Vietnam Today
It has been 35 years since the Vietnam War ended and America withdrew from Vietnam after killing 2 million Vietnamese and losing 35,000 Americans in the killing fields. It was the strangest American War ever, and certainly one of the most shameful. The West had promised Vietnam free elections but when the time drew near for the election, realizing that they were going to elect a Communist leader, American decided it was not in our ‘national interests’ to allow this, that a domino effect would follow with all of southeast Asia next, right on down the line, until America itself was gobbled up by a Communist dictator. After all, Joe McCarthy himself, one of the purest of patriots, had warned us about this communist stuff and how many of us were already jailable communists.
It came as a real shock to the American people that we could actually kill 2 million people of such a small country, only lose 35,000 ourselves, and still lose the war. We had spent so much on military hardware and bases all over the world that we had enough fire power to blow up all of Vietnam many times over. But as a Christian nation we were not going to blow up everyone, 2 million seemed an appropriate place to declare victory and go home. So Vietnam became Communist, and if there was any measurable impact on the security of our country, we must have missed it somehow. Vietnam hadn’t invaded, or bothered any other countries in hundreds of years, if ever, and they haven’t bothered any other country since. As Dick Cheney would probably say, “Well, you can never be too cautious, better to kill 2 million before they can become enemies than to wait until they become enemies and then kill them. Many Americans wish we had killed Dick Cheney before he had a chance to become Dick Chaney.
It is perhaps interesting to take a look at what Vietnam is 35 years later. It is hardly ever in the news, and even the most right wing hawks (of which I was one at the time) don’t bother to pursue their notions of how dangerous a communist Vietnam would be or is. I have been on the wrong side enough times in my life, but the Vietnam War debacle ranks up there as my most shameful political stance. Even Barry Goldwater came around on this issue.
Vietnam is still under single party communist rule, but there is a decent amount of market oriented businesses and tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty. Over the last decade economic growth has grown annually at 7 percent (the United States, under 2%). Since 1993 the percent living in poverty has dropped from 58 percent to 11 percent last year (In 2012, 46.5 million people were living in poverty in the United States—the largest number in the 54 years the Census has measured poverty. The poverty rate (the percentage of all people in the United States who were poor) also remained at high levels: 15% for all Americans). What???? The percentage of people poor in the United States is higher now than the percentage of people poor in Vietnam? I suspect this is not a fair correlation, but nevertheless poverty is growing in the United States rapidly and falling rapidly in Vietnam. I guess they rightfully won the war and are reaping the benefits. It has been a while since we won any war with benefits, and I really don’t think Reagan’s Granada War should count here.
In a recent poll 81% of the people in Vietnam said their country was moving in the right direction. In the United States only 27% of Americans said their country was moving in the right direction. What????? Maybe we are being overtaken by Communist Vietnam. Maybe all Joe McCarthy’s domestic communists are operative after all. Actually, if we had bombed our own poor instead of the Vietnamese, we would only have 44.6 million poor people instead of 46.6 million.
In Vietnam, large state-owned firms dominate the economy. In the United States billionaire-owned firms control the economy and most of our government politicians. In Vietnam, the communist party operates the country directly; in the U. S. the billionaire owned firms operate the country via lobbyists and record levels of campaign cash for their puppets. And this puppet control has no weak linked strings either. None of the puppets has a prayer in hell getting elected without corporate and billionaire campaign financing. But that is ok apparently, since our supreme court has declared Corporations are people.
In the United States around 30% were interested enough in politics to vote in our last election leaving around 17% of eligible voters determining our government policies. That’s a tad short of a majority. We are no longer a democracy but a corpocracy. That’s just fine for those of us on the affluent end of the economy. The rest will be fine as soon as the trickle down pipeline gets unplugged. It’s been plugged now for 40 years but we are told it takes time for trickle down to work. In Vietnam more than 60% said they are not interested in politics and 39% said they were. What?????A higher percentage of people in Vietnam are interested in politics than in America?
Here’s something not surprising. Only 3% of Vietnamese think the U.S. should have gone into Iraq or Afghanistan. Finally something not surprising. But guess who received the highest approval rating of all world figures? Yep, Barack Obama. What??????? Obama is more popular across the world than in the U.S.? So who gets the lowest approval rating? George W. Bush. Why the huge difference? Most Vietnamese agreed with this statement. “Bush is kind of hawkish but Obama wants to be friends with countries around the world. I don’t know who benefits from these wars, but it’s the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who pay the price.”
While all of the above has meaning, Vietnam has all the problems that comes with communism. Corruption is wide-spread. There is a lot of jailing over recreational drug use and violation of social state decreed norms. There is not a lot of individual freedom. Discrimination against women is huge. Here is one interesting bit of intrigue. While there is a lot of jailing over drug usage there is also a lot of jailing for white collar crimes. When it comes to theft in the United States, our jails are full of petty thieves and drug users/sellers but it is relatively rare to find white-collar big time thieves in jail. They, when rarely caught, get fines, not jail—which leaves the profit margin for being a white collar criminal both jail safe and with adequate profit margin safety nets (They have to give back some of the money stolen and are never tried for a crime).
It seems both communism, in most forms, and democracy, in certain forms, are becoming failures. Vietnam seems to be blunting the failures of communism by allowing more market economic principles. Both systems are plagued with an inability to control the mass movement of their country’s wealth into the hands of a small upperclass. Right now, the major communist and democratic countries are stymied by a rapidly growing very unequal distribution of wealth among their citizens. In both cases, those at the top cannot restrain themselves, the governments won’t do it, and the only way the already wealthy can amass even more wealth is taking it from the middle class, which pushes more of the middle class into poverty and, the whole of their country into chaos.
As the world turns and ultimately driven right now by human overpopulation, the evolutionary process, and all the laws which govern it, have never dealt with a situation where the planet itself, and all other species are being threatened by overpopulation of one species. Given that evolution has many times regressed from disaster and recovered in due time (evolutionary time, not human time) there is no reason to feel the world is ending. As always the case, TIME stays, WE GO.
