years.
It can be debated if it was even that, in light of recent events.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
The president was the daughter of one of the dictators too, IIRC.
this
OP is an uneducated nigger, as per the norm on this shit board
Vietnam was colonized by howaito piggus while Korea was colonized by other Asians.
In Vietnam, the white man was the oppressor (America was actually a white country up until the 80's) while in Korea he was the savior.
because they had the greatest general of all times supporting them before the trumanites backstabbed him and brainwashed people into irrational non-factbased hatred of him.
What is French Catholicism? What is French Communism? What is VN Buddhism? What is city vs countryside? What is Soviet infiltration?
SK did not like being under the Japs and saw the Amerifats as their savior and Amerifats scored brownie points with them fighting Chinks and their gommie brethren.
Vietnam hated the French, the Japs, the French again and the Amerifats who came soon after. Hilarious and ironic since Vietnam today may still have a gommie gubmint but they are as capitalistic and democratic as ever just like China in the 90s.
I'd always heard the South Korean president was a brutal dictator in his own right so idk where you are getting your popularly elected leader idea from.
trained by the imperial japanese in counterinsurgency techniques, in fact.
The south also didn't share borders with multiple unfriendly nation's like south Vietnam did.
Vietnam was abandoned
South Korea has had a massive US presence ever since
confucian tradition, SK leaders' alliance with the corporate giants, rather violent & effective suppression of communism in the South, the fact that Norks attacked South, Norks' use of child soldiers...
the man wanted to nuke the commies even after Truman told him no, apparently even trying to get his hands on some so he could go through with the insanity
>how was the US far more successful at establishing an actually popular democratic president in South Korea and actually winning hearts and minds to capitalist democracy
But that's absolute bullshit. The guy US had fought for was a military dictator and his reign lasted until the 80s when the locals finally got tired of his shit and started a slew of democratic governments, each one falling apart and getting replaced faster than you could get a firearms license.
I personally love korean pussy any asian pussy really.
Vietnam just wanted the French to GTFO, and Communism was just a vehicle for that to happen. Korea had no such Imperial European power.
Ho Chi Mihn was a sovereign independence fighter.
Both Kim Il Sung, South Korean and Vietnamese rulers were figureheads installed by relative superpowers.
South Korean guys were actually shittier than Kim Il Sung too.
P.s. Until Park Chunghee of course, a man of great caliber and talent.
South Korea was a military dictatorship for most of the Cold War, try again
>mfw Edward Lansdale tried to move Diems insane and retarded brother to attend Harvard but the Dean vetoed it
Imagine how much bullshit this would have solved
wasn't the South Vietnamese president a total corrupt jackass?
didnt they try to outlaw buddhism or some shit? which is why that monk burned himself alive.
>popular democratic president in South Korea
What
He gave his dumb cunt brother too much power
>South Korea
>Democracy
You know jackshit about early South Korea.
What's undemocratic about rounding up political opponents for purges?
Google "jungle Asians and fancy Asians"
Vietnamese here. I don't know much about the Korean, but I can tell you how much unconnected Diem was to the rest of the country in his time.
He basically lived in luxury from birth to death - His parents were among the richest in Vietnam at that time, and his father was an imprtant official in the Nguyen dynasty. On top of that, they were converted into Christian (you know how strongly the faith of convert is, right?)
The period between his early adulthood to South Vietnam presidency was full of political fighting, betrayals, and such. He was made an official in the Nguyen dynasty, and when the feudal system collapsed, then the French invaded, he became the prime minister to the French-puppet government. America kicked France out of Indochina in 54-55, he changed side to the American.
So, basically, think of a G. W.Bush that is much more religious zealotry, political savvy, bloodthirsty, but just as unconnected to the lives of the average people.
Diem wasn't that extremely Catholic, his brother was and Diem let him do whatever the fuck he wanted because he was too much of a fag to reign him in, I won't argue he was totally disconnected to the population because he absolutely was
Look at South Korea now vs South Vietnam. Which is the more succesful capitalist state?
Gwangju_massacre.jpg
>The SK dictators were at the very least good at running a country.
sure but that wasn't what OP stated originally. you're moving the goalposts
The French had spent generations pissing and shitting on the Viets and expected their lapdog puppets to do the same. When the French left we inherited their colonial fuckup. We backed the corrupt Viet governments no matter what to fight the commies, despite those governments being wildly unpopular with the masses. The Viet regimes were Francophiles and acted as such.
They supported an autistic Christian in a mainly Buddhist country. The fucker only promoted Christians to high position and his brother's secret police only care about looting and destroying pagodas rather than caring about quelling insurrections.
Not to mention the fact that the dumb fuck reintroduced the landlord system which pissed off most of the population in rural areas.
He worked under the Japanese infiltrating and destroying Resistance cells in Manchuria. He also graduated at the top of his class at the Manchuko Military Academy. The dude was an unapologetic opportunist with brass balls and a sharp mind. Real talent for cracking down on dissidence.
Friendly reminder that Diem was the best option in a bad situation, and one of the generals that overthrew him even admitted that there wasn't a superior replacement among the generals
Because they had very little choice Vietnam. Deng basically forced himself in and was like "It's either me or the commies." When they removed him it was already too late.
South Korea isn't tied to another part of a country that took the brunt of the largest US bombing campaign in modern history.
this
HCM was a francophile as well.
...
>what is North Korea
Because the South Koreans were ruthless as fuck and didn't let themselves get skullfucked by the commies after we left. There was plenty of support for the South Vietnamese gov't and most of the South did not want to reunify. They were forced to. What happened to South Vietnam was viewed as a tragedy at the time.
>There was plenty of support for the South Vietnamese gov't and most of the South did not want to reunify.
hmm, explain the vietcong then
a group formed by the north vietnamese to foment dissent in rural areas of the south.
while a lot of VC were southerners, just as many were north vietnamese soldiers.
furthermore, a lot of VC recruitment was done through threat of violence.
a far larger amount of urban southerners were not big fans of the north, which would explain the large scale refugee movement in the south after the US pulled out.
Because Koreans are a superior people.
Koreans were always slaves (China, Japan) so they were eager to suck amerijew cock
Vietnamese on the other side were hostile to chinese since day 1 and repelled both them and the mongols
I was wondering when you’d show up /int/ guy
Partly the terrain. It's a lot easier to have an insurgency in the jungles of Vietnam, conveniently bordered by Laos and Cambodia, than it is on the Korean peninsula. The thing is, there /were/ attempts by Kim Il Sung to incite an uprising in the south. They just weren't very successful. Also, people tend to overstate the support that the south vietnamese population had for the Viet Cong. Generally the illiterate rice farmers of south vietnam didn't care one way or the other about the Americans or the communists just so long as they were left alone. The Viet Cong controlled the countryside through ruthless terror, massacring whole villages if they didn't hand over supplies.
Other than that the only difference was America itself. The media in the 1960s was far more liberal than it had been in the 1950s, what with McCarthy's time having passed and all that. There was more willingness to report on things like the My Lai massacre - don't think for a second that shit didn't happen in Korea too - and more of a tendency to focus on 'the horrors of war' rather than 'our brave boys fighting communism'. Plus, Korea was fought by guys who'd gone through WW2 and their younger brothers who were guilty over having missed the biggest show of the century, so there wasn't the same resistance to conscription.
When you really start to look it to it, it becomes apparent that the old 'the liberal media betrayed the military in Vietnam' meme has a lot of truth to it.
/thread
It isn't all white people. It's the French specifically.
In the same era as the Indochina Wars there were communist insurgencies in
>Indonesia (colonized by the Dutch)
>the Philippines (colonized by America)
>Korea (colonized by Japan)
>Malaya (colonized by Britain)
>Thailand (colonized by no one)
Literally every single country did better than France.
t. Phuc Duc Nguyen
>The media in the 1960s was far more liberal than it had been in the 1950s, what with McCarthy's time having passed and all that.
> 'the liberal media betrayed the military in Vietnam' meme has some truth to it
I'm not convinced; the natures of the conflict in question, (the way in which it was fought, and the place in which it was fought) were so widely different there's not much of a comparison.
the difference (aside from geography) came down to the nature of the vietnamese independence movement, and how it differed entirely from Korea.
I'd really advise watching the Ken Burns documentary, they go into some of the politics that were occuring in north vietnam at the time, as well as a sort of prologue/backstory of Ho Chi Minh's involvement with the Office of Strategic Services during ww2, and the French Disaster at Dien Bien Phu.
Basically it was a series of poorly made, and poorly carried out decisions regarding tactics and political strategy that led to the US getting tied into a post-colonial civil war.
>all the triggered americans itt
> 'the liberal media betrayed the military in Vietnam' meme has a lot of truth to it.
it really doesn't. its hugely overrated and there's a reason it's a fundamentally conservative talking point, because it sits well with the narrative of "muh liberal elitist media is corrupting america" when, in fact, the media was hugely compliant with US government demands during the war.
the tet offensive came at a time when many of the US were beginning to get a bit sick of hearing about the conflict.
>the US military/US government tries to reassure people that it's got the situation under control, and that the Viet Cong are growing ever smaller and weaker and that "the battle is being won".
>Suddenly the Tet offensive occurs and the generals who declared things were "winding down" get egg all over their face.
>democratic
en.m.wikipedia.org
Rhee was a dictator and S Korea was a repressive shithole until like the 90's
and you identify the heart of the problem with the "media lost the war" narrative. It assumes that the media is a monolithic entity that shapes opinion in a vacuum with an ideological singlemindedness. The fact is that it was a matter of PR failure of the presidential administrations dealing with the war and a PR failure for the military, who dealt with a compliant media in the beginning of the war, a media that unquestioningly gave the military view of things. But the narrative spun by military commanders and the potus administration blew up in their faces when the Tet Offensive happens because it's a narrative that is impossible to incorporate such an event. That was a failure of imagination and a cockiness on the part of Johnson and the military and the public chimped out in reaction and the media simply pandered to their prejudices for the sales.
But we weren’t. Plasticland was a military dictatorship until 1993.
Vietnamese were Chinese cuckolds for like over a millennia though
Most of their dynasties are Chinese in origin as well.
The bombing in NK was statistically worse than in Vietnam. Like 85% of NK cities were leveled.
>It assumes that the media is a monolithic entity that shapes opinion in a vacuum with an ideological singlemindedness
Of course it's not, but some organisations certainly have much more influence than others, like the New York Times, where David Halberstam - their man on the ground in South Vietnam - was highly critical of the Diem regime.
Also, one of the top sources of the American press in South Vietnam was a Vietnamese reporter that turned out to be a decorated North Vietnamese intelligence agent. American reporters drew heavily from him because few reporters were familiar with Vietnam before they were sent there, and so credulously believed whatever its native son(s) told them
en.wikipedia.org
The hilarious part is that pretty much every journalist involved with Pham Xuan An (after they found out he was a North Vietnamese intelligence officer) is still adamant that he had a completely objective and unbiased perception of life in South Vietnam.
So the media's compliance with the government and military is completely nullified because one of their sources was compromised? Okay if you say so senpai...
diem was before serious american involvement vietnam war. and for all diem's strengths his regime was corrupt and repressive and to criticize this is not equivalent to being "liberal" or "defeatist", especially when people at the time didn't realize that diem couldn't be replaced so easily.
also, the former pic has a book (the uncensored war) dedicated to discussing NYT's coverage and concludes that NYT was compliant with the official narrative until it became clear the public was tiring of the war.
>capitalism requires democracy
Because Korea got significantly more development aid per the Marshal Plan. Vietnam was originally a French colonial conflict we got roped into, and development aid took a backseat to counterinsurgency operations. The result was disaster because nobody liked us.
Nixon had realized this by 1972 and his entire plan was to support South Vietnam using aid, however this did not happen because of Watergate. The rest is historyt.
he wasn't "popular" he was a former japanese conspirator who slaughtered any Korean that resisted.
>stabbed in the back theory
This post entirely misses out that prior to Tet, the American government itself was actively propagating the idea that the war was won. They had repeatedly said that the war was won, and every time this was disproven the creditability gap opened more and more. So when a defeated enemy puts up a fight that shouldn't have been possible, the very fact of that action is enough to destroy morale, nothing to do with the actual realities of the Vietcongs situation. Yes, if America had fought on after Tet they might have won, but at that point it was unclear if the war would, could ever be won.
Yeah they're lapdogs
There were two Koreas. There was only one Vietnam artificially cut in two and doomed to reunite. We fought the inevitable, and lost.
Cuz Viets are retards.
It’s weird going their and seeing the ghastly empty, post war buildings surrounded by multi million plazas and towering 72 room tall apartments.
there* for fucks sake
>The south korean gov was democratic
I stopped reading
all the way up until the seventies S.K was under a Chile/Brazil Tier US backed Authoritarian dictatorship
fpbp
What is it about tropical and subtropical regions that breeds lesser peoples?
You know Zimbabwe has some of the best educational stats in Africa right?
That's like being Valedictorian of the Special Ed class, user
Two very different history.
Vietnam was a colony of France for around 70 years(Up until late 1950s). They won their freedom through force(ala American independence). US invaded here.
Korea was controlled by Soviets/Americans at the end of WWII. North/South Korea was created by this divide. US defended here.
Wasn't Ngo Dinh Diem an inept retard who tried to impose Catholicism on a majority Buddhist population? At least our dictator stabilized and industrialized the country.
t. a gook
t. ameritard who knows nothing of SK history after 1953
Yeah, the famous Monk burning himself was because Diem was trying to fuck over Buddhist temples in Saigon.
Correct.
The French left behind an upper crust that was all Catholic, and then Diem turned that upper crust into a theo-oligarchy in which French educated Catholics controlled everything important.
This, leftist parasites screeched at the top of their lungs until we abandoned Vietnam, whereas we stayed in SK
Your last sentence contradicts the point you were originally making
>in Korea there was no insurgency or local support for guerrilas
ummm, thats where you're wrong sweetie
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
South Korea was only kept together in its early history by brutal repression by the armed forces. They were anything but popular
>when fpbp
There were anticommunist insurgencies in North Korea as well prior to the war. Can't really say the same for North Vietnam.
Related question, why didn't the USA try to unite Vietnam under an anti-communist government? It's pretty obvious that even Viet commies were nationalists first, communists second, and they wanted unified Vietnam more than anything else.
Hard to sell "We're siding with the commies." to Congress and the American people. Sadly, both Kennedy and Johnson seemed entirely unprepared for the ordeal. I bet the State Department and CIA also lacked proper academic knowledge on the region and its history.