Debate about the Vietnam War

[Eric the Green]

(06-10-2016, 06:41 AM)Anthony 58 Wrote: But, to the extent that America was sometimes "wrong" during the Cold War - supporting nun-raping death squads in El Salvador, and even the apartheid tyrannies in Rhodesia and South Africa - it was necessary to defeat the Communists, who sought to take over the world.  Similarly, supporting Stalinist Russia - which not for nothing murdered four times as many civilians as Nazi Germany - was necessary to stop the Nazis.

The problem for many Americans who supported the Vietnam War, which as a teenager I supported at first until I quickly learned more about it, is this lumping together of peoples as "communists" and "the one enemy" trying to conquer the world like Hitler, when this was not part of what was happening in Vietnam. When many Americans of all ages learned the true history, they turned against the war. That is what happened; not a young generation turning traitor.

Communism was a world revolutionary movement, just like democracy was, and other movements today like the greenpeace movements. The French Revolutionaries sought to extend their help to any nation seeking to "recover" their liberty, and mobilized to protect their nation against royalist foreign invaders trying to restore Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Eventually Napoleon took over the Revolution and turned it into conquest, and he was defeated. Socialism and Communism were needed revolutionary movements. They brought greater equality and restrained the evils of untrammeled capitalism. They came in many different shades, including democratic and nationalist. They took over the Democratic Party in the USA as "populists" in 1896. Like the Democratic Revolution before it, the movement was also taken over in some cases by tyrants who had to be contained, such as Soviet Russia under Stalin. But that did not justify supporting other tyrants against movements to overthrow them by their own people, or trying to assassinate foreign leaders like Castro.

As a nationalist yourself, Anthony, you can understand how the nationalist Vietnamese felt about defeating first the Japanese, then the French, and then the Americans, who all sought to colonize them. They finally succeeded. Their communist government may not be to our liking, but communism to them represented a liberating revolution that they wanted for their country. They were not interested like Napoleon and Hitler in world conquest, and have not carried out any such thing.

On the contrary, they have practically been our allies. They do not tolerate attempts by the Communist Chinese to dominate them. They defeated Chinese ally Pol Pot in Cambodia and put an end to his holocaust, and did not conquer the country for themselves.

A revolution that seeks to liberate the people, as socialism/communism does, cannot be defeated by foreigners who think it is a world conquest scheme. The Revolution must go forward, and the USA (as Martin Luther King Jr. said) needs to get on the right side of it.