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Vietnam Midterm To many Americans, especially those like myself who were born into a culture of pop music, flouresante clothing, and “New Kids on the Block”, Vietnam was simply a War, not a country. It is the site though of the longest and most controversial war we've ever fought, the one that shattered our national honor and pride and made a whole generation question our greatness and purpose as a nation. But even more importantly to note, we must look at the way the war savagely destroyed a tiny country full of peasants. But the United States was not the first country to do so. From 1850 onwards, the French started to control what they now called Indochina, which included present-day Laos and Cambodia. Under French colonialism, their only aims were to see that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer (same capitalistic tactics that the U.S. implies) therefore creating a wide gap of social classes of rich and poor or in this case landowner and peasant. One aim of French Colonialism was to accumulate capital for investors, both French and Vietnamese that were seeking profit from this newly acquired territory. The other aim was to obtain Vietnam’s raw materials such as rice, tin, and rubber.
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