What has been the impact of Communism on the people of Southeast Asia?

What has been the impact of Communism on the people of Southeast Asia?

Economically, Socially and Politically.

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SE Asia has a long and complex history of imperialism. In response to foreign aggression, SE Asian nations developed independentist movements within which the Communist Party played an important role.

Ho Chi Mihn, an early figure of SE Asian independence mobilized opinion against the French occupation of Indochina and attempted to gain the support first of the Americans and, upon failure, he sough the support of the Soviets. While Ho Chi Mihn was a communist, his intentions for his country (Viet Nam) were to establish a nationalist coalition as the government of an independent country.

Ho Chi Mihn and his Viet Mihn took power from the Japanese in 1945 after the August Revolution only to have the British and Chinese invade them after the end of WWII on behalf of the French. The French kept the South, later to be protected by the Americans, and the North would go on to become Communist.

Communism in SE Asia, as the example of Viet Nam shows, was intstrumental in galvanizing public opinion against European Empires. It is through the Communist system that China and Viet Nam came out of colonial destitution into the modern age as independent players.

Why did Communism come accompanied with so much misery? that is a good question to ask the US and Europe, whose miserable intolerance drove them to make SE Asia the single most bombed place on the planet. Viet Nam alone was bombed by far more tonage than the Pacific theater in WWII. The suffering SE Asia has less to do with the adoption of communism than with a prolongued campaign of economic, military and terrorist offensives on the part of the US against the people of the region.

For a greater understanding of this campaign I reccomend Noam CHomsky's At War With Asia.

As for Sarah C, she keeps on quoting the figures of famines as proof of Communist malfeasance. Perhaps if these governments could have developed without fear of US aggression they might have dedicated more time to feeding their people. Given the stated intention of the US government to boycott the success of Socialist and Nationalist governments, why should we believe communism failed in SE Asia rather than the veritable fact that the US government forced the communist governments of tiny poor SE Asian countries to fail.

Peace.

The murder of around 38 million people springs to mind - more than were killed in every war this century. China is second only to the USSR for genocide (who managed to murder 55 million of their own citizens).

Their economic record is, of course, appalling: only now capitalism is being embraced are billions of people being lifted out of poverty. (It's not by chance that the world's greatest recorded famines in China and the USSR.)

My opinion is that Communism was the greatest human disaster of the 20th century. It killed more people than war and kept half the world in crushing poverty.

EDIT: Washington raises an interesting point. Who is to blame for the famines? He and Chomsky would have you believe it's the wicked US; personally I blame the governments that forced farmers to work in large collectives where the state dictated farming methods, production quotas, and forbade any private farming.

The world's worst famine occurred in China between '58 and '61 - upwards of 30 million people starved to death (this is nearly as many as were killed in every war this century). What caused this? Western aggression? Or maybe something else?

"In October 1955, Mao ordered Chinese peasants to be organized into collectives of 100-300 families. He would later order even larger collectives to be organized. In 1956 grain yields fell by up to 40 percent." The government went on to dictate the use of ever more bizarre agricultural methods, leading to huge crop failures.

But in Washington's (and Chomsky's) world, this isn't the fault of the communist governments, but the western democracies. In fact, to people like them NOTHING is the fault of the communist governments, and everything bad that happens is laid at the door of the west.