The War Against the Working Class by Will Podmore

Author:Will Podmore [Podmore, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781503531109
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Published: 2015-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

Vietnam’s victory

Vietnam, like Korea, was until 1945 a single united country. In 1945, the people of Vietnam made their revolution and evicted the French, in the first overthrow of a colonial state, and President Ho Chi Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), establishing state power in the north of the country.

But in October, the Labour government authorised British troops ‘throughout Southern French IndoChina, to maintain order in support of the French government’. British forces assisted the French coup against the Viet Minh administration in Saigon and imposed martial law throughout South Vietnam. Their commander, General Douglas Gracey, boasted, “I was welcomed on arrival by the VietMinh … I promptly kicked them out.” The British and US governments divided Vietnam, supposedly temporarily.

From 1946, French governments fought to reimpose their colonial rule over Vietnam. But the Vietnamese people gradually wore down the French forces. Finally, the French risked a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. Towards the end of the battle, the French government, desperate to avoid defeat, begged the Eisenhower government to launch a huge bombing raid on the Vietminh forces. Eisenhower said that he would only intervene if the Churchill government did too. To their credit, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden refused. Eisenhower then tried to get the Australian government to intervene. It too refused. Its allies forced the US government not to intervene.

This Vietnamese victory crowned their successful struggle. As American historian Fredrik Logevall summed up, “The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.”16

But in their eight-year war, French forces killed 175,000 Vietminh fighters and at least 300,000 civilians. The French wrecked much of the country. When they left, they dismantled hospitals and stripped factories of tools, machinery, even lightbulbs.17

Vietnam’s 1953 Law on Farm Land Reforms confiscated the farms of colonial and feudal owners, landlords and capitalists, and gave the land to more than half of all families, under the slogan of ‘farms to the cultivators’. Ho Chi Minh tried to curb any excesses. When a people’s tribunal had a woman landlord executed, he said, “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower, and you, you allowed her to be shot!” On 8 February 1955, at a conference on land reform, he said, “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric. … It is absolutely forbidden to use physical punishment.”18

At the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference, the British, French, Chinese and Soviet governments agreed, “In their relations with Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, each member of the Geneva Conference undertakes to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and the territorial integrity of the above-mentioned states and to refrain from any interference in their internal affairs.

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