A People's History of the Vietnam War
by Jonathan Neale, Howard Zinn

List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $13.95
You Save: $6.00 (30%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $6.95 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of A People's History of the Vietnam War

Book Review: Misleading, Trotskyist account of US attack on Vietnam
Summary: 1 Stars

For example, Neale supports the US government's continuing hostility to Vietnam when he smears the Vietnamese government as 'corrupt'. He parrots the US state's point of view, writing that the Vietnamese government "signed a mutual defence treaty with Russia late in 1978, and that pushed them into war with Cambodia and China."

This is a travesty of the truth. From 1975 onwards, the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, backed by the US state, had continuously attacked Vietnam, killing tens of thousands of people, until in December 1978 the Vietnamese counter-attacked and freed Cambodia.

And China that attacked Vietnam in 1979, not the other way round, after the US state had given Deng Hsiao-Ping the green light. Neale claims that "the victims of this war were the Chinese minority in Vietnam", again taking the US state's point of view, that the Vietnamese government was the aggressor, not the Chinese government.

This is typically Trotskyist - just enough class analysis to be plausible to a few, but always backing the counter-revolution at key moments, backing the US state in its counter-revolutionary attack on the Vietnamese people. Similarly, Trotskyists backed the kulaks against the Bolsheviks in the 1930s, the landlords in Hungary in 1956, the mujehadin in Afghanistan in 1989, and Boris Yeltsin in the Soviet Union in 1990.

Trotskyists always pontificate about other people's struggles, patronisingly telling the Vietnamese what they should have done at every moment, yet they never get it right for their own country.

Anyone interested in the Vietnamese people's historic victory should read Ho Chi Minh's writings, not this book.

History Books