Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: May 30, 2022 01:37PM
The problem then, and now, is oversimplification of geopolitics.
"Communism" was falling apart at the time. In the late 1960s relations between Moscow and Beijing were so bad that China and the Soviets fought a few undeclared large-scale battles along their joint border; and China stopped letting the Soviets ship equipment to their allies, the North Vietnamese, overland. When the US and the Soviet Union came close to reaching a deal on the war in late 1967, the Chinese reacted by supporting their ally, the Vietcong, in the Tet offensive in early 1968, which made it impossible for Washington to continue negotiating a ceasefire.
In 1972 Nixon drove a wedge between the USSR and China, fracturing the supposed unity of the international communist movement. When the US finally withdrew in 1975, China's allies in Cambodia launched a war against Vietnam, whom they feared wanted to unite Indochina under its auspices as the region had been united under France. Part of that war was Pol Pot's pogrom against the Vietnamese community within Cambodia whom he feared might function as a fifth column for Hanoi. That led to the war between the two countries that lasted through 1978 and the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in February 1979--an action unwittingly supported by the clueless Carter administration's recognition agreement with Beijing in December 1978, which prevented the soviets from supporting their ally Vietnam.
There are two important points about that. First, the boat people you encountered were almost entirely Vietnamese who had lived in Cambodia and were displaced by Pol Pot between 1976 and 1978. Besides Hong Kong, they washed up in refugee camps on Palawan in the Philippines, in Thailand, Malaysia, and even Australia. Tens of thousands of them would be stuck in those camps for decades; two generations of children would be born in those collections of hovels. Second, there was no international "communism" then or anytime since. Wars between the communist powers were at least as intense, and certainly more frequent, than between them and the "free" world.
With that background, I'm wondering what you mean by communism and fascism being on the march today. China rejected communism in that same Third Plenum in 1978 that confirmed the decision to recognize the US as well as the imminent invasion of Vietnam. The reason the Chinese economy has done so well since then is precisely because it embraced capitalism. Nor is modern Russia communist; rather, it is a kleptocratic form of capitalism.
Sure, we may be facing a new "Cold War," but it isn't between capitalism/fascism and communism: it is between various forms of capitalism under increasingly authoritarian/fascist leaderships. The wave across the world is towards the latter, not the former. In the US and parts of Western Europe there is definitely a proto-fascist tendency, but what you appear to term "communist" is really just attempted movement back towards the more egalitarian politics and economics of the 1950s--when the highest marginal tax rate in the US was 93%. Did that make Eisenhower and Nixon communists???
And "Cold War" doesn't need to be between different ideological systems: it more typically is between similar regimes fighting over concrete economic and geopolitical interests.