What Zinn is
talking about here is the ability
of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong (the organized human
beings) to
defeat the US military (the organized modern technology). Zinn argues that this
was
possible basically because the communists were popular among the people
and the US-backed
government was not.
Zinn argues that Ho
Chi Minh and the communists had the
backing of the majority of the people of
Vietnam. He goes on to point out that the Diem
government and those that
followed it had very little support among the people. All they had,
Zinn
says, was the support of US military technology.
Zinn, then, is
painting
this war as a victory of people fighting for an idea they believed
in over what he sees as an
oppressive military using its technology to try to
make up for the fact that the cause it was
supporting completely lacked
legitimacy and popular support.
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