A People's History of the Vietnam War

by Jonathan Neale

Book Overview

This latest addition to The New Press's People's History series offers an incisive account of the war America lost, from the perspective of those who opposed it on both sides of the battlefront as well as on the homefront.

The protagonists in Neale's history of the "American War" (as the Vietnamese refer to it) are common people struggling to shape the outcome of events unfolding on an international stage-American foot soldiers who increasingly...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565849434
• ISBN13: 9781565849433
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Vietnam War from a Class struggle point of view

Very interesting analysis of the class struggles both in Vietnam and the US, that as a consequence leaded to the Vietnam war. Recommended.

very good.

The war in Iraq and September 11th probably will be the defining event of the youth of the United States today when we look back in a few decades, in much the same way the war in Vietnam defined a generation of youth in the 1960s and 1970s. In a war that ended place a decade before most of those youth were born, what lessons can we take back? How exactly did the Vietnamese win? What were the social movements in the US that arose out of this conflict? Why are the myths of the American-Vietnamese War? The trick to understanding a lot of history is that a lot of what was taught us growing up was simply wrong and just a particular point of view. "A People's History of the Vietnam War", by Jonathan Neale, does a fantastic job of presenting an excellent history that skips over the usual hoop-la about certain elite leaders of the war, and instead concentrates on a more systematic analysis of the war that took so many millions of lives. He sees the world in terms of class and therefore argues that the American ruling class got into Vietnam as a continuation of their policies aiming at domination of the globe. They needed to save South Vietnam, which was about a brutal a dictatorship as there gets, in order to shore up their support of other dictators throughout the world. At the same time, he doesn't commit the same blunder that many other left-wing historians make in supporting elite cadre of the Communist Party either. He correctly identifies that the majority of the party leadership were the sons and daughters of the ruling landlord class, and though they wanted a better world and sought to destroy the class of their ancestors, they also made sure that they, the CP, stayed on as rulers. They did lead a mass mobilization of peasants which liberated their land and carried out a revolution, and life was much better under the CP than it was under the French, but at the same time as Vietnam liberalizes its economy, it is the Party which mainly benefits from it. Neale makes a pretty convincing argument that three main factors led to the defeat of the United States military in Vietnam by the Vietnamese forces. 1) The main one was the peasants revolt, led by the Communists and guerillas, in which hundreds of thousands of fighters gave their lives to bring a new future to their country. Millions of peasants died in bombings, slaughters, and executions, but they never gave up. When the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese guerrilla group) was nearly annihilated following the Tet offensive and Operation Phoenix by US special forces, North Vietnamese units filled the void and gave everything until the truce of 1973 five years later. By the time of that truce, the guerrillas of the south and soldiers of the north were completely exhausted. The second factor for why the US could not win the war (which it could have done given a few more hundred thousand dead soldiers, a few more million dead civilians, and a few more years of death and war) was because of the US Pea

Making Sense of Vietnam

Using a Marxist class perspective, Neale makes sense of the post WWII history of Vietnam in all its complexity. In fact, having read Neale's history, the standard nationalist histories which insist on nation states as the central actors, seem not just inadequate, but misleading. By emphasizing the clash of Vietnam's many masters and would-be masters, both colonial and local, including Asians -- Japanese and Chinese -- French, and U.S., Neale gives us compelling and instructive insights into time and a place that is now remebered by most Americans as the first war the U.S. ever lost, a war that created a syndrome that could only be overcome by winning the first Gulf War. Particularly good on how the French colonists and the Vietnamese landlord class ruled amicably for a number of years, the insurgence of the Marxist inspired North Vietnamese, followed by the arrival of the U.S. to prop up the French Catholic Vietnamese dictatorship in the name of global anti-communism. An excellent and even awesome achievment.

An Excellent Primer to the Vietnam War

Whether you are already familiar with the war, or new to the subject, this book is an excellent addition because of the approach it takes. While most history is written from the view of the powerful, this book concentrates on those segments of the population typically brushed aside in the telling of history, i.e. the masses. To quickly address the previous reviewer's comments on the book--Regarding the novel quoted from describing the rape scene: that was only one aspect of the author's approach; he also quotes directly from soldiers who witnessed such acts. If you want hard numbers on the number of rapes, good luck finding out, at least in any establishment histories or sources. While the number has been estimated in the hundreds of thousands, it was certainly a number the U.S. was unconcerned with, just as it was unconcerned with the numbers of Vietnamese dead (estimated to be 3 to 4 million dead peasants in that war). J. Neale broaches the topics of the Russian revolution, McCarthyism, and classism here at home; but does so as to give the Vietnam war a more proper context. Wars don't occur in vaccums, and he points out that there were a number of factors that contributed to the U.S. terror in Vietnam.Regarding the oversimplifications, you'll find that in any concise approach to telling history, particularly something as monolithic as the Vietnam war which spanned 4 decades. If you want a greater understanding, you'll need to read from a lot of sources. Lastly, regarding the author's tying in of Vietnam with today's wars, the author is merely doing what a historian ought to be doing. Learning about previous acts of U.S. terror serves no purpose on its own unless the ultimate aim is to affect the terror that continues today. Many of the lessons of Vietnam aptly apply to Bush's acts of terror and aggression in the middle east today. If you're looking for an establishment history of the war, try Robert McNamara's "In Retrospect" which is a typical exercise in apologetics for American terror (i.e. WE were attacked by Vietnam, OUR intentions were moral and good, WE suffered in the war, etc.)If you enjoy this book, and want to read one of the other (very few) humane tellings of the Vietnam war, try SECRETS, by Daniel Ellsberg.

Highly Recommended

Shredding the lies and fabrications that conservative Americans like to pretend are facts, Neale gives a clear and accurate account of the war. Not to be missed.