Q10.Discuss the conflicting views of two great revolutionary leaders in Vietnam.
Answers
The conflicting views of two great revolutionary leaders in Vietnam were between Phan boi chau and phan chu trinh who were the Japanese scholar in between phan boi chau thought to bring monarchy back for independence and phan chu trinh wanted as the eastern people have which is monarchy.
Answer:
What both advocates for and critics of the Vietnam War got wrong about North Vietnam: its radical commitment to communist revolution
During the 20th century, anti-Western revolutions swept throughout Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Embracing ideologies from communism to Islamism, these revolutions sought to overthrow or roll back Western domination.
Revolutionary states—whether large like the Soviet Union and China, or small like Cuba and Nicaragua—might have hindered the West, but they were never able to defeat it. Many have collapsed, including the once mighty Soviet Union, and most survivors have made peace with their former Western enemies.
Nevertheless, even small revolutionary states had tremendous impact on world politics in their heydays. This is particularly true of communist North Vietnam, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which at one point provoked the United Stated to commit about half a million troops to defending South Vietnam and to fight a long, bitter, and divisive conflict.
North Vietnam’s war profoundly divided American citizens, seriously damaged American credibility around the world, and lent moral support to many radical movements in Africa and Latin America. Some observers credit the conflict for inspiring “antisystemic movements” in the 1960s and 1970s in North America, Europe, Japan, and Latin America; another source counts at least 14 revolutions that ensued in the seven years following US withdrawal of troops from South Vietnam in 1973.
Revolutionary impact aside, America’s failure at hands of North Vietnam also led to changes in US military strategy and caused the US to retreat from nation-building missions abroad in the subsequent two decades—a self-restraint that was only partially lifted with the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.
Given their limited military and economic capabilities, the ability and determination of small but radical states like North Vietnam to inflict such humiliation on a superpower poses a significant analytical puzzle: What were the thoughts of revolutionary leaders in those states? How could they even consider challenging those much more powerful than they were?
These questions must be asked of all revolutions, but they hold special importance in the Vietnamese case because the nature of this revolution has been widely misunderstood. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese revolutionaries were commonly portrayed either as dominoes in the game of big powers or as essentially nationalists who inherited a tradition of patriotism and were motivated by national independence—but the North Vietnamese were in fact radicals who dedicated their careers to realizing a communist utopia.
In opposing American intervention in Vietnam, contemporary critics and antiwar activists typically claimed that the Vietnamese revolution was aimed at achieving national self-determination. Vietnamese revolutionaries were said to be reenacting the patriotic tradition of their ancestors through the millennia. Because that tradition had historically been directed against China, Vietnam would not be a menace to the US and could even serve as an American ally to contain Communist China. Senator William Fulbright, an early critic of American policy, stated as much:
Ho Chi Minh is not a mere agent of Communist China…He is a bona fide nationalist revolutionary, the leader of his country’s rebellion against French colonialism. He is also…a dedicated communist but always a Vietnamese communist…For our purposes, the significance of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism is that it is associated with what Bernard Fall has called “the 2,000-year-old distrust in Vietnam of everything Chinese.” Vietnamese communism is therefore a potential bulwark—perhaps the only potential bulwark—against Chinese domination of Vietnam.
Dr. Martin Luther King, in a famous address in 1967, similarly took issue with the US government for rejecting
a revolutionary [Vietnamese] government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.