The Early South Vietnamese Critique of Communism

Abstract

In both historiographies of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the topic of South Vietnamese anticommunism has been typically assumed than studied, labeled than examined and elaborated. That is, if it is labeled at all. In the first two and a half decades after the war, English- language scholarship either set aside the subject of anticommunism altogether or referred to anticommunism to mean the American variety rather than that in the former Republic of Vietnam (RVN).¹ Recent histories are more sensitive to the subject, if still largely lacking in information. The first book-length study of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN), for instance, makes the supportable claim that many “ARVN soldiers enlisted ... because of their commitment to anticommunism and the rhetoric contained in [nationalistic] documents and speeches.”² But it does not elaborate on what anticommunism might have meant to those soldiers, or how they came to commit themselves to the anticommunist cause. Another example, a synthesis-minded general history of the war, recognizes that “no amount of American money and military support could have sustained a struggle until 1975 had there not existed ... a huge opposition to communist rule,” adding that the “opposition was united only by its hatred of the communists.” It further acknowledges the commitment of the Vietnamese anticommunists that enabled them to survive as long as they did even as the Saigon governments were weak while facing an aggressive regime in Hanoi, the latter being the “most strongly armed communist client state in the history of the Cold War.”