re: #183 Jay C

Proving my point: the Catholic-Buddhist divide (a lasting relic of French colonialism) was an essential faultline in Vietnamese society for many decades; yet in the 1960’s the whole issue - aside from the occasional depiction of Vietnamese Buddhists as loony self-immolaters - was generally (in American media, anyway) ignored or subsumed in a simplistic “Communist/Anti-Communist” dichotomy.

Right, it’s something that no one really talked about during hte Vietnam Era. I wasn’t alive but it was all Domino Theory and all that. Honestly, anti-communists in their zeal never understand why some groups turned to the Communists. Latin and South America, a lot of the things going on there that we intervened in during hte Reagan years were conflicts between elites and indigenous peoples.