AHC: Surviving South Vietnam, Post-Diem

It's easy enough to make a scenario before the 1963 coup and murder of Diem wherein South Vietnam survives. It generally involves Diem avoiding coup or someone besides Diem rising to the leadership of South Vietnam and brushing away the problems that affected the original timeline, allowing South Vietnam to survive.

I don't want to discuss that. What I am primarily interested in is how can the Republic of Vietnam, after Diem and his brother have been overthrown and brutally murdered and that die has been irrevocably cast, manage to survive?
 
What I am primarily interested in is how can the Republic of Vietnam, after Diem and his brother have been overthrown and brutally murdered and that die has been irrevocably cast, manage to survive?

It can't.

A successful Diem-era leadership class (yes, class; not cadre, not group; class) is needed to save the RVN.

It's not going to turn up after the epic fail that was the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.
If President Kennedy were to pursue de-escalation, that might facilitate North Vietnam turning into an analogue of North Korea, where Hanoi focuses primarily on economic growth and occasional provocations in the South to showcase the superiority of the Communist model.

Interesting.

Is the post-Gulf of Tonkin air raids the one reason why the 1965 LBJ-approved peace feelers failed?
 
No, it was less that and more historical experience that informed the VWP leadership when it came to negotiations. Although there were signs that some members of the Politburo wanted a diplomatic solution to the war - there was a serious effort involving Premier Pham Van Dong in 1966 to try with the Poles as intermediaries - Le Duan and the 'North-firsters' kept with the argument that negotiating with the Americans would result in the same disaster as Ho's negotiations with the French in 1945, which resulted in a truce that had let the French re-enter Indochina without too much molestation after WWII, thereby prolonging the independence conflict.

I don't know enough about the internal workings of the Hanoi regime, but this has an eerily similar ring about it to the 'America was this close to getting out/not getting in' revisionism, and from reading I've done recently I tend to think that's a very slim argument.

Also, too, we have the historical control group of the Hanoi Hawks eventually pulling off their grand plan, y'know. I somehow doubt that mob have published any remorseful 'oh why didn't we give peace a chance' books.:D
 
I don't think it's a necessarily slim argument, given the doubts being voiced privately by the likes of President Johnson and Secretary McNamara about the course of the war in Vietnam, but I don't think it's a very strong argument.

'Slim' or 'not very strong.' Quite.

And you just raised something I've been thinking of--it's every bit as valid to speculate about the Johnson administration seeking a way out of escalating the war as it is to speculate about a living Kennedy attempting as much (I won't hold my breath waiting for any of our sixties experts to write _that_ fictional scenario.:rolleyes:)

or a shift in USA/ARVN tactics that puts intolerable pressure on the North

McNamara says the next step up from Rolling Thunder under his watch was too much to consider, and that the bombing campaign was at its limits during those years (I think he even wrote "of course we dismissed genocide out of hand"--which is obviously part of the nukes discussion.) I think even Nixon's Christmas bombing offensive is too much for a Democratic presidency to try.

Yet maybe having Nixon win in 1960, then by virtue of the fact he isn't as constrained as OTL's Dem WH he starts a more devastating Rolling Thunder in 1965, the opinions of his NATO allies be damned?

Otherwise I don't think your Hanoi conciliatory faction will be able to point to the dangers of American force as a reason to go to Paris or whatever that early.

That doesn't eliminate the VC, who could have operated with vastly more independence from Hanoi, and it doesn't eliminate the divided leadership in Saigon, but it gives the latter that chance.

Once again, I'm not a Hanoi-ologist, but it seems to me that for the purposes of a peace settlement with the U.S. there isn't much chance of the NLF getting too far off the lease. I mean, what faction in the North wants the NLF having genuine, autonomous input into that?

Also, this peace faction you allude to, were they generally open to the idea of an RVN that would be allowed to exist indefinitely, or did they accept some further planning for more opportunistic action against Saigon, some time in the future when, say, hopefully the Soviets had matched U.S. industrial output? And I find it hard to believe they would ever accept the notion that they should allow the Saigon govt. to enjoy a permanent stability, for years on end, possibly even to the point it could reform/rebuild/enhance its own military abilities to project power into Laos, or even into the North itself!

'Cos these are pretty odd revolutionaries if they don't consider such contingencies.

Not the leadership, but that isn't to say that Vietnamese literature doesn't exist written from the angle of the conflict being a total waste of lives.

Yes, it was a tragic war, though the thing is (trying not to sound like a cultural supremacist here) the only humanist/pluralist-influenced types making decisions in this war were the office holders in Washington, and they were the deciders who ultimately brought the greatest killing power to bare.

So, yeah, pointles from our perspectives, and even from the perspectives of LBJ and McN in retirement. But from the loyal communists?

Or, indeed, pointless from the perspective of folk who speculate about ways for the RVN to have successfully defended itself with a little bit of U.S. airpower in reserve to pressure Hanoi?
 
It's easy enough to make a scenario before the 1963 coup and murder of Diem wherein South Vietnam survives. It generally involves Diem avoiding coup or someone besides Diem rising to the leadership of South Vietnam and brushing away the problems that affected the original timeline, allowing South Vietnam to survive.

I don't want to discuss that. What I am primarily interested in is how can the Republic of Vietnam, after Diem and his brother have been overthrown and brutally murdered and that die has been irrevocably cast, manage to survive?

The key requirement would be that the plotters have sufficient political nous to recognise their shortcomings and to create a viable political support base from the vipers nest of contending interests.

So in an ideal world this would play out one of two ways. You have an officer with impeccable nationalist credentials and there are a couple that I cannot think of as I am at work presently, who takes power on behalf of the nga que. So a populist with some support from the establishment, ala a South Vietnamese Shinawatra.

Alternatively the cabal of generals is supported and reflects a narrower political base and entrench structure. However as an inadvertent result of crony capitalism is still able to grow the economy and provide security to the majority of the population. So let's call that the Suharto model.

But in either case you require the senior military officer's to be aware of their shortcomings and to act to improve them, which in OTL they were singularly unable to do so.
 
ide

here is what we need for RVN to survive.
3 difficult but not impossible things
1 Assemblymen Chau, needs to stay friends with Thieu. These two great leaders wasted so much energy fighting.
2 Put former VC's Hoi Chanh, into national government postions sooner.
They understand the gurrliea mindset.
3 No Ky Thieu split hardest of all, two good men, who ran on the same ticket and destroyed each other. together unstoppable.
 
It's easy enough to make a scenario before the 1963 coup and murder of Diem wherein South Vietnam survives. It generally involves Diem avoiding coup or someone besides Diem rising to the leadership of South Vietnam and brushing away the problems that affected the original timeline, allowing South Vietnam to survive.

I don't want to discuss that. What I am primarily interested in is how can the Republic of Vietnam, after Diem and his brother have been overthrown and brutally murdered and that die has been irrevocably cast, manage to survive?

Massive U.S. intervention would be needed to stop the factionalism. Diem's assassination not only removed him from power, but a whole generation of rising bureaucrats and junior officers that were being trained for being "Diemists". The revolving door governments made this worse as each coup meant removing more people from jobs they were capable of doing because of loyalty issues.

Of course, all of this just further de-legitimizes the Saigon government from accusations of being a puppet by the Communists. As much as people say "Americanizing" the war was a mistake, it seemed to be the only way from saving South Vietnam from collapse in the early 1960s. Triggering a civil war in the middle of a war is a fatal blow.
 
In that the prospect of the United States unilaterally declaring victory, withdrawing, and letting South Vietnam to fend for itself is in itself unlikely for a variety of reasons, most of them linked to the exigencies of public opinion in America during the 1960s.

Yes, and in fact I've just posted an essay about that very subject, https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=7217712&posted=1#post7217712

No, the writing of that had nothing to do with this thread, it's actually goes back to a series of notes I made from several books I read before Christmas--really only intended as something I can point some of our less worldly USAmericans to.

We should remember that Vietnam isn't a FP issue for most people here, it's a sixties culture war thing, i.e. JFK could have saved American virtue.

My particular interest is in the imperial presidency.

If Nixon was elected in 1960, the Laotian Crisis would probably have been more on his mind than the sort of incremental escalation of US involvement in South Vietnam.

Laos and Vietnam incrementalism were deeply intertwined. And the Vietnam Annex (first U.S. step to escalation) came out of it. Laos isn't going to change the Vietnam question for POTUS, though it can speed it up considerably.

b) Preserves South Vietnam as an independent state

Interestingly enough this was not necessarily a priority when push came to shove--McNamara and McNaughton had "bomb the North to defend our 'friends'" as a lower priority--they actually wrote that in their memos.

In that sense, there are clear red lines LBJ felt he couldn't cross, but that doesn't preclude the influence of the bombing of North Vietnam as it occurred historically from prompting a change of heart within the VWP Politburo.

This is all hypothetical RE the internal workings of '65 Hanoi factionalism.

IOTL, it did.

Yes, but after many years of bombing, and Nixon and Kissinger deciding to up the ante.

When it comes to the Viet Cong, their autonomy would have to occur simply because the VWP can't have their cake and eat it.

I think you have to be clear about where you are or aren't getting fictional. Otherwise my mainsteam education about this war makes it clear that Hanoi most certainly found an up side from the NLF being gutted by the Tet offensive.

And LBJ/McNamara's doubts were privately voiced during their times in office. See Appy's Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History and Robert Dallek's biographies of Johnson if you don't believe me.

Oh, no, I'm a firm believer in them being pretty self-aware all along about what a crazy mistake they were making with 'that bitch of a war'.

(Also, Dallek is good on LBJ, but he's surprisingly waifer thin on JFK and Vietnam.)

ADDENDUM: But what sort of future timeline did these Hanoi 'doves' have for conquering the South? I assume 'North First' means they wanted to develop their Red River home region first, then invade and destory the anti-communist regime at Saigon later.

Surely that's the longterm plan from their history.
 
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Are you planning on starting your own TL around this or are you exploring a topic?

I could include it in a timeline. A lot of ideas I write down for my plans (the timelines I will end up writing by the year 2077) do come out of stuff like this where I have a thought I'm interested in enough to make a thread, and then shortly thereafter decide that'd be something good to use or the discussion may go in a way and bring up stuff where I get interested in the idea of using that. But it also may not be included.

As to if this thread was started with timeline writing purposes and reasons, no. It's just that everything to save Vietnam in our discussions seems to be to avoid the post-Diem situation, letting him live or replacing him in history with another leader for South Vietnam or altering the US leadership. I want to not allow that in the discussion, and focus on the practical realities of Vietnam post-1963 and force that hard wall where you can't go back, only forward.
 
Probably not as much as you think.

In real history or in counterfactuals about Nixon? In real history Laos was the great FP problem for the POTUS in 1961, and in defusing the situation his advisors forced him to pivot towards an escalatory decision in the RVN.

Not if you consult the text I cited, and not if we're abiding by the OP. This is alternate history, after all.

Sorry, you've lost me; you want me to consult a book about real North Vietnamese history so as to come up with a fictional scenario in keeping with the OPer's request?

I am tempted to go to the trouble of finding & reading that source, but only to answer questions in my mind about Hanoi's decision making process.

No, the factional struggle was present from the mid-Fifties onwards.

And how is the overall, longterm existence of factions in Hanoi related to the success of Nixon's 'madman' strategy in negotiations with Hanoi during the very specific nineteen seventies? That's a serious question, and I think it goes pretty deep; you were brave to bring it up in reference to a tangentially related point. Very brave.

I'm assuming this 'mainstream education' you're referring to is revealed the bibliography of your essay. If it isn't, I'd like to know what other books you've been reading on the subject, because your essay on escalation in a fictional Kennedy term has a lot of merit - I agree with its broad thrust, so to speak - the source base is thin, for want of a better word. Apart from that solid primary source base in the Pentagon Papers, you've only referred to about seven secondary analyses, one of which is Schlesinger, who - as I've found out in my own dissertation research on Kennedy - isn't altogether reliable when it comes to reporting issues concerning national security (at the time.)

(a.) My 'Mainstream education' about Hanoi exploiting the weakened VC after 1968; that's more than just this reading list, it's everything I've read & heard about the war. Are you arguing that the post-'68 reportage and scholarship about the North taking advantage of the devastation the NLF suffered in Tet, that there is nothing to that? I'm sure it's a thesis that can be challenged; but to say it's not a widespread perception about this war, that's just plain weird.

(b.) Anyway, my piece here has a limited bibliography because I don't have access to an academic library or scholarly journal articles; but thanks to Freedman, I can tell there were no massive revelations from '61/'65 made between the (secret) publication of the PPs and 2002, so I decided I needn't look for a huge array of other analytical sources.

Also, the PPs do contain secondary sources as far as I'm concerned; a lot of what I was quoting from them is actually writers analysing years-old paper trails. Okay, I wouldn't push hard on the PPs being a secondary resource if I were an undergrad (because they're anonymously written!), but for a masters thesis or above I'd ask my prof to look at what was quoted and let her decide.

(c.) As for Schlesinger: I quoted his 1965 work so as to show that the popular revisionist effort to whitewash JFK was not yet under way back then, at least not on a Vietnam policy divergence between him and his successor. Okay, I was calling him a polemicist and then judging his claims to a non-polemical standard. Too clever by half, perhaps.

makes me think either you haven't read Dallek's biography, or you've skimmed it. He devotes a disproportionate amount of the book on JFK's personal commitment to the Vietnam problem.

Dallek's JFK's bio? An Unfinished Life? I quoted it in a post I wrote here in 2011, https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=4444811&postcount=9

No, it is actually really ridiculously brief on JFK and Vietnam; it's another of these 'Jack's-off-the-record-discussions-are-more-important-than-his-memos' things. Admittedly, Maclear can be a bit like that, but his book tends to be a very capable piece of reportage, a good single volume history of a war.

(Though Dalek, as anti-intellectual as he is, makes one very good point about why Kennedy could never formulate a concrete plan to get out while he lived--that would have meant creating too big a political lie. Even bigger than Nixon's 'secret plan to end the war', I imagine. )

Dalek on Youtube speaking for three minutes when it comes to American strategy? Uh huh. Thin indeed.:rolleyes:

Heh, I gather your communist-bloc-theory speak is well credentialled by one of the academy's schools of thought (pluralistic communism 4ever!)... but your American policy stuff, not so much.:D

I've already explained that; the only thing I can add to it is that they had as much a highly-defined roadmap as the Americans had in their intentions regarding Vietnam. Then again, not having a readily-defined long-term plan hasn't exactly impeded political decisions before, has it.

I'm sorry, I don't think you have.

This is a simple question: Was the peace faction in the North a genuine 'let the Southern regime survive' faction, or were they advocating for temporary peace with the later subversion and destruction of the ARVN?

That is a very simple question.

Forget counterfactualism. Forget any desire you have to create a scenario where a doctrinaire revolutionary regime adopts a strategy that's oddly similar to Western, bourgeios, anti-war activist urges, even as you also somehow have them keep their Marxist-Leninist doctrinal perspective intact.

Did these nationalistic Leftist cats want to conquer the oppressors in the Southern part of their homeland? Yes or no?
 
If you don't have access to scholarly articles or an academic library, then I would now recommend buying Hanoi's War, as well as Chen Jian's Mao's China in the Cold War, because if you're just relying on secondary material that ultimately just relates to the American viewpoint, then you're not reading anything new.

Do you have any more recommendations for sources on North Vietnam? I have to admit that I have read very little in comparison to South Vietnam and the U.S. on the matter.
 
I'd guess that you'd have to weaken China (so the US can wage more than limited war) and get greater support from the US public as well as dive into the War with greater ferocity and/or earlier.

Depending on the outcome, you'd either have a Korea-type situation with a a huge level of apprehension between the North and South Vietnams. Of course, South Vietnam might go for all of Vietnam, but I can't see that happening.

As for Diem, get more US support and help and you might keep him alive and in power.
 
I'd guess that you'd have to weaken China (so the US can wage more than limited war) and get greater support from the US public as well as dive into the War with greater ferocity and/or earlier.

Depending on the outcome, you'd either have a Korea-type situation with a a huge level of apprehension between the North and South Vietnams. Of course, South Vietnam might go for all of Vietnam, but I can't see that happening.

As for Diem, get more US support and help and you might keep him alive and in power.

Since 037771 and Magniac are in debate (which I love to see and will force you two to continue come hell or high-water), I'll tackle this one.

Weakening China is a possibility. Not sure how to do it, but it is a possibility. At the same time, you'd still have Soviet support. US support was, at the start of the war, exceedingly high and pro-war. There's no problem with initial support. The problem comes that as the war dragged on, it's brutality and lack of semblance and ambiguity started to hit home for the American people. Everyone knew someone who shipped off and knew people who had lost their kids or they themselves had lost their kids or they had lost a friend or brother or something, and they knew of or knew guys coming home maimed and scared mentally and/or physically and meanwhile the news was towing the administration line of success and imminent victory that was all the time becoming very evident to the average American as not being the case. It's a popular myth that the media changed American opinion. Not so. As the American people were changing there opinions on Vietnam in the face of reality and what they were seeing and experiencing themselves, for a very long time the media was still reporting the star spangled whitewashed version and the media changed from that message only after the American public had already. American public opinion and support or lack thereof for the Vietnam war was and would be tied to the realities of the Vietnam war. If the war was going well, American opinion would be up, and if it was going badly it would go down. Such was the case in actual history: those weeks and months the war was going well, public opinion went up, and when it was going badly public opinion went down. Keep in mind, there is a bit of a limiter based on the overall quality of the war year to year. You can have a 43% approval instead of a 37% approval, but it's still not the 50% or whatever it was you had when it started and you aren't going past that 43% wall unless things consistently pick up year after year from thereon.

South Vietnam won't unite all of Vietnam. The North would be hard enough to make sure it just left the South alone. Try conquering it, and sending countless revolutionaries into the wind without any head to guide them, and right on the border of a Communist state known as China that will happily supply them and undermine a united republican Vietnam and you have an ungodly mess. But, there is also the fact that if you pushed forward into North Vietnam, there is a great possibility China, feeling a threat, will do as it did in Korea and send in troops which worsens the situation and makes Vietnam a flashpoint between a Superpower and a nuclear world power.

On the final paragraph, that's not the point. The point is not to keep Diem alive and supported. The point of this is I'm not allowing that because I want a discussion on Vietnam after that die has been cast. Johnson is president, Kennedy is dead, Diem and Nhu were ousted and executed and the future must proceed from there and must proceed from that hard intellectual limiter we have of Vietnam when it became our sort of Vietnam as we think of it. Not necessarily war, but with not Diem and not Kennedy, and with the leaders after Diem and with Lyndon Johnson and trying to manage things from there.
The problem is with the discussion on having South Vietnam not fall or the war go better is that there's always that wiggle room the people in the discussion go into. Kennedy's not dead and the war either doesn't occur or is much more low key or he does something like have Navy SEALS and a covert war rather than just troop surges, or Diem doesn't die and is kept in place and rallies the nation to victory, or someone other than Diem is made to have become president, or lord knows we go back to WW2 and change something there or we go back to the 19th century or even further back. I'm giving a very stark cut off. It's after November 22nd, 1963. Diem and his brother were shot in the back of the head execution style on the 2nd, and Kennedy was shot in the back of the head by a deranged Communist with dreams of self importance on the 22nd. Go from there, but there's no going back from there.

On the topic of Diem, I frankly am losing any faith that there's a way for him not to be removed in some way, shape or form. There were previous attempts against him and plots brewing, his people hated him, and the US was increasingly growing to dislike him because of his alienation of the public, his persecution of Buddhists in a mostly Buddhist country (he was Catholic), and his appointment and promotion of people in military and government based on patronage and loyalty to him rather than competence and merit which they felt was losing the war. The thing keeping US support was that he was the most qualified anti-Communist, but on all other fronts he was an absolute, self-important jackass. The United States is willing to accept authoritarianism, but it needs to be efficient enough and promoting morons because they swear loyalty and kiss your butt and frequently liquidating qualified people in government and the military because you fear they may be disloyal (or they are disloyal because they think you're a jackass who promotes morons and liquidates qualified people all the time) is anything but efficient. And even if there were continued US support, that would not preclude someone shooting him or bombing him to death or elements in the ARVN executing a coup and then forcing the US to deal with the situation thereafter. This all is for a different topic, though, since the scenario already is Diem is dead and gone.
 
On the topic of Diem, I frankly am losing any faith that there's a way for him not to be removed in some way, shape or form. There were previous attempts against him and plots brewing, his people hated him, and the US was increasingly growing to dislike him because of his alienation of the public, his persecution of Buddhists in a mostly Buddhist country (he was Catholic), and his appointment and promotion of people in military and government based on patronage and loyalty to him rather than competence and merit which they felt was losing the war. The thing keeping US support was that he was the most qualified anti-Communist, but on all other fronts he was an absolute, self-important jackass. The United States is willing to accept authoritarianism, but it needs to be efficient enough and promoting morons because they swear loyalty and kiss your butt and frequently liquidating qualified people in government and the military because you fear they may be disloyal (or they are disloyal because they think you're a jackass who promotes morons and liquidates qualified people all the time) is anything but efficient. And even if there were continued US support, that would not preclude someone shooting him or bombing him to death or elements in the ARVN executing a coup and then forcing the US to deal with the situation thereafter. This all is for a different topic, though, since the scenario already is Diem is dead and gone.

Well, there's always the remnants of the Viet Quoc. I'm not sure if there was any major figures left by 1963-64 in South Vietnam. However, they did have credibility and were far more fiercely Anti-Communist than the typical South Vietnamese, except maybe Catholics. Of course, I'm not sure if Washington was well aware of their existence.
 
Disclaimer: 037771 has made me seek out 'Hanoi's War' by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen. Brother, seeing as it's been so many weeks since I last responded to you, don't be surprised if I don't come back to this thread for an even longer period of time, as I read and digest that work.

It seems logical then to conclude that if Nixon or, I daresay, Kennedy, somehow decides to invade Laos from US bases in Thailand, an occupation would likely reduce North Vietnamese aid to the NLF.

This sounds a lot like nineteen sixties US Cold War warrior thinking and analysis RE military tactics; doesn't your reading of North Vietnamese history address their own generals' assessments RE the lay of the land?

Anyway, Kennedy wanted to stay out of Laos because he feared Chinese intervention. That was his rational choice; fight in the RVN, not in Laos or even the North, because the sensible thing was to avoid finding out what Mao's limits were for getting involved against US forces. Natch.

You can see the point I'm trying to make is relating to the flexibility of the VWP Politburo vis-a-vis the conduct of the war, in that a) the body was riven by factionalism throughout the early to mid 1960s, and b) that it was prone to alter its decision-making through the application of external stimuli.

This is a professional sounding argument, to be sure, but once again you seem to be basing it on maybe a single work, maybe two. And this thesis (or two) of yours is pretty heterodox, not something you can credibly convince me about, not when you have no worthwhile passage you can cite about either Hanoi factionalism or the rest of the communist blocs' baleful influences on Hanoi's processes.

And you haven't answered my question about 'how aggressively opposed to the longterm survival of the South were this peace faction you talk of?'.

North Vietnam isn't destined to fight doggedly for reunification in the manner to which we are accustomed.

Seems implausible, as far as I currently know. Might make good fiction, but that's besides the point.

What's 'plain weird' as you put it is your insistence that I am arguing that.

My point was that you're constantly coming back to poorly-supported heterodox notions, ala the NLF could easily have become independent of Hanoi.

If you don't have access to scholarly articles or an academic library, then I would now recommend buying Hanoi's War, as well as Chen Jian's Mao's China in the Cold War, because if you're just relying on secondary material that ultimately just relates to the American viewpoint, then you're not reading anything new.

This is the one valid point you have against me here, and I will cop to it.

But trust me, if, once I've read this material, and I find you're analysis makes extrapolations that are yours and yours alone, not supported by said literature, then I reserve the right to be a little offput.:rolleyes:

The comments that you make in the link you supplied do not convince me that you did anything more than skimmed it, at best for this conversation... Which begs the question, have you read anything that would suggest you appreciate that there is another side to telling the story of the Vietnam War beyond the American? I assure you, having consulted nearly all of the books you cite in the bibliography on your thread dedicated to Kennedy and Vietnam, I am just as schooled in American policy during this period as you are... I included the clip from Youtube because a) this is a man who has done the legwork sifting through the primary sources and come to enough conclusions to write an informed biography about John F. Kennedy, and therefore even a succinct opinion of his would have merit (a great deal more than both of ours, I might add,) and b) I don't really believe that you have actually read the book to any great extent.

As a matter of interest, do you rely entirely on general histories/popular biographies for the US side of your knowledge about this war, while only going to the trouble of apparently reading dedicated strategic histories when it comes to Hanoi?

Seriously, Dalek is nowhere near being a geopolitical or national-security-state specialist here; do you want me to get his Kennedy book out of the library so I can count the number of paragraphs he devotes to Vietnam?:D

It's just embarrassing to rely on a TV historian like him. Seriously, I read at least two military-staff-college-grade histories when researching my essay on JFK, and that's including one book I didn't even bother using in my finished piece.

The point you made in 2011 about Kennedy resisting the 'NSC establishment' is...shaky, to say the least.

Where do I say any such thing in my post from two years ago? This?:
Magniac 2011 said:
I find it very hard to believe that JFK can go against his entire NSC establishment
Kennedy consistently exhibited a habit of not listening to even his closest advisers, even Bundy
I hope you're not complaining about me dismissing the popular historiography RE Kennedy supposedly bucking the system on Vietnam; Lawrence Freedman quietly derides that stuff as 'the anecdotal evidence', that stuff about Jack Kennedy having a secret plan to end the war, a secret plan he doesn't even have to inform McNamara about while alive. Guys like Freedman mostly ignore it all, because that pop narrative is real anti-intellectual stuff, it's a rejection of both primary and specialist secondary history.

If you do have any in-depth knowledge of the actual Camelot-era national security state, then you'd dismiss that thin gruel, too.

Which begs the question, have you read anything that would suggest you appreciate that there is another side to telling the story of the Vietnam War beyond the American?

I'm sorry, but I see no reason to believe your pacifist-hypothetical-scenario take on the Vietnam war actually has much in common with the actual anti-American, Communist North one.

Your notion that you're enlightening us about the 'other side' confounds me, seeing as you're constantly implying they didn't have any determinative motivation to fight this war! How on earth do you try to express anything from the communist PoV in such western, liberal pacifist terms?

and you seem to have hit upon the reason when you stated a lot earlier that you suspected the Dove faction didn't write a lot of autobiographies lamenting the reunification of Vietnam. Well, they didn't, and you can probably think up for yourself why they didn't. What we do have is a newly-accessed primary source base that alludes to their intentions which, while not fully defining their endgames, nonetheless challenges the orthodox narrative that Hanoi was hell-bent on reunification from '54 onwards.

This doesn't really strike me as the study of history, as opposed to it being the citing of history-speak in support of polemic.

I can't but take this as you trying to impose a narrative over either thin material, or material that's essentially social history, not war policy history.

Are you even citing primary sources of the Hanoi regime, or just of its dissidents?

Why on earth would I decide to do that on a site entitled 'Alternatehistory.com'? Counterfactualism is the whole point, and the reason we're having this discussion in the first place.

But you keep on challenging real history with your fictional-scenario-inspired extrapolations, with seemingly too much input from social/popular history. That's the problem.

Anyway, I'm going to delve into that book you cite as your main inspiration for believing them lot didn't have the heart to fight the running dog imperialists. Who knows, I might discover they actually wanted to fight a war of nationalist reunification, that it wasn't all just a perfect storm of weak coincidences that made them march South.;)
 
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A)
It doesn't and my wider reading does address North Vietnamese military history.

snip --
I'm trying to address that problem. The important words there is 'how'; in reference to an event or process in history that did not occur, the use of hypotheticals is nigh-on a given. That you have consistently questioned the validity of that approach on an alternate history site is why I question your understanding of the site you're posting on.




If you wouldn't mind changing that ambition to this one...



...I'll be a happy man.

B) Quote:
Originally Posted by Magniac
Forget counterfactualism.

Why on earth would I decide to do that on a site entitled 'Alternatehistory.com'? Counterfactualism is the whole point, and the reason we're having this discussion in the first place.
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Hi 037771,

Having gotten into a few verbal quagmires myself, it is policy to avoid posting in others'. Hopefully quite a few readers have time to try to sort this out, too, the parry/thrust/traps, from a distance. Both of you probably are far better read in the Vietnam sub part subject of Northern leadership, etc.

The ideal is to come here to compare ideas, gather new ones from others, and form dendrites on our own precious babies of new born theories, usually delivered with bloody & rosy vision through reality tunnel birth canals. Everyone will be wrong sometimes, unless vapid of thought, which is itself a kind of wrong. Poseurs seem not similar, but really are just trying to take the vantage point to curry status and normally at all interested. Many experts are also a startling variation of just that, enjoy pushing others down who have not come up in similar roads as their own (voiced from family members who are experts in one field or another).

I mean we need filters, but all filter and no substance is not an answer either. Maybe a solution of a jitter factor with almost randomly presuming the other guy is right for 15 minutes? Not saying your opponent is anything bad, but as said, many an expert is extremely fussy about filters of allowing in other information. In alternative history, sort of a clearing house of points of view in an assembly attempt of big jigsaw puzzle pictures, it is more so.

Keep up the good work,

Jack
 
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to convey, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

So if we're talking about open-mindedness, then I'd think trying to introduce that factor would make me more rather more than less. To be honest, I'd love to have a debate with both people having explored the factor that both are seeking to evaluate.

Completely about open mindedness or at least about free debate.

It seems to me like a lot of people at this site have a serious chip on their shoulders (while wintering in their mother's ice cold basement, no doubt), and really gum up the works with their tar baby approach. You seem to be able to handle it concisely well enough, at least in this subject. But a lot of us are wary of posting lest one of the numerous who should have signs front and back 'feed me, troll' ambush with a blizzard of negative tone questions and usually end up getting away with it, especially when in a wolf pack. It is a strategy that works, and sometimes is even a sock puppet or strawman. This normally in areas of controversy like the Vietnam War, Rhodesia, Socialism, political sacred cows etc. but not always.

Perhaps we could set up a discussion in a board listing more in tune with general policy? I would love to do so also, seeing the potential fine tuning of this site.
 
-- snip-- I'm afraid the culture of jostling one-upmanship coordinated from frozen basements is probably going to remain part and parcel for a while.

Sorry to hear. I was not talking about you, or necessarily even of the other guy, though he did seem to use the blizzard of questions tactic by odd coincidence. Agreed that this is the place to present and debate alternate history Vietnam ideas.
 
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