Book contents
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume III
- General Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I The Late Vietnam War
- Part II The Postwar Era
- 13 Vietnam after “Liberation”
- 14 The Third World and the Communist Triumph in Vietnam
- 15 The Third Indochina War
- 16 Vietnam in the Reform Era
- 17 Postwar US–Vietnam Relations
- 18 Refugees and US–Vietnam Relations
- 19 The US POW Experience, American Veterans, and the War
- Part III Legacies
- Index
14 - The Third World and the Communist Triumph in Vietnam
from Part II - The Postwar Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2025
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Contributors to Volume III
- General Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I The Late Vietnam War
- Part II The Postwar Era
- 13 Vietnam after “Liberation”
- 14 The Third World and the Communist Triumph in Vietnam
- 15 The Third Indochina War
- 16 Vietnam in the Reform Era
- 17 Postwar US–Vietnam Relations
- 18 Refugees and US–Vietnam Relations
- 19 The US POW Experience, American Veterans, and the War
- Part III Legacies
- Index
Summary
This chapter situates the communist victory in the Second Indochina War in the broader context of Third World revolution during the 1970s. It argues that 1975 represented a high-water mark of secular revolutionary activity in the global Cold War, and that the following years witnessed the retreat of left-wing revolutionary politics in the Global South. The period that followed saw the rise of a new model of political organization among Third World revolutionaries that largely abandoned secular progressive ideologies in favor of appeals to ethnic and sectarian identities as the basis of armed revolution. If Vietnamese communist fighters represented the archetype of Third World Revolutionaries in the long 1960s, the Afghan Mujahideen would come to symbolize the revolutionaries of the 1980s.
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- The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War , pp. 313 - 332Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024