On April 30, 1975, the United States pulled the last of its military apparatus and its last few hundred personnel out of Saigon, its final foothold in South Vietnam. If viewed through the lens of a U.S. military planner, the scenes of chaos, confusion and desperation might bring to mind loss and humiliation. But if viewed through the lens of a Vietnamese person, who had suffered for decades under French, Japanese, and U.S. imperialism, the scenes can instead be seen as the culmination of a long and painful yet ultimately successful struggle against successive imperial rulers. Today, we remember that on this day 50 years ago the people of Vietnam succeeded in winning freedom from nearly a century of imperialist rule.
In 1954, when the United States took its first steps toward military and political control over the southern half of Vietnam, the people of the region had been dominated by previous imperialist powers for almost a century. From the 1860s on, the region had been controlled by the French, who called it French Indochina and exploited its land and people to produce commodities like rice, rubber, and industrial metals. During World War II, it was taken and controlled by the Japanese military. After the Japanese defeat in 1945, French forces and colonial officials reclaimed control over much of the region until 1954, dominating the southern region and effectively creating a new nation that would be called South Vietnam. After French forces were defeated by Vietnamese independence fighters in 1954, the United States stepped in to prop up friendly rulers in South Vietnam. Slowly, in the early 1960s, the U.S. began to send troops, beginning what most in the U.S. think of as the Vietnam War.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the people of Vietnam (mostly the Kinh ethnic group, more commonly known as the Viet people) showed a desire for self-governance and independence from outside powers. With the exception of a collaborationist commercial class and a layer of Vietnamese officials who worked with and for the French, the majority of the population was economically exploited and politically separated from control over their own lives. It was they – poor peasants, urban working people, a more educated student milieu – who would begin and develop a movement that would challenge the political-economic domination under which they lived.
Already in the late 19th century there had been failed revolts against French rule. Throughout the early 20th century, nationalist demands and protests bubbled, setting the stage for larger forms of organization. In the late 1920s many of these activists formed a Vietnamese Nationalist Party, and in 1925 the Communist Party of Vietnam was founded by Ho Chi Minh and others. In 1941, they and others organized a broad nationalist alliance called the Viet Minh, dedicated to ending French and Japanese rule. At the end of World War II, the Viet Minh seized control of the capital, Hanoi, and declared independence using the same words as the U.S. Declaration of Independence used to declare independence from Great Britain. When the French refused to grant the Viet people independence and reoccupied the nation, the Viet Minh began a guerilla war against the French that lasted until 1954. The U.S. financed much of this decade-long French war effort and, when the French were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the United States then propped up the state of South Vietnam in opposition to the north, which was by then under the control of the Communist Party of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. In response, the Communist government and pro-unification nationalists organized militants and organizers to go south to undermine the South Vietnamese government and unify the Vietnamese people. In addition, they developed a new National Liberation Front (NLF), which was to become the army that would fight U.S. troops to defeat.
Although dominated by the Communist Party, both the Viet Minh and the National Liberation Front were broad nationalist coalitions that never challenged capitalism itself. The U.S. government, however, used anti-communism to justify its military aggression in Southeast Asia.
As the U.S. increased its military presence from 1963 to 1968, what had initially begun as a political movement to unify north and south became a war for independence against the United States. In this long struggle for freedom from imperial rule, the people of Vietnam survived arrests and interrogations and torture. They survived napalm that burned villages to the ground, agent orange that defoliated dense forests, land mines that killed and maimed tens of thousands, and poisoning of their fresh water and fish from the dumping of mercury into their rivers and lakes. They survived a bombing campaign larger than any in World War II. They survived deaths in guerilla attacks and in large scale battles against far better equipped U.S. forces. Although estimates vary widely, it is beyond doubt that in just the 21 years of direct U.S. involvement (1954 until 1975) at least one million Vietnamese were killed, at least hundreds of thousands of those killed being civilians, and hundreds of thousands more were wounded and maimed. The people of Vietnam, men, women, and children, sacrificed mightily over decades to free themselves from imperial exploitation. It was their will for independence and their sacrifices over decades first and foremost that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the end of the war.
Although it was the organized action of the Vietnamese people themselves that was the primary reason the war ended, events and movements in the United States also had significant influence on the end of the war, and more so as the war dragged on.
The first protests against the war in the U.S. took place in 1963 and were small and student-led, mostly on university campuses. As opposition to the war grew, they expanded into the Black community and sections of the working class. Student protests grew in size and intensity in the mid-60s, and groups including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began to play key roles in organizing actions and opposition to the war. There was also a draft at that time, which increased resistance among many working-class people who were targeted for military service, while most university students had draft deferments as long as they were enrolled in school. As more troops were deployed, particularly in 1968, the movement exploded among students and other young people. Millions of young people protested the war, not through encampments of a few hundred as we’ve seen recently in support of Palestine, but in consistent protests with ever growing numbers of protesters over years. In 1968, the short- lived but successfully executed Tet Offensive throughout South Vietnam convinced millions in the United States that the war was being lost. Martin Luther King, Jr. had begun to speak openly of the horrors of the war and his opposition to it, drawing more Black people into the anti-war movement. In the summer of that year, mass protests at the Democratic National Convention and police violence against the protesters showed the world images of cops beating mostly white protesters much like they had done to Black demonstrators during the Civil Rights Movement.
Over the next few years, the discovery of the My Lai massacre, the release of the Pentagon Papers and the Kent State shooting shattered the perceptions that many in the U.S. held about the war and posed the questions of whether it was even possible for the U.S. to win and whether involvement in the war was worth the costs. Even with those revelations, the war didn’t end. Although he slowly pulled U.S. troops out of the worst combat, Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, actually intensified bombing campaigns and expanded the war into Cambodia, with tragic consequences for millions. Within the U.S. military itself, personnel on all levels increased their protest against the war. Some created G.I. coffeehouses outside their bases, wrote underground newspapers, handed out and air-dropped leaflets, refused orders, went AWOL (absent-without-leave), accepted courts-martial, misguided bombing campaigns to save innocent populations, and even killed their officers. Groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War joined student and working-class protesters, putting the lie to the idea that supporting the troops meant supporting war.
Facing a population of people in Vietnam unwilling to give in and remain oppressed, and both a mutinous military and a civilian population resisting the war, the U.S. political and military authorities finally began to scale back operations in the early 1970s. As at least some U.S. veterans argue, with a mass movement of military personnel organizing against the war, Nixon understood that he could no longer count on his troops to even follow basic orders, much less give their lives.
The long struggle of the Vietnamese people for their independence from imperialist rule finally ended on April 30, 1975. But it didn’t end because of the generosity of French, Japanese, or U.S. ruling classes and their political leaders. The people of Vietnam won their independence because of their own decades- long movement to organize themselves politically and militarily to get rid of their foreign rulers. It was their hard work and sacrifices, assisted by the mass movements within the U.S. population and within the U.S. military itself, that led to the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army’s victorious march into Saigon 50 years ago today.
Today we remember the suffering, the organizing, and the sacrifices of millions of Vietnamese people during their decades-long movement for freedom from imperialist rule.
