Why did South Vietnamese feel the need to flee Saigon despite the fact that both North Vietnam and South Vietnam were dictatorships?


 South Vietnam was not a dictatorship. It was a free, democratic nation — unlike North Vietnam, which was a totalitarian Communist dictatorship.During the Vietnam War, liberals claimed that South Vietnam was corrupt, oppressive, incompetent, and therefore not worth defending. Leftists went even further: they concocted the falsehood that South Vietnam was illegitimate, artificial, and criminal — a “US puppet regime” — whereas Communist North Vietnam was a victim of “US imperialism.” Both liberals and leftists undermined US support for South Vietnam, which aided the Communist victory in Vietnam, not to mention the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia.


In fact, South Vietnam had been fighting an uphill battle ever since it got shafted by the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords — which the South Vietnamese had been excluded from participating in. The South Vietnamese refused to accept an agreement that ensured a Communist takeover of the South, and instead founded by referendum the Republic of Vietnam: the true, legitimate successor to French colonial rule in Vietnam.


From then on, South Vietnam endured unrelenting, vicious attacks by Communist insurgents (and later North Vietnamese troops) who engaged in terror, sabotage, and mass murder in South Vietnamese villages. Liberal intellectuals in Saigon, meanwhile, criticized their government to the US news media to turn the US against the war. In such conditions, heavy-handed authoritarian rule was necessary. Stability — i.e., defeating and eliminating the Communist threat — had to come first before democratic institutions could develop.


The US however did not understand this basic principle. It lacked patience. It had an unrealistic attitude. It expected South Vietnam to be what it couldn’t be right away. It did not realize what should have been obvious: that democracy is a foreign implant to most countries outside the West, not easily assimilated without a long adjustment period — and which is especially difficult to implement while fighting a war against the Communists.


Democracy is basically good table manners; it was what the US was trying to impose on South Vietnam. But all this did was interfere with US military objectives. Because if you don’t defeat the Communists first — i.e., destroy them and totally deny them power — then you will have no chance at all of establishing any table manners in your nation.

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