this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Lefty Memes
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Who won the Vietnam War? It is not at all clear that the US military could defeat a committed domestic guerrilla force. Especially if the military was split on the nature of the conflict. A bloodless political revolution is possible and there's historical precedent for it wrt socialist movements, although expect a civil war of some kind. The fallacy that socialists just want to wage a bloody civil war in order to get free healthcare is so tired and fake and divorced from anything but liberal delusions.
Also the arms are needed to defend the political and social revolution, which will be directly attacked by armed thugs and reactionaries if it managed to gain traction toward actually upending the capitalist system. Look up The Deacons of Defense and the history of defending civil rights orgs and leaders, while kicking the Klan out of southern mainstream political life. Its not optional. However individuals armed is meaningless, there needs to be civil defense groups and left wing militias to be able to actually protect the people that need protected when they become targets of attack.
I wouldn't really call the NVA a guerilla force. They used those tactics somewhat, but the guerilla force was the Vietcong and they got wiped in the Tet offensive. It was the NVA that won the war.
Thanks for the correction, I hope to start studying the socialist history of Vietnam much more
The best thing I would say is the NVA wanted to position itself where US ground forces had to engage with it directly and have a war of attrition, which the US could not politically do while similarly the south was an illegitimate corrupt state that nobody was interested in dying for in a war of attrition so pushing their conscripts to go die would just lead to defections. They did that by going into the jugle to make US air power and artillery less effective while also using Soviet air defense and jets. Guerilla tactics usually avoids massed fighting against your enemy, but that's actually what the NVA wanted.
If the US could march into North Vietnam that'd be a different story but they were entirely unwilling to do anything like that because it would've taken incredible manpower and casualties and the US public was not for it.