[lbo-talk] Follow Up to Cold War Liberalism and Vietnam

[Carrol Cox]

Every single time a nation in what used to be called the Third World had an
actually democratic election the result would be the coming of either the
CIA or the Marines or both in the following months. The debate over the
various "liberated zones" in the 20th-c as to whether they were "socialist"
or not has always been misleading. Regardless of their internal political
structure, what these "liberated zones" (USSR, PRC, the Eastern Europe
states, North Vietnam for a short time) did was 'remove' their populations
from the global "Reserve Army of Labor." Conditions were sometimes not very
good in these states -- but without exception they are worse now.

This even applies partly to some nations which did not even pretend to be
"socialist": Hussein provided a fine water system for Iraq (which the U.S.
went out of its way to destroy), decent medical care, and food subsidies. He
was a vicious tyrant, but Iraq is much worse off now. 

And so forth.

(Some foolish people on this list in the summer of 2003 argued that the
anti-war movement should demand that the U.S. stay in Iraq until it had
undone the damage it had done; withdrawal of troops, they said, would not
restore the water system. But of course the U.S. can only b ring more harm
to any nation it "aids."

The U.S. is Nightmare from which the world is unlikely to escape.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Nick Manley
Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2016 2:43 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: [lbo-talk] Follow Up to Cold War Liberalism and Vietnam

Thanks to Doug and others for their responses to my first post!

Anyway,

I was also strucky by the political programme of the NLF in this book. I
don't know how much they actually implemented it in North Vietnam or when
the country was unified again, but it's very liberal and democratic
sounding. Not at all the communist tyranny bogeyman the American government
was talking about. Does anyone know if post-war governance or wartime
governance in North Vietnam was particularly liberal or democratic? I would
not want to fall prey to Cold War propaganda about "communist tyranny". I
don't identify as one, but I like to be fair and accurate.
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