No wonder why South Vietnam fell to the commies. Bastard policies that led to its collapse, plus the persecution of Buddhists.
The Diem government, created by the USA, immediately began the restoration of the large landed estates. The peasants had to abandon the lands they had occupied after the launch of the agrarian reform (about 2,000,000 hectares), and this was achieved through a series of bloody expeditions in the countryside.
In 1956, Diem forbade the villages from electing their own representatives according to the tradition of the communes, and appoints governmental village chiefs (the Ac On). The puppet government also establishes traveling “special courts” to wage terror in the countryside.
The restoration of the landowners gives good results; suffice it to say that in 1957, 1% of the owners had 44% of the surface cultivated with rice, while in 1934 1% of the owners had 358% of the same surface.
It’s not without saying however that much of this came to happen because the Vietminh decided to agree to the Geneva Convention in good faith and withdrew from South Vietnam, effectively leaving the peasants defenseless:
South Vietnam was (and still is) the region with the most concentrated ownership of land. After the launch of land reform, during the anti-French war, the peasants had driven out the landowners and occupied their land. After the Geneva Agreements, the Vietminh forces had to withdraw from the south and leave the field open to the return of the landowners and the bloody repression that accompanied them.
Thought it might be said this good-faith gesture to the stipulations of the Geneva agreement, and an overall lack of radicalism on the part of the DRV is also to blame and no single pound of it can be given to Diem’s government all together, although they’re their own collection of dark comedies. But:
On the part of the DRV, there was no material or propaganda support to the insurrection; on the contrary, the Vietminh leaders who were still in the South argued that any recourse to violence should be avoided, in order not to be accused of violating the Geneva agreements. One of the exponents of the Front, Quyet Thang, declares about this period: “Very strict directives were issued in view of a very strict compliance with Geneva: we never went beyond the legal political struggle…. This cost us hard losses, our best comrades. And it took us a whole year to explain and convince everyone that it was the right line” (quoted by Lê Châu).
The opportunist press generally tends to emphasize this position of the North Vietnamese government, and happily hypes it up as a demonstration of its “good will for peace” and the aggressiveness of the Americans. The position held by the DRV, on the other hand, showed that, in line with the decisions of the great powers, it had now accepted as definitive the partition of the country into two. On the other hand, this “will to peace” was certainly not a merit when dealing with a stronger adversary.
On the whole I think the matter falls into the same analysis of anything that happened during the Cold War and its through line into present day. There was never a revolutionary commitment by many of the “communist” forces in the post-war years and simply came as national independence from colonial regimes. The Diem government - by having American money dumped on it to the detriment of local production - served to build a market of American dependency to maintain what shred of economy it could hold in the long waning period of the terminal New Deal. However, the development of third world nations offered a market for the Soviet and the young Chinese regimes to develop their own, not out of raw consumerism but something in the market not defined here. They’re interesting all the same, v funny