Talk:Gabriel Kolko

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[edit] Purported disagreement with Kahin

I removed the following sentence, placing it here, for the reasons outlined below:

"Although Kolko and Kahin advance similar viewpoints, they differ as to the situation in South Vietnam. Kahin, in his treatise Intervention, emphasizes that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was a spontaneous home-grown movement that indicated a pervasive desire among South Vietnamese for unification with North Vietnam. Kolko disagrees, contending that the NLF was dominated by Hanoi from its foundation in 1960, confirming the US Government policy stance expressed in the White Paper of 1965 that opposition to the Saigon government was 'not a spontaneous and local rebellion against the established government.'"
reasons for removal
1. The sourcing for this alleged dispute is inadequate.
2. If this purported difference is elaborated on in print somewhere please provide references. It is perhaps notable that when Kolko reviewed Kahin's book of memoirs in The Journal of Contemporary Asia (Vol.33, 2003) he made no reference to any such differences. Kolko remarked that Kahin "went to South Vietnam and met opposition Buddhists as well as the NLF, gaining credibility as well as insight. But he also realized the importance of land in mobilizing the peasants behind the NLF, and he quickly became knowledgeable on all aspects of the Vietnam conflict. He wrote two books on the Vietnam War, one in 1967 and his 1986 work, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam, remains a classic."
3. From my experience if there is a difference it is that Kahin felt that "the appeal of the NLF was broad and so was its leadership. Carlyle Thayer found its early leaders to be "long-time VWP (Lao Dong) cadres who had been active in the south, members of the sect forces, former non-party members of the Resistance, and non-communist opponents of the Diem regime." (Intervention, 116) For his part, Kolko afforded the key leadership and direction role to the branch of the communist party that existed in the south, The Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), which is not the same as claiming that it was directed or dominated by Hanoi. In fact in the appropriate section of "Anatomy of a War" Kolko emphasizes significant dimensions in which the NLF was autonomous with respect to Hanoi, as well as its organic ties with local populations at the grassroots level. To quote a sample:
"This local autonomy and power allowed the NLF to reconstitute itself again and again, leaving the United States with the frustrating reality that, no mater how successful the RVN was, it could never destroy the grassroots NLF. The paradox for the Party leadership was that the southern movement was by its very flexibility, autonomy, and community basis often quite ready to take care of its own problems in its own ways, the punishment of enemies being just one example. Another, and more important, was the southern Party’s substantially greater emphasis on land reform, as opposed to a united front against the RVN, than Party leaders in Hanoi deemed wise." see [1]BernardL 16:12, 14 September 2007 (UTC)