Nine Years (or so) After

IT Is sad, and chastening, to look at the condition of Vietnam, nearly ten years after the Paris agreements that enabled the Americans to pull out and nearly eight years after the collapse of South Vietnamese resistance. Those who campaigned so vehemently for a U.S. withdrawal can now see (if they can tear their eyes away from say, El Salvador) just what kind of fate their propaganda victory condemned the Vietnamese people to suffer.

I am writing now not of the boat people nor of the re-education camps: simply of yet another economic failure of socialism. Like all Communist parties, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (Lao Dong Dang) is perfectly organized for war and totally unadapted to peaceful reconstruction.

BC

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Brian Crozier

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IT Is sad, and chastening, to look at the condition of Vietnam, nearly ten years after the Paris agreements that enabled the Americans to pull out and nearly eight years after the collapse of South Vietnamese resistance. Those who campaigned so vehemently for a U.S. withdrawal can now see (if they can tear their eyes away from say, El Salvador) just what kind of fate their propaganda victory condemned the Vietnamese people to suffer.

I am writing now not of the boat people nor of the re-education camps: simply of yet another economic failure of socialism. Like all Communist parties, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (Lao Dong Dang) is perfectly organized for war and totally unadapted to peaceful reconstruction.