Talk:Viet Cong

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Viet Cong?

Is there any source of the anti-imperialist forces in the south calling themselves Viet Cong and not Viet Minh?

At the very least, there should be a clarification of the name. 89.253.73.146 (talk) 17:42, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

The Viet Minh was a pre-independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh who fought against the japanese and the french, the Viet Cong is later. Vif12vf/Tiberius (talk) 20:45, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Funnily I came to make this very talk page topic. My understanding is that this is never what the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam called themselves and was the label given to them by the Diem regime. I do not think uncritically naming things like this is very good, for example one would not rename the Covid article the 'Kung-Flu China Virus' would they? It is not good and quite frankly calls into question the article in a more general sense if we cannot collectively get basic things like the title correct in an article that is years and years old. If nobody replies to this in a few days I will go ahead and change the title. SP00KYtalk 01:04, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Doesn't really matter what they call themselves....what matters is what RS calls them. (Anymore than it matters what the Nazi party's proper name was.) I can't think of too many sources that didn't call them that. In probably one of the most notable books on the Vietnam War (which we reference in the article) Stanley Karnow's 'Vietnam: A history', the VC are called the "Vietcong" about 80 times. Even a former member of the VC wrote a book called 'A Vietcong Memoir'. So the fact of the matter is: this is their common name. And secondly, you may want to check the archives. This subject has come up several times in the past in requested moves. There was no support for making that change.Rja13ww33 (talk) 02:10, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Note, however, that Karnow's book is more than 25 years old. More recent scholarship (e.g., Mark Atwood Lawrence, Robert Brigham, etc.) calls the National Liberation Front by its name rather than by the nickname that was popularized by the NLF's enemies. I think it's embarrassing that Wikipedia is still sticking with Viet Cong as the main term. Clearly there should be a disambiguation page so that you get to the article whether you search for Viet Cong or National Liberation Front. But the idea that the preferred term is Viet Cong would find little support among today's scholars. D.Holt (talk) 20:09, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

We can't throw out what historians have called them for decades based on what a few (more recent) scholars have said. That is a issue with WEIGHT (and a few other things).Rja13ww33 (talk) 21:18, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

That’s complete nonsense. By long-standing site-wide community consensus, significant alternative names for the topic should be mentioned in the article, usually in the first sentence or paragraph Unless that consensus changes, we need to follow it and in the short term follow 89.253.73.146's suggestion to clarify the various names, including the widely used NLF in scholarship and Mat-Tran Dan-Toc Giai-Phong Mien-Nam in Vietnamese sources. In the longer term we need to consider moving it as per the suggestion by @W1tchkr4ft 00: especially as neither the 2008 nor 2017 discussions had more than minimal participation, and there was essentially zero analysis of scholarly usage or Ngrams in the 2019 discussion. Cambial — foliar❧ 15:55, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

• None of which matters as as Viet Cong is still the common name.

100.34.85.44 (talk) 16:38, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand why people get these lables confused after 60 or 70 years. The National Liberation Front was the name of a Front Organization that ostensibly included Communist and non-Communist organizations. The NLF leadership didn't call themselves Communists because their claim was that they were an organization of Communist and non-Communist orgnizations. But Vietnamese Communists certainly identified as Communists.

"Viet Cong" is a short form for "cộng sản việt nam" which is the proper name for "Communist Vietnam" or "Vietnamese Communist." The proper name for the Communist Party of Vietnam was and is "Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam, "Đảng" meaning "Party" in this case. Neither the short form, "việt cộng" nor the long form "cộng sản việt nam" is a pejorative to a Communist, regardless of how it might be used by others. That Americans used the even shorter form of VC is irrelevant, but it is incorrect that it was in and of itself a pejorative. It was an identifier based on the false understanding that there were Communist military units fighting in the South which were separate from the army of North Vietnam, a myth successsfully fostered by the North for political reasons, VC being used to identify those southern units, to distinguish them from northern units ("NVA") used to identify units which were northern. South Vietnamese used the terms interchangebly for any Vietnamese Communist North or South, and did not distinguish southern and northern units as American military and government people and foreign reporters did. Sciacchitano (talk) 23:29, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Not in more recent scholarship. D.Holt (talk) 20:12, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

They made an effort to hide the fact that they were completely controlled by the Communist Party. Calling themselves the "National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam," or "National Liberation Front" for short, was part of that effort. Their enemies called them the "Viet Cong" to emphasize that they were essentially a Communist organization. In general, one should avoid calling a group by the name applied to that groups by its enemies. But in this case the label "Viet Cong" was truthful and the label "National Liberation Front" was deceptive, so I favor using "Viet Cong." Ed Moise (talk)

Revisions

I couldn't tell if others have made this comment, so I apologize in advance if I am repeating things. Assuming that there is some point to having it as a separate article in Wikipedia, and I make no judgment on that, the original possibly and certainly the various revisions have turned it into a mess that is repetitive but contradictory in part. Given the amount of new scholarship and Vietnamese material available in English and Vietnamese, the errors and contradictions aren't inexcusable. I don't question the various writers and editors efforts. But the article needs to be rewritten from scratch in my view if it has an accepted place in Wikipedia. A glaring example of an out of date viewpoint expressed in the article is the following: "The Viet Cong's best-known action was the Tet Offensive, an assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the Viet Cong. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese." First, this statement perpetuates the idea that the National Liberation Front was some sort of independent organization supported by the North with its own armed forces. The NLF had administrative and propaganda responsibilities and indeed some members did believe that they were a partner organization and not a wholy owned and controlled subsidiary of the politburo. But it's supposed military force was always fully integrated into the structure of the Army of North Vietnam, it's commanders were officers (southern born included) in the Army of North Vietnam, it was trained and supplied and directed by North. Moreover in this specific example it had no separate role in the planning and execution of the Tet Offensive. That offensive was planned by Le Duan and Van Tien Dung and commanded by Dung. By the time of the offensive, many or most of the so-called NLF units were already manned chiefly by northern soldiers because of the heavy losses suffered by the Communists in 1967, and the difficulty the Communists had in recruiting replacements in the South. I don't know what Wikipedia's network of historians is but recruiting someone professional to write a new article from scratch would seem to be a sensible way to produce a high quality article. Sciacchitano (talk) 00:14, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree that the article needs work. It's a big challenge, however, because things are far more controversial than you acknowledge. Your assertions about the nature of the NLF and its relationship to the PAVN do not at all reflect a consensus among scholars. These are not settled questions about which reasonable people no longer disagree. The point of this talk page is to recommend improvements, and I know that's what you intend, as do I. But we should acknowledge that cleanup of an article may be quite difficult when some of the core factual content is quite disputed. D.Holt (talk) 21:01, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

RS has said the NLF/VC was controlled by the North Vietnamese for quite sometime.Rja13ww33 (talk) 21:21, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 12 September 2024

Change the reference to footnote 9 at the end of the first paragraph to "[source needed]".

That source says only that the Workers Party of Vietnam was involved in the initial founding of the Viet Cong. According to its Wikipedia article, the Party was made up of North and South Vietnamese groups. Furthermore, this source doesn't provide any evidence for the claim that North Vietnam's government controlled the Viet Cong. 2604:CA00:109:887E:0:0:260:1F7A (talk) 22:56, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

 Done ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 04:55, 13 September 2024 (UTC)