Political Warfare in Republican Vietnam
Political Warfare in Republican Vietnam

Author: Robert A. Silano

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-08-30

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1476668116

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This work examines the development of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces as a national institution; explores the historical origins of the political warfare system; and assesses that system's nurturing of military morale, popular support, and ways to weaken enemy resolve. North Vietnam in the 1940s and South Vietnam in the 1960s embraced the system of political control over the military that was developed in Soviet Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and in Republican China in the 1920s where it influenced both the Nationalist and Communist movements. The book discusses the overall effectiveness of political warfare activities in the Republic of Vietnam's army, the advice and support offered by the U.S. military to the South Vietnamese political warfare establishment, and the consequences of the war's end for the members of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces who served in the political warfare system.

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975
The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975

Author: Tuong Vu

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1501745158

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Through the voices of senior officials, teachers, soldiers, journalists, and artists, The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975, presents us with an interpretation of "South Vietnam" as a passionately imagined nation in the minds of ordinary Vietnamese, rather than merely as an expeditious political construct of the United States government. The moving and honest memoirs collected, translated, and edited here by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear describe the experiences of war, politics, and everyday life for people from many walks of life during the fraught years of Vietnam's Second Republic, leading up to and encompassing what Americans generally call the "Vietnam War." The voices gift the reader a sense of the authors' experiences in the Republic and their ideas about the nation during that time. The light and careful editing hand of Vu and Fear reveals that far from a Cold War proxy struggle, the conflict in Vietnam featured a true ideological divide between the communist North and the non-communist South.

Vietnamese Colonial Republican
Vietnamese Colonial Republican

Author: Peter Zinoman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2013-11-16

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0520276280

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This volume is a comprehensive study of VietnamÕs greatest and most controversial 20th century writer who died tragically in 1939 at the age of 28. Vu Trong Phung is known for a remarkable collection of politically provocative novels and sensational works of non-fiction reportage that were banned by the communist state from 1960 to 1986. Leading Vietnam scholar, Zinoman, resurrects the life and work of an important intellectual and author in order to reveal a neglected political project that is excluded from conventional accounts of modern Vietnamese political history. He sees Vu Trong Phung as a leading proponent of a localized republican tradition that opposed colonialism, communism, and unfettered capitalismÑand that led both to the banning of his work and to the durability of his popular appeal in Vietnam today.

Disunion
Disunion

Author: Nu-Anh Tran

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2022-02-28

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0824891635

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Since the 1950s, the domestic politics of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) has puzzled outside observers. To these external analysts, the American-backed regime seemed to be plagued by instability and factionalism for no apparent reason. Their bewilderment, however, has obscured a deep and complex history. In Disunion, Nu-Anh Tran shows how factional struggles in the Saigon-based republic reflected serious disagreements about political ideas at a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the Vietnam War. The book traces the emergence of Vietnam’s anticommunist nationalists back to the struggle for independence and explores how their alliances were tested and then broken during the rule of the RVN’s first president, Ngô Đình Diệm. The anticommunists rejected the authoritarianism and ideology of the Vietnamese communists and dreamed of building an independent, democratic government that would unite the Vietnamese nation. The RVN was supposed to be the fulfillment of this long-cherished vision. But discord soon erupted among the anticommunists. Politicians fiercely debated to what extent the government should be democratic and which groups had a legitimate place in political life. The unresolved disagreements provoked intense and continuous infighting that troubled the RVN throughout the regime’s existence. Ultimately, the animosity undermined any possibility of realizing the anticommunists’ shared vision for the country. Based on previously neglected primary sources and extensive research in Vietnamese and American archives, Disunion paints a rich and sensitive portrayal of leaders and activists in the RVN. Anticommunist nationalists were deeply devoted to their homeland and inspired by forward-looking visions, but they were also hobbled by their failure to live up to their lofty ideals. By examining these historical figures on their own terms, the book offers a fresh perspective on the political history of South Vietnam that has remained misunderstood to this day.

The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War
The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War

Author: Seth Offenbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-19

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0429559410

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The Vietnam War was the central political issue of the 1960s and 1970s. This study by Seth Offenbach explains how the conflict shaped modern conservatism. The war caused disputes between the pro-war anti-communists right and libertarian conservatives who opposed the war. At the same time, Christian evangelicals supported the war and began forming alliances with the mainstream, pro-war right. This enabled the formation of the New Right movement which came to dominate U.S. politics at the end of the twentieth century. The Conservative Movement and the Vietnam War explains the right’s changes between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Vietnam
Vietnam

Author: Michael Lind

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-07-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1439135266

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Michael Lind casts new light on one of the most contentious episodes in American history in this controversial bestseller. In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context—as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war. In an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.

Our Year of War
Our Year of War

Author: Daniel P. Bolger

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0306903245

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Two brothers -- Chuck and Tom Hagel -- who went to war in Vietnam, fought in the same unit, and saved each other's life. They disagreed about the war, but they fought it together. 1968. America was divided. Flag-draped caskets came home by the thousands. Riots ravaged our cities. Assassins shot our political leaders. Black fought white, young fought old, fathers fought sons. And it was the year that two brothers from Nebraska went to war. In Vietnam, Chuck and Tom Hagel served side by side in the same rifle platoon. Together they fought in the Mekong Delta, battled snipers in Saigon, chased the enemy through the jungle, and each saved the other's life under fire. But when their one-year tour was over, these two brothers came home side-by-side but no longer in step -- one supporting the war, the other hating it. Former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and his brother Tom epitomized the best, and withstood the worst, of the most tumultuous, shocking, and consequential year in the last half-century. Following the brothers' paths from the prairie heartland through a war on the far side of the world and back to a divided America, Our Year of War tells the story of two brothers at war -- a gritty, poignant, and resonant story of a family and a nation divided yet still united.

The American Warfare State
The American Warfare State

Author: Rebecca U. Thorpe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-04-16

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 022612410X

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How is it that the United States—a country founded on a distrust of standing armies and strong centralized power—came to have the most powerful military in history? Long after World War II and the end of the Cold War, in times of rising national debt and reduced need for high levels of military readiness, why does Congress still continue to support massive defense budgets? In The American Warfare State, Rebecca U. Thorpe argues that there are profound relationships among the size and persistence of the American military complex, the growth in presidential power to launch military actions, and the decline of congressional willingness to check this power. The public costs of military mobilization and war, including the need for conscription and higher tax rates, served as political constraints on warfare for most of American history. But the vast defense industry that emerged from World War II also created new political interests that the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate. Many rural and semirural areas became economically reliant on defense-sector jobs and capital, which gave the legislators representing them powerful incentives to press for ongoing defense spending regardless of national security circumstances or goals. At the same time, the costs of war are now borne overwhelmingly by a minority of soldiers who volunteer to fight, future generations of taxpayers, and foreign populations in whose lands wars often take place. Drawing on an impressive cache of data, Thorpe reveals how this new incentive structure has profoundly reshaped the balance of wartime powers between Congress and the president, resulting in a defense industry perennially poised for war and an executive branch that enjoys unprecedented discretion to take military action.

The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism
The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism

Author: Philippe M.F. Peycam

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0231528043

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Philippe M. F. Peycam completes the first ever English-language study of Vietnam's emerging political press and its resistance to colonialism. Published in the decade that preceded the Communist Party's founding, this journalistic phenomenon established a space for public, political contestation that fundamentally changed Vietnamese attitudes and the outlook of Southeast Asia. Peycam directly links Saigon's colonial urbanization to the creation of new modes of individual and collective political agency. To better justify their presence, French colonialists implemented a peculiar brand of republican imperialism to encourage the development of a highly controlled print capitalism. Yet the Vietnamese made clever use of this new form of political expression, subverting colonial discourse and putting French rulers on the defensive, while simultaneously stoking Vietnamese aspirations for autonomy. Peycam specifically considers the work of Western-educated Vietnamese journalists who, in their legal writings, called attention to the politics of French rule. Peycam rejects the notion that Communist and nationalist ideologies changed the minds of "alienated" Vietnamese during this period. Rather, he credits colonial urban modernity with shaping the Vietnamese activist-journalist and the role of the French, even at their most coercive, along with the modern public Vietnamese intellectual and his responsibility toward the group. Countering common research on anticolonial nationalism and its assumptions of ethno-cultural homogeneity, Peycam follows the merging of French republican and anarchist traditions with neo-Confucian Vietnamese behavior, giving rise to modern Vietnamese public activism, its autonomy, and its contradictory aspirations. Interweaving biography with archival newspaper and French police sources, he writes from within these journalists' changing political consciousness and their shifting perception of social roles.

Haunting Legacy
Haunting Legacy

Author: Marvin Kalb

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 081572389X

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The United States had never lost a war —that is, until 1975, when it was forced to flee Saigon in humiliation after losing to what Lyndon Johnson called a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country." The legacy of this first defeat has haunted every president since, especially on the decision of whether to put "boots on the ground" and commit troops to war. In Haunting Legacy, the father-daughter journalist team of Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb presents a compelling, accessible, and hugely important history of presidential decisionmaking on one crucial issue: in light of the Vietnam debacle, under what circumstances should the United States go to war? The sobering lesson of Vietnam is that the United States is not invincible —it can lose a war —and thus it must be more discriminating about the use of American power. Every president has faced the ghosts of Vietnam in his own way, though each has been wary of being sucked into another unpopular war. Ford (during the Mayaguez crisis) and both Bushes (Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan) deployed massive force, as if to say, "Vietnam, be damned." On the other hand, Carter, Clinton, and Reagan (to the surprise of many) acted with extreme caution, mindful of the Vietnam experience. Obama has also wrestled with the Vietnam legacy, using doses of American firepower in Libya while still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authors spent five years interviewing hundreds of officials from every post war administration and conducting extensive research in presidential libraries and archives, and they've produced insight and information never before published. Equal parts taut history, revealing biography, and cautionary tale, Haunting Legacy is must reading for anyone trying to understand the power of the past to influence war-and-peace decisions of the present, and of the future.