AHC-WI less "Vietnams" more "Falklands' "?

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

Ho Chi Minh was actually planning to insititue a real democracy, France's oppression and America's fears of dominoes forced them to turn to the only power and ideology that was expliictly ant-colonialist, Communism.

Ho spent most of the 1930s in Moscow working for the Comintern. He was a Communist long before the US Did Anything in Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh did not set out to make a communist Vietnam.

Just about the first thing Ho's regime did after taking power in North Vietnam in 1954 was order the general liquidation of all "class enemies", as defined in Marxist doctrine. That is, landowners, merchants, Catholic priests, officials of the former regime, etc. The Central Committee estimated these categories as 2% of the population, and issued execution quotas to all local cadres.

Nearly all of the people who fell under the "class enemy" definition had fled to the south at the time of the 1954 armistice (the US Navy transported over 1M such). So the local cadres soon ran out of "class enemies" to execute - before reaching the quotas set by the Central Committee. When they reported the purge completed early, the CC told them to find more class enemies to liquidate - or else. The cadres started choosing additional victims for any reason at all, or even at random.

By late 1955, this policy was provoking widespread armed resistance and even full scale rebellion in some provinces (including one that had been a VIet Minh hotbed). The Central Committee finally realized they were endangering themselves, and stopped it. Over 100,000 people had been killed.

This is not the record of Jeffersonian democrats. It is the record of Stalinist Communists. It is the record of what Ho and his accomplices chose to do, entirely on their own. They were not following the orders of Soviet or Maoist advisors.

 

[Lord_Vespasian]

Ho spent most of the 1930s in Moscow working for the Comintern. He was a Communist long before the US Did Anything in Vietnam.


Just about the first thing Ho's regime did after taking power in North Vietnam in 1954 was order the general liquidation of all "class enemies", as defined in Marxist doctrine. That is, landowners, merchants, Catholic priests, officials of the former regime, etc. The Central Committee estimated these categories as 2% of the population, and issued execution quotas to all local cadres.

Nearly all of the people who fell under the "class enemy" definition had fled to the south at the time of the 1954 armistice (the US Navy transported over 1M such). So the local cadres soon ran out of "class enemies" to execute - before reaching the quotas set by the Central Committee. When they reported the purge completed early, the CC told them to find more class enemies to liquidate - or else. The cadres started choosing additional victims for any reason at all, or even at random.

By late 1955, this policy was provoking widespread armed resistance and even full scale rebellion in some provinces (including one that had been a VIet Minh hotbed). The Central Committee finally realized they were endangering themselves, and stopped it.

This is not the record of Jeffersonian democrats. It is the record of Stalinist Communists. It is the record of what Ho and his accomplices chose to do, entirely on their own. They were not following the orders of Soviet or Maoist advisors.

I guess I retract my initial statement. Still, if America told France to get out of Vietnam, they could've had a pro-Western dictatorship that would've probably liberalized earlier than OTL. Plus no Vietnam War which would go towards helping reach the OP's goal by not even having Vietnam, leaving only Korea and Afghanistan as the major "Vietnamesque" wars of the Cold War

 

[Riain]

In the early days of the Indonesian Confrontation the TNI conducted small parachute and amphibious landings on the Malayan peninsula. Instead of a measured response Britain could have reached for her sledgehammer and tried to end the confrontation with massive retaliation.

 

[Riain]

Similarly the reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incident could have been a reach for the sledgehammer, rather than the graduated response of OTL, and just trashed the place for a few months.