“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
― Hồ Chí Minh

April 30, 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of the victory of the people of Viet Nam over the US military. The Vietnamese national liberation struggle moved the entire world and is one of the most important historical events of the 20th century.

The people’s war waged by the people of Viet Nam, reaching a peak in the Tet Offensive of 1968, demonstrated that a united people, even in a poor and underdeveloped nation, could defeat the most powerful military and economic power on earth.

In an era when national liberation struggles surged in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the struggle of the Vietnamese people provided an inspiring example to solidarity movements around the world and inside the US. The movement against the war in Viet Nam in the US was inextricably tied to the early anti-imperialism of the civil rights/Black liberation movement, and many other movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 

The victory of Viet Nam is a living example that holds lessons for the ongoing struggle against US imperialism today.  We are creating this online tribute, much of it drawn from the Freedom Archives, to help illustrate and pass on these lessons.

From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country-and failed. When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won.

- Howard Zinn from A People's History of the United States

The Chican@ Moratorium marches against the Vietnam War played a decisive role in ending that conflict (poster: Malaquias Montoya)	Colonialists, International Traitors, Think Carefully Before You Take Vietnam - To Lien (1978)

Women played a powerful, absolutely crucial role in Viet Nam’s liberation struggle, from the Trung Sisters leading ancient struggles against Chinese domination to the courageous participation of millions of women from north and south in the people’s war against the US Empire. Prominent leaders include General Nguyen Thi Dinh, a commander of the National Liberation Front, and Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, who led the delegation for the Front at the Paris negotiations. There were a number of meetings between Vietnamese women with women from North America and other nations during the war; the example of women in Viet Nam’s independence struggle had a profound impact on the antiwar and then resurging women’s liberation movements—and in fact inspired women all over the world. In her book, Women and Revolution in Viet Nam, Arlene Eisen quotes Bui Thi Me, then Minister of Health of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam, as saying, when welcoming her to a liberated zone: “We are part of the worldwide family of militant women. The oceans cannot dampen our feelings of solidarity and love.”

 

One of the most powerful and often understated components of the movement against the war in Viet Nam was the unprecedented wide-scale revolt inside all branches of the US Armed Forces that essentially led to the breakdown of the military’s ability to wage war—the US military in all branches became unmanageable. At its height, the GI movement involved nearly half of all enlisted personnel. There were 300 antiwar GI newspapers, and many antiwar GI coffeehouses near bases throughout the US. For soldiers of color, who were predominantly fighting and dying on the front lines allegedly for “democracy” the contradictions were even greater, as activists inside the US struggled and sometimes died for a democracy that had so long been denied. On the battlefield itself, there were numerous incidents of rebellion, including “fragging”—the killing of officers by enlisted men. Even official statistics record hundreds of successful fraggings—and those only include incidents using explosives, not rifles or other means, nor the many threats of fragging that curtailed officer orders.  By 1970, the US Army recorded 65,643 desertions, roughly the equivalent of four divisions. There were also many thousands of draft refusals and an active draft resistance movement, including demonstrations such as Stop-the-Draft Week in Oakland, California and the public burning of draft cards in many cities.

http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/gi_mvmt.shtml

https://libcom.org/history/1961-1973-gi-resistance-in-the-vietnam-war

 

We will fight and fight from this generation to the next - 1969.	May 19: Birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two great revolutionary fighters for social justice and national liberation.

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
― Unidentified U.S. Army major, Bến Tre, Viet Nam, February 7, 1968.

On Lynching and the Ku Klux Klan by Ho Chi Minh - 1924

Interview with Vo Nguyen Giap about People's War and Diên Bin Phû

Viet Nam War & Resistance Timeline