Southeast Asian Crossroads Essay

SOUTHEAST ASIA CROSSROADS
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Southeast Asia Crossroads
Communism in its revolutionary, modern and totalitarian form was introduced in Asia in the early 20th Century. This happened after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, however, many institutions and ideas around communism like state ownership, political authoritarianism, economic egalitarianisms had existed in the Asian history. Communism was embraced in Asia as a counterforce against the western imperialism and also after the World War 2. The US troops entered the Vietnam war in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism. In the 1950s and 1960s, many countries including Vietnam were interested in trying the communist approach in government. The fear of a domestic communism gripped America in 1949. Internationally, following the World war 2, many countries in Europe had gone down under communist governments, just like China had and the trend was spreading to other parts of the world such as the Latin America, Africa and Asia. The US had a feeling that it was losing the cold war and therefore had to contain communism. Communism was the main cause of the Vietnam War; after the U.S. identified that this ideology was taking over the country and would end up making the whole of Asia communist. Communism was disastrous for Vietnam.
However, a decade after the Vietnam won the war, the communist ideologies started being abandoned and there was the introduction of a market based economy and soon the country registering some economic growth. The ultimate disaster with communism happed in 1975 after the war was over, the communists sent millions of people to the concentration camps which they called the re-education camps, so that they could be taught the new principles. In those camps 165,000 people were killed. Further, more than a million others fled the country for fear of prosecution. Communism was after the most enterprising, most skilled, most productive people in the country. Communism had a hand in every sector and life of the Vietnamese; they collectivized agriculture, confiscating peasant land and created state farms.
The general agreement about the genesis of Islam in Southeast Asia is that the conversion happened peacefully, and took the route of trade networks that connected the region with South Asia, China and the Middle East. Traveling preachers or holy men and Moslem traders from these regions were the main means of that transmission. The connection to the sea saw Islam making its initial impact and taking root largely in the archipelagic region of Southeast Asia in modern-day Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia. The time frame when the conversion took place in Southeast Asia is not clear, however, there are archeological remnants, like tombs that exist from earlier periods, the prevalence of Islam started sometimes after the 13th century, when it became a fundamental eleme...