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[–] 84 points 1 year ago (11 children)

A coworker once told me that the South was doomed because the North had a larger industrial base. I said that sounded like wisdom in English, but it was a joke in Vietnamese.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Apples and oranges.

    Vietnamese had been fighting for twenty years against the French and Japanese. The South thought they would achieve victory with a few battles.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So weak, stupid, and with a rigid mindset?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    https://richardpoe.substack.com/p/how-the-british-caused-the-american

    I've seen this idea from several sources. The British figured that American 'Manifest Destiny' would mean annexing Canada eventually. It didn't cost the Brits a lot to stir up Southern resentments against the North. So they South got played.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    The south was doomed because a significant portion of their labor hated them. They also had terrible industrial capacity, no international legitimacy, and no asymmetric advantage.

    It's a lot more like when Cambodia invaded Vietnam than when America did.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The north Vietnamese had China and the Soviet Union backing them. The US south had basically nobody.

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  • Not to mentioned the U.S. deployed something like 2.7 million people to Vietnam over the years. ~58,000 U.S. soilders died. Somewhere between 1-3 million people died in the war. Everyone lost that war. With deaths between 95%-98% not being U.S. troops though... It's hard to argue when someone says the U.S. didn't lose. We should have never been there, it was horrible.. but any proud boy I meet in a bar who knows the numbers is going to call that a win... Because they don't care about anything other than how many "bad people" died, and they consider anyone who looks/talks/acts different, bad people.

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