In scratching the surface on the Vietnam War, I was surprised by the similarities between the Vietnam War and the Korean War a decade prior - two major 20th century wars on which I know quite little. From my limited understanding, the American playbook during the Cold War era went something like this:

1. A third-world Asian country is invaded and brutally colonised for decades by an imperial power (Japan in Korea, France and Japan in Vietnam).

2. The invader abandons/surrenders their colony due to low capacity after WW2, leaving a power vaccuum.

3. The indigenous resistance movements that had been opposing colonial rule finally have a chance at independence and begin forming the foundations of self-determination for their people. While tempting to call these folks the “good underdogs” and the Americans/Russians the “big bad guys”, this is not all that clear cut. The indigenous independence movements are neither homogeneous nor free from their share of brutality.

4. Some external force (America, Russia, etc.) moves into the power vaccuum, using the country as a convenient stage for a capitalism vs. communism proxy war. This overwhelms any genuine grassroots efforts at anti-colonial independence (peasants wanting more equality and less wealth gap).

5. The countries are split in two by these external powers (Korea at the 38th parallel, Vietnam at the 17th parallel) and a bloody war ensues. NZ and Australia, also fearful of Russian-style communism in their Asia-Pacific backyard, also send troops. The wars go down in history as some of the most brutal wars in recent history, particularly in how thoroughly the land and all infrastructure is bombed, and the indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations (“kill anything that moves”).

The difference is that the Korean War paused in a bloody stalemate (it is still techncally at war today, with only a ceasefire signed) with the peninsula remaining torn in two and South Korea deeply enmeshed with American geopolitics (and North Korea with Russia and China). Meanwhile, the US lost the Vietnam war, and Vietnam reunified into one independent country, still led today by a single-party communist government.

Vietnam today

These are just basic observations, but I noticed that Soviet-style party propaganda was very prominent everywhere we went in Vietnam. Billboards depicted hale peasants and workers looking out a bright future. Bunting criss-crossed streets and shops, consisting of red communist flags (hammer and sickle) alternating with the red Vietnamese flag. I read that there is a lot of corruption. There is also definitely the buzz of an energetic, young population that is readily embracing new trends, new technology, and globalisation. For example, their apps for booking intercity buses (Vexere) or their EV equivalent of Uber (Green SM) were highly functional, sleekly designed, worked seamlessly in English, and had great service - much better than some equivalents I’ve experienced in Europe so far! As another example, we went to several hipster cafes serving single-origin coffee, oat matcha, and vegan oat slices. These are just observations; I don’t think I could really say whether these are good or bad.

Impact of the war on Korea today

The podcast I was listening to suggests that Korea turned out to be a success story - “but no one would want to undo the Korean war now, seeing South Korea and North Korea now”. By many humanistic measures of success (infant mortality, poverty, freedom of religion/speech/movement, etc.), South Korea is doing better than North Korea for sure. But many of the other points of comparison - South Korea's technological advancement, their palatability to Western cultural tastes (K-pop, K-dramas, K-beauty) - are obviously measured by European standards. And then there’s the downright bad - very high suicide rates, longest work hours in the world, little real upward mobility, and an extremely jerky foray into equal rights for women/all marginalised groups with the flood of Western cultural values clashing strongly with Korean and/or Confucius ones. And what about the decades of cruel military dictatorship following South Korean "independence", which laid the bloody foundations of the 21st century South Korean economy today? If the installation of a high-GDP "western democracy" cost so much in blood (and environmental damage - bombing every inch of a country isn’t great for nature, obviously), and the ends are such as they are (good in some humanistic and Eurocentric ways, average-to-terrible in others), do the ends justify the means?

A bit of a random segue, but I think about this often: if we consider that art is a reflection of a culture's inner world, I often wonder what Korean art would look like today without the weight of external colonising forces (both physical colonisation, and ideological colonisation like westernisation). What would the Korean music, movie, and TV scene look like today if it wasn't focusing so hard on making money in Western markets? (I say this as I'm about to go to a BTS concert). It think works like Parasite and Squid Game are exceptions.

As for Korean folk tradition, how does it preserve itself authentically? It feels like sometimes, folk tradition takes on a bit of a defensive quality, like a shield against Western cultural dominance, or in the case of North Korea, a weapon of state propaganda.

Maybe it doesn't matter, because art as a response to difficult times - as critique, compliance, or survival - is still a reflection of those times, is still art, and one isn't inherently better or worse than the other. This is a wistful thought experiment anyway, because it assumes the absence of external forces. Perhaps we can get there one day, if our species can move beyond the fear-based, domineering mindset of "more"!