georgephillip
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So is history:You'll get Ebola first.Some of your relatives died in another illegal war of aggression?sharting an elephant said:I saw the History Channel's Vietnam in High Definition again this past weekend, and couldn't stop fluctuating between being mad as hell and crying — especially when that "Purcell" widow was talking about what it was like for her and her little children when the news came to her via her pastor at her church one Sunday in the late 60s/ early 70s that her husband had been located as a POW.
I realize I'm at odds with defense contractors and population control engineers in saying this, but the Vietnam War was the most stupid war in US history. We had absolutely no business whatsoever being in Southeast Asia.
I'm just glad for former President Lyndon Baines Johnson—given all the souls he destroyed in his and Bell Helicopter's Southeast Asian "War on Poverty"—that The Almighty is a forgiving sort.
georgephillip said:You might consider what Noam Chomsky has to say about whether the US invasion/occupation of South Vietnam qualifies as a mistake; for some, it was, and still is, a highly profitable success:
"Noam Chomsky: Well, I don't think that Vietnam was a mistake; I think it was a success.
"This is somewhere where I disagree with just about everyone, including the left, right, friends and so on.
"To determine whether it was a failure you have to first look at what the goals were.
"In the case of Indo-china, the US is a very free country; we have an incomparably rich documentary record of internal planning, much richer than any other country that I know of.
"So we can discover what the goals were.
"In fact it is clear by around 1970, certainly by the time the Pentagon Papers came out, the primary concern was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at.
"The concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate.
"And it has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same conditions."
From the standpoint of independent nationalism, it's clear that with the exception of Cuba none of the nations Chomsky mentioned became completely free of US domination, in one form or another.
On the War in Iraq Noam Chomsky interviewed by David McNeill
shart of a woman said:Nope.
I refuse to consider what a self-absorbed wanna-be anarchist of American Academia thinks about the positive implications of an horrific war that didn't cost him anything personally — in terms of lost family members and/ or close friends.
The point he's trying to make there is further complicated by the fact that Islamofascism is eminent in Southeast Asia now, too.
In other words, the US presence there did nothing to curtail the rise of America's true long-term enemy — which wasn't the Soviet Union, per the Domino Theory.
Fuck Noam Chomsky.
georgephillip said:You and Yours.
"By around 1960 the US recognized that it could not maintain a client state in Vietnam.
"The client state, which had already killed maybe 60,000 people, had engendered resistance which it could not control.
"So in 1962 Kennedy simply invaded the country outright.
"That's when US bombing started, chemical warfare, attempts to drive people into concentration camps and so on, and from then on it just escalated.
"By 1967 South Vietnam was practically destroyed..."
"There was very little protest at that time.
"The US and England and the rest were just content to see Vietnam destroyed.
"That was much worse than anything happening in Iraq."
Chomsky's forgotten more about US imperialism than you'll ever know, get it?
On the War in Iraq Noam Chomsky interviewed by David McNeill
Like I said, motherfucker, FUCK NOAM CHOMSKY.
I have had and have relatives who have fought and died in that goddamned war, unlike his self-congratulatory, narcissistic ass has.
His opinion is worth no more than mine, no matter what he and/ or the idiots like you who put him on a pedestal would like to think.
Good.
When are you planning to follow in their heroic footsteps, Polly?
Karma is a bitch.
" Ambivalence characterized U.S. policy during World War 11, and was the root of
much subsequent misunderstanding.
"On the one hand, the U.S. repeatedly reassured the French that its colonial
possessions would be returned to it after the war.
"On the other band, the U.S. broadly committed itself in the Atlantic
Charter to support national self-determination, and President Roosevelt personally and vehemently advocated
independence for Indochina.
"F.D.R. regarded Indochina as a flagrant example of onerous colonialism which should be
turned over to a trusteeship rather than returned to France.
"The President discussed this proposal with the Allies at the
Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta Conferences and received the endorsement of Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin; Prime Minister
Churchill demurred.
"At one point, Fall reports, the President offered General de Gaulle Filipino advisers to help France
establish a 'more progressive policy in Indochina'--which offer the General received in 'Pensive Silence.'"
http://www.vietnamwar50th.com/assets/1/7/Pentagon_Papers,_Gravel_Edition,_Summary_and_Chapter_I.pdf
The French were among the most brutal of colonialists, yet even they never considered napalm, Agent Orange, or concentration camps.