Second indochina war: further reading guide

Bombing of Vietnam, 1965, public domain

A compilation of relevant content on the Second Indochina War.

Submitted by adri on January 7, 2023

Books

* War Crimes in Vietnam - Bertrand Russell
* Vietnam: Anatomy of a War, 1940-1975 - Gabriel Kolko
* Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace - Gabriel Kolko
* 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: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism - Gareth Porter
* The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 - Marilyn Young
* Giai Phong!: The Fall and Liberation of Saigon - Tiziano Terzani
* Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level - Edwin E. Moise
* The "Silent Majority" Speech: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the Origins of the New Right - Scott Laderman
* In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary - Ngo Van
* The Third Force in the Vietnam Wars: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 - Sophie Quinn-Judge
* The Pol Pot Regime - Ben Kiernan
* How Pol Pot Came to Power - Ben Kiernan
* Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present - Ben Kiernan
* Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia - William Shawcross
* The United States and Cambodia, 1872-1969: From Curiosity to Confrontation - Kenton Clymer
* The United States and Cambodia, 1969-2000: A Troubled Relationship - Kenton Clymer
* Cambodia, Pol Pot, and the United States: The Faustian Pact - Michael Haas
* 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft - Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow

Anthologies

* Four Decades on: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War - Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini
* Coming to Terms: Indochina, the United States, and the War - Douglas B. Allen and Ngo Vinh Long

Primary sources

* Ho Chi Minh: Selected Writings 1920-1969 - Ho Chi Minh
* The Vietnam War: A History in Documents (Pages from History) - Marilyn B. Young, John J. Fitzgerald, A. Tom Grunfeld (eds.)
* Vietnam: A History in Documents - Gareth Porter (ed.)
* Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays - Robert McMahon (ed.)
* The Pentagon Papers
* "Land-to-the-Tiller in South Vietnam: The Tables Turn" - Roy L. Prosterman
* The Military Art of People's War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap - Vo Nguyen Giap (ed. Russell Stetler)
* Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 - David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, Chanthou Boua (eds.)
* Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981 - Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua (eds.)
* My War with the CIA: The Memoirs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk as Related to Wilfred Burchett - Norodom Sihanouk
* "Memorandum of Conversation: Secretary's Meeting with Foreign Minister Chatichai of Thailand" - Henry Kissinger and Chatichai Choonhavan

Articles, essays, and chapters

* "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
* "A Necessary Salve: The 'Hue Massacre' in History and Memory" (in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History) - Scott Laderman
* "Land Reform and Land Reform Errors in North Vietnam" - Edwin E. Moise
* "'Before It Is Too Late': Land Reform in South Vietnam, 1956-1968" - David A. Conrad
* "Rural Resettlement in South Viet Nam: The Agroville Program" - Joseph J. Zasloff
* "The American Bombardment of Kampuchea, 1969-1973" (in Vietnam Generation) - Ben Kiernan

Audio and video

* "Remembering Vietnam" - Ngo Vinh Long and Noam Chomsky
* Four Hours in My Lai - Kevin Sim

Comments

adri

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by adri on January 7, 2023

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.

Steven.

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on January 9, 2023

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.

sherbu-kteer

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by sherbu-kteer on January 9, 2023

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.

adri

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by adri on January 10, 2023

The German communist left journal Kommunistisches Programm had a three part series that may be relevant, translated by Libri Incogniti:

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.

adri

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by adri on January 10, 2023

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.

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).

adri

1 year 2 months ago

Submitted by adri on January 29, 2023

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.

adri

7 months 2 weeks ago

Submitted by adri on August 14, 2023

I feel like it deserves a special mention that Nguyen Cao Ky, the South Vietnamese Prime Minister and later Vice President, expressed an admiration for Hitler on numerous occasions, such as in a 1965 interview with a British journalist. Ky made such comments while American officials attempted to portray "communism" in Vietnam (a peasant country) as an existential threat on the same level as Nazi Germany. War hawks also cited the Western accommodation of Nazi Germany (e.g. the Munich Agreement) as an example of why the U.S. should act more decisively in Southeast Asia. It was thus not very convenient for the U.S. when one of the people they were supporting described Hitler as their only hero! It was reported in a number of different news outlets at the time. Here's the Jewish Telegraphic Agency for example:

A statement by South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky that Adolf Hitler is his personal hero has upset Washington officials committed to the Saigon regime, it was learned here today. Gen. Ky told the London Sunday Mirror, in an interview printed in the Washington Post, that “People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one–Hitler.”

Gen. Ky explained that the basis of his admiration for the Nazi Fuehrer was that Hitler succeeded in unifying a divided Germany around himself. He reportedly added that South Viet Nam should have “four or five Hitlers to deal with subversive elements and unify the Vietnamese nation.”

One official source here said that Gen. Ky may have admired Hitler as a nationalist leader of Germany, but that Washington authorities felt this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.