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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Epaminondas of Thebes (talk | contribs) at 01:01, 6 October 2013 (→Requested move 2013: reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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This entire paragraph is of questionable accuracy

Sources being cited are US information service, and the Reader's Digest, among others, publicized during the war. None of these are reliable sources. I suggest this entire paragraph be deleted. This is merely questionable propaganda. 68.226.57.161 (talk) 05:12, 2 April 2013 (UTC) Gerard Briardy jerrybriardy@yahoo.com[reply]

"Many Viet Cong units operated at night,[46] and employed terror as a standard tactic.[47] Rice procured at gunpoint sustained the Viet Cong.[48] Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas.[49] Government employees, especially village and district heads, were the most common targets. But there were a wide variety of targets, including clinics and medical personnel.[50] Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế, 48 killed in the bombing of My Canh floating restaurant in Saigon in June 1965[51] and a massacre of 252 Montagnards in the village of Đắk Sơn in December 1967 using flamethrowers.[52] During the war, the Viet Cong reportedly sliced off the genitals of village chiefs and sewed them inside their bloody mouths, cut off the tongues of helpless victims, rammed bamboo lances through one ear and out the other, slashed open the wombs of pregnant women, disemboweled random civilians and draped their mutilated bodies on fences, machine gunned children, hacked men and women to pieces with machetes, and cut off the fingers of small children who dared to get an education.[53] Viet Cong death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam; the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967-72. They also waged a mass murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; in the peak war years, nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.[54] Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century".[55]"


Article Title, and content is atually grossly offensive. The Wermacht wiki page isnt called 'Gerrys' or 'Krauts', so why is this NVA (thats north vietnamese army, or the NLF, you know, their actual name?) page entirely revolving around the insulting pejorative that the US troops and government used for the north vietnamese? The vietnamese themselves make clear distinctions between viet cong (communist guerrilas) and NVA /NLF regulars, while this article effectively treats them as one in the same.

National Liberation Front

Please rename this to National Liberation Front (Vietnam). Using this name is so subjective! Wikipedia should be neutral, not a propaganda place for planting the US point of view by even using propaganda names! The article CAN'T be called Viet Cong! Rename it now. --188.113.91.110 (talk) 20:08, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And now I see that the real name is even taken out of the infobox, as well as that it stays "Viet Cong, also known as National Liberation Front" in the introduction (and when Viet Cong stays first, it seems more like Viet Cong was the organization's prefered name, and NLF was another name used on them - exactly opposite of reality!) --188.113.91.110 (talk) 20:12, 22 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, but what can we do to have it changed to NPOV? Revlurk (talk) 13:59, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've started a formal request to have the article moved, see the bottom of the talk page. Revlurk (talk) 14:57, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This whole article examines the NLF from the perspective of their enemies, so it's not surprising that it use the name they used. It's still a travesty, though. 99.248.241.9 (talk) 20:01, 6 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Grammatical error in second paragraph: 'ferment' should be changed to 'foment'

Suggest changing first sentence of second paragraph from:

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front in 1960 to ferment insurgency

to:

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front in 1960 to foment insurgency

Unless they were making alcohol.

Moving this page to National Liberation Front for South Vietnam

Adelson Velsky Landis converted this page into a redirect and performed a cut and paste move to National Liberation Front for South Vietnam. There are two problems with this;

Firstly, from a technical point of view, this is not how you move an article. Please read this and this. Unfortunately we cannot perform the move properly now, because the created National Liberation Front for South Vietnam article is now in the way. A request to a moderator will have to be made to delete this page first.

Secondly, this moving is likely to be controversial and should be discussed first. You should follow the procedure described here.

Thanks. --Escape Orbit (Talk) 22:08, 26 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 2013

Viet Cong → National Liberation Front (Vietnam) – Viet Cong is pejorative colloquialism for the NLF used by American soldiers and the Saigon regime and newspapers (see Viet Cong#Names and also History.com). It would be more NPOV to use the official name of the group as the article title as well as in the article itself. This is in line with point #2 of WP:POVNAME. The name could be either "National Liberation Front" (NLF) (short for "National Liberation Front for South Vietnam"), or it could be "Liberation Army of South Vietnam". I suggest "National Liberation Front" as that seems to be the most commonly used NPOV term (used for example on Encyclopædia Britannica and History.com), and is also precise, in line with WP:PRECISE. Revlurk (talk) 14:54, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support, WP:COMMONNAME should not be used to promote pejoratives. FNL was predominately labelled as 'Viet Cong' in American news media, but English Wikipedia isn't an exclusively American encyclopedia. Searching FNL OR NLF Vietnam gives 146,000 book results, so this is hardly a fringe name. Doing a quick glance of the results compared with googling 'Viet Cong', I'd say that the the former gives more academic and less US-centric results. --Soman (talk) 15:21, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. The proposed title should be either Liberation Army of South Vietnam or National Liberation Front for South Vietnam. This is not the National Liberation Front for Vietnam, but for south Vietnam, the only part that needed liberating. Indeed, if we go with the proposed title, aren't we casually affirming American propaganda that the NLF was just an arm of the PAVN? If we go with the more formal titles I've suggested, aren't we affirming communist propaganda that the NLF was an indigenous southern insurgency? Let's just stick with the common term we've got: Viet Cong. Srnec (talk) 16:32, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Natural disambiguation is preferred over parenthetical. Viet Cong does that job just fine; I'd be happy with one of the suggested alternatives if they're actually backed by more strong sources and if we can resist the urge to glue some brackets onto the end of it. bobrayner (talk) 16:59, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per Revlurk. Zocky | picture popups 19:36, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. The term Viet Cong/Vietcong is certainly more common than "National Liberation Front", as you can see from this ngram. Britannica is being misrepresented in the nomination. Their main article on this subject is titled "Viet Cong". The NLF article describes the Viet Cong as the NLF's "military arm." I don't see any reason to consider the name "Viet Cong" to be pejorative, and Britannica certainly doesn't describe it that way. The name suggests that the group was communist, but that is hardly a controversial claim at this point. As far as what they called themselves, they had many names. When they were first organized in 1954, they were the "Saigon-Cholon Peace Committees". After 1969, they dropped NLF and switched to "Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam." In military terms, there was a single communist army with commanders who reported to Hanoi. Modern Vietnamese writing normally drops the North/South distinction -- everyone is described as "PAVN" or whatever. Epaminondas of Thebes (talk) 21:53, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Comment: This comment explains why the move is necessary. What by your standards is this mysterious 'Viet Cong'? In this comment the armed movement, united front movement and government structure are conflated into one and the same. Using the actual names of actual organizations/entities helps the reader to navigate and learn (as opposed to reaffirming popular misconceptions). --Soman (talk) 23:29, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Per Thebes, and if you wanted the US name, it'd be "Charlie" -- 76.65.129.3 (talk) 22:12, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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