Pilger is a wannabe Communist sympathiser who makes friends of the most despotic regimes on the planet while luxuriating in his London Apartment, making the best he can out of the Western capitalism. Always neatly dressed in fashionable gear, happily receiving awards for his 'journalism' he then unleashes on the very nations and people who pay to read and watch his ideological drivel. Of course, he is reluctant to move to one of his darling regimes because he would likely spend most of the rest of his life in abject poverty if not prison for merely expressing his opinion.

Arjay,

You really do live in a parallel universe don't you. The Khmer Rouge were gifted power by the North Vietnamese, who did the bulk of the fighting against the Cambodian government. They were supported with arms by the Chinese communists.

By the way, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), an undeniably communist organistation, killed 21% of their total population. 2.5 million people.

Ie really takes a closed mind to be able to pretend that the Khmer Rouge were not a communist orgainsation, primarily supported by Chinese communists, and for a crucial period, by the North Vietnamese communists.

PaulL, in 1975 there were about 48 million
people living in Vietnam, now the population
is nearly 90 million. Following the stupid war,
it's not surprising that the collaborators,
colonials and Chinese got out of the place,
but the vast majority of surviving Vietnamese
stayed put. Despite your erroneous assertion,
Vietnam is now an independent nation and is no
longer a part of the French colonial empire.

Since trade sanctions were lifted, the Vietnamese
economy has been going from strength to strength.
Education, iteracy levels and life expectancy have
all been steadily improving, and are extremely
good for a developing, mostly agricultural economy
that was virtually destroyed less than half a century ago.

Your claim that the defeat of the USA and its allies
somehow translated into stopping the spurious
dominoes falling is both counterintuitive and interesting.
Do you have any facts with which to back that claim up,
or is it the wishful thinking that it appears to be?

You haven't demonstrated that the Vietnam War was
anything beyond a phenomenal waste of lives and
money, both for the Vietnamese and the invaders
that they defeated.

Talisman,
Firstly, your inherent racism is showing. “ ... its not surprising that .... Chinese got out of the place.
The Chinese had 170’000 soldiers in Vietnam at the height of the war. On the North Vietnamese side.

The exodus from Vietnam was Vietnamese who did not want to live under communist rule. Many were already refugees from North Vietnam, where Catholics and Buddhists and minorities were persecuted.

You say once trade sanctions were lifted, Vietnam went from strength to strength. I agree. Capitalism is far better at feeding and clothing people than communism. It just goes to show the failure of communism that the Vietnamese couldn’t get by without global trade.

Germany was far more comprehensively destroyed than Vietnamever was. Saigon fell after very little fighting. The South had run out of bullets to fire back after the misguided US congress passed a bill preventing ANY assistance to the gov’t of SVN.

There is nothing counterintuitive in the suggestion that the war in SVN prevented other countries falling to communism. No doubt you’ve heard of a pyrrhic victory. The North’s victory, in concert with the communist supported youth movements in the west, was such a victory. The communist countries were never wealthy enough to fully back local communist insurgencies to the level required, whilst also bankrolling the war against the US. The 15 odd years where the west fought the communists in Vietnam, gave other countries the space and time (in the absence of full blooded Soviet/Russian support) to defeat their own insurgencies. Communist Insurgencies in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines’ were all defeated during this period.

Your assertion that because the West lost the war, therefore it wasn’t worth fighting is fallacious.

There was always a majority in South Vietnam, principally in the cities, that did not want to be ruled by communists. Hence the mass exodus once the communists took over. It might also have had something o do with the 5000 citizens of Hue who were executed by the Northern Army in 1968 when they captured the old capital.

PaulL,the USA funded and backed Pol Pot,a despotic murderer.They created and supported Saddham until he started to think independantly and use Euros instead of the $ for trading oil.Saddham threatened the sanctity of the $ and cheap oil to the cartels,that's why he had to go.

The USA/Israel backs and creates despots for their own economic gain.Hamid Kazai in Afghanistan is another case in point.

Dear Mr Pilger,

I do enjoy your writing and in many ways you are fighting the good fight but a tad more research would be desirable.

Vietnam has not had free health care nor education for a very long time. The government covers 80% of the health bill of those under 5 yo but after that it is the full whack except in cases of TB. This has been the case for decades.

However the fact that Vietnam was a more equal and caring society before market reforms is undeniable except by ideologues. The debate should be about the friction between a freer economy and a the very slow movement toward political reform. The capacity of the market place to corrupt is obvious and without a robust system of checks and balances it can be very destructive in any society, socialist or otherwise.