A compilation of relevant content on the Second Indochina War.
Books
* War Crimes in Vietnam - Bertrand Russell
* Vietnam: Anatomy of a War, 1940-1975 - Gabriel Kolko
* Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace - Gabriel Kolko
* Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States, and the War - Douglas B. Allen and Ngo Vinh Long (eds.)
* At War with Asia: Essays on Indochina - Noam Chomsky
* The Political Economy of Human Rights - Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
* Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
* Vietnam: Peasant Land, Peasant Revolution: Patriarchy and Collectivity in the Rural Economy - Nancy Wiegersma
* Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam - Gareth Porter
* A People's History of the Vietnam War - Jonathan Neale
* Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture - Noam Chomsky
* Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal - Howard Zinn
* Vietnam: A History in Documents - Gareth Porter
* The Pentagon Papers
* Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism - Gareth Porter
* The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 - Marilyn Young
* Giai Phong!: The Fall and Liberation of Saigon - Tiziano Terzani
Articles and essays
* "America's War in Indochina" (in Root & Branch) - Paul Mattick
* "Notes on the War in Vietnam and American Capitalism" (in Root & Branch) - Jorge M. E.
* "Vietnam: Whose Victory?" - Bob Potter
* "The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam's Land Reform Reconsidered" (in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) - Gareth Porter
* "The Myth of the Hue Massacre" (in Ramparts) - Edward S. Herman and Gareth Porter
* "Vietnam: The Real Enemy" (in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) - Ngo Vinh Long
* "Cambodia (Kampuchea): History, Tragedy, and Uncertain Future" - Michael Vickery
* "The United States and Indochina: Far from an Aberration" (in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars) - Noam Chomsky
* "The Impossible Victory: Vietnam" (in A People's History of the United States) - Howard Zinn
* "The 'bloodbath' in Vietnam [is] just a myth" (in The Boston Globe) - Howard Zinn
* "On the Emergence of Bourgeois Society in Indochina" - Kommunistisches Programm
* "The Formation of the Vietnamese Nation-State" - Kommunistisches Programm
* "National Revolution and Downfall of Cambodia" - Kommunistisches Programm
Audio and Video
Comments
Feel free to modify/change…
Feel free to modify/change the image if it's too graphic (it's of the My Lai Massacre), and please suggest stuff to add to the reading guide.
Thanks for getting this…
Thanks for getting this started. For now I have moved this into the Further reading guide. Have updated the graphic image, and used the latest Solidarity pamphlet which superseded the earlier one.
The German communist left…
The German communist left journal Kommunistisches Programm had a three part series that may be relevant, translated by Libri Incogniti:
https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/kommunistisches-programm-on-the-emergence-of-bourgeois-society-in-indochina/
https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2021/02/18/kommunistisches-programm-the-formation-of-the-vietnamese-national-state/
https://libriincogniti.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/kommunistisches-programm-national-revolution-and-downfall-of-cambodia/
I found it interesting, bearing in mind the usual Bordigist quirks.
The German communist left…
Not a bad analysis. I'll add it to the list. There are certainly more works just critiquing American imperialism than there are those critiquing both that and the Lao Dong Party/Vietnamese Communist Party, so it's sort of refreshing to see both. Then again the majority of Vietnamese actually supported Ho and the DRV, as American officials constantly lament throughout the documentary record, and which was also the reason why the Diem government refused to ever hold the reunification elections as specified in the Geneva Accords of 1954. Nonetheless, I agree that there was nothing "socialist/communist" about the Vietnamese Communist Party, whether before or after reunification.
Thanks for getting this…
Np. I'll try to add links for the books and articles and possibly upload some of the content on here. I'll also probably reformat all the entries into proper citations with more info at some point (kind of like the China reading guide).
It's rather interesting how…
It's rather interesting how the term "Viet Cong" was actually a pejorative invented by the Saigon government that the National Liberation Front never used themselves (and which is still not used in Vietnam today). Ngo Vinh Long (who recently passed away) argued that it was coined by Nguyễn Văn Châu as a homonym for "Diệt Cộng" (meaning to "annihilate the communists") and was part of the Diem government's Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign. See this correspondence here, and also the above "Remembering Vietnam" clip starting at around 14:53. It's sort of a testament to the effectiveness of U.S./Saigon propaganda that virtually everyone in the West, whether intentionally or not, treats it as if it were some "official term" for the NLF (or rather the Vietnamese who rose up against the aggression of the U.S.-backed Diem regime). I'd be interested in other sources discussing the origins of the term; most sources seem to acknowledge that it's a pejorative or slang term, but don't really go into any depth.