I have been recently watching quite a bit of Vietnamese history programs on YouTube and thought I would see if anyone else is interested. This history is really difficult to understand by westerners because so much of it online is very confused and occasionally conflicting.
What this cacophony of clashes and changing combinations tells us is that until the French imposed their rule the various pieces of the Vietnam puzzle did not know real unity. That is a useful gloss because it helps explain why communists efforts to "reunify" or even "unify" Vietnam imagined a national model that had never existed apart from French colonial maps. During the last war many protesters found it difficult to understand why many of us on the ground viewed North Vietnam's invasion/subversion of the South after 1954 as one sovereign nation attacking another, rather than the Vietnamese rising up under a universally accepted nationalist force, the Communist Party of the North. to cast out some new colonialist/imperialist intruder. The intelligence quickly revealed who controlled the so called revolution and it was most certainly not coopted southerners. This is separate from the question of whether the various factions of Vietnam wanted to be free of foreign interference. That is why nationalists in South Vietnam resisted the northern intruders whom they viewed as foreign interference. As any visitor to Vietnam today can see, the northern, middle, highlands-centric and southern parts of the country coexist imperfectly under the authoritarians in Hanoi with their imported ideology. There is a land mass called Korea but we have no problem accepting that North and South Korea are quite distinct national entities. Western romanticism and French colonialism brought a very different lens to Vietnam and the various peoples of Vietnam paid a heavy price for it.
What this cacophony of clashes and changing combinations tells us is that until the French imposed their rule the various pieces of the Vietnam puzzle did not know real unity. That is a useful gloss because it helps explain why communists efforts to "reunify" or even "unify" Vietnam imagined a national model that had never existed apart from French colonial maps. During the last war many protesters found it difficult to understand why many of us on the ground viewed North Vietnam's invasion/subversion of the South after 1954 as one sovereign nation attacking another, rather than the Vietnamese rising up under a universally accepted nationalist force, the Communist Party of the North. to cast out some new colonialist/imperialist intruder. The intelligence quickly revealed who controlled the so called revolution and it was most certainly not coopted southerners. This is separate from the question of whether the various factions of Vietnam wanted to be free of foreign interference. That is why nationalists in South Vietnam resisted the northern intruders whom they viewed as foreign interference. As any visitor to Vietnam today can see, the northern, middle, highlands-centric and southern parts of the country coexist imperfectly under the authoritarians in Hanoi with their imported ideology. There is a land mass called Korea but we have no problem accepting that North and South Korea are quite distinct national entities. Western romanticism and French colonialism brought a very different lens to Vietnam and the various peoples of Vietnam paid a heavy price for it.
Congrats on fitting so much in a short post, Brian!