A BLOG ABOUT HISTORY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND THE PROBLEMS OF HUMAN DOMINION
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
HIST300F: In the Nam
Does the American war in Vietnam offer us historical continuity when we think about the other imperialisms we've considered (i.e. what patterns appear similar)? Or is it a moment of rupture in American imperial history?
There were some similarities between Vietnam and the Philippines. In the Philippines, the U.S. was conquering the "tropics" and the "salvages". The U.S. viewed Vietnam as a "third-class Communist peasant state" pg. 291Which is a similar mentality that is seen with the Philippines; they are "sub human". Also, Adas discusses U.S. superiority in technology, and how this effected the attitudes of important leaders. This is a theme that is seen through out U.S. history. Like the Philippines, the U.S. wanted to emphasis programs of surveillance on the population. This is seen with the Strategic Hamlet Program that wanted these measures to provide "security for a rural population". pg. 306 The Philippines helped lay the foundation to some respect of what occupying a country will become. However, I do think Vietnam is a unique example and in a lot of respects is vastly different from the Philippines.
I think the similarities are that Americans went into Vietnam expecting similar outcomes as in the Philippines but it turned out very differently. That similar notion was to improve their standard of living. The Strategic Hamlet program was “to provide rural development and peasant security.” (317) These matched the outwardly notions for reasons to go in and set up a system that models American Democracy. Vietnam factors in the cold war and fear of communism whereas in the Philippines, American government and military focused on setting up an economic system in which Americans could extract their natural resources. I agree with Cassie, there were vast differences between Vietnam and Philippines.
I think that Vietnam was a deliberate attempt by Americans for furthering their imperialism. Adas argues that it was "seen by U.S. policymakers as a superb arena in which to test American approaches to development and to demonstrate the advantages of capitalist democracy over communist alternatives (289)." The war was fought over these developmental ideologies. Unfortunately for the U.S., the Vietnamese was prepared and willing to endure devastation and death for a prolonged period of time through means of their guerrilla warfare. As Adas noted, the Vietnamese did not have good technology and mobility by Western standards, but the Americans completely underestimated their culture and history; Both of which influenced their fighting tactics. Similar to the U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, the U.S. expressed its involvement in humanitarian terms. Both occupations were racially charged, yet the Philippines did not have other outside nations like the Soviet Union and China also trying to influence the development in their favor. This made the justification of so many American deaths in a prolonged war more difficult for the U.S., because if they lost, they were not simply losing to what they considered an inferior race but to other potential world powers. I think Vietnam was the first time the U.S. saw that dominion over certain lands, even disguised as aid to inferior peoples, was not going to be as easy as the Philippines had been.
I think that Vietnam was a continuation of U.S. empire building. The empire building in Vietnam was more subtle than other imperial ventures like the Philippines. The U.S. was more concerned with creating allies rather than empires, but the allies would be controlled by a puppet government ruled by the U.S. So the U.S. didn't have actual american governments in these foreign countries but the U.S. was still in control. Adas' book also talks about similarities to other empire building attempts by the U.S. The belief in superior technology so a strong driving force in Vietnam. The U.S. thought that their superior military power could defeat the Vietcong, especially through the use of the Air Force.
Similar to Americans in the Philippines, Americans in Vietnam were extremely confident in their technology. Americans in Vietnam believed that their technological superiority would help them deliver economic and technical assistance to South Vietnam. Vietnam was also used as a “laboratory” for testing new weaponry or other innovations similar to the Philippines. In contrast to the Philippines, the focus of American intervention became military repression since Americans in Vietnam underestimated the NLF’s capacity to withstand high-tech assaults. Therefore, Americans were not able to focus a lot on transforming the country physically and socially like they had done in the Philippines.
There are definitely some similarities, but I think everyone who's posted already is on to something as far as the uniqueness of the Cold War mentality and ideology. There is something different about Vietnam and the motivations fueling the interest of the US, China, and USSR. The Vietnam War also sort of served as a humbling experience for the hubris of American technology. I think it was certainly a rupture in the popular memory of US imperial history. Vietnam changed the way Americans talked about imperialism
When U.S. soldiers were sent into Vietnam, despite the technological superiority we possessed over the Vietnamese, our soldiers were not expecting the brutal, bloody tactics that the Vietcong were administering. The Vietnam War was quite different from any other conflict that the U.S. has taken part in. In other cases, soldiers were given a mission and at the very least they were aware of the general reasons as to why they were being sent to fight and what the primary objective of the mission was. For example, in World War II, the main objective for the U.S. was to fight the Japanese, for the bombed Pearl Harbor and to fight the Germans and anyone who sympathized with the German Nazi’s. Fairly simple and straight to the point, and of course, because there was an attack on American soil, many Americans were proud to stand up and fight or stand behind the soldiers that were sent to do battle. In the case of Vietnam however, many soldiers were unaware of the exact mission they were there for, other than to fight the communist Vietcong. The U.S. government provoked fear and hysteria that communism was spreading and it threatened the existence of the U.S. democracy. Through the Domino Theory, U.S. policymakers and advisors believed that the spread of communism was like the game of dominoes, and once one country falls prey to it, all other surrounding nation states will as well. With this being said, I don’t understand how a small, economically poor country would threaten the U.S. existence of democracy. However, whether imperialistic or not, there must have been some form of financial or economic gain that the U.S. was hoping for.
During this period, the U.S. lost roughly 58,000 American troops, and many of them didn’t even know what they were fighting for. In this aspect, one could see the similarities between Vietnam and the occupation in the Philippines, because many soldiers then were unsure of the exact objective of their mission. Whether the intent of the United States was to expand their empire or not, it was a venture that failed. “Imperialistic arrogance, personal gain and prestige, greed, anti-Communist hysteria, and the desire to control, drove the decision-making process that led the US to war.”
American Imperialism in Vietnam had a very different outcome than they did in the Philippines. Unlike their campaign in the Philippines, their imperial mission in Vietnam was a disaster. According to Adas, "American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society matched by intensively of outright hostility to Vietnamese culture, which was apparent at all levels from war councils in the White House to U.S. infantrymen confronting peasants in the countryside of South Vietnam." (Adas, 297). One of the main reasons that the Americans were ignorant about the Vietnamese was the inaccurate material that is fed to their computers. American ignorance has led of Americans not only losing the war, but also led to South Vietnam surrendering to North Vietnam and therefore, Vietnam was officially became communist as a whole.
American confidence in its own ability to fix the worlds problems, including Vietnam, turned that conflict into a prime example of how technology and American Exceptionalism can't solve everything (or most things, really). Especially in an evolving and increasingly electrified age. Vietnam helped prove that American imperialism would find it difficult to assert any influence in the future via purely military means.
I think that there is obviously some level of continuity between the American imperialist tendencies of the past to overlap on the Vietnam War simply because it would be ludicrous to assert that those tendencies simply fluttered away with the onset of the cold war. I think that Adas' interpretation of American technological imperialism shows this continuity between the past and present American empire experiences. Adas talks of how "Kennedy's advisors displayed both ignorance of local conditions and overweening faith in technological solutions that would drive U.S. interventions in Vietnam." As with the Philippines, where the advancing technological capacities of the police state designed there to counter the Filipino insurgency, Vietnam served as a critical testing ground for new developmental technologies to use both against the local populous and to see if those technologies could be used in other foreign military interventions. While Adas makes a good case for why US imperialism remained similar during this time I think that it also altered from its once overtly racially-motivated imperialism to a more subtle approach to fulfill the same ends. In many regards, this form of imperialism did not change. While hidden behind the guise of combating the specter of global communism, Americans were still subtly seeking to expand their empire in the hopes to civilize non-white people in an attempt to make them more like themselves, in ideology and physicality. For instance, take the steady Americanization of the war. On the one hand, it is clearly discernable through a study of public documents and newspapers that this was employed to help prop up a falling Saigonese regime that could not support itself amidst its own corruption and ineptitude. However, on the other hand, this American escalation and increased presence in country can also be viewed as a means to initiate US cultural assimilation onto the South Vietnamese. This was rationalized as a means to help save the South Vietnamese from communism but in fact, it would appear that it also had the benefit of transposing US cultural, economic, ideological, and even physical norms onto their South Vietnamese styles. South Vietnamese military units were seen as inferior by many members of the US armed services and the US public because their fighting style and view of military service were incredibly different from that in the United States. Their cultural views were entirely different from those of the United States and thus their system of governance and economic realities aligned much more easily with socialist ideals. However, it would appear that the presence of American fighting men would be able to show the Vietnamese that communism, regardless of whether it worked better in their society as opposed to capitalism, was bad and should not only not be instituted in Vietnam but it should in fact have been fought against even to their last breath. All these point to how very little change occurred in US imperialism during this era.
The trend for the United States went really bad even though it looked as if things would be good. It is easy to think that the United States would win the Vietnam war considering we had the power and the technology to do anything. We could destroy entire nations at the flick of a switch. However, Vietnam was different.. they didn't think like we did. They did not fight like we did.
The United States could have felt that the Vietnamese were inferior because of this guerilla fighting tactics. But (according to several sources) this tactic worked. It was amazingly wonderful how powerful the US Military is on the open floor, but scary when you add the jungle into the mix.
But there is an issue, American Imperialism is an amazing thing where we try to tell other countries what to do (sarcasm). The problem comes when we take things to the max. "Domino Theory" dictates that we have to stop N. Vietnam from spreading to the south. To do this, they invade a nation and then at the end of the story, S. Vietnam goes south. Sadly, the North Takes over and a United Vietnam is hatched.
For the United States, Imperialism is almost over, with a major defeat. Imperialism starts dying when there is nothing else to conquer and when you start loosing.
I think like many others have posted that there are connections between the Vietnam war and the past American Imperial ventures. Our belief that our superior technology could win the battle in any theater we went continued into Vietnam, though in the end we were proven wrong. In the past Imperial ventures that America went on our soldiers used derogatory or racial slurs against there enemies to create a sense that they were not fighting real people. This trend continued with U.S. soldiers into Vietnam as well. Though some of the ideas and trends we have looked at may not be as prevalent in Vietnam, many survived or at least made appearances in the war.
I think that Americans went into Vietnam expecting similar outcomes as in the Philippines but it turned out very differently. The Philippines helped lay the foundation to some respect of what occupying a country will become. Also the Philippines paved the way for major health reforms and the Philippines was more of an experiment. America went into Vietnam with the game plan of just trying to out number and put a stronghold on the Vietnamese. When America wasn’t able to succeed in their plans, Americans were not able to focus a lot on transforming the country physically and socially like they had done in the Philippines.
There were some similarities between Vietnam and the Philippines. In the Philippines, the U.S. was conquering the "tropics" and the "salvages". The U.S. viewed Vietnam as a "third-class Communist peasant state" pg. 291Which is a similar mentality that is seen with the Philippines; they are "sub human". Also, Adas discusses U.S. superiority in technology, and how this effected the attitudes of important leaders. This is a theme that is seen through out U.S. history. Like the Philippines, the U.S. wanted to emphasis programs of surveillance on the population. This is seen with the Strategic Hamlet Program that wanted these measures to provide "security for a rural population". pg. 306 The Philippines helped lay the foundation to some respect of what occupying a country will become. However, I do think Vietnam is a unique example and in a lot of respects is vastly different from the Philippines.
ReplyDeleteI think the similarities are that Americans went into Vietnam expecting similar outcomes as in the Philippines but it turned out very differently. That similar notion was to improve their standard of living. The Strategic Hamlet program was “to provide rural development and peasant security.” (317) These matched the outwardly notions for reasons to go in and set up a system that models American Democracy. Vietnam factors in the cold war and fear of communism whereas in the Philippines, American government and military focused on setting up an economic system in which Americans could extract their natural resources. I agree with Cassie, there were vast differences between Vietnam and Philippines.
ReplyDeleteI think that Vietnam was a deliberate attempt by Americans for furthering their imperialism. Adas argues that it was "seen by U.S. policymakers as a superb arena in which to test American approaches to development and to demonstrate the advantages of capitalist democracy over communist alternatives (289)." The war was fought over these developmental ideologies. Unfortunately for the U.S., the Vietnamese was prepared and willing to endure devastation and death for a prolonged period of time through means of their guerrilla warfare. As Adas noted, the Vietnamese did not have good technology and mobility by Western standards, but the Americans completely underestimated their culture and history; Both of which influenced their fighting tactics. Similar to the U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, the U.S. expressed its involvement in humanitarian terms. Both occupations were racially charged, yet the Philippines did not have other outside nations like the Soviet Union and China also trying to influence the development in their favor. This made the justification of so many American deaths in a prolonged war more difficult for the U.S., because if they lost, they were not simply losing to what they considered an inferior race but to other potential world powers. I think Vietnam was the first time the U.S. saw that dominion over certain lands, even disguised as aid to inferior peoples, was not going to be as easy as the Philippines had been.
ReplyDeleteI think that Vietnam was a continuation of U.S. empire building. The empire building in Vietnam was more subtle than other imperial ventures like the Philippines. The U.S. was more concerned with creating allies rather than empires, but the allies would be controlled by a puppet government ruled by the U.S. So the U.S. didn't have actual american governments in these foreign countries but the U.S. was still in control.
ReplyDeleteAdas' book also talks about similarities to other empire building attempts by the U.S. The belief in superior technology so a strong driving force in Vietnam. The U.S. thought that their superior military power could defeat the Vietcong, especially through the use of the Air Force.
Similar to Americans in the Philippines, Americans in Vietnam were extremely confident in their technology. Americans in Vietnam believed that their technological superiority would help them deliver economic and technical assistance to South Vietnam. Vietnam was also used as a “laboratory” for testing new weaponry or other innovations similar to the Philippines. In contrast to the Philippines, the focus of American intervention became military repression since Americans in Vietnam underestimated the NLF’s capacity to withstand high-tech assaults. Therefore, Americans were not able to focus a lot on transforming the country physically and socially like they had done in the Philippines.
ReplyDeleteThere are definitely some similarities, but I think everyone who's posted already is on to something as far as the uniqueness of the Cold War mentality and ideology. There is something different about Vietnam and the motivations fueling the interest of the US, China, and USSR. The Vietnam War also sort of served as a humbling experience for the hubris of American technology. I think it was certainly a rupture in the popular memory of US imperial history. Vietnam changed the way Americans talked about imperialism
ReplyDeleteWhen U.S. soldiers were sent into Vietnam, despite the technological superiority we possessed over the Vietnamese, our soldiers were not expecting the brutal, bloody tactics that the Vietcong were administering. The Vietnam War was quite different from any other conflict that the U.S. has taken part in. In other cases, soldiers were given a mission and at the very least they were aware of the general reasons as to why they were being sent to fight and what the primary objective of the mission was. For example, in World War II, the main objective for the U.S. was to fight the Japanese, for the bombed Pearl Harbor and to fight the Germans and anyone who sympathized with the German Nazi’s. Fairly simple and straight to the point, and of course, because there was an attack on American soil, many Americans were proud to stand up and fight or stand behind the soldiers that were sent to do battle. In the case of Vietnam however, many soldiers were unaware of the exact mission they were there for, other than to fight the communist Vietcong. The U.S. government provoked fear and hysteria that communism was spreading and it threatened the existence of the U.S. democracy. Through the Domino Theory, U.S. policymakers and advisors believed that the spread of communism was like the game of dominoes, and once one country falls prey to it, all other surrounding nation states will as well. With this being said, I don’t understand how a small, economically poor country would threaten the U.S. existence of democracy. However, whether imperialistic or not, there must have been some form of financial or economic gain that the U.S. was hoping for.
ReplyDeleteDuring this period, the U.S. lost roughly 58,000 American troops, and many of them didn’t even know what they were fighting for. In this aspect, one could see the similarities between Vietnam and the occupation in the Philippines, because many soldiers then were unsure of the exact objective of their mission. Whether the intent of the United States was to expand their empire or not, it was a venture that failed. “Imperialistic arrogance, personal gain and prestige, greed, anti-Communist hysteria, and the desire to control, drove the decision-making process that led the US to war.”
American Imperialism in Vietnam had a very different outcome than they did in the Philippines. Unlike their campaign in the Philippines, their imperial mission in Vietnam was a disaster. According to Adas, "American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society matched by intensively of outright hostility to Vietnamese culture, which was apparent at all levels from war councils in the White House to U.S. infantrymen confronting peasants in the countryside of South Vietnam." (Adas, 297). One of the main reasons that the Americans were ignorant about the Vietnamese was the inaccurate material that is fed to their computers. American ignorance has led of Americans not only losing the war, but also led to South Vietnam surrendering to North Vietnam and therefore, Vietnam was officially became communist as a whole.
ReplyDeleteAmerican confidence in its own ability to fix the worlds problems, including Vietnam, turned that conflict into a prime example of how technology and American Exceptionalism can't solve everything (or most things, really). Especially in an evolving and increasingly electrified age. Vietnam helped prove that American imperialism would find it difficult to assert any influence in the future via purely military means.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is obviously some level of continuity between the American imperialist tendencies of the past to overlap on the Vietnam War simply because it would be ludicrous to assert that those tendencies simply fluttered away with the onset of the cold war. I think that Adas' interpretation of American technological imperialism shows this continuity between the past and present American empire experiences. Adas talks of how "Kennedy's advisors displayed both ignorance of local conditions and overweening faith in technological solutions that would drive U.S. interventions in Vietnam." As with the Philippines, where the advancing technological capacities of the police state designed there to counter the Filipino insurgency, Vietnam served as a critical testing ground for new developmental technologies to use both against the local populous and to see if those technologies could be used in other foreign military interventions. While Adas makes a good case for why US imperialism remained similar during this time I think that it also altered from its once overtly racially-motivated imperialism to a more subtle approach to fulfill the same ends. In many regards, this form of imperialism did not change. While hidden behind the guise of combating the specter of global communism, Americans were still subtly seeking to expand their empire in the hopes to civilize non-white people in an attempt to make them more like themselves, in ideology and physicality. For instance, take the steady Americanization of the war. On the one hand, it is clearly discernable through a study of public documents and newspapers that this was employed to help prop up a falling Saigonese regime that could not support itself amidst its own corruption and ineptitude. However, on the other hand, this American escalation and increased presence in country can also be viewed as a means to initiate US cultural assimilation onto the South Vietnamese. This was rationalized as a means to help save the South Vietnamese from communism but in fact, it would appear that it also had the benefit of transposing US cultural, economic, ideological, and even physical norms onto their South Vietnamese styles. South Vietnamese military units were seen as inferior by many members of the US armed services and the US public because their fighting style and view of military service were incredibly different from that in the United States. Their cultural views were entirely different from those of the United States and thus their system of governance and economic realities aligned much more easily with socialist ideals. However, it would appear that the presence of American fighting men would be able to show the Vietnamese that communism, regardless of whether it worked better in their society as opposed to capitalism, was bad and should not only not be instituted in Vietnam but it should in fact have been fought against even to their last breath. All these point to how very little change occurred in US imperialism during this era.
ReplyDeleteThe trend for the United States went really bad even though it looked as if things would be good. It is easy to think that the United States would win the Vietnam war considering we had the power and the technology to do anything. We could destroy entire nations at the flick of a switch. However, Vietnam was different.. they didn't think like we did. They did not fight like we did.
ReplyDeleteThe United States could have felt that the Vietnamese were inferior because of this guerilla fighting tactics. But (according to several sources) this tactic worked. It was amazingly wonderful how powerful the US Military is on the open floor, but scary when you add the jungle into the mix.
But there is an issue, American Imperialism is an amazing thing where we try to tell other countries what to do (sarcasm). The problem comes when we take things to the max. "Domino Theory" dictates that we have to stop N. Vietnam from spreading to the south. To do this, they invade a nation and then at the end of the story, S. Vietnam goes south. Sadly, the North Takes over and a United Vietnam is hatched.
For the United States, Imperialism is almost over, with a major defeat. Imperialism starts dying when there is nothing else to conquer and when you start loosing.
I think like many others have posted that there are connections between the Vietnam war and the past American Imperial ventures. Our belief that our superior technology could win the battle in any theater we went continued into Vietnam, though in the end we were proven wrong. In the past Imperial ventures that America went on our soldiers used derogatory or racial slurs against there enemies to create a sense that they were not fighting real people. This trend continued with U.S. soldiers into Vietnam as well. Though some of the ideas and trends we have looked at may not be as prevalent in Vietnam, many survived or at least made appearances in the war.
ReplyDeleteI think that Americans went into Vietnam expecting similar outcomes as in the Philippines but it turned out very differently. The Philippines helped lay the foundation to some respect of what occupying a country will become. Also the Philippines paved the way for major health reforms and the Philippines was more of an experiment. America went into Vietnam with the game plan of just trying to out number and put a stronghold on the Vietnamese. When America wasn’t able to succeed in their plans, Americans were not able to focus a lot on transforming the country physically and socially like they had done in the Philippines.
ReplyDelete