Debate about the Vietnam War

[pbrower2a]

(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?

[Ragnarök_62]

Bronco80 Wrote:To keep the way I see it brief, both sides were terrible, thus the US should not have taken a side.

Good luck with that dude. You just touched the Boomer tar baby issue and here you are!   Some Boomer is gonna say you're wrong because there are Boomer factions that say the North was evil, while others will the South was evil. Nope, nope, in some minds, there ain't middle ground. Of course we should have stayed out and told the French, no thank you.

[Eric the Green]

(06-06-2016, 07:42 AM)Anthony 58 Wrote: No one understands, respects, and appreciates the fact that African-Americans have always had - and still have - legitimate grievances more than I do.  Yet at the same time, it is never acceptable to collaborate with a foreign enemy in time of total war - and don't kid yourself: The Cold War was a total war - had we lost, it would have meant a Communist boot stamping on the human face forever; by contrast, there was never any concrete evidence that the Nazis had any conquest ambitions for the Western Hemisphere.

Yes, but we lost Vietnam; and Vietnam hasn't turned out anywhere near as bad as we feared it would be in the hands of the communists. The Vietnamese were fighting us because we had invaded their country, and they wanted their own. There was never the remotest threat that Vietnam would invade America.

Quote:And why was the Vietnam War "immoral"?  North Vietnam and its Viet Cong stooges invaded South Vietnam, which was not making any aggressive moves whatsoever towards them.  And what G-d damn hypocrites the Boomer cowards and traitors were - calling this noble war "immoral" while concomitantly having sex like rabbits without even the thought of getting married, just as they called our brave police officers "pigs" while they themselves lived like pigs, hardly ever taking baths, etc.

And since when does disapproving of treason make anyone a chickenhawk?  Was Dante a chickenhawk for reserving the very lowest circle of his Inferno for traitors?

There was never any such thing as a South Vietnam for the North to "invade." The Viet Cong were from the South. The USA were the invaders. When I think about Bush's invasion of Iraq being "the worst foreign policy blunder ever by the USA," and then I remember Vietnam, I have to say there was a worse one. The Boomer peace activists were the heroes for trying to stop it. Yes, Boomers were wrong to call police "pigs," but they did it because they came onto campus to put down the demonstrations against the war. Police when they misbehave, as they still do when they shoot unarmed young black people, need to be called to account, just as our government needs to be opposed when it starts deadly, unnecessary wars. I'd say young Boomers not taking a bath was nothing to yell about compared to young Boomers being forced by their government to go to a distant land and kill other young people who had done nothing to them or their country at all. Yes, that was way immoral.

[Eric the Green]

(06-07-2016, 11:16 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Ahhhhh Vietnam.

So, it is true that the US supported a bad government. And yes there were atrocities and injustices from that side of the fence.

On the other hand, the North Vietnamese really were a satellite of the Communist Bloc. There is no doubt. They were not some Vietnamese versions of the US late 1700s patriots. So, we had to do something. Of course, that something ought to have been swifter and more aggressive - e.g. actual invasion and occupation of North Vietnam. Meanwhile, the North also had their atrocities and injustices up the yin yang.

War is a bad thing and hell and there are atrocities on both sides of any war.

Those of us who opposed the US invasion of Vietnam did not agree that North Vietnam was a satellite state. No, it was a state that had at first offered to be allies of the USA and adopt our constitution. When we backed the French instead, Ho turned to the commie countries for help. Once the French lost their colony, the Domino Theory was invented to justify the USA taking over from the French and colonizing Vietnam. But there were never any dominoes. Ho was not Hitler and the Vietnamese just wanted their own country. And so it has turned out. The USA needs to admit its mistake, and make friends. That's pretty much what it is doing now.

Quote:Oh, and then there was the 1000 year old animosity between the North and South that predated all modern geopolitics and domestic Vietnamese polity.

A classic mess.

Such north-south split doesn't exist today. Seems Vietnam has turned out pretty well. The US-Vietnam War was a mess of our own making. There's animosity between north and south in the USA, and it came to blows once. Should the Vietnamese take sides and come over here and fight for one of them, on the pretext that IF THEY DON'T, WE will invade THEM? (( as we once DID, in fact...))

Tar baby issue for boomers indeed. Why am I getting into this?

[Eric the Green]

(06-06-2016, 07:42 AM)Anthony 58 Wrote: there was never any concrete evidence that the Nazis had any conquest ambitions for the Western Hemisphere.

We could debate another war too

The British and French were our allies of long-standing, and Hitler was directly conquering them or already trying to. And Hitler declared the war against the USA, NOT vice-versa. The USA was attacked by Hitler's ally. When we the USA declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the USA. If Hitler had conquered all of Europe, there was a threat that he would invade more lands. His ambition knew no bounds. He could have stopped at any point. He did not.

But other dictators and tyrants are not necessarily like Hitler. That was OUR mistake in Vietnam.

[Ragnarök_62]

Eric The Green Wrote:War is a bad thing and hell and there are atrocities on both sides of any war.

Agreed, which is why war should be the last resort and not the first in our current flock of wars of choice.

Quote:Those of us who opposed the US invasion of Vietnam did not agree that North Vietnam was a satellite state. No, it was a state that had at first offered to be allies of the USA and adopt our constitution. When we backed the French instead, Ho turned to the commie countries for help. Once the French lost their colony, the Domino Theory was invented to justify the USA taking over from the French and colonizing Vietnam. But there were never any dominoes. Ho was not Hitler and the Vietnamese just wanted their own country. And so it has turned out. The USA needs to admit its mistake, and make friends. That's pretty much what it is doing now.

Agreed here again. There is no reason to hold animus against Vietnam at present. Ditto for Cuba. I rather doubt either has a worse government than Saudi Arabia.  Rather hypocritical / using double standards isn't it?

Quote:Tar baby issue for boomers indeed. Why am I getting into this?

You just answered your own question there big buy.  You're getting into this because you're a boomer. Never mind this thing has sucked in the cusps on both sides. Hell, we had "ROTC sux" in Jr high! The War babies were of course on the front lines back then.

Vietnam = Herpes, the gift that just keeps on giving. 

[radind]

(06-08-2016, 05:58 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(06-06-2016, 07:42 AM)Anthony Wrote: there was never any concrete evidence that the Nazis had any conquest ambitions for the Western Hemisphere.

We could debate another war too

The British and French were our allies of long-standing, and Hitler was directly conquering them or already trying to. And Hitler declared the war against the USA, NOT vice-versa. The USA was attacked by Hitler's ally. When we the USA declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the USA. If Hitler had conquered all of Europe, there was a threat that he would invade more lands. His ambition knew no bounds. He could have stopped at any point. He did not.

But other dictators and tyrants are not necessarily like Hitler. That was OUR mistake in Vietnam.

Hitler was evil and  I agree that his ambition knew no bounds. The more he got, the more he wanted. Fortunately for us he choked on Russia. If he had prevailed in Russia and Europe, I have no doubt that Hitler would have come after the US as well.

[Anthony '58]

Politics stops at the water's edge - and it was not a Boomer, but rather the Lost Arthur Vandenberg, who said that.

Who is/was "good" or "evil" has nothing to do with it. The foreign enemy of your domestic political opponent is not your friend - unless you are a traitor.

[pbrower2a]

(06-09-2016, 06:56 AM)Anthony Wrote: Politics stops at the water's edge - and it was not a Boomer, but rather the Lost Arthur Vandenberg, who said that.

Who is/was "good" or "evil" has nothing to do with it.  The foreign enemy of your domestic political opponent is not your friend - unless you are a traitor.

The Vietnam War became a domestic disaster when Boomers became the draftees. In the 1960s Boomers were much more naive than older generations about foreign policy. Already judgmental, they were vulnerable to such slogans as "War is harmful to children and other living things", at least on the Left. On the Right, they really believed in the reality of the Communist menace. Yes, the Boomer division was already severe.

Avoiding military service, or at least service in Vietnam, was easy for those who had the brains to do something other than wait for the draft board to call one's name. One could get deferment after deferment as S-2 (college student).  By the time one had one's PhD the military no longer wanted one.  (Harmful effect: instead of doing military service and going home to build a business or begin a skilled trade one got to participate in the flooding of the job market for white-collar workers to the detriment of people too young to fight in Vietnam... like me!) One could do one's military service (a six-year enlistment, four active years and two reserve) in Europe with the understanding that if the Soviet Union really invaded Europe one would not last long, but in the meantime one might get to visit Germany. If one fouled up badly in Europe one might be shipped off to Vietnam.

America got the foul-ups in Vietnam, including above all others Lieutenant William Calley. Even if he was the scapegoat for My Lai, on the whole it was not the "peace, love, and dope" people who messed up the American cause. We need not go into the details of My Lai. American opinion on the war crashed about then. We could no longer see ourselves as the unqualified good in Vietnam.

....I'm going to make a distinction that you, Anthony, do not make. Three sorts of people oppose a war. The first is the cautionary who may believe that participation in a certain war is wrong because participation therein is ultimately contrary to the national interest, a pointless waste of men and materiel, and hence government funds that could be more wisely used elsewhere (even if on tax cuts that stimulate business).  The leadership may want war for all the wrong reasons, like achieving its own glory or creating easy and corrupt profits for merchants of war. A particular war is thus wrong and avoidable. The cautionary may have no qualms about wars necessary for the defense of one's own country or its obvious allies.  Defending one's colonial position  after the people in the colony want one's colonial officials to leave or propping up a vile and unpopular regime could easily violate the sensibilities of a cautionary. The cautionary may see situations in which military heroism is necessary for the survival of his nation or its values, and often has the rectitude to wage righteous warfare.

Second is the pacifist, someone who opposes war on principle -- all war. The pacifist may believe that even the most brutal invader might come to the realization that the people that it has defeated is unworthy of cruel treatment and might as well be treated with respect. Obviously that failed with the Mongols and the Nazis, demonstrating that pacifism taken to its logical conclusion can fail. Of course a pacifist world is a peaceful world.

Third is the defeatist, often a traitor who wants his country defeated in war and sees a potential conqueror as the solution to his problems (like his opportunity to achieve power or to participate in the looting and exploitation of his own country, or at the least to bring about a political order of his desire through a revolution that will never be popular).  France had many such people at the start of World War II, and they served the Nazis ably. They wanted a reactionary, illiberal government; they wanted their fellow Frenchmen to be cheap labor on their aristocratic estates; they wanted to consign the Jews to the same mistreatment as Jews got in Germany -- and gladly turned Jews over to the Nazis. They were not anti-war; in fact they recruited French troops for the "Struggle against Bolshevism". They hated Britain and America and served as mouthpieces for anti-British and anti-American propaganda. They were definitely not cautionaries.

Usually a traitor, I must say. Participants on the July 20 plot to overthrow Satan Incarnate knew well that if they succeeded they would realize a German defeat and would end up consigning large numbers of German war criminals to Soviet Gulags and to the harsh judgment of the bloodthirsty* Polish Home Army (the non-Communist resistance in Poland). But Nazi war crimes would end, and the Allies would surely have other concerns than punishment of what remained of Germany, like economic reconstruction or the defeat of Japan. But Nazi Germany is the extreme case in any political debate about alternative social orders. In the case of the July 20 plotters, they recognized that the war was going badly and that its objectives and practice was contrary to the Christian values that they were brought up with.  Shiites who collaborated with the US Armed Forces as Saddam Hussein was defeated? Completely understandable, as the US Armed Forces put an end to a  hideous regime.  Cautionaries or defeatists? In the Third Reich or Saddam Hussein's Iraq one almost had to be a defeatist if one was a cautionary to be morally clean. Demonic regimes might as well go down.

Sleeper agents of a foreign power set on conquest are defeatists if they betray their own country or its allies. Such people are traitors who deserve to be weeded out at the first opportunity.

The pacifist and the cautionary have some ethical defense even if they are wrong at the time. The defeatist, except in the extreme position of finding oneself in an abominable social order, is a traitor. Can defeatists exploit the sentiments of the pacifist and the cautionary at times? Of course. But they can also foster military recklessness and administrative brutality that themselves bring defeat.

The pacifist and the cautionary can be very heroic. Standing up to the numbing din of militarism can take great courage, especially when the consequences for anti-war stances can include capital punishment, economic ruin, and a long prison term. Militarism always begins as a joyous spectacle of glorious pageantry; war is numbing awfulness. The defeatist, unless seeking the demise of a horrific regime, is by any standard a traitor.

*but fully justified in view of what the Nazis did in the slaughterhouse that they made of Poland

[Eric the Green]

(06-09-2016, 06:56 AM)Anthony Wrote: Politics stops at the water's edge - and it was not a Boomer, but rather the Lost Arthur Vandenberg, who said that.

Who is/was "good" or "evil" has nothing to do with it.  The foreign enemy of your domestic political opponent is not your friend - unless you are a traitor.

Unless the "enemy" is trumped up by the government to keep the military industrial complex happy. There is no use defending a "free society," if that society says that criticism of the government's war policies is treason and is not allowed. Such a society is not free, and is not worth defending.

[Anthony '58]

All I know is that while growing up I genuinely admired G.I. liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Gardner (who founded Common Cause), James Michener (whose Kent State: What Happened And Why exposed the spoiled-brat traitors for who and what they really were), John Lindsay, mayor of New York City in which I of course lived at the time, who denounced violence in a misguided attempt to bring about social change as, and I quote, verbatim, "cowardly and immoral," and also G.I.-Silent cusper Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later, I became a big-time admirer of Mike Royko).

Yes, these men were liberals - but they were Americans first.

So I really get burned up when some gross ignoramus calls me a right-winger.

[Odin]

"My country, right or wrong" has no place among reasonable discussion.

[Anthony '58]

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.

[Odin]

This is some disgusting shit you are spewing, Tony. I'm speechless.

[Anthony '58]

It's only "disgusting" to you because you are a left-liberal, while I'm a national liberal.

The point being that two people don't have to be 180 degrees apart (we're 90 degrees apart) to hate each other in this Culture Wars-benighted time that we so unfortunately continue to live in despite now supposedly being in a 4T and not a 3T.

[pbrower2a]

(06-09-2016, 02:04 PM)Anthony Wrote: All I know is that while growing up I genuinely admired G.I. liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Gardner (who founded Common Cause), James Michener (whose Kent State: What Happened And Why exposed the spoiled-brat traitors for who and what they really were), John Lindsay, mayor of New York City in which I of course lived at the time, who denounced violence in a misguided attempt to bring about social change as, and I quote, verbatim, "cowardly and immoral," and also G.I.-Silent cusper Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later, I became a big-time admirer of Mike Royko).

Yes, these men were liberals - but they were Americans first.

So I really get burned up when some gross ignoramus calls me a right-winger.

The struggle between Marxism and liberalism is over. Liberalism won. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are gone. China and Vietnam preserved the dictatorial part of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and some of the official simulacra of the Marxist pantheon. The anti-American rhetoric in Cuba is becoming irrelevant and will likely die with Fidel Castro.

The "New Left" of the 1960s has lost all relevance, and in view of its destructiveness its irrelevance is a good thing. Ronald Reagan reshaped America in a way parallel to Andrew Jackson around 1840 -- also near the start of a 3T. But as with Jackson, the order that Reagan established showed its seams. The Free State/Slave State dichotomy may be far more severe than the "Red/Blue" divide today, but it is a partial parallel.

So what is more important today? The current Right-Left divide between people those believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as it makes people moral on the one side and those who believe that people can make conscious and rational choices of what is best for themselves. The Right has a traditional Anglo-American chauvinism connected to early settlement of America mostly by British and to a lesser extent German emigrants -- and the establishment of a slave system in the Old South. Descendants of the slaves have no nostalgia for the old hierarchy of the plantation that many Southern whites harbor to this day.

We do not have so much a struggle between tradition and modernity as we have between differing traditions.

[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.

[Eric the Green]

(06-10-2016, 07:15 AM)Anthony Wrote: It's only "disgusting" to you because you are a left-liberal, while I'm a national liberal.

The point being that two people don't have to be 180 degrees apart (we're 90 degrees apart) to hate each other in this Culture Wars-benighted time that we so unfortunately continue to live in despite now supposedly being in a 4T and not a 3T.

There's no reason to hate you. In my opinion, you need to understand some things better, politically. How you decide to think about these things is your business, though. There are disagreements around the political spectrum.

[Odin]

(06-10-2016, 07:15 AM)Anthony Wrote: It's only "disgusting" to you because you are a left-liberal, while I'm a national liberal.

Your a fucking FASCIST, that is what you are. People like you are an insult to all the GIs who died fighting Fascists in WW2.

[Ragnarök_62]

(06-10-2016, 12:41 PM)Odin Wrote:

(06-10-2016, 07:15 AM)Anthony Wrote: It's only "disgusting" to you because you are a left-liberal, while I'm a national liberal.

Your a fucking FASCIST, that is what you are. People like you are an insult to all the GIs who died fighting Fascists in WW2.

No Taylor, he seems to be a hard hat democrat.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comm...republican

He pretty much said as much. If you're old enough to remember. the Democratic party suffered a rift during the Nam era.
In the South, there was a similar rift that extended way to to Jr High.  It was hippies vs. rednecks.