The South were not above bad behaviour, some evidence of which is in the Museum of War Remnants in HCMC, but this is true of most wars ever.
I don’t think it’s useful to make a good/bad guys argument case for North vs South, but it is easy to make a case that the USA committed a lot of heinous atrocities in that whole region for little reason beyond the fact that the rich people in charge didn’t like the idea of communism becoming popular and their wealth being taken from them.
There are no shortage of stories of Viet Cong being sneaky or less than gracious hosts to captured POWs, but these often skim over the fact that they were the ones being invaded; it’s churlish to conduct a massively asymmetrical assault on a peasant village with helicopters, bombers and Agent Orange, and then complain that their prison facilities weren’t up to your standards…
…however, go to to the top of your question, modern Vietnam is doing ok compared to its immediate neighbours. There’s some amount of corruption at various levels of government but this seems to be improving slowly. The main utilities etc are govt owned so stuff like mobile phone plans are reasonably priced. Commerce is thriving, but I don’t think that was ever banned in the first place.
They relaxed visa requirements for visitors more recently, so the tourist spots are WAY more crowded than 15 years ago.
The South were not above bad behaviour, some evidence of which is in the Museum of War Remnants in HCMC, but this is true of most wars ever.
I don’t think it’s useful to make a good/bad guys argument case for North vs South, but it is easy to make a case that the USA committed a lot of heinous atrocities in that whole region for little reason beyond the fact that the rich people in charge didn’t like the idea of communism becoming popular and their wealth being taken from them.
There are no shortage of stories of Viet Cong being sneaky or less than gracious hosts to captured POWs, but these often skim over the fact that they were the ones being invaded; it’s churlish to conduct a massively asymmetrical assault on a peasant village with helicopters, bombers and Agent Orange, and then complain that their prison facilities weren’t up to your standards…
…however, go to to the top of your question, modern Vietnam is doing ok compared to its immediate neighbours. There’s some amount of corruption at various levels of government but this seems to be improving slowly. The main utilities etc are govt owned so stuff like mobile phone plans are reasonably priced. Commerce is thriving, but I don’t think that was ever banned in the first place.
They relaxed visa requirements for visitors more recently, so the tourist spots are WAY more crowded than 15 years ago.