01-21-2020, 05:45 PM
(01-21-2020, 04:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I don't know who knocked veterans of the Vietnam War. I thought they should not have gone, and I thought they should not have gone to Iraq too. But I don't remember any friends or people I knew who put them down. I know there were some people who did after the Vietnam War. But we hippie-age blue boomers and silents who protested the wars wanted to save their lives by bringing them home. And we wanted to stop the killing. War did great damage to many people who fought and were victims of it. And the supposed cause was defective, and not worth killing and deforming millions of people for.
There were some regrettable people who greeted American veterans from the War in Vietnam with the epithet "baby-killer" as if all American soldiers were equivalents of William Calley. I remember seeing people cheer the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army advancing into Saigon and shouting "Bring the victory home". Multitudes of Vietnamese fled the Communist takeover of the North and then the Communist takeover of the South. I have met some Vietnamese refugees; they are not evil people.
Quote:Sure, it would have been nice if the United States could have set up a democracy in South Vietnam. Communism is not so good, although sometimes it can be reformed. But what business did we have to go invade a country half way around the world and set up their government for them by burning women, kids, houses and villages, as Arlo Guthrie put it? It was up to the Vietnamese to fight this out. And there never was any such democracy there to defend.
Would that we could have been as successful in South Vietnam as in South Korea. To spoof Lincoln Steffens, from what I understand about South Korea I might say, if I ever visited it -- I would love to have done so while my father, a Korean War veteran, was living and I would have told him that I have seen the future and it works. Note well that there was no armistice in Vietnam as there was in Korea. Vietnam, like China, has abandoned Marxist-Leninist economics without abandoning the dictatorship.
Our leadership thoroughly bungled the War in Vietnam. On the other hand, the government of the Republic of Vietnam was corrupt, insensitive, and incompetent.
Quote:Much the same issue came up about Iraq. What right did we have to just go invade another country and set up their government for them? Was it our oil that was under their sand? Maybe it will turn out OK. But in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and the demon of the Islamic State was released. Maybe we could have helped them with money and intelligence and supplies once the Iraqi people rose up in the Arab Spring, IF they wanted our help (as the Syrians did, and we failed to provide).
It was definitely not "our" oil. Maybe things will turn out well in Iraq in the end... well, maybe if Trump ends up with little role in it.
Quote:These wars are the archetype of the quagmire. The United States must avoid them in the future if it wants to keep its standing in the world. My country right or wrong, is wrong. If my country is right, it's because it allows its people to decide what is right. To fight for democracy abroad, and destroy it at home in the name of "Americans," is the road to destruction. If saying these things make me a blue hippie un-American, then I'm proud to be one.
It could be far worse should America become an Evil Empire. I think of this clip from a History Channel documentary relating Star Wars III in which the Evil Empire supplants the shaky, Weimar-like Republic with a monstrosity.
The Dark Side is much closer to us than most of us want to believe.
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.