Vietnam War

South Vietnamese residents flee Saigon, as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between North Vietnamese Communist troops and South Vietnamese forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing Cold War between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of Japan, which occupied Vietnam during World War II, in 1945. Ho Chi Minh, an operative of the Comintern (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world), led the movement for a unified, Communist Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

Prelude

During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The United States backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. Ho Chi Minh began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in Geneva, the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of Indochina: Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. Contrary to commonly repeated myths; it was North Vietnam, not South Vietnam, that was the most extreme and steadfast in its efforts to prevent any such election from taking place. Nevertheless, it is true that South Vietnam consistently opposed all such arguments, claiming that the majority of South Vietnamese wanted independence, but that those North Vietnamese who wanted conquest should not be allowed to veto their just demands. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials favored such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages." The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

Unwilling to accept or even consider free elections, and with the South's economy growing rapidly and its prospects looking brighter by the day, Ho Chi Minh was up against a wall. A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

The North Vietnamese Terror

During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.) The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. Both Japan and France controlled different parts of Indochina for a time, and the Japanese supported the 1945 August Revolution that led to a Communist take-over in North Vietnam. The Communists killed untold thousands throughout this struggle, and their victory led to a brief incursion into Vietnam by Nationalist China. Ho Chi Minh arrived in Vietnam in 1941, and had seized control of all of North Vietnam by 1945. North Vietnam received massive supplies of arms from Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, enabling it to escalate its conflict with France into a full-blown, and bloody, war for independence. The Communists enacted drastic reforms that brought about a total collapse of whatever remained of the North Vietnamese economy; as a result, harvests declined by 20% in just one year. North Vietnam's Communist rulers rejected food aid from South Vietnam and France in order to escalate their guerilla war; they exported food despite the obvious failure of their economic policies; and they indiscriminately massacred the top producers in society. Massive bombing by all sides during World War Two had destroyed much of Vietnam's infrastructure; a drought in 1944 made conditions even more deadly and desperate. The Communist take-over turned this volatile situation into an outright catastrophe, as political and economic changes in the North caused the mass death by starvation of 400,000 to 1,000,000 North Vietnamese. South Vietnam was virtually untouched by the famine. (This is even more remarkable when one considers the massive aid given to North Vietnam by the USSR and China, all of which was diverted for war). Inflating the scale of the famine for propaganda purposes, and heaping all of the blame on France; Ho Chi Minh absolved the Communists of any responsibility for the tragedy. He argued that war against France was the only way for the country to make a full recovery.

David Koh, an opponent of the US war and a supporter of Ho Chi Minh, argued in The Straits Times that the Communists should not be blamed for the famine. His main argument was that Imperial Japan was using half of Vietnam's grain production for its war effort. Although he acknowledges the surplus of food in the French-controlled South, he declines to mention North Vietnam's rejection of food aid from other countries. The plain fact that Communist economic policies caused a 20% drop in food production cannot be evaded. Almost all of the food aid given to Imperial Japan or Vichy France came from their colony, South Vietnam; the Vietnamese Communists deliberately diverted American, Soviet, and Chinese aid sufficient to avert a famine towards their guerilla war against France and South Vietnam while forcing farmers to give up their harvets and exporting rice. To the extent the Communist North supplied food to the Japanese, it was largely part of a deliberate strategy: The Communists alternatively played the French, Vietnamese Nationalists, and Japanese against each other during their consolidation of power. The August 1945 formal Communist take-over (they had already controlled most of the country for years) of North Vietnam was, in fact, orchestrated in large measure by Japan: On August 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered to the Allies. In Indochina, the Japanese officials took advantage of the situation to cause additional problems for the Allies. Violating their surrender agreements, they helped Vietnamese nationalist groups, including the Việt Minh, take over public buildings in various cities. On August 25, 1945, Bảo Ðại was forced to abdicate in favor of Hồ and the Việt Minh. Although Japan must share responsibility for the death toll, it would be hard to argue that the Communists were not responsible for at least 50% of it. (More literally, a 50/50 split sharing responsibility between the Japanese and the Viet Minh for the death toll should be applied only to the portion of the famine that was democidal; other factors, like drought and natural disasters, played a role as well).

Ho's collaboration with Japanese war criminals continued long after World War Two. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers trained or commanded Vietnamese forces during the war with France. According to Bernard Fall, both France and the Việt Minh were ready to come to terms by late 1947, but peace talks broke down due to Ho's refusal to hand over Japanese military officers for trial in France. Ho praised them as friends and comrades whose loyalty could not be disabused, and then stormed out. Hundreds of thousands died as a result.

The survival rate for French soldiers in Communist POW camps was comparable to the rates of survival in the Dachau concentration camp during the Holocaust.

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination." Early estimates as to the number killed varied from 50,000 to 1,000,000. Although far-left activists such as Gareth Porter, Edwin Moise, Marilyn Young, and Edward Herman have for years denied that the bloodbath ever took place (by relying entirely on official North Vietnamese Communist propaganda, which Moise claimed was “extremely informative” and showed “a fairly high level of honesty”), there is now a substantial literature available documenting the incredible scale of the mass killings.

The North Vietnamese bloodbath began innocuously enough with an innocently named "rent reduction" campaign ostensibly designed to aid the poor. The slaughter escalated in 1954, with the beginning of "land reform" proper, which saw an award of more than 800,000 hectares of land and rice paddies, plus 100,000 cows and water buffalo, redistributed to 2 million farmers. The killing soon spread in a frenzy across the entire country in an outburst of societal madness. Neighbors turned on neighbors in a paranoid attempt to satisfy government quotas specified as to the number that had to be killed per village. Anyone accused of being "bourgeois" would be executed immediately after a Stalinist show trial; children were forced to witness and applaud the slow torturing of landowners. Rebellions were crushed through mass deportations; scores of thousands were sent to camps; streets were filled with bodies. The entire population joined in, convinced that killing was necessary to "purify" society. Anyone deemed "too wealthy" was socially ostracized to such an extent that they could not acquire basic food or shelter, and thus starved to death along with their entire families.

Domestic repression escalated dramatically, and the only free paper in North Vietnam was shut down after writing: 'If somebody tells me to keep my mouth shut in case the Americans and Diem should make capital out of what I say, I reply: "Diem has a very good case when he refuses to hold joint consultations with us on the ground that there is no freedom in North Vietnam."'

Official Vietnamese government records smuggled out of the country and authenticated document some 172,000 executions of victims named as landowners excluding summary executions of Communist cadre, which are estimated at 40-60,000. This is in line with democide analyst R.J. Rummel's estimate of 152,000 executed. The lowest widely accepted estimate of executions is a conservative figure of 56,000 from historian Bernard Fall.

Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, estimates the number of executions as being potentially in the hundreds of thousands:

In South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Canh, a former Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information and Amnesty (1969-70), sought an answer to this problem by interviewing returnees from Chieu Hoi programs and interrogating POWs, including communist cadres, soldiers, and officers from the North. These interviews and interrogations produced a great deal of valuable and reliable information. Ultimately Nguyen Van Canh was able to generate an estimate of 200,000 victims, which he divided into 2 main categories:

— 100,000 accused and murdered during the period before 1955, excluding another 40,000 victims who were sent to various concentration camps in the mountain areas. Here most of them died of malaria or other epidemic diseases. Those who were able to survive and were released became crippled mentally as well as physically. They have led a dog’s life ever since.

— 100,000 killed during phase 5, the last phase of the reform campaign, known as the Dien Bien Phu General Offensive, which ended in summer 1956. Thousands of others, most of them rich farmers and land owners, were sent to concentration camps for “reeducation.”

Of more than 200,000 victims executed, 40,000 (20%) were communist cadres, according to Nguyen Van Canh.

During work visits to the Mekong Delta (assigned by Ho Chi Minh City’s agriculture department), we had opportunities to talk to a number of Northern cadres working in scientific and technological areas as part of the “agricultural collectivization policy” in 1978-9. The discussions eventually touched on the land reform campaign in the North. Two of the cadres admitted that they were participants in the campaign in 1955-6.

— One estimated that 120,000 victims were falsely accused and executed. This number included 40,000 communist cadres.

— The other gave a larger figure: 150,000-160,000 victims killed, among them 60,000 communist cadres.

In general, the conclusions and estimates are similar; especially the number of communist cadres, which ranged from 20-30% of the total number of victims. Though the numbers of victims falsely accused may be different, the acceptable figure is 120,000-200,000 (including cadres and Party members).

Virtually all contemporary scholars accept a figure of at least 150,000 executions, an estimate backed up by the some 150,000 houses and huts allocated to new occupants during the "reform". But this does not convey the full scale of the slaughter in this 4-year period alone. Rummel estimates a total of 250,000 dead; counting summary executions of party cadre, killings of dissidents and political prisoners, undocumented massacres, and forced starvation/suicides, a figure roughly identical to that extrapolated from official Vietnamese government records.

Beyond this quarter of a million, however, many more were killed in democide by the government of North Vietnam. By conservative estimates, 10-15,000 were killed by the state through its suppression of various uprisings. At least 60,000 were killed in camps from 1945-75, and as many as 40,000 died of epidemics caused by state policy during deportations. There is only one estimate of the democide associated with the "rent reduction" campaign, and for it the source (Hoang Van Chi, a Vietnamese nationalist with firsthand experience) cites Professor Gerard Tongas, who was in Hanoi during these years (he left in 1959). The estimate suggests that approximately 100,000 were killed in the early fifties during this prelude to the land reform. However, based on Nguyen Van Canh's research, as well as statements from Tongas and Rummel; it is not clear whether or not this number is included in the estimates for the total number of executions during the "land reform" period.

Throughout this entire period, various political struggles/revolts were accompanied by government retaliation. Although estimates are less clear for the number killed during these conflicts, Chi cites a figure of 3-5 killed in every village in the country in the 1953 "political struggle" campaign alone, which adds up to at least 45-75,000 dead. Other independent estimates suggested 70,000 were killed in 1956 through political repression and massacres, and from this scholars have attempted to determine a rough overall total. Though most of these deaths do not cover recorded executions of landowners and none slave labor, camps, starvation, or suicides; assuming a sensible overlap between these estimates and other estimates of dead for the period and considering the estimated total dead from all causes during this time; Rummel estimates some 70-150,000 additional deaths. North Vietnam also killed tens of thousands in anti-Nationalist terror during the forties, and committed democide in the war with France.

Rummel estimates that Hanoi killed 195,000-865,000 North Vietnamese from 1953-57, with a “most-likely” figure of 365,000 dead. One way of assessing this figure is by comparing it to the total number of executions documented in official Vietnamese government records smuggled out the country by defectors and authenticated: 172,000. It would be expected that the total number of deaths from all causes throughout this whole period would be at least twice this sum.

A US intelligence report estimated 500,000 were killed in North Vietnam in the fifties.

Up to 200,000 were executed in purges from 1957 on (Rummel estimates 50,000) and at least 50,000 more were killed through other means.

Radio Free Asia reported that unofficial estimates of those killed by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam Labor Party, which later become the Vietnamese Communist Party, range from 200,000 to 900,000 for its entire reign. Taking every available estimate for deaths by cause under North Vietnam and averaging them out; Rummel arrived at a low of 242,000 and a high of 922,000 killed from 1945 to 1957.

President Nixon claimed that 500,000 were massacred and 500,000 killed in concentration camps during the "land reform" period alone; but there are no independent estimates of camp deaths that are anywhere near that high a total. However, if one assumes that the lethality of these camps can be determined by comparison to those established in South Vietnam after 1975--where 16.5% of 1,000,000 prisoners died--then 240,000 North Vietnamese were killed in camps from 1945 to 1975 if the North Vietnamese camps were slightly less than half as lethal. If one assumes a more likely and conservative figure of 5% dead annually (in line with Rummel's mid-estimate); this still adds up, over 30 years, to some 150,000 dead in concentration camps. This number can further be checked by comparison to the range: at least 2% of prisoners died per year, or 60,000 in three decades; the average between this and the high of 240,000 is exactly 150,000.

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, Lost Victory, "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the Vietminh and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the Khmer Rouge), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the Vietcong) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:

The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or any one else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of napalm, casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.

The War

In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam. North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The Kennedy administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in 1963 to the overthrow of South Vietnam's Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for the United States intervention was an alleged attack on a US ship by North Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The US responded with a massive bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but deeply sincere and good man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his wildly incompetent administration, exemplified by Robert McNamara, began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by prosecuting it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians. Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing. Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war, which is about three times the real figure, and far-left activists such as Noam Chomsky have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge underestimated the full toll from the war--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the KVM, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:

"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.

American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.

North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.

For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.

For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.

In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.

North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win." Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself. The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed Ford's call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for weeks by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story". The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

Aftermath

Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties), from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered. Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined to have been virtually exclusively execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime. Because only about one-half to a third of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, brutal mistreatment by the state, and normal mortality), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2.0 and 2.5 million Cambodians, with a most likely estimate of 2.2 million. This is because 2.5 to 3 million Cambodians died from 75-79, and 500,000 deaths over this time would have represented normal mortality--subtracting these "expected" deaths from the total, we derive the total number of "unexpected," "excess" deaths attributable to the regime. A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion. By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,” who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. The victorious Communist troops entering South Vietnam massacred around 100,000 civilians who attempted to flee the "Highlands" offensive. The most exact study documented 70,000 executions in the first ninety days of the fall of Saigon; while a total of 100-250,000 South Vietnamese were executed by the Communists altogether (the mid-value, 150,000, is exactly what you would expect--double the number killed in the first-ninety-day reprisals). (Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson, cited by the State Department for their figure of 65,000 executions; later concluded that this figure was absurdly low and that the real number was probably twice as large; no independent sources estimate a toll lower than 100,000). One to two million were sent to concentration camps, of whom some 165,000-230,000 were never seen again; another million were deported to the North, and it is estimated that 50-150,000 died in the process due to epidemics, mistreatment, starvation, and the slave labor that they were made to perform in the "New Economic Zones" to which they were sent. Half a million Chinese citizens were forcibly deported from Vietnam. Tens of thousands more were killed through other means. Based on the total number of refugees who fled from Vietnam--more than 3 million--an absolute minimum of 200-300,000 boat people died at sea, since the lowest estimate ever put forward as to how many died was 10%. The highest possible figure, based on the number who arrived to freedom, would probably be on the order of Rummel's 500,000. A mid-value estimate would thus be on the order of 400,000 dead, in line with UN estimates, but far lower than the estimates of the Vietnamese government (and US intelligence). In sum, then, about 500-600,000 South Vietnamese were killed by the Communists after the US withdrawal (i.e., 200,000 in concentration camps; 150-200,000 executed; 50-150,000 killed through slave labor; 100,000 massacred trying to escape the Communist victory after the “Highlands” assault; and—based on the hundreds of thousands sent to prisons, camps, and slave labor zones through the eighties, nineties, and more recent years—undoubtedly many tens of thousands since)—with the victims beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive—, and another 300-500,000 were drowned. This can be checked by a comparison of how many refugees fled the slaughter—and what this implies about its scale—and how many South Vietnamese fled the war itself. These considerations give us no reason to adjust this total. Finally, some 171,500 were killed in the invasion of South Vietnam, putting the total number of Vietnamese dead after 1973 at over one million.

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape. The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to CIA estimates, more than 350,000 Cambodians were massacred by all sides, primarily by the Vietnamese and their allies; some 250,000 were specifically identified as having died as a result of Vietnam's deliberate continuation of the 1979 famine. The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson). Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat, while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself. Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government. The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000; but this is mere guesswork. Given the doubling of famine-dead by 1981, according to Etcheson's demographic analysis; one could extrapolate from the CIA study a very conservative estimate of 700,000 dead from 1978 until the Vietnamese withdrawal--and this in democide and famine outside of actual combat in the war (which would have killed at least 50,000 Cambodians). Assuming, then, that at least half the famine was democidal, and that 2/3 of the democide was the responsibility of Vietnam (1/3 of Samrin); we would arrive at a total of 300,000 democides by Vietnam, 150,000 by Samrin, and 250,000 dead in non-democidal famine. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun Thailand and Malaysia. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge. (See Reagan Doctrine)

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 4-5 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

Failure of US campaign to help the South

Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia."

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men.^{[Citation Needed]}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

Cost of the War

The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese, 100,000 to 600,000 Cambodians and 30-50,000 Laotians. The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, endorsed by the Associated Press, estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict. R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides. Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam. Communist propaganda claimed that 3-6 million died in the war, and a small minority of radical anti-war protestors and Chomsky cultists endorsed these figures, although they are not demographically possible.

The most widely cited/accepted estimate, and the middle value of the plausible range (1-2 million Vietnamese) is 1.5 million. This figure is often used in US school textbooks. Keeping in mind that there was not a 50/50 split for casualties between Hanoi and Saigon, and that North Vietnam suffered losses far heavier than the South, we could put the casualty ratio at 60/40. This would yield a rough estimated total of 875,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed in the war compared to 625,000 soldiers and civilians killed in South Vietnam. If, on the other hand, the more recent demographic studies of Charles Hirschman and others are correct, then the real figures were probably closer to 500,000 South Vietnamese and 700,000 North Vietnamese, and even that may be slightly too high. This estimate is substantiated by US intelligence, which estimated that 200-250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, and a smaller number of civilians, were killed in the war. Further, this includes the 171,500 South Vietnamese killed in the massive invasion of South Vietnam made possible by the American withdrawal.

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure of 2 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration; however, the official Vietnam News Agency asserted the likelihood of an even higher toll in an April 4, 1995 propaganda broadcast calling for reparations and foreign aid. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men. Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.

“

They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something. And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---President Ronald Reagan, 1986

”

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat arguably surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

Controversies about the War

Max Boot wrote:

Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true communist, and that his victory was inevitable. That Ngo Dinh Diem was an unpopular and repressive reactionary. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘domino theory’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. Mark Moyar, a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [3]

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century. He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.

Media Bias

Charges of western media bias in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics, who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,

For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."

CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group. Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by Yahoo news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.

The extreme left-wing propagandist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young's work on Vietnam is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); even though official North Vietnamese government records smuggled out of the country document over 172,000 recorded executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone (these exclude starvation, suicides, deportations, concentration camps, slave labor, Viet Cong atrocities, suppression of uprisings, the "rent reduction" campaign, the 1953 "wave of terror," the killing of Communist cadre and all the other decades of mass murder from the forties through the seventies). She ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable demographic evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses Noam Chomsky's nonsensical lies, supports the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves! She further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She even has the unbelievable gall to simply deny the Hue Massacre! Finally, she claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--hardly surprising when you consider her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality. Notably, all of her sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, yet she does not cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work and bizarrely casts suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is simply obscene. As Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left." And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Her denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide. Indeed, Porter is caught repeatedly contradicting himself, simply lying, making incredible judgments sans evidence, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak! Although it was apparently sufficient to convince Young, it's difficult to imagine how any honest scholar could ignore his work's manifest sloppiness. Hoang Van Chi also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack. Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."

Vietnam War in Popular Culture

The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including The Green Berets, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, and We Were Soldiers.

The TV series Tour of Duty was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the Tet Offensive. The series Magnum, P.I, Night Court, Airwolf, and Area 88 all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series JAG, the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

Quotes

“... we had to make the people suffer, suffer until they could no longer endure it. Only then would they carry out the Party’s armed policy.” - Senior Viet Cong defector (Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An [University of California Press, 1972], p. 112)

“We’ve been worse than Pol Pot, but the outside world knows nothing.” - Vietnamese communist boast (Nguyen Van Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982 [Hoover Institution Press, 1983], p. 207)

“Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer, and the Americans are the invaders... The key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that.” - Mai Chi Tho, Vietnamese communist politician (New York Times Magazine, March 29, 1981)

“In the new Kampuchea, one million is all we need to continue the revolution. We don’t need the rest. We prefer to kill ten friends rather than keep one enemy alive.” - Khmer Rouge slogan (Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son [Touchstone, 1987], p. 148)

“[If every soldier kills 25 Vietnamese], we will need only 2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese; and we still would have 6 million people left.” - Khmer Rouge broadcast (Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia [Stanford University Press, 1999], p. 104)

“I saw the extreme horror, and I wondered what kind of regime this was, that had no other method than to repress and annihilate its people. It took them to 'people’s courts' and shot them on the scene without a fair trial and even without any evidence. The land reform campaign was a crime of genocide like that of Pol Pot." - North Vietnamese dissident Tran Manh Hao

“Suppose that their [i.e., American] postwar estimates [that more than one million people will be killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia] are correct. Since the situation at the war’s end is squarely the responsibility of the United States, so are the million or so deaths that were predicted as a direct result of that situation.” - Far-left anti-war activist and genocide-denier Noam Chomsky (After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p162)

"No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic." - President Richard Nixon in No More Vietnams

“When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive….Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.” - Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

“Vietnam appears determined to expel virtually all the members of its ethnic Chinese minority.” - "Hanoi Regime Resolved to Oust Nearly All Ethnic Chinese"

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." - Left-wing "anti-war" terrorist Bill Ayers in 1969

"I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat." - Ayers

“I was very frightened when I saw the Khmer Rouge saw off the neck of a civilian with the sharp edge of sugar palm leaves. They spent three days cutting his head off. They sawed a little one morning, and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and night. They made the victim stand up while they were cutting in front of hundreds of people living in the Khmer Rouge area. Then they held him up when he could stand no longer.” - Cambodian refugee from the civil war

"[This Council condemns Vietnam for] its acts of aggression against Democratic Kampuchea, ... acts which cause serious damage to the lives and property of the Kampuchean people." - The UN on the "illegal," unilateral Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia

"The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system." - Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, p191

“Once the evidence of Indochinese Communist behavior began to accumulate, there were three possible responses for those in the West who had been helping to give history a push: the first was to admit the facts and hence the error of their past political position, and work to eradicate the evil they had mistakenly contributed to; this has been the response of most of the democratic left in France. The second possible response to the evidence was to admit what was going on, but to try and justify it, usually with some form of bizarre moral relativism. This was the response of America’s new political liberals. The third possible response was to deny evidence of repression, either totally or in part, and thereby retain one’s pride and prejudice. The American radical left, with Professor Noam Chomsky in the vanguard, has taken this third course.” - Stephen Morris, Harvard International Review, Dec-Jan 1981

"Just consider how the Khmer Rouge controlled personal relations. They made showing love to a relative or laughing with them dangerous, since they might perceive this as showing less dedication to, or poking fun at, the Great Revolution. It was even dangerous to use some term of endearment, such as "honey," "sweetheart," or "dearest," for a loved one. The doctor Haing Ngor tried to so refer to his wife, for example, and a spy overheard and reported him for this, as well as the fact that he had eaten food he picked in the forest, instead of bringing it into the village for communal eating. The local head cadre interrogated him about these sins, and told him, "The chhlop [informers] say that you call your wife 'sweet.' We have no 'sweethearts' here. That is forbidden." Soldiers then took him to a prison where cadre severally tortured him, cut off his finger, and sliced his ankle with a hatchet. He barely survived. This deadly communist revolution created pitiful human dilemmas. Think about what this same doctor Haing Ngor went through when his wife suffered life-threatening complications during childbirth. To help her deliver her baby would mean death, since the Khmer Rouge forbid husbands from delivering their wive's babies. In any case, to use his medical skills to save her would in effect tell the cadre that he was a doctor, and would result in his death, and possibly that of his wife and newborn child. To do nothing might mean their death anyway; still, if he did nothing, the wife might pull through. He chose to do nothing, and perhaps he could do nothing anyway since he had no proper medical instruments. Mother and baby soon both died, then, leaving a gaping wound in his heart that never healed." - Rummel

"It was. . . of Tan Samay, a high schoolteacher from Battambang. The Khmer Rouge accused him of incompetence. The only thing taught the children at the village was how to cultivate the soil. Maybe Tan Samay was trying to teach them other things, too, and that was his downfall. His pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, "Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!" until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing." - Buddhist monk Hem Samluat's description of an execution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy

"Not only did the Khmer Rouge run amok massacring their people, but also everywhere the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy the very heart of peasant life. Hinayana Buddhism had been a state religion, and the priesthood of monks with their saffron robes was a central part of Cambodian culture. Some 90 percent of Cambodians believed in some form of Buddhism. Many received a rudimentary schooling from the monks, and many young people became monks for part of their lives. The Khmer Rouge could not allow so powerful an institution to stand and therefore set out with vigor to destroy it. They exterminated all leading monks and either murdered or defrocked the lesser ones. One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks only 800 to 1,000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2,680 monks in eight monasteries, merely seventy were alive in 1979. As for the Buddhist temples that populated the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amazingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarnation, its institutions. This was an act of genocide within the larger Cambodian democide, and it was not the only one. In most if not all the country, simply being of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Lao ancestry meant death. As part of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong Xiem, for example, they demolished five Cham hamlets and reportedly massacred 20,000 that lived there; in the district of Koong Neas only four Cham apparently survived out of some 20,000. The cadre threw the Cham Grand Mufti, their spiritual leader, into boiling water and then hit him on the head with an iron bar. They beat another leader, the First Mufti, to death, tortured and disemboweled the Second Mufti, and murdered by starvation in prison the Chairman of the Islamic Association of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Overall, the Khmer Rouge annihilated nearly half--about 125,000--of all the Cambodian Cham. As to the other minorities, the Khmer Rouge also slaughtered about 200,000 ethnic Chinese, almost half of those in Cambodia--a calamity for ethnic Chinese in this part of the world unequaled in modern times--additionally, they murdered 3,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics; around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese (over half); and 12,000 ethnic Thai out of 20,000. One Cambodian peasant, Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his wife, but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen of his wife's relatives. In this genocide, the Khmer Rouge probably murdered 541,000 Chinese, Chams, Vietnamese, and other minorities." - Rummel

"I questioned this bitch who came back from France...my activity was that I set fire to her ass until it became a burned-out mess. Then I beat her to the point that she was so turned around I couldn't get any answer out of her; she [finally] croaked, ending her answers...." - A Khmer Rouge "interrogator"

"Along with Vickery's theory of a 'peasant revolution', we can now dismiss Thion's assertion that in Democratic Kampuchea, 'The state never stood on its feet.' Despite its underdeveloped economy, the regime probably exerted more power over its citizens than any state in world history. It controlled and directed their public lives more closely than any government had ever done." - Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (1996)

"The Khmer Rouge were tipping out patients [from the hospitals] like garbage into the streets.... Bandaged men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have ever seen." – Description of the evacuation of Pnohm Penh

"The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and Herman claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war." - Bruce Sharp, "Averaging Wrong Answers"

"The Khmer Rouge took children away from their parents and made them live and work in labor brigades. If the children died of fatigue or disease, the cadre were good enough to inform their parents; then, what emotion the parents showed could mean their life or death. If they wept or displayed extreme unhappiness, this showed a bourgeois sentimentality--after all, their children had sacrificed themselves for the Great Revolution and the parents should be proud, not unhappy. Similarly, a wife expressing grief over an executed husband--an enemy of the Great Revolution--was explicitly criticizing the Khmer Rouge. This unforgivable act of bourgeois sentimentality could mean her death." - Rummel

"Everyone knows about the war waged by the United States in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975. But very few people know about or understand the war that it is waging today against that country, which now calls itself Democratic Kampuchea. The war is being fought on many fronts. But it is mainly a propaganda war, a consciously organized, well-financed campaign to spread lies and misinformation about Kampuchea since the victory of its revolution in 1975. … The most slanderous of all charges leveled against Kampuchea is that of 'mass genocide,' with figures often cited running into the millions of people. I believe this is a lie, which certain opinion-makers in this country believe can be turned into a 'fact' by repeating it often enough." - The New York Times, November 21, 1978

"In Chomsky's condescending view, if the media was right about the Khmer Rouge, it was only because their "lies" happened to match the truth by pure coincidence." - Sharp, "Averaging Wrong Answers"

"Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility." - Chomsky, 1977

"You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence." - Chomsky, 2002, on Znet

"Once, I was in a boat steaming up a narrow river, just off the Great Lake. I was being taken to see a fishery in one of the richest of the fishing areas. Along with rice, fish is a staple food in Cambodia and the most important source of protein. Long before our old boat came around the bend of the river, an extraordinary smell came wafting out to greet us. The river was jammed with hundreds of thousands of dead fish, packed tight as ice floes. What had happened? I asked. 'Pol Pot' came the reply. It turned out that the Khmer Rouge had built a huge dam just upstream from here and the water in this ancient fishing village was now far shallower than it had ever been before. In the heat of the dry-season sun the fish had, quite simply, cooked." - William Shawcross, in The Quality of Mercy, p.283

"... it is not only because I once argued for the victory of this very regime, and feel myself partially guilty for what is happening under it, that I believe I can say: there is a time, when a great crime is taking place, when it is better to speak out, in whatever company, than to remain silent." - Jean Lacouture on Cambodia

"I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his ten-year old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but skin." - Description of the death march from Pnhom Penh (Cambodia Year Zero, pp.6-7)

"The object of this disgraceful exercise cannot be to convince the reader that the arguments offered are actually true. Rather, the goal is to affect the reader’s emotional attitude, by dulling his or her sense of outrage on contemplating millions of tortured and mutilated corpses brought about by the radical movement that campaigned for a communist victory in Indochina. In this task, the book is eminently successful, not unlike the works of Holocaust denial that serve as its echo and mirror image." –Paul Bogdanor, reviewing Chomsky’s After the Cataclysm

"On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman quietly abandon their earlier view that the Khmer Rouge had killed only 25,000, that its crimes had been inflated by “a factor of 100” and that Pol Pot’s brutality had “saved many lives”. Now they try to equate American bombing with communist genocide, arguing that “the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities” in Cambodia is “roughly in the same range”. They generate this conclusion by a remarkable sleight of hand. First, they give estimates of 500,000-600,000 dead in the civil war (1970-5) (p. 263), more than twice the real figure. Second, they attribute the civil war deaths - all deaths, both military and civilian, on all sides - to American bombing (p. 260), in truth only a minor factor. Third, they reduce the toll of Khmer Rouge atrocities (1975-9) to 750,000-1 million (p. 263), only half of the actual number. Finally, they maintain that the starvation component of this toll “must be attributed to the conditions left by the US war” (p. 263), and not to the Khmer Rouge policy of enslaving the whole population while abolishing medicine and hospitals and rejecting food aid in the midst of a government-created famine. Doubtless unfairly, I am reminded of the techniques of Holocaust deniers, who exaggerate the cost of Allied bombing and then attribute Jewish deaths in the camps to starvation and disease caused by the war against the Nazis." – Bogdanor reviewing Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent

"After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake." - Paul Postal on Chomsky (The New Yorker, March 31, 2003)

"Speaking on this occasion, Noam Chomsky, Douglas Dowd and Richard Fernandez vehemently condemned the U.S imperialists' crimes against the Vietnamese people in both zones and demanded that the U.S. authorities bring immediately all U.S. troops home. They paid profound tribute to President Ho Chi Minh and expressed their admiration for the Vietnamese people engaged in a ‘just struggle’ for independence and freedom, and their confidence in the latter’s certain victory." – Official North Vietnamese press release, 1970.

Nixon: Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.

Kissinger: And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…

Nixon: That’s right!

Kissinger: There haven’t been as many killed [by the US military] in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.

Nixon: …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s unbelievable! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, of course we have to help those 7,000 people! – President Nixon and Henry Kissinger discussing current events, September 24, 1972, from The Nixon Tapes

"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, editorial, June 14, 1975

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - The Nation, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," 1977

"During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, some three million people were terminated with extreme prejudice." - The Nation, movie review of The Killing Fields, 1984

"Even before the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese had to think about life in South Vietnam under Hanoi's rule and act accordingly. They were the ones who had to pay with their lives and liberties for any error of judgment. If they bet on a "bloodbath" and exiled themselves and there was "peace" and "reconciliation" they would have lost a home and a homeland for nothing. If they believed in the Communist promise of "reconciliation" and stayed in Vietnam, they might find themselves in a concentration camp today. It was a matter of life and death for thousands of South Vietnamese, not for comfortable democratic armchair intellectual speculation." - Le Thi Ahn, "Let the Vietnamese Speak for Themselves"

"Mr. President, putting it bluntly, wouldn't we just be continuing a bloodbath that already exists in Cambodia if we voted the 222 million [in aid]?" - Reporter to US President Gerald Ford, 1975

"You know the John Lennon song ‘Imagine’? ‘Imagine no possessions, no religion’? That’s what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily pourridge. And that pourridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields." - Sophal Ear

“Ear reminds us of all the Western intellectuals who loved — loved, loved, loved — the Khmer Rouge. … Ear shows us pictures of the “Kampuchea Conference” that took place in Stockholm, in 1979. The purpose of the conference was to promote the restoration of the Khmer Rouge to power! Jan Myrdal was the keynote speaker — the famous intellectual who is the son of Gunnar and Alva. Ear also quotes Noam Chomsky, and others. Chomsky is still making moral and political pronouncements today, and so is Myrdal. Being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry. They just glide on...” - Jay Nordlinger, National Review Online, 2010

"The revolution in Kampuchea marks the beginning of the greatest and most necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the latter 20th century to shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all." - Malcolm Caldwell, Kampuchea, p.45.

"The forethought, ingenuity, dedication and eventual triumph of the liberation forces in the face of extreme adversity and almost universal foreign skepticism, detachment, hostility and even outright sabotage ought to have been cause for worldwide relief and congratulation rather than the disbelief and execration with which it was in fact greeted. . . But if manipulators have a very good reason to distort and obscure the truth we do not. Indeed we have a clear obligation to establish and propagate it with every resource at out command." - Caldwell, Kampuchea, p.46

"The conclusions which Caldwell draws are so distanced from reality as to make them unrecognizable." - Ear, The Khmer Rouge Canon

"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." - Ear, ibid.

"To the contrary, if Nixon blamed himself for anything, it was for having left Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge partly because of Watergate." - Ear, ibid.

"If you don't do what they say, you die." - Former Tuol Sleng guard

"The shame, alone, would have justified that this book be written--which is firstly a cry of horror. The shame of having contributed, even as little as it was, as weak as its influence could have been on the mass media, to the establishment of one of the most oppressive powers history has ever known." - Lacouture, Survive le peuple cambodgien! (1978), p.5

"Nothing could be more natural than that the press should rise up to denounce violations of human rights in Spain, Latin America, and South Africa. But nothing could be less justifiable than that so few voices should be raised in protest against the assassination of a people. How many of those who say that are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth of the present suffering of the Cambodian people?" - Ponchaud, 1976

"How much blood makes a 'bloodbath'?" - Morton Kondracke, New Republic, October 1, 1977, p.22

"This [deceit] was apparent to anyone listening closely to his [Pol Pot's] speeches and press conferences in 1977 and 1978 and to the unsettling propaganda broadcast every day over Radio Phnom Penh by the Kampuchean Communist Party (meaning Pol Pot himself) from 1975 until January 7, 1979, when Vo Nguyen Giap's blitzkrieg brought down Phnom Penh. Never in the human memory has a leader (be he an emperor or dictator), government, or a political party in power sung its own praises in such a dithyrambic, insolent, deceitful, shameless, and immodest way as the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime did. As Radio Hanoi has since stated, Messers. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary outstripped even their guru, the late Joseph Goebbels, when it came to propaganda!" - King Norodom Sihanouk, 1980

"Le Duc Tho used to tell me that their ambition was all of Indochina after which they would proceed to take over South East Asia." – Kissinger, 1975

"Suharto: At Camp David, we discussed the question of unification of Vietnam. That seems now to be moving ahead. Laos and Cambodia seem already under Vietnamese influence. Does the United States believe the three will be incorporated into one country?

Ford: The unification of Vietnam has come more quickly than we expected. There is, however, resistance in Cambodia to the influence of Hanoi. We are willing to move slowly in our relations with Cambodia, perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese influence. ... The situation in Laos is disturbing.

Kissinger: It is interesting that in Laos Souvannavong is now in a subordinate position. The Chinese want to use Cambodia to balance off Vietnam and are keeping troops in connection with road building in the north. We don’t like Cambodia, for in many ways the government is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t discourage Thailand or China from drawing closer to Cambodia." - Ford, Kissinger, and Suharto, 1975

"Kissinger: What is the Cambodian attitude?

Thai Foreign Minister: The Cambodians want salt and fish. They wanted to barter for these items.

Kissinger: Did Ieng Sary impress you?

Thai Foreign Minister: He is a nice, quiet man.

Kissinger: How many people did he kill? Tens of thousands?" - Kissinger to Thailand's Foreign Minister, 1975

"The North Vietnamese have to be the meanest people in the world. The North Koreans and Albanians are pretty difficult, but the North Vietnamese are by far the worst. They can lie to you effortlessly. ... The Vietnamese in Paris used to make the same speech every morning. They used to say that if we would make a major effort, they would make a major effort. One morning the leader of the Vietnamese delegation said that if we would make a major effort, they would make an effort. At the end of the speech, I asked whether I had understood or whether he had in fact dropped an adjective. He explained that yesterday they had made a major effort, but we had made only an effort. So today we would have to make a major effort and they in turn would only make an effort." - Kissinger, ibid.

"I am, personally, embarrassed by the Vietnam War. I believe that if you to go war, you go to win and not to lose with moderation. ... You must act firmly. That's the only way to deal with the Communists." - Kissinger, ibid.

"We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me." - Kissinger, ibid.

"You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don't tell them what I said before." - Kissinger, ibid.

"The events that followed our withdrawal from Vietnam, including the plight of the boat people and the more than 1 million slaughtered by the new communist rulers of Cambodia, showed that media critics who said we were on the wrong side were mistaken." - Nixon, "I Could See No Reason to Live," Time, April 2, 1990.

"Yes, I wish I'd done it sooner." - Nixon, recounting his response to the question of if he had any regrets about the 1970 invasion of Cambodia; "Paying the Price," Time, April 2, 1990.

"I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?" - Pol Pot, quoted in "The Top 100 Asians of the Century," Time, August 1999

"He [Ho Chi Minh] has become the Strategist, the Theoretician, the Thinker, the Statesman, the Man of Culture, the Diplomat, the Poet, the Philosopher. All these names are accompanied with adjectives like "legendary" and "unparalleled." He has become Ho the Luminary, Ho the Visionary. Peasants in the South build shrines to him. In the North old women bow before his altar, asking miracles for their suffering children. Others--[such as] anti-communist fanatics...see him in a negative light." -Time, ibid.

"Some typical tortures [in North Vietnam] were:

-The victim was compelled to kneel down, supporting on his head a basket filled with heavy stones.

-He was forced to hang by his thumbs or feet from a rope thrown over a rafter. In this position he could be either beaten or, by pulling on the rope, jerked violently up and down.

-His thumbs were wrapped in a cloth soaked in oil which was then ignited.

These tortures were widely used throughout the whole country." - Former North Vietnamese government official Hoang Van Chi, quoted in US intelligence report, "The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam"

"Two years earlier, in 1951, heavy bombing by the French had annihilated the entire irrigation network in the communist-controlled zone. The party now saw in this military disaster a possible solution to its present problem. Its leaders revealed that the idea of destroying the irrigation system had been suggested to the French by these very traitors whom the angry masses had denounced. It was even said that they had provided the French with accurate maps giving the location of dams and lock-gates. The absurdity of this accusation was immediately apparent to all but the blindest followers of the party, since all Vietnamese knew perfectly well that it was the French who had built the dams, and that all the ordnance maps of Vietnam and of Indochina had been compiled by the French. To suppose that they had forgotten the whereabouts of these gigantic constructions, and needed map references from local spies to locate them again, was patently ridiculous. But communists, in their propaganda, have never considered absurdity to be a serious obstacle to mass persuasion. It was their habit when dealing with peasants constantly to repeat simple statements, and their propagandists knew from past experience that the villagers would believe without question any story, however fanciful, about the French and the Americans; many of them had probably never met a Frenchman or an American in the whole course of their lives. One communist officer, who had valiantly fought at Dien Bien Phu, was heard to enquire whether or not Americans had red skins. Obviously, he had confused Americans with American Indians, the Redskins--a name introduced into the Vietnamese Language by its French equivalent, Peauro Rouges. Clearly, an ignorant man; all the same, he typifies the abysmal ignorance which was so widespread. Thus, the simpler the argument, the more suited it was to the peasants' understanding." –Chi, ibid.

"I want to be sure...that nothing is done on these veterans. Is that understood?...Is the word out? That they are not to touch 'em, they are not to do a thing?...Get a hold of the district police; they're not to touch them, they're to do nothing: Just let 'em raise Hell." - Nixon, telling John Dean to make sure that anti-war protestors--especially veterans---are left alone by police, from The Nixon Tapes

"On September 23, 2001, Cambodians in Chicago celebrated Pchum Ben at Truman College. This year, coming less than two weeks after the attacks which claimed thousands of American lives, the atmosphere was different. There were American flags everywhere: on shirts, on walls, on car windows, on antennas. Toward the end of the ceremony, volunteers began to walk through the crowd. They carried small cardboard boxes, with American flags printed on the sides, ready to accept donations for the victims of the attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The response was instantaneous. Within seconds there were people crowded around every one of the volunteers. Within minutes the boxes were overflowing with currency. I was seeing something that I had never expected to see: Cambodians, rushing to the aid of American victims of war. Few people on Earth understand war and suffering as well as the Cambodians. In the face of insurmountable odds, they have preserved their culture. Now, the strength and resilience that withstood the Khmer Rouge forms another individual thread, woven into the fabric of America. With every new thread, the fabric grows stronger."

Further reading

• Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (2009) 704 pages
• Jennings, Phillip. America's victory in Vietnam 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

External links

• Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen
• Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [4]
• SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975.
• "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers".
• Vietnam War.
• Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)