06-08-2016, 09:14 AM
(06-08-2016, 07:50 AM)Anthony Wrote: But it was not a civil war. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam!
As for the "anti-Buddhist" BS, the Communists pulled this same calumny regarding every Western or Western-allied country: The British "oppressed" the Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Canadians "oppressed" Quebec, Spain "oppressed" the Basques, the "fascist" Flemings in Belgium "oppressed" the Walloons, and so on.
But the Communists didn't oppress the Balts and the Ukrainians, or the Tibetans.
Give me a break!
Did I say that the Commies are saints? They are among the worst hypocrites about ethnic minorities, rivaled only by programmatic racists. Yes, China has infamously oppressed Tibetans and Uighurs. Nicolae Ceausescu so mistreated the large Hungarian minority in Transylvania that he created a security gap for the old Soviet Union. That's before I mention Jews (for religion), and Balts and Ukrainians among others for ethnicity in the Soviet Union. Slovak autonomy was practically a dead letter to Czechoslovak Commies. Need I discuss the outright ban on religion in Albania? Tito may have kept the lid on ethnic strife in the old Yugoslavia, but once he was gone that lid was blown away.
As for Northern Ireland... the Protestants are in the majority, and the worst thing for Catholics in Ulster would be independence for Northern Ireland. Belgium? The Nazis clearly favored the Flemings over the Walloons and sought to split Belgium so that it could annex Flanders as well as the Netherlands to the Devil's Reich -- but that is past. Apartheid and Jim Crow were of course all too real.
The solution to ethnic strife is democracy that recognizes the rights of minorities. It was clearly better to be an Arab citizen of Israel (a democracy), Catholic in Northern Ireland, Basque in either contemporary France or Spain, Maori in New Zealand, or black in contemporary America than to be a Shiite subject of Satan Hussein. Who oppresses whom in Hawaii?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.