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Originally Posted by obbop
Dig further into South Vietnamese society and note the many internal troubles. How a Roman Catholic elite class distributed wealth and power alienating large segments of the populace. One could spend a multitude of hours obtaining the knowledge required just to make a feeble stab at guestimating the ins-and-outs of why what happened in South Vietnam came about. I doubt if I was a typical South Vietnamese citizen that I would have donned a uniform and placed my life on the line fighting the "invader" from the north. Heck, I may have viewed them as liberators and viewed the ruling junta in the south as more of an enemy than Uncle Ho!!!!!! There was a LOT more going on within South Vietnam than the USA mass media ever made generally known to the US public who likely didn't care anyway. We live in a society demanding easily-digestible 5-second sound bites. Also, intellectualism is generally ridiculed and typically is 5th fiddle to what is on sale at the mall, what team is on TV and which burger is bigger and sold at the newest calorie-laden price.
Further afield but similar in some ways was the tumult in China between Mao and his minions and the various warlords and other political players wanting political power and the wealth that comes with it. Compared to the evils of so many warlords I could see why Mao won the battle for the hearts and minds of the people.
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I have dug deeply into the religious/political interactions of the Vietnamese, and in fact, wrote a major paper titled, "The Religious Sects in Vietnamese Politics," while at the University of Texas, and discovered in the course of my research that the Cao Dai sect had their own army that was seperate and distinct from the ARVN. The Hao Hua were more a band of thieves than a religious order, as well as many others facts. The society in South Vietnam was no more fragmented then any other culture of third-world countries.
As a matter of fact Vo Nguyen Giap made the same miscalculation that you advocate, thinking that the poor uninformed South Vietnamese would rise up and welcome the Northern invaders - that error in understanding the ethos of the South Vietnamese cost Giap 12 divisions of troops, and virtually destroyed the local communist infrastructure.
Mao and his band of thugs won the hearts and minds of the people via the business end of a machine gun, not because of his benevolence. Read some factual history, and you just might discover that he is the most brutal dicator in world history, slaughtering millions of his own people.
Your trite and futile attempts to engage in historical revisionism are duly noted.