Too true. As a young man in the navy I recall always hearing media reports about countries alleged to be Communist supports who were "puppet" governments. Of course this sounded grossly unfair and manipulative and made me feel anger against the communist leaders - as it was intended to do. By 1978 I had returned to school and started to major in history.
One morning I attended a class in which the professor lectured on the Vietnam War with reference to the many uncomfortable truths exposed by the Pentagon Papers. It was a total surprise. It turned out that most of the truths that had been the foundation of my political and historic beliefs to then had been not only untrue, but deliberate lies and propaganda.
Ho Chi Minh was on the Allied side in WW2 against Japan. He aided the allies in return for a promise of Vietnamese autonomy after the war. The US and Britain agreed. After the war ended the French said no we want our colony back, so America turned the Jap POW’s loose under Allied officers against the Vietnamese. Eventually France tried to run the country as its old colony but failed. That resulted in their military defeat by General Giap at Dien Bien Phu.
The Vietnamese demanded freedom. A north-south split developed in Vietnam in which America, having already sided against Ho Chi Minh in the north, sided with the minority in South Vietnam. A demilitarized zone was set up half way down the country And elections were called to determine wither the government of the north or south would form the central government. It became obvious that the north would win so the US and France cancelled the elections.
The Vietnamese refused to be satisfied with half a country. Even in the south the government could not have won a free election. China was not the driving factor, Vietnamese nationalism was. Eventually America had to giver up and within three years the south fell. Within two years after that Vietnam was at war with China.
The war in Vietnam developed serious strains of anti-Americanism, but that was because America butted in after breaking its WW2 promises. The Vietnam War was primarily a civil war. Every foreigner who became involved from 1945 on was bloodied. The Japs, the French, the Americans and finally the Chinese.
The biggest surprise was not so much that America was proved wrong. The biggest surprise was that so much of what the US claimed as true was lies. There is a huge difference between someone who has been wrong and someone who lies to you. All of a sudden everything they have ever said is open to question, and whenever their interpretation is disagreed with the presumption arises that nothing they say can be trusted. So what happened next? Gradually everything went back to normal. Old lies were forgotten. Then along came Iraq. Dubya not only lied America into a totally immoral and unnecessary war, it was obvious from the outset that he was doing so.
So this is where we are today. The Cold War is gone. Communism as an ideological threat is gone - if it was ever a serious threat to start with. Russia is a sometimes-ally. Powers that did not used to effect us much like Pakistan, India, China and the ME, are now rising threats. We are still part of the old NATO alliance, but the strongest member is ideologically unstable and economically unreliable. It really is a whole new chapter in world history and we are on the losing side. The root cause is exactly what the old hard-line communists said it would be - greed. Most of the losses have been caused by US Republicans since 1980. Since 1980 the middle class in every western nation has shrunk. Db is absolutely correct when she says that the economic war is being conducted mostly against us. Invented terrorists are being used in a way taught in every Political Science 101 course, to divert domestic attention away from corrupt internal government.
