Michael Lind, in Vietnam, The Necessary War (New York: Free Press, 1999) uses information which became available to westerners with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire to place the Vietnam War into the context of the first cold war. He examines the myths of liberals, conservatives, minimal realists, and maximal realist in this context. This paper will examine the persistence of liberal myths about the Vietnam War by contrasting newly available facts contained in Vietnam, The Necessary War to the liberal myths perpetrated in Douglas Miller's book On Our Own (Lexington, MA: DC Heath & Company, 1996). These myths were important in shaping American policy. The following myths will be examined: I. Ho Chi Min was an oriental George Washington forced, against his will, to fight the U.S. to establish national independence. II. The South Vietnamese Insurgency was a spontaneous rebellion against misgovernment. III. Anti-war demonstrations were a spontaneous outpouring of emotion on the part of student activists resulting from their disillusionment with government disinformation. Lind describes the cold war as World War III and divides it into three phases; the first cold war between 1946 and the Tet offensive of 1968, the American isolationist period when Soviet expansionism was not vigorously opposed, and the second cold war of the 1980s when President Reagan's new arms race stressed the Soviet economy to the point of collapse. He identifies the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Greek and Turkish Civil Wars, and other proxy wars on the periphery between the Soviet Empire and the American sphere of influence as necessary shows of American military power and determination to deter the Soviet drive to world conquest. He attributes the American failure in Vietnam almost entirely to the inflexibility of the U.S. military and their refusal to fight the war as an insurgency. This led to excessive casualties which the American public was not prepared to accept and the ultimate American withdrawal from Indochina. In addition to the leftist myths listed above, he debunks rightist myths, military myths and liberal myths. The revelation in Soviet archives of Robert Kennedy's attempt, after his brother's assassination, to make a private deal with Kruschev to insure his election as president adds an interesting twist to history. Miller's book, still used as a textbook in American universities, places the Vietnam War in the context of American domestic issues of the '60s. Miller concludes that Ho Chi Min was "a gentle, scholarly revolutionary", basically a nationalistic American supporter forced to embrace communism by America's support of French Colonialism. Lind points out that this "Gentle scholar" executed between 10,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese farmers starting in 1953 for the crime of owning as little as two acres of rice land. Ho Chi Min was a founding member of the French Communist party and a member of the Comintern, a network of agents controlled by Moscow. He lived in the USSR in the 1930s. In the summer of 1946, while Ho was in Paris negotiating with the French, Vo Nguyen Giap supervised the systematic destruction of non-communists nationalists and leftists. Ho Chi Min was not a nationalist forced into the arms of the communists by American perfidy, he was a communist who took advantage of American support during WW II, as did Mao in China and Stalin in the USSR. Miller describes the guerilla war in South Vietnam as "an indigenous response to Diem's oppressiveness", without significant support from North Vietnam. Lind, with the benefit of hindsight, says "the guerrilla war was controlled by Hanoi from the beginning to the end." The concept of a spontaneous rebellion against misgovernment can be applied with less ambiguity to North Vietnam than to South Vietnam. The peasant's revolt of November 2, 1956 at Nghe-An, North Vietnam, against the savagery of Ho's land reform was crushed by the NVA 325th division with the death or deportation of about 6,000 farmers. This uprising was free of external influence and almost unnoticed outside Vietnam. Lind places the disturbances in the U.S. in the context of the cold war and other wars. Miller regards these disturbances as a product of the activism of the '60s. Lind points out that in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet/Afghan war, public dissent/disapproval in the home country became significant after the death toll passed 15,000. This point was reached in 1967, coinciding with the time when Miller notes that the anti-war movement became a popular movement. The success of the anti-war movement was the result of combat deaths, not government disinformation. The opening of Soviet archives in the last decade has proven that Ho Chi Min was a communist long before the U.S. involvement in Indochina and that the "insurrection" in South Vietnam was initiated by North Vietnam. An analysis and comparison of data on other wars leads to the conclusion that disillusionment with the war was more related to the number of deaths than to any policy of the U.S. government. The perpetration of these and other myths by the liberal left influenced American policy and contributed the American pull-out of Vietnam and to millions of deaths in Indochina. "On our Own" was written in 1996, well after the myths had been disproven by facts disclosed by the opening of North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet archives. If the misleading information contained in the book is the result of ignorance, the ignorance is deliberate. Why are disproven myths being perpetrated in university textbooks? Miller is a university intellectual of the "Greater New England" tradition, the consequences of his mistaken analysis will be increased prestige among his peer group and greater book sales. The consistent support of University liberals for vicious dictators who implement policies of exterminating intellectuals does not impress me with their intelligence or a desire to emulate them. Back to Cry Havoc #29 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com