Makeshift_Swahili posted:

From page 191



Was the CIA really so self-sabotaging? White supremacists lol

Here's Robert McNamara on that:

Like most Americans, I saw communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and Chinese were cooperating to extend their hegemony . . . It seemed obvious that the Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to the guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s. We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements - as they largely appear in hindsight - but as signs for a unified Communist drive for hegemony in Asia. This way of thinking lead Dean Acheson President Truman's Secretary of State to cal Ho Chi Minh "the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina."

So, yeah they basically were that stupid. "Hurr durr I am literally incapable of imagining a colonized people striving for self determination without us really smart white people to tell them how."

The_Boourns_Identity posted:

On the question of real vs illusion, zizek says this is a false choice, he prefers to find the real within the illusion. That is, the truth of a situation told through the vehicle of a fictional narrative.

Zizek also says we can tell a lot about a nation's psyche by looking at its toilets.

It should be self-evident that we can find out truths about something by looking at the narrative about it with a critical eye. We don't need to look at fiction to do this, I'm talking for example about mainstream media discourse around events in eastern Ukraine, though this arguably does fall largely into the category of fiction. Even Noam Chomsky offered a similar truism about reading the financial papers to find out what's going on from the perspective of the powerful.

As for the book you mention, it sounds like the truths it offers are merely the perspective of an American Vietnam vet, which have surely been rehashed and warmed over countless times in popular films etc, no matter how critical of the war, society, whatever. I don't see what is novel about that.

In 1968, faced with the prospect of a two-year commitment to a new job as a file clerk deep in the bowels of the CIA Headquarters Building at Langley, I volunteered for the only assignment with sufficient priority to free me from my desperately boring existence: training as a Vietnamese-language interpreter/translator . . . I arrived in Saigon in the Spring of 1970 and promptly fell in love . . . the scenery was lushly exotic, the work exciting, the culture fascinating, the women beautiful . . . I immediately . . . informed my new boss that I intended to stay in Vietnam until someone forced me out at gunpoint. Five years later on 29 April 1975, someone did just that. I left Saigon aboard a Marine CH-46 helicopter, dazed and confused at the rapid collapse of the largest and most expensive U.S. military effort since World War II.

Someday this man will die, proving that with enough Vietnamese, you really can have two happy endings

Merle was still spooking around and writing (or at least dictating) for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project as of late 2014, churning out incredibly relevant page-turners such as "WORKING PAPER #73: The Soviet-Vietnamese Intelligence Relationship during the Vietnam War: Cooperation and Conflict". Whatever.

To Pribbenow’s credit—and I don’t really know if it’s to his credit because I don’t know Vietnamese—he insists that he has "tried very hard to render the original as accurately as possible and to preserve the ‘voice’ of the PAVN authors" so that we can objectively conclude, along with Pribbenow, that the foreword by ultra-freak Foreign Service officer William J. Duiker is correct, and the People's Army history "fail[s] to provide sufficient insight" into what happened after "French forces withdrew in accordance [sic] with the Geneva Agreement" and "the Eisenhower administration decided to sponsor the new anti-communist regime in South Vietnam, with its capital in Saigon". Duiker’s foreword is actually a 16-page version of the history taught in most American schools, that is, the history written by the United States Army and intelligence forces, in a hopeful but goofy attempt to pasteurize the work to follow.

This history as its pros and cons, and one thing you won’t see anywhere but the publication page is that the original Vietnamese text was actually published, as part of a series, in 1988. This undercuts the idea advanced by the interlocutors that the history is designed to legitimate the Vietnamese government against the West. At the time the book was published, Vietnam had strictly followed the Soviet Union’s line of capitalist-road reforms and was in the midst of agricultural, industrial and commercial privatization. Vietnam had begun to ship imperialist remains and U.S. military wreckage back to the States as a conciliatory gesture, and even managed to square the circle of the non-existent "MIA/POW" crisis with the Reagan Administration, leading to direct American support for aid to Vietnam by third parties by the publication date of this history. Two years before, in 1986, the country’s leadership had introduced the collection of policies known informally as đổi mới. Two years later, in 1990, the government would officially recognize joint-stock and limited liability companies through legislation.


Ho Chi Minh City, less than 24 years after this history was published. Mere coincidence? It’s impossible to say

The downside to the date of publication isn’t that the history is improperly conciliatory toward the West, or full of bellicose Stalinist rhetoric to tamp down a picturesque bubbling stream of freedom, but rather than it emerged during a moment when the U.S. and European intelligence agencies and militaries, and their graduates among the Western and global academy, had already taken plenty of time to establish the Western-centric narrative of "why we lost Vietnam" over that of PAVN victory or any attempt to investigate the injustice of imperialism. As a result, it is decidedly a patriotic response to those narratives, and suffers from a lack of detail, although it's not nearly as bad as the official Western histories in that regard.


I know who I’m voting for

For instance, the Vietnamese authors were well aware that distorted, propagandistic and outright lie-ridden Western reporting on the 1956 land reforms provided the main excuse claimed by the United States when they violated the Geneva agreements, an excuse still accepted by many Western historians (and thus many historians seeking funding elsewhere in the world). Additionally, the Vietnamese government in 1986-1988 was actively pushing farmers to claim and farm private plots in an act of severe reaction against the reforms of 1956. In response the treatment of those reforms here is brief and circumspect, underplaying their importance to reorganizing Vietnam. It is unlikely that anyone who bothered to read an official PAVN history in 1988 would be unaware of the Army’s role in smashing feudalists in the interregnum between Geneva and the rejoined imperialist advance, whether the reader was inside Vietnam or outside of it, and I would really like to have read some details on exactly how many landowners fought back and the techniques used to quell the revanchists, but PAVN exercises the same savvy and shrewdness you’d find in any official national history. Don’t worry, though, there’s plenty to stir the blood.

Next, I’ll start with 1954-1956 and the building of PAVN into a modernized force ready to defend the Geneva agreements against the new American aggressor, and I’ll include the story of a badass dude who died in a really badass way.


And the women will be beautiful, I promise

For now, I’ll leave you with some of the translated phrases that Pribbenow gives at the beginning of my edition, so you’ll have some idea of what they mean in the stuff to come.

Central Military Party Committee (Quan Uy Truong Uoung): The Communist Party Central Committee organ responsible for directing all military affairs. General Vo Nguyen Giap was Secretary of this committee.

Commandos (bo doi biet dong): A subcategory of sappers specializing in operations inside enemy cities, from raids to intelligence-gathering.

General Military Party Committee (Tong Quan Uy): The predecessor organization of the Central Military Party Committee.

General Political Department (Tong Cuc Chinh Tri): The Party, propaganda, and political element of the People’s Army. One of the three (later four) main administrative subdivisions of the People’s Army.

General Rear Services Department (Tonc Cuc Hau Can): The People’s Army’s logistics and support element. One of the main administrative subdivisions of the People’s Army. In 1974, its technical elements would be spun off into the General Technical Department (Tong Cuc Ky Thuat).

General Staff (Bo Tong Tham Muu): The People’s Army’s highest staff organization. One of the main administrative subdivisions of the People’s Army.

K-20: Covert PAVN logistics element operating under civilian business cover in Cambodia; worked to provision Communist units in South Vietnam with goods purchased locally in Cambodia or through the port of Sihanoukville. Extremely trill.

MAAG: Military Assistance and Advisory Group. The imperialist arm in Southeast Asia in the 1950s. Founded by the Truman administration, this group acted as the route by which American "advisors" and cash were injected into South Vietnam into the Kennedy administration. Lead pimp Jedi baby killers on planet Earth until 1961, when they were renamed the Field Advisory Element, Vietnam and placed under the umbrella of MACV (see below).

MACV: Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. The fucking bad guys. A joint-services organization of the most powerful military on Earth that lost the Vietnam War to a bunch of people wielding surplus Chinese Nationalist rifles, Mausers and whatever ammunition they could capture. MACV’s last act in Vietnam in 1975 was to detonate a bunch of thermite explosives in civilian areas in downtown Saigon, which really showed the Vietnamese.

Massed (or concentrated) combat (danh tap trung): Conventional, as opposed to guerilla, combat operations.

Massed (or concentrated) troops (bo doi tap trung): Full-time soldiers operating in military units. The "massed troops" specifically refer to the main force and the local force soldiers, not the guerilla militia.

Mobile combat (danh van dong): Combat tactics involving maneuver, as opposed to defensive or siege tactics.

Sappers (bo doi dac cong): People’s Army special operations personnel, trained in explosives, infiltration, combat assaults, and reconnaissance. A cross between frontline combat engineers, Rangers, LRRPs, and special forces, created by charting out all the time their various Americans equivalents sat on their fat rapist asses and then setting the chart on fire with a flamethrower. PAVN don’t play.

"The three kinds of troops": The classification used by the People’s Army for general types of forces. These appear very frequently in the text:

• Main force troops (bo doi chu luc): subordinate to military regions or higher-level organizations.
  
  
• Local force troops (bo doi dia phuong): operated on the provincial and district level.
  
  
• Militia (dan quan) (either guerilla militia—dan quan du kich—or self defense militia— dan quan tu ve): operated at the village and hamlet level.