have been killed, with total civilian and military
casualties amounting to 30 million. Such statistics
bring home to the West the extent of Vietnamese
suffering as a result of the war.
The so-called lessons of history are often at
their most dangerous when they are used to
justify the adoption of specific policies. The failure
of the attempts to appease Hitler in the 1930s was
resurrected in circumstances after 1945 that were
very different. The assumption was made that all
dictators behave in exactly the same way, that
their ambitions are always limitless and that con-
cessions feed their appetites. There was no need,
therefore, to differentiate or even to study the sit-
uation in the area of conflict. It did not matter
whether the crisis was occurring in Europe, for
instance in divided Berlin, or in Asia in divided
Vietnam. The Cold War wonderfully simplified
everything in what was perceived as a global
struggle against expanding communism. From
Washington’s standpoint, the real enemy was in
Beijing and Moscow. Here the strings were sup-
posed to be pulled, with the smaller communist
countries as mere puppets with no will of their
own. There can be no denying Russia’s and
China’s influence in Vietnam, but it was not
always decisive. The critical decisions were taken
in Hanoi. Moreover, the US could not carry the
war to China or Russia without the danger of
nuclear exchange. So there was no choice but to
fight conventional wars against smaller commu-
nist states that were apparently being pushed
forward into aggression against the free world.
Ho Chi-minh transformed North Vietnam into
a rigid communist state by stages. Until the
fighting with the French began, from 1946 to
1949 he played down communism under the
slogan ‘Fatherland all’. Having secured much
of the countryside by 1950, a new phase began
under a fresh slogan, ‘the anti-imperialist fight
and the anti-feudal fight are of equal importance’.
The ‘land reform’ from 1953 to 1956 was model-
led on Mao’s example and ruthlessly eliminat-
ed the landlord class, anyone connected with
them, and all ‘reactionary elements’. The wave
of terror took many lives, and after the 1954
Geneva Conference there was a mass exodus of
hundreds of thousands of refugees from the North
to the South.
Some of the Vietnamese people were moti-
vated by powerful ideological or religious beliefs.
But the majority of the poor peasants would not
have chosen to be ruled harshly by the Com-
munist Party in the North or by the succession of
corrupt governments in the South. As for the
minority – the professionals, the well-off, the
army officers, the politicians – they looked after
their own interests or supported what they
regarded as the lesser evil. Vietnam in contempor-
ary history is the product not of what the mass of
its people have chosen, but of half a century of
power struggles among the Vietnamese leadership
elites within a Cold War framework.
The Geneva Accord had divided Vietnam at the
17th parallel. In the southern Republic of
Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem established an increas-
ingly autocratic and nepotistic regime, distribut-
ing posts to his brothers and relations. He was
supported by the large landowners, which neces-
sarily limited the scope of agrarian reforms. His
regime uprooted millions of peasants and forced
them into ‘strategic hamlets’ to cut their ties with
the Vietcong. The peasants, who wanted only to
get on with their own hard lives, were terrorised in
turn by Vietcong guerrillas and Ngo Dinh Diem’s
security forces. Some were attracted by the com-
munist promise to distribute land to the peasants,
but most were just afraid for their lives if they did
not comply with whoever was able to exert the
greater pressure at any one time. The peasants did
not feel any loyalty towards the Diem regime.
Internal demands for reform were stifled, coup
attempts suppressed. When Buddhists set fire to
themselves to attract attention to their grievances,
the world was aghast, but Diem remained confi-
dent that the US had no alternative but to support
his anti-communist government.
For all Diem’s military efforts and those of the
American advisers to ‘pacify’ the countryside, the
Vietcong remained a powerful insurgent force in
the jungles and rice-paddies, despite their heavy
losses, concentrating on the killing of South
Vietnamese government officials. In 1960, Ho
Chi-minh had formed a National Liberation
Front, to coordinate the fight in the North and
1
THE VIETNAM WAR AND AFTER 603
