Political power projection and the manuevering to hide corruption is the 'rich' equivalent in highly socialist systems. Smart adaptive people are not necessarily moral or ethical people, so regardless of economic system or government types, you will always have the worry of unscrupulous opportunists.
If Vietnam has billionaires then why the f*ck were they fighting against capitalism in the Vietnam War? North Vietnam might as well have just asked to join South Vietnam and they could have skipped 20 years of wars. Looks like all they were really fighting against was democracy.
The South Vietnamese governments were all extremely repressive and pretty much openly fascist. The US pretty much didn't care so long as they were opposed to communism (a recurring theme in US cold war foreign policy)..
So much of that was wrong. The last government was not "openly fascist" Thanks to the USA, it was democratically elected. North Vietnam was 100x more repressive than South Vietnam in 1975.
Under pressure from the US, they held elections for president and the legislature in 1967. The Senate election took place on 2 September 1967. The Presidential election took place on 3 September 1967
The US should really be congratulated for not installing a fully fascist puppet government that one time.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted, which sounds great but it was 84% of those eligible to vote. Huge swathes of the population were not allowed to vote due to their political beliefs or past opposition to the government.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted
That was actually better than most countries.
The big picture is that the Vietnamese dictatorship did exactly the wrong thing. Creating a billionaire class proves that they ditched socialism. But they kept the dictatorship. They should have instead entrenched socialism and become a democracy. That would have been a very interesting thing to see. That they did exactly the wrong thing proves that North Vietnam's entire reason for fighting the war was a farce.
The freedom to run their own country whether that's into the ground or into prosperity its the right of the vietnamese to self govern. How you correlate colonialism and democracy as the same thing is interesting.
The freedom to run their own country whether that’s into the ground or into prosperity its the right of the vietnamese to self govern.
Huh? Both North and South Vietnam gained independence in 1954. The South Vietnamese had an elected government by 1968. North Vietnam had a dictatorship so the people couldn't run their own country. Then North Vietnam robbed South Vietnam of the ability to run their own country.
North Vietnam was literally fighting to deny the people to run their own country. To this very day nobody in Vietnam gets to choose their own leaders. The people are not allowed to govern themselves. But South Vietnam got to elect their own leader in 1968.
How you don't know that French colonialism ended 10 years before Americans arrived is bizarre.