{"id":2992,"date":"2019-01-24T20:43:12","date_gmt":"2019-01-24T20:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/seac\/?page_id=2992"},"modified":"2019-02-05T21:39:32","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T21:39:32","slug":"history-of-viet-nam-war","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/csead\/resources\/past-talks\/history-of-viet-nam-war\/","title":{"rendered":"History of Viet Nam War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do You Teach About the Vietnam War?<\/h2>\n

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What\u2019s wrong with this statement from Rory Kennedy\u2019s documentary film, Last Days in Vietnam<\/em>?<\/p>\n

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A) The date is wrong; in actuality the offensive Kennedy refers to started in January 1975.<\/p>\n

B) There was no territorial or political division into a North and South Viet Nam. The two rival governments, (1) the DRVN and (2) the ASVN and its successor state the RVN, each claimed to have legitimate authority over the whole of Viet Nam.\u00a0 Unlike the US Civil War, there was no secession.<\/p>\n

C) The National Liberation Front, an armed force situated south of the DMZ and allied with the DRVN, began actively fighting the non-Communist government based in Saigon in 1960. By 1965, it controlled large swaths of territory.\u00a0 The insinuation of an ideological divide between the \u201cCommunist north\u201d and the \u201cdemocratic south,\u201d and suggestion that there were no pro-Communist forces south of the DMZ who joined the PAVN to defeat Saigon in 1975, are inaccurate and misleading.<\/p>\n

D) All of the above.<\/p>\n

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Viet Nam:\u00a0 Facts and Fables<\/h3>\n

University of Washington professor of international studies and history, Christoph Giebel, examines the Viet Nam War, not with a focus on battles, but on the ways in which the various parties framed the reasons for their involvement and tried to motivate their followers. \u00a0Dr. Giebel\u2019s focus on spatial representations underscores the role that misleading mapping plays in popular imaginations to this day.[1]<\/p>\n

In these videos, Dr. Giebel addresses two points that are critical for teaching about the Viet Nam War:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 The indivisibility of Viet Nam was a fundamental belief of Vietnamese nationalists from the beginning of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0 Despite widely-held American beliefs to the contrary, there was no territorial division into a North and South Viet Nam resulting from the 1954 Geneva Accords.<\/p>\n