THE FRENCH REVOLUTION? TOO SOON TO SAY: Did We Just Win the Vietnam War?

Over 50 years since America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War, history has legitimized and vindicated its sacrifice in the Vietnam War.

While few Americans have noticed, Vietnam’s new General Secretary of the Communist Party, To Lam, has replaced Marxist-Leninism as the Party’s governing ideology with something more authentically Vietnamese: Truong Ton Dan Toc, or “Vietnamese nationalism.”

That is a bombshell. Hanoi has just abandoned its Communist ideology, which governed it since 1954 and sustained it in its wars against the United States and its ally South Vietnam, and with its Communist neighbors, Cambodia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Marxist-Leninism came to the Vietnamese from France. Thus, Communist Vietnam was actually a neocolonial state, its ideology imported from Europe to rule the Vietnamese, first in the North and, after 1975, the entire country. Now freed from the yoke of Communism, the Vietnamese have returned to the nationalism that was theirs all along.

To be fair, we sorta did win it, the first time: “In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war.  It was over.”

(Classical reference in headline.)