Communism in Vietnam

Hi All,
We're well on our way in Vietnam and the tour has been going very well despite some rain. This is definitly travelling in style as far as Gay and I are concerned. Private air-con bus, fancy hotels with welcome drinks and the farthest we carry our backpacks is from our room to the bus. It's been raining a lot here and there are rumours that our next destination, Hoi An, is truly underwater. We talked to a couple of tourists who had just come from the city and they said they had to get a boat to take them out of thier hotel. Needless to say our tour guide is scrambling but he doesn't seem too concerned.

Communism?
Over here they call the Vietnam War the American War even though the Americans were fighting not only with the South Vietnamese but also Australians, New Zealanders and soldiers from a lot of other near by countries. In the beginning of the tour we saw 2 sights that concentrated on the Vietnam war; the War Remanents Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Both of these I felt were decidedly anit-American. The Remanants museum becuase it had a lot of gruesome pictures with captions like "Americans brutily tortured the Vietnamese" or "Americans killed innocent civilians". At the Cu Chi Tunnels we watched a video that was obviously made recently but looked as if it was actual war footage. The voice said things like "..here is Kim, she bravely fought the Americans and won an award for the most Americans killed in a single battle." Kim is shown waving with her gun with fake machine gun fire effects in the background. I felt pretty offended at these things, and when our tour guide started using the same rhetoric I talked with him. He's a young guy, only 2 years younger than myself and he has as much first hand war experience as me; none.

After that, I read some more about the history of the Vietnam War and I realized that it actually was the Americans doing most of the killing and planning and I also got a good explaination of why we went to Vietnam in the first place; and that was Communism, or really, the fear of it. Yes, the Communist North Vietnamese beat us and as a result the government turned Communist and has been ever since, even today. I'm glad I've gotten a chance to see, first hand, Vietnam and China, probably the 2 big Communist governments today. The truth is that modern Communism is nothing more than capitalism with the government having a tighter control of the people. The markets are wide open and people can go out and buy fancy clothes and bling-bling motorbikes and our tour guide said you can even buy a Rolls Royce for 1.5 million USD. The difference between us and them is that we can say publicly that our government sucks, they can't. Now the anti-American talk doesn't bother me, but what's more frustrating is thinking about what all the fighting and killing and Napalm use was for. We killed to erradicate communism but now it's not too different from how we live. If we would have know what modern Communism would look like I think we would have just said "yeah fine go for it".