Tag Archives: vietnam-war

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 6 is the third part of this detour into Vietnamese history which I have found really interesting. The Path to the Second Indochina War – Part Three: Agent Orange, Kennedy… covers the years 1961 – 1963. The first tests for Agent Orange were carried out in 1961, and the program began in 1962. The nerve agent dioxin was included as part of the manufacturing process. JFK was a very close election, so now South East Asia was HIS problem. At this stage, Laos was seen as more of a problem. Kruschev announced his support for wars of national liberation, and Kennedy began escalating the war, although covertly and only as a half measure. The number of ‘military advisors’ was increased from 600 to 1600. Diem supported the defoliation program using Agent Orange, and a South Vietnamese navigator was placed in each plane as cover for the American involvement, despite US military unease about its use. After bombing with defoliants, villagers were moved to ‘strategic hamlets’, which was supposed to isolate villages from contact with the communist insurgency. Meanwhile, the Buddhist crisis that led to the self-immolation with which this little excursion into Vietnamese history began, came to a head in 1963. It had started earlier with the Buddhist Revival Movement in the 1920s. It clashed with Diem’s vision of putting Catholics into positions of power. After the protests and act of self-immolation, Diem was convinced that the Communists must be behind it, and cracked down even harder on the pagodas, leading to even further loss of support. On November 1 1963 there was a coup against Diem which the US ambassador claimed ignorance of, and although officially neutral, the US govt did not assist Diem. Diem escaped but he was later shop by the coup leaders. Meanwhile, back in Cambodia there was increased student and leftist protest. Sihanouk threatened the leaders, and fearing scrutiny of his secret identity Pol (we’ll call him ‘Pol’) returned to the jungles and the revolutionary movement.

The Rest is History Ep. 551 The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4) I really have learned so much from this four part series. Rather than a great, sudden invasion, the integration of the Normans and the Britons started long before, as did the integration with Denmark. Quoting from the show notes, which explain this much better than I could:

Often symbolised as the last of the Anglo-Saxons, [The Godwinson family]’s stratospheric rise to power was engineered by Godwin, an obscure Thaine from Sussex, in a striking case of social mobility. Making himself integral to Cnut, he was made Earl of Wessex to help him run his new kingdom. But Godwin was also cunning and conniving, constantly shifting sides to ensure the maximum advantage to his family. Even Edward the Confessor, who hated the Godwinsons, had no choice but to promote Harold and Godwin’s other sons, and marry his daughter, Edith. But, with his hatred mounting and the couple childless, the fortunes of the Godwins would soon change…in September 1051, with tensions reaching boiling point, they went into exile. It would not last, and their return would see them catapulted to even greater heights of influence. Meanwhile, just as Edward’s life was dwindling, Harold’s star was rising, and across the channel William of Normandy’s prowess was also mounting.

On returning from exile, Edwin and the Godwins reconciled. Harold Godwin was shipwrecked, and taken under the protection of William of Normanby, and he swore to uphold William’s claim to the throne should Edward remain childless (which it was pretty obvious he would). Was Harold coerced into this? Certainly, if Harold or one of the Godwins became King, William certainly would invade. Meanwhile, there was ‘trouble up North’ with rebellion in Northumbria, where Harold’s brother Tosvig was in charge. In the end Tosvig went into exile, just as Edward was getting increasingly frail. And meanwhile, there was action afoot in Denmark.

Ezra Klein Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism Can I admit that I was a bit disappointed in this? It was actually recorded in 2022 before the Second Coming, and there’s lots of talk about story and narrative and it wanders all over the place.

The Ezra Klein Show. I’m over in Phnom Penh surrounded with little ones at the moment, and it seemed a particularly apposite time to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt Our Kids Are the Least Flouishing Generation We Know Of. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was on the best seller list for a year. Haidt’s work has been picked up by many on the right, although it really transcends a left/right binary, and it’s interesting that he often references the certainties (for good or bad) promulgated by traditional religions. I don’t know if it’s my age, or my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism, but I find much to agree with here.

The Rest is History Episode 538 Horror in the Congo– 3 parts. I had already read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost which Tom and Dominic defer to in these episodes, and so I was already familiar with quite a bit of material. However, listening to it at more than 20 years remove, it seems even more relevant today with Trump’s naked shake-down of compromised countries for their rare earths (somehow, everything I read seems to come back to Trump). I had forgotten the degree of privatization and the sheer exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold, and the role of Roger Casement in publicizing the atrocities. The first three episodes deal with the story of the Congo, while Episode 541 Part 4 Fear and Loathing in the Congo looks in detail at Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness which I read over fifty years ago. I remember the feeling of impending doom in it, but I didn’t particularly see it as the masterpiece that Tom and Dominic do. Of course, it was written in 1898, and new literary and historical lenses are trained on it now, with some commentators seeing as racist and imperialistic.

In the Shadows of Utopia. I’m in Cambodia, but Episode 4 of Season Two deals completely with Vietnam. In The Path to the Second Indo-China War Part I The Two Vietnams, Lachlan promises a shorter episode dealing with the years immediately following the Geneva Accords. He starts with the heavily-choreographed photograph of the monk self-immolating in 1963, which most people associate with the Vietnam War, but it was in fact a protest against the actions of the South Vietnamese government before the Vietnam War had even started.

He then moves to examining first North Vietnam, then South Vietnam. Between 1953-1957 the North Vietnamese Government under Ho Chi Minh, following the example of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, embarked upon a land reform program. This involved cleaning out ‘the reactionary and evil landlords’, but perhaps with not quite the same ruthlessness of Russia and China, with the suggestion that perhaps 1 in 1000 people would need to be executed. Although the numbers of victims may have been lower, it followed the same process: denunciation, land confiscation and redistribution, and later collectivization (which, as in Russia and China the newly landed peasants deeply resented). However, there was so much internal protest that the government admitted its error and abandoned the program and turned its attention instead to the writing of a new constitution which would cement the role of the Communist Government.

In South Vietnam, although under the sponsorship and patronage of the United States, the Diem government undertook a very similar program (albeit less violent). The Geneva Accords were undermined from the start, and the planned elections never took place. The nascent-fascist Diem government was elitist and rife with nepotism. There was a similar land reform program, complete with denunciations and arrests for possible disloyalty, and it too was abandoned when it failed. The formation of the National Liberation Front gave a focus to the armed struggle, and many former South Vietnamese with communist sympathies who had fled north returned to South Vietnam and the civil war resumed.