Make friends with a corporate executive and have a talk with them about labor laws. I have not met one who does not love the free market and I've spoken with a few. We have no idea what struggling to survive means under this suffocating bureaucracy.
Fucking bullshit. I spent a couple of months in Vietnam and the sentiment is the opposite, first off they call it the American war. Words matter and in this case they it’s clear they view it as a war caused and perpetuated by a foreign government and not as a civil war between south and north.
Second is the fact that almost all museums and everyone I talked with is not hiding their disdain for the treatment and warcrimes committed against their family in this war. And their pride in having survived the war as a more unified country, this shows in their sentiment towards the renaming of Saigon to Ho-Chi-Minh City.
Anecdotal of course but I’m really not sure where he met these people, my experience is like I wrote abough, North through South.
"have a talk with them about the old country" would seem to imply they are only talking to people who emigrated from Vietnam, not anyone currently living there.
Which obviously is going to skew it more towards them praising the US. Immigrants usually have more issues with their home country than the people that choose to stay
"We can't just call it the American war, you'd have to ask which one?"
Also underlooked is living somewhere with war is worse than the living in the place that did the bombing and was never touched by its actions.
My friend's Italian grandma loved the Americans and moved to America because her family were poor and had 0 land, and the American troops gave her candy as a kid and weren't the mob or the Catholic church. They gave them vaccines and it was the first time she remembered going to a doctor.
This Vietnamese guy might've just been successful in America and sees he's better off (has more stuff) than his relatives without analyzing why. Or he might be a gusano, idk that much about Vietnam.
Not to mention, the US further punished Vietnam for winning through sanctions which made reconstruction significantly harder. There was no one to pay the country reparations and the aid they did receive was not enough to suddenly transition to a non-bombed, non-agent orange, non-massacred country. My parents lived as peasants through the war and famine and barely had any food for themselves or families - even the so called rich people at this time were barely above peasants, unless you were urban and had western connections. And the almighty, freedom loving Americans didn't lift a finger to help anyone. I don't care if my parents' anti communism is valid or not. Every American soldier, diplomat, intelligence agent, and their European and Asian stooges who was in Vietnam during the war deserves PTSD and suicide.
If they met a Vietnamese person who was a refugee from South Vietnam then neither of them has any idea what struggling to survive in a communist country means.
Almost all my family and relatives (anti communist or indifferent) will say that, yes, the US has improved our material conditions, but we traded our souls for it. In the US there's no community, no events, can't even operate a store on your property, everything is far, no vacations, too much crime and shootings (perceived or real), education and medicine are absurdly expensive. They likely won't want to go back to living in a home with no modern plumbing and a job that pays a few hundred dollars a month, but I would hardly say their "love" for the US is based on anything other than better pay and anti Chinese sentiment. It's also absurd when I meet people who survived the war (as a civilian), lived in Vietnam in the aftermath, then moved to the US some time later, and they call Joe Biden and the liberals communists.
Why were they struggling to survive in Vietnam? Could it be because they had devastating wars forced upon them first to kick out a thieving colonial regime and then to defend against a brutal foreign invader and then afterwards facing sanctions and sabotage? No, it must be because the government did their best to organise the economy in favour of the masses.
Yeah, plus they essentially nuked Chinese support by liberating Cambodia. They were the people that stopped Pol Pot. America and China both backed him. When you look at the history, Vietnam has pretty much never been the bad guys.
I very occasionally see people flying the south vietnam flag here. Such concentrated loser energy, really wild to see.
Diaspora Asian politics and being cringe, name a more iconic duo.
Diaspora
Asianpolitics and being cringe, name a more iconic duo.
