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Blogpost 10 (10/27)

I never really knew what exactly happened when the United States fought in Vietnam; this chapter has filled many gaps for me. In “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam”, Zinn explains how the United States lied about the war to keep its citizens calm. As usual, Zinn never fails to surprise me with the truth which always seems to be unpleasant. The United States has claimed the purpose of the war is to fight against communism in East Asia however, they wanted to benefit from the French and they gave them large amounts of military aid to them. The reason behind this is that both countries are world-dominating, upper class, capitalist countries, and building ties with them would be more helpful to the United States. Thus, France was seen as a country that would improve Vietnam if it managed to control it, and to do so, the US and France have used the help of Diem who was an aggressive anti-communist wealthy Vietnamese catholic.

 

The Dime regime was extremely unpopular and people in Vietnam were executed during the times of the war just for being suspected of supporting communism. The working-class American people were opposing this war as soon as it started, we see that in the antiwar movement. I was fascinated to see how many people were opposed to the war while the US media was trying to show that these working/middle-class people were in favor of the war. While in reality they were affected the most and the upper-class people had the power and as usual did not even care about the opinion of those who are more disadvantaged. Only until people from different groups in the lower class stood against the war, the government has stopped it. I was shocked again to see how the American government did not care about going to war knowing that its middle and lower class were against it.

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3 Comments

  1. Sophia Peltzer Sophia Peltzer

    I agree with your statement that Zinn is always showing us unpleasant but not talked about truths of American history. I learned about the Vietnam War in detail in a class I took last semester, and reading about the autrocities that occurred and lies from the government still shocked me when I read Zinn’s chapter, even hearing them for the second time.

  2. Annie Waters Annie Waters

    The United States’ defense of the Vietnam War on the basis of anti-communist rhetoric is really interesting to me. I feel like as McCarthyism drew to a close toward the beginning of US involvement in Vietnam, the idea that communism was an inherently immoral economic system had been instilled into much of the American public, while the American government’s interest in preventing communism really had no moral motivation at all and was rather largely based on accessibility to Southeast Asian markets.

  3. Sophia Picozzi Sophia Picozzi

    It is definitely interesting to see at what point the government decides to listen to what the people have to say, and which groups hold more weight and persuade the government the most. Within history, there is a threshold of how much it takes for the government to respond and I think that is something worth thinking about.

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