DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: The_Professor on February 05, 2008, 10:44:02 PM
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The Tet Offensive
Breaking the negotiated annual truce, for surprise, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars launched the Tet Offensive, in the night of 30/31 January 1968, named for the Vietnamese lunar new year. This campaign continued in various forms through September of that year, ending in total military defeat, for the aggressors. And a brilliant propaganda victory, for the same.
Thinking back on the Vietnam War this last week. And while I was doing so, a young leftist friend wrote to me, on an entirely unrelated topic, taunting with a remark about 2008 being, ?The last year of the American Empire? -- as if it started and ended with George W. Bush. He does not seem interested in the question: By whose Empire will that vacuum be filled?
My friend does not even think of himself as a leftist, only as a person with an ?open mind.? We agree on that, but define ?open? differently, for to my mind, a skull without a brain inside is completely open. The more brain, or more precisely, the more brain used, the more resistance it can offer to the importation of nonsense.
Forty years have now gone by, which one might figuratively characterize as the forty years of the Tet Offensive, against Western Civ. The West has done fairly well in the field: we have still not lost a purely military encounter with any of the enemies of the West. Going back farther, the French didn't even lose their battles in Algeria. Rather, Charles de Gaulle decided they were not worth fighting.
The Tet Offensive was a desperate ploy by the Communist enemy in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of his troops were flung simultaneously at more than 100 South Vietnamese towns, and into the heart of Saigon. The Communists announced a general uprising, but that did not occur. The tide was actually turned within a few days by the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies. As they re-took town after town, they discovered massacres the Communists had committed while in possession. The enemy's real object had been to decapitate a whole society.
My friend, Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German Lutheran pastor and also life-long journalist, was there as a reporter. Entering Hu? as the smoke was clearing: ?I made my way to university apartments to obtain news about friends of mine, German professors at the medical school. I learned that their names had been on lists containing some 1,800 Hu? residents singled out for liquidation.
?Six weeks later the bodies of doctors Alois Altekoester, Raimund Discher, Horst-Guenther Krainick, and Krainick's wife, Elisabeth, were found in shallow graves they had been made to dig for themselves.
?Then, enormous mass graves of women and children were found. Most had been clubbed to death, some buried alive; you could tell from the beautifully manicured hands of women who had tried to claw out of their burial place.
?As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, 'Why don't you film this?' He answered, 'I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda'.?
The Tet Offensive ended not only in a huge allied victory in the field -- some 45,000 of the Communist soldiers had been killed, and their infrastructure destroyed. It was victory after an event that showed sceptical South Vietnamese, and should have shown the world, the nature of the enemy our allies were fighting.
Walter Cronkite, the famous news anchor of CBS, led the American media reaction. After a very brief visit to Saigon, in which he got himself filmed wearing flak jackets, he returned to the United States, declaring before his huge prime time audience:
?It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who have lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
The media turned a tremendous victory into a tremendous defeat. Yet seven more years would pass until an America, which had by then abandoned Vietnam, and a Congress, which had cut off military supplies to the South Vietnamese, watched the helicopters removing America's last faithful servants from a roof in Saigon's old embassy compound. The South Vietnamese Army had surrendered, to another Tet Offensive, as it ran out of ammunition.
We have seen this ?Vietnam syndrome? writ large, through the intervening years. We see it today in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romans, too, had a facility for winning ground battles.
David Warren
? Ottawa Citizen
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=841
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We see it today in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Seems to me we wouldn't see it in Afghanistan if King George had let the troops there go ahead and finish the job, rather than throwing them into his massive cock-up in Iraq.
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Vietnam was the dumbest foreign policy the US ever had, until Juniorbush, who decided to try to find a rhyme for it.
If the South Vietnamese had actually wanted a democracy, they could have won. But they didn't want it enough.
The US had no business trying to foist a neocolonialist regime on Vietnam then, and has no business trying to do the same in Iraq now.
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I remember the Tet Offensive very well, and the Professor left out significant elements in assessing its significance:
1. The U.S. invasion of Viet Nam was completely illegal and immoral, a flagrant attempt to avoid free elections in the South, which even Eisenhower had admitted would have resulted in an overwhelming electoral victory for Ho Chi Minh.
2. Leading up to the Tet Offensive, the Amerikkkan sheeple had been bombarded with an endless campaign of bullshit about corners being turned, light at the end of the tunnel, etc.
3. I will give you a portrait of a young university student following this all very closely - - me. I was enraged by the slaughter, torture and flagrant illegality of the war. Sometimes it got so bad I couldn't study, I'd call my wife or my best friend at night from the library and just try to unburden myself, sometimes for hours. I'm sure they dreaded those conversations but there was nothing else I could do. The endless campaign of lies and bullshit about how well the campaign was going was starting to weigh me down too - - what if they were true after all? What if the bad guys were gonna win?
And then the news of the Tet Offensive - - really, one of the happiest days of my life, for several reasons. One, the Amerikkkan aggressors were finally getting their fat asses kicked, and hard. It was like that moment in the fight movie when the battered hero, lying face down on the canvas, catches a glimpse of his mother's or sweetheart's teary face, or hears again something some priest told him in his childhood, gets up on the count of nine and proceeds to beat the shit out of his evil, brutish opponent.
But even more important than the ass-kicking was another factor - - the lies and bullshit that the sheeple had been fed for so long, which had seemed to fool everyone but the students and a few enlightened folks on the left wing of the labour movement, suddenly were nakedly exposed to the sheeple as the lies that they were. I felt, and I think correctly, that this was the Stalingrad of the propaganda war, the moment when the tide had finally turned - - whether or not this was a great military victory for the VC (and I happen to think that it was) this was the point where the Amerikkkan sheeple finally realized that their government had been lying to them or didn't know what it was talking about.
If you ever want to understand the significance of the Tet Offensive, you should look it up in the excellent David Halberstam book, The Best and the Brightest, where Halberstam describes a meeting of the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which the Joint Chiefs are "explaining" to the President (LBJ) how nothing has changed and the President's adviser, Arthur Goldberg, is cross-examining them.
Goldberg is first asking what the enemy troop strength had been prior to Tet, and the Chiefs come out with all this authoritative-sounding BS, well, if you count the full-time guerrillas and then if you add the local VC militia and the North Vietnamese this and that, so they come up with a number. As if they knew. As if they knew anything. And then Goldberg asks them, what is the body count of dead VC from Tet, and they add up some huge number for him, to "prove" what a great Amerikkkan victory it was for them. And then Goldberg asks them, and what's the ratio of killed to wounded for them? And someone tells him, "We generally use a ratio of three to one."
Then some silence, Goldberg is scribbling on a pad. Then Goldberg announces, "Well, according to these figures, the enemy has no effective forces left in the field." The Joint Chiefs had no answer at all. They were too fucking dumb to have seen it coming. They just sat there stunned, like the lying dumbasses they were and for the first time, just. Had. Absolutely. Nothing. To. Say. They were busted.
I think if you assess Tet as a military victory, they (a hit-and-run guerrilla army) seized and held ground, contrary to all expectations of their capacity to do so. And when the time came to melt away, they melted away. As a propaganda victory it was unparalleled - - it proved to the Amerikkkans that their military had been lying to them and could not be trusted. It proved to the Vietnamese that the VC were everywhere and that collaboration with the invaders could be very damaging to one's health and well-being. And to guys like me - - who if I had been in the States would very definitely have been an anti-war activist -- it gave an immeasurable shot in the arm, a renewed confidence that this fight could be won, that if the VC were capable of such an upset in their homeland that we in Amerikkka, fighting the Leviathan from within its own belly, had no right to give up and should renew the struggle with even more intensity.
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I think if you assess Tet as a military victory...
And right there is your problem. In fact, right there is the problem we're having in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why is this so difficult to understand?
You can win ever battle and still lose the war.
There was no way Vietnam could beat us in a full on military engagement. Not many people can. Not the Iraqi insurgents, not the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is why those extreme right-wing militia folks that bitch about the 2nd amendment and talk about fighting federal agents are complete idiots. If you've ever seen professional infantry in action, you'll realize that a few guys who go to the range on the weekends and gun shows every two months aren't ging to be a match.
But, guerilla war doesn't work that way. There weren't many battles we didn't win in Vietnam. Yet, the ever-daunting task became - what does a victory look like? Those guys weren't dying for communism or communist principles, they were dying for Vietnam. They were nationalists who no longer accepted a foreign power occupying their country. We could not control South Vietnam - how could we ever attain a victory? As for massacres, look no further than the crap we installed to lead South Vietnam. These weren't democratic, freedom-loving, patriots! These were some of the most ruthless sons of bitches we could find, often people who were pals with the French beforehand. They were loathed by the Vietnamese, which only fueled the fire. Diem even had the police open fire on a group of Buddhist monks! So make no mistake that the inhumanity ran both ways and the people knew it.
Yet, the lesson is still there. Our victories in Vietnam were hollow and reactive. Unlike Normandy or Stalingrad, they did nothing to advance the war towards a final resolution.
Meanwhile: France, Germany, and the United States held social, cultural, and political revolutions (moreso in the former two).
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<<There was no way Vietnam could beat us in a full on military engagement. >>
You realize, of course, that Vietnam was a war of attrition. The Amerikkkans figured that at some point the Vietnamese would get tired of the burden and lay it down. They killed literally millions of Vietnamese for that principle. But there were 80 million Vietnamese and behind them a billion Chinese. (I know Vietnamese from the North, who told me that there were many Chinese volunteering to join in their struggle for national liberation - - the saying was, "When they take their shirts off, they become Vietnamese." ) There was a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of manpower to continue the fight for as long as it took.
On the Amerikkkan side as well, perhaps not fully realized when the aggression commenced, it was really a war of attrition. There was a magic number that nobody knew - - the number of body bags coming home that would finally convince even the dumbest and most belligerent of the sheeple that enough was enough. It turned out in the end that the magic number didn't really relate to body bags, it was more to do with currency reserves and the maintenance of the dollar's value in the forex markets. When that number was reached, the business community, whose Cabinet spokesman was Mel Laird, gave its orders to Richard Nixon, who had no choice but to obey. The game was over.
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I have to hope that a system that considers its people totally expendable will eventually loose the support of its people because it doesn't deserve it.
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Too bad you can't appreciate the heroism of their sacrifices. I suppose you think those soldiers who died on D-Day for the Allied cause were a bunch of schmucks and Ike and FDR were monsters for going ahead with it.
Sounds more like sour grapes to me. The Vietnamese died for the liberation of their people from foreign domination. The GIs died there for nothing.
I know which system had the least respect for the lives of its troops.
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I have to hope that a system that considers its people totally expendable will eventually loose the support of its people because it doesn't deserve it.
A different people, different culture, different historical climate. We picked up a colonial war that the French had long abandoned. We weren't wanted in Vietnam by a vast majority of the people. They never saw us as "liberators" but as invaders. You're making a statement that simply does not apply.
The problem with the article is that it misses the entire truth of history. As I said and Mike correctly replied to, Vietnam could not win a full-on military engagement with the U.S. So, very astutely - they chose not to fight one.
The IRA could not win a set-piece battle against the British Army. Hezbollah could not win a set-piece battle against the Israeli Army. So why fight that way?
Again, you can win all the battles and still lose the war.
To use football as an analogy, I'm sure you've seen a game where a team dominates in yards and throughout the game, but still loses on the scoreboard.
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Too bad you can't appreciate the heroism of their sacrifices. I suppose you think those soldiers who died on D-Day for the Allied cause were a bunch of schmucks and Ike and FDR were monsters for going ahead with it.
Sounds more like sour grapes to me. The Vietnamese died for the liberation of their people from foreign domination. The GIs died there for nothing.
I know which system had the least respect for the lives of its troops.
and yet you were cheering when American forces were being beat by the Vietnemese, when American soldiers were dying for followwng orders given to them. This is really sick. I would have punched your lights out and made you eat concrete if I would have been there at the time. Americans were dying and you and people like you were cheering. I think that is disgusting. I know you don't give a hoot that I do, but sobeit.
As far as Vietnam, I could have solved the problem just like a friend of mine in the Mossad advised to American commanders at the time, namely deploy tactical nukes.
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Too bad you can't appreciate the heroism of their sacrifices. I suppose you think those soldiers who died on D-Day for the Allied cause were a bunch of schmucks and Ike and FDR were monsters for going ahead with it.
Sounds more like sour grapes to me. The Vietnamese died for the liberation of their people from foreign domination. The GIs died there for nothing.
I know which system had the least respect for the lives of its troops.
and yet you were cheering when American forces were being beat by the Vietnemese, when American soldiers were dying for followwng orders given to them. This is really sick. I would have punched your lights out and made you eat concrete if I would have been there at the time. Americans were dying and you and people like you were cheering. I think that is disgusting. I know you don't give a hoot that I do, but sobeit.
As far as Vietnam, I could have solved the problem just like a friend of mine on the Mossad advised to American commanders at the time, namely deploy tactical nukes.
And what a victory that would have been for democracy and freedom! ::)
Of course with that precedent, the Soviets would have done the same in Afghanistan. Yeah - the world would be a better place.
This is the same Mossad that had agents captured for murdering an innocent man in Lillehammer, Norway. Impressive.
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This is really sick. I would have punched your lights out and made you eat concrete if I would have been there at the time. Americans were dying and you and people like you were cheering. I think that is disgusting. I know you don't give a hoot that I do, but sobeit.
As far as Vietnam, I could have solved the problem just like a friend of mine on the Mossad advised to American commanders at the time, namely deploy tactical nukes.
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My own personal choice was to simply not go to Vietnam. Had my dodging the draft not worked out so well, I would have taken a job teaching in British Columbia.
Vietnam was an immoral war, and no American soldier -not one- had to die there, all they had to do was refuse to go.
It was the noble and patriotic thing to do, in my mind.
Eventually, the Army simply could not find enough soldiers by using the draft. They HAD to end it, because there were not enough suckers to march off to die for a stupid and misbegotten colonial war. It wasn't because of any 'treason' of Democratic senators of Congressmen, it was because of the outright rebellion of the draftees.
They don't tell you this, but that doesn't make it untrue.
As for your Mossad c*cks*cking pal, he can eat my shorts. After they had nuked the North Vietnamese until they glowed in the dark, it is entirely irrational to believe that they would have come to love murderous thieves like Thieu and Ky.
While there may have been heroic deeds committed by the US Army and Muhrines in Vietnam, they were about as moral as the equally brave deeds of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in WWII. Herr Adolph was one brave little Austrian to have been awarded the Iron Cross, after all.
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<<and yet you were cheering when American forces were being beat by the Vietnemese, when American soldiers were dying for followwng orders given to them. This is really sick. I would have punched your lights out and made you eat concrete if I would have been there at the time. Americans were dying and you and people like you were cheering. I think that is disgusting. I know you don't give a hoot that I do, but sobeit.>>
That's the fate that all fascist aggressors deserve. They invaded someone's homeland, killed over 2 million Vietnamese, laid waste the land, poisoned it with chemicals, tortured, raped and murdered all with total impunity. Their victims were innocent children, nursing mothers, elderly peasants and of courst the Resistance fighters themselves. God-damn right I cheered their deaths. I'm only sorry there weren't ten times as many. THAT'S the real tragedy of Viet Nam. Instead of 57,000 dead Amerikkkans and 2 million dead Vietnamese, it should have been 2 million dead Amerikkkans and 57,000 dead Vietnamese. Following their orders was no excuse. That was just what the Nazis claimed to be doing, following their orders. Maybe it never occurred to you that the Vietnamese were also following their orders too.
People have to understand clearly: fascist oppressors will die, and deservedly so. It was like that in WWII and in Vietnam. It's like that today in Iraq. Maybe they'll kill more of the other side, but enough of them will die, till their government can't maintain the aggression any longer. If they were dying in a good cause (WWII) there would be no limit to the causalties the sheeple could bear, but the sheeple know in their hearts when a cause is good and when the cheerleaders are all fulla shit. In the latter case, they'll reach a limit of acceptable casualties sooner rather than later.
You should tone down the rhetoric of punching out lights and eating concrete. You're starting to sound like that moron Rich. You can start something like that but you don't know whose lights will be punched out at the end of the day. If I can't do it, somebody else can. Bullies always get their comeuppance, as Vietnam and now Iraq are handily demonstrating.
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Well, your lack of patriotism disgusts me and/or I am simply too tired. Time to go away for a while it seems...
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Too bad you can't appreciate the heroism of their sacrifices. I suppose you think those soldiers who died on D-Day for the Allied cause were a bunch of schmucks and Ike and FDR were monsters for going ahead with it.
Sounds more like sour grapes to me. The Vietnamese died for the liberation of their people from foreign domination. The GIs died there for nothing.
I know which system had the least respect for the lives of its troops.
There was a virtually inexhaustible reservoir of manpower to continue the fight for as long as it took.
And it doesn't strike you as sad?
That the strength of their movemen is based on having no need to respond to the need of their people , that to the leadership people were just as much cannon fodder as it took to adsorb all the canon the opposition could bring to bear.
That is a "strength" we don't need even if our "weakness" cause s to loose the war in Vietnam , I would rather run the risk of loosing again than to try to develop an evil strength like that.
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>> Time to go away for a while it seems...<<
I suppose that's the only thing to do. I imagine they'd eventually get tired of seeing which one of them hates America the most.
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<<And it doesn't strike you as sad?>>
Horatio at the Bridge
(excerpt)
Then up spake brave Horatio
The captain at the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
"Death cometh soon or late;
"and how can man die better
"than facing fearful odds
"for the ashes of his fathers
"and the temples of his gods?"
In answer to your question: no, I don't think it's sad. It's mournful, heroic and magnificent. Their story will be told for 2,000 years. These men and women in black pyjamas and rubber-tire sandals faced up to the best-equipped army in the world; faced torture, execution, rape, mutilation, the torture and murders of their families and the destruction of their homes by invaders with lower morals and values than the snakes of the earth; and in the end, they won an unprecedented victory. It's one of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit ever recorded in all of history, and all you can think of is how SAD it is? plane, I feel sorry for you. If you can't appreciate a victory like that, what are you getting out of being born a human being?
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The Vietnamese were certainly persistent. What they ended up with after the war was hardly any sort of admirable government, its chief virtue being that is was 100% Vietnamese in lieu of the colonial and neocolonial governments that preceded it.
If Vietnam had become another Taiwan, Singapore, S. Korea or even Hong Kong, that would have been more deservng of the sacrifice and struggle of its people.
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So what? Look at the even more heroic sacrifices made by the Russian people in WWII, only to end up with a lower standard of living than the defeated Germans.
In life, and especially in war, the consequences of our actions can't be foretold. Sometimes a situation (occupation, invasion) becomes so intolerable that people have to strike out against it, whatever the cost. The immediate goal is often simple: Death to the Invaders! and all operations are directed to that end. For a person to hang back from the struggle on the grounds that he or she has no guarantees of the type of society that will exist after the aggressors have been driven off is to miss the tide of history. They will die anyway, after a lifetime of misery and humiliation, lived on their knees, but their gift of life on this earth will have been misspent or totally wasted.
I would have loved to see the Vietnamese, after driving out the French and then the Amerikkkans, develop an ideal communist society, like Cuba or at least a prosperous and dynamically growing society like China, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. That's too bad, but it doesn't take away a single thing from the heroism and victory of their struggle, and it doesn't vitiate even one of their heroic deaths.
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>> Time to go away for a while it seems...<<
I suppose that's the only thing to do. I imagine they'd eventually get tired of seeing which one of them hates America the most.
Y'all are forgetting a few things.
1. Mike is not a citizen of the United States. Why you expect him to salute everything USA is a little surprising to me.
2. Wars are rarely black and white, friend and enemy, good versus evil. We might wish that they were, but often times both sides have good cases for their struggles and poor arguments as well. Wars come with atrocities, death, loss of limbs, and often many indescribable horrors. They are often fought by a mixed bag of people, some are gung-ho, others want to be anywhere else, many are scared kids between 18 and 22.
3. Not everyone who serves is a hero or a great person. Some people just could not function anywhere else in society but the armed forces. There are wife abusers, thieves, rapists, loan sharks, and some of the worst human beings you'd never want to meet in the military. On the other hand, there are some really great people as well. The truth is that any of them may do something very heroic on the spur of the moment - not for their country, God, or the President - but typically for their fellow soldiers in the field.
I disagree with Mike. Many of the soldiers aren't gung-ho, Rambo assholes. Most are just people doing their job. They are a foreign policy tool. I had a grandfather fight on both sides of World War II. One fought the Soviets on ther Eastern Front for Germany. The other fought at Okinawa for the United States. The former was a draftee, the latter a volunteer.
I never knew my German Grandfather (Opa). He died when my mom was only eleven. He returned from the war a different man. He became an alcoholic and was abusive to his wife and children. He only talked about the war to my mom's uncle, who was in France for the war. He witnessed many horrors in Eastern Europe and took much of it to his grave - a haunted and shattered individual.
He was no Nazi. Indeed, my grandmother voted SPD her entire life (with one notable exception where she didn't vote). They were extremely poor and Nazi conscription made no room for conscientious objection (just ask the Seventh Day Adventists who went to the Death Camps).
So, I don't think most American Soldiers are fascists or anything of the sort. They are mostly young people who are used as tools to implement American foreign policy. It is that foreign policy that has been most troubling.
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<<And it doesn't strike you as sad?>>
Horatio at the Bridge
(excerpt)
Then up spake brave Horatio
The captain at the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
"Death cometh soon or late;
"and how can man die better
"than facing fearful odds
"for the ashes of his fathers
"and the temples of his gods?"
In answer to your question: no, I don't think it's sad. It's mournful, heroic and magnificent. Their story will be told for 2,000 years. These men and women in black pyjamas and rubber-tire sandals faced up to the best-equipped army in the world; faced torture, execution, rape, mutilation, the torture and murders of their families and the destruction of their homes by invaders with lower morals and values than the snakes of the earth; and in the end, they won an unprecedented victory. It's one of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit ever recorded in all of history, and all you can think of is how SAD it is? plane, I feel sorry for you. If you can't appreciate a victory like that, what are you getting out of being born a human being?
And not a word of that fails to apply to the common soldier on both sides , the sad part is that they were betrayed into support of Communism which promises an ideal that it has no hope of approaching.
Communism has no hope because it rejects Democracy , that alone dooms it to either weakness or totalitarianism.
Rejection of capitolism on the other had is rejection of truth .
What great things could have been done with the energy of that great number of people we will never know , they were harnessed by Communism and Communism itself has come to naught.
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<<What great things could have been done with the energy of that great number of people we will never know , they were harnessed by Communism and Communism itself has come to naught.>>
Harnessed to communism. Right there, in that one phrase, your racism and bigotry surfaces for all the world to see. They weren't draft animals, plane, and no one "harnessed" them to anything. You'd never claim that GI's were "harnessed" to anything - - they're mostly white, obviously capable of exercising free will and choose to fight for their country. The Vietnamese, dumb peasants and farmers that they are, are "harnessed" to communism. What a fucking crock; your whole outlook is poisoned by sour grapes and racism. You'll never admit that a tremendous victory was won - - the victors weren't victors, they were draft animals "harnessed" to communism, not victors in the sense that white people are victors.
Communism has come to naught? Tell that to the Chinese - - they will be ruling the world in this century, and it was communism that freed them from the bonds of European and American colonialism. Tell it to the Russians, who were dragged out of the Middle Ages by Communism. Tell it to the Cubans, who today live in an egalitarian society with decent housing, education and medical care available to all citizens, thanks to communism.
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<<And it doesn't strike you as sad?>>
Horatio at the Bridge
(excerpt)
Then up spake brave Horatio
The captain at the gate:
"To every man upon this earth
"Death cometh soon or late;
"and how can man die better
"than facing fearful odds
"for the ashes of his fathers
"and the temples of his gods?"
In answer to your question: no, I don't think it's sad. It's mournful, heroic and magnificent. Their story will be told for 2,000 years. These men and women in black pyjamas and rubber-tire sandals faced up to the best-equipped army in the world; faced torture, execution, rape, mutilation, the torture and murders of their families and the destruction of their homes by invaders with lower morals and values than the snakes of the earth; and in the end, they won an unprecedented victory. It's one of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit ever recorded in all of history, and all you can think of is how SAD it is? plane, I feel sorry for you. If you can't appreciate a victory like that, what are you getting out of being born a human being?
And not a word of that fails to apply to the common soldier on both sides , the sad part is that they were betrayed into support of Communism which promises an ideal that it has no hope of approaching.
Communism has no hope because it rejects Democracy , that alone dooms it to either weakness or totalitarianism.
Rejection of capitolism on the other had is rejection of truth .
What great things could have been done with the energy of that great number of people we will never know , they were harnessed by Communism and Communism itself has come to naught.
But in fairness Plane, what was the other side offering?
Were we offering democracy?
We didn't in South Korea. We hadn't in South Vietnam. Taiwan was a dictatorship. Even today Japan's elections on a national level are a bit of a joke. The local elections were always known to be the ones that weren't rigged. Indonesia was our puppet tyrant known for his horrors.
It was a battle between two totalitarian regimes. The people respected Ho Chi Minh but they held folks like Diem in complete contempt. We didn't think enough of democracy to allow the Vietnamese to vote. So I wouldn't pin all the anti-democracy on the communists. We were no better in that regard.
Seriously, was it really a choice of authoritarianism versus democracy? It sure doesn't look like it.
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<<I disagree with Mike. Many of the soldiers aren't gung-ho, Rambo assholes. Most are just people doing their job. They are a foreign policy tool. . . . So, I don't think most American Soldiers are fascists or anything of the sort. They are mostly young people who are used as tools to implement American foreign policy.>>
To me, if they're instruments or agents of an aggressive foreign policy made by ass-holes, then they're aggressors and ass-holes too. They can't divorce themselves that neatly from what they're doing. They have some limited measure of free will and they're not totally unconscious. They know right from wrong.
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>> Time to go away for a while it seems...<<
I suppose that's the only thing to do. I imagine they'd eventually get tired of seeing which one of them hates America the most.
]
I see the both of you taking great umbrage with others, inferring that a lack of patriotism on the part of others is to blame for your impossilbe gasping.
The reason you both are frustrated and exasperated is that you have no wiring for dissention in questions of the military, and by extension, the nation the military defends.
It makes a good military that they are all one-minded.
The Professor is US military, and Rich is a wind-up Fox News blitzkreiger.
You would both gain in perspective by going civilian, and live in a land where thinking without cue cards is actually permitted and is acceptable.
Greatly lowers the blood pressure to have options.
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>> Time to go away for a while it seems...<<
I suppose that's the only thing to do. I imagine they'd eventually get tired of seeing which one of them hates America the most.
]
I see the both of you taking great umbrage with others, inferring that a lack of patriotism on the part of others is to blame for your impossilbe gasping.
The reason you both are frustrated and exasperated is that you have no wiring for dissention in questions of the military, and by extension, the nation the military defends.
It makes a good military that they are all one-minded.
The Professor is US military, and Rich is a wind-up Fox News blitzkreiger.
You would both gain in perspective by going civilian, and live in a land where thinking without cue cards is actually permitted and is acceptable.
Greatly lowers the blood pressure to have options.
Actually, I lived in the civilian sector for many years as a programmer and systems analyst and now I am a tenured professor at the University of Georgia. Are not those civilian? Only one of my colleagues at work is ex-military and he was here briefly as Mr Perceptive, I believe (or something to that effect). In fact, quite surprisingly, many at my institution are very liberal. Surprising because we are in the Bible Belt.
However, you ARE correct that I shouldn't let it get to me. Non-patriots are filth and so why should it bother me? I will endeavor to do so.
As far as cue cards, I am known locally as a rebel rouser and maverick. I rarely suck up to my superiors or play "games". After all, if you're good, really good, you can get away with it. As only one example, I wear sport shirts and slacks to work and see no reason to dress up. I don't at church; why should it do it at work? I'm the guy who tapes down people's phone receivers. Cue cards? Ha?
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I'm the guy who tapes down people's phone receivers.
Hunh? what does that mean?
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I rather resent the fact that you think that anyone that doesn't follow Juniorbush lock-step into his misbegotten war, and anyone who saw that Vietnam was the wrong war, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons, was somehow "filth" for his sense of vision. I don't thnk that nuking the North Vietnamese would have been an example of all that is good and noble about my country, but the opposite.
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<<What great things could have been done with the energy of that great number of people we will never know , they were harnessed by Communism and Communism itself has come to naught.>>
Harnessed to communism. Right there, in that one phrase, your racism and bigotry surfaces for all the world to see. They weren't draft animals, plane, and no one "harnessed" them to anything. You'd never claim that GI's were "harnessed" to anything - - they're mostly white, obviously capable of exercising free will and choose to fight for their country. The Vietnamese, dumb peasants and farmers that they are, are "harnessed" to communism. What a fucking crock; your whole outlook is poisoned by sour grapes and racism. You'll never admit that a tremendous victory was won - - the victors weren't victors, they were draft animals "harnessed" to communism, not victors in the sense that white people are victors.
Communism has come to naught? Tell that to the Chinese - - they will be ruling the world in this century, and it was communism that freed them from the bonds of European and American colonialism. Tell it to the Russians, who were dragged out of the Middle Ages by Communism. Tell it to the Cubans, who today live in an egalitarian society with decent housing, education and medical care available to all citizens, thanks to communism.
They may have been noble people MT , but they were chained to their trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Was a choice given?
Was there a Canada for Vietnam pacifists to get to?
What Pyrric victory has ever been worse?
After nearly thirty years of fighting ,
http://www.vietnamtourism.com/
What do they have with all that fighting that they couldn't have had without it?
In what way are they better off than Tahiti?
China has begun to abandon communism and has for just that reason begun to cease starving , North Korea has achevied the apex of Communistic society , if you don't think so ask any one of them , theyalternate starvation with living on our charity .
Communism does not work it is a cruel lie , it was good to fight it in Vietnam , it was good to fight it all around the world and prevent its growth to engulf us all. If that had happened there would be many unmentionable famines in places that no have a serious obesity problem.
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<<They may have been noble people MT , but they were chained to their trucks on the Ho Chi Minh trail.>>
I never heard that before, plane, but it's just more of your sour grapes and racism showing through. First of all, I don't believe it. Secondly, if it ever happened, it had to have been infrequently. Maybe it happened to a few deserters or a penal battalion and suddenly it's ""They were chained to their trucks." Those trucks took weeks to negotiate the Ho Chi Minh trail, you really think every driver was chained to his truck? Get real. What's your rationalization for the millions of VC fighters that weren't chained to anything? I guess they were "high on drugs" or some other bullshit.
<<Was there a Canada for Vietnam pacifists to get to?>>
Yes, there was a Cambodia and a Laos and a Thailand. There was a population of 80 million Vietnamese they could have tried to blend into and disappear. They could have joined the puppet army, stood a much better chance of survival, protected by air-power, something the Vietnamese people themselves never had.
<<What do they have with all that fighting that they couldn't have had without it?>>
They have their independence and their pride. "We took on the mightiest power on the face of the earth and we whipped their ass. They couldn't break us. We totally humiliated them for all the world to see."
If you think of the human condition as a struggle for freedom, as the perpetual fight for man's freedom against the forces of evil, this was the struggle that defines us all - - they took on the powers of Lucifer and they prevailed. They're the real deal, plane - - they're everything that phony Amerikkka pretends to be and isn't.
<<China has begun to abandon communism and has for just that reason begun to cease starving . . . >>
China could never be what it is today without communism. Communism and communists liberated China from Amerikkka and Amerikkka's puppet rulers. The extent to which communism still runs the state, and the extent to which communism may run the future state remains to be seen.
<<Communism does not work it is a cruel lie , it was good to fight it in Vietnam , it was good to fight it all around the world and prevent its growth to engulf us all. If that had happened there would be many unmentionable famines in places that no have a serious obesity problem.>>
You are very seriously deluded about famine - - there was famine in China for thousands of years before Communism and there is famine all over the world in many places, which is not due to communism at all but to global capitalism and Amerikkkan business interests.
<<North Korea has achevied the apex of Communistic society , if you don't think so ask any one of them , theyalternate starvation with living on our charity .>>
North Korea has atomic weapons and when they turn their mind to more practical goals they will achieve those too. North Korea may not be communism but the cult of personality. Nobody knows much about North Korea and I'm not going to get into it. It's whatever you want to make of it right now and the fascists and their propaganda machine sure want to make it a disaster area. Who knows?
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<<I rather resent the fact that you think that anyone that doesn't follow Juniorbush lock-step into his misbegotten war, and anyone who saw that Vietnam was the wrong war, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons, was somehow "filth" for his sense of vision.>>
I made one of my fastest hires ever in the early 70s - - a young lady from California who had worked in a big university there. I asked her how come she'd moved up here and she said it was because her boy-friend was escaping from the draft. I hired her on the spot and it worked out pretty well. I knew I was dealing with intelligent and highly principled people.
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You are very seriously deluded about famine - - there was famine in China for thousands of years before Communism and there is famine all over the world in many places, which is not due to communism at all but to global capitalism and Amerikkkan business interests.
The worst famine n the history of mankind is forbidden to discuss in China , as is the Tienanmen Massacre which also did not really happen.
All the good of Communism is lies , every bit of it.
Where the USA has won we have not enslaved nor removed any pride if you think we have , then how would you explain France and North Korea as being our slaves or free from pride?
Vietnam has less to brag of than it could have ,and the Buddhists still light themselves on a regular basis.
http://www.angelfire.com/nb/protest/viet.html
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Buddists still light themselvs on a reglar basis.
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Buddists still light themselvs on a reglar basis.
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Sorry I have corrected the spelling.
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Buddists still light themselvs on a reglar basis.
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No, they don't. Not in Vietnam.
Where the Hell do you dredge up this shit?
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China had famines for centuries before Communism. Most were caused by droughts, floods, and civil wars, and only some of the latter were caused by foreign meddling. China no longer has famines, and seems to have maintained a growth rate for a longer period than any nation in history. The Chinese are financing Juniorbush's stupid war, in fact. If there were not extra capacity in China, there would be no money to lend.
Communism worked better in China than in any western country because China's population was already more collectivized than any other society. Taiwan has a higher standard of living than mainland China for its 22 million people but it is unlikely that what worked for a small island nation could work as well for a population of 1.2 billion.
Every society must find out what system works best for their culture and apply it to the maximum benefit. A government that is imposed from above by a foreign power will never work as well as one designed by the people of that country.
No one, anywhere, has ever devised a perfect system that benefits everyone equally, and it is highly unlikely that anyone ever will. There are no utopias, there will be no Millenium.
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Buddists still light themselvs on a reglar basis.
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No, they don't. Not in Vietnam.
Where the Hell do you dredge up this shit?
=====================================
China had famines for centuries before Communism. Most were caused by droughts, floods, and civil wars, and only some of the latter were caused by foreign meddling. China no longer has famines, and seems to have maintained a growth rate for a longer period than any nation in history. The Chinese are financing Juniorbush's stupid war, in fact. If there were not extra capacity in China, there would be no money to lend.
Communism worked better in China than in any western country because China's population was already more collectivized than any other society. Taiwan has a higher standard of living than mainland China for its 22 million people but it is unlikely that what worked for a small island nation could work as well for a population of 1.2 billion.
Every society must find out what system works best for their culture and apply it to the maximum benefit. A government that is imposed from above by a foreign power will never work as well as one designed by the people of that country.
No one, anywhere, has ever devised a perfect system that benefits everyone equally, and it is highly unlikely that anyone ever will. There are no utopias, there will be no Millenium.
http://www.vietfederation.ca/newsletters/identifTQD.htm
There is no perfection ,but there are better and worse ways of doing things.
The UBC Bhuddists of Vietnam have never had their wants met and thus still immolate themselves now and then , this is an anchient practice there that the French tried to supress and the Commuists still try to supress.
http://www.quangduc.com/index.html
Quang Duc and Nhat Chi Mai immolated themselves in protest of injustce and supression of their beloved religion , because their sacrifice was accessible to the people of the US it made a diffrence here, because there was still some freedom in VietNam it made a diffrence there, ince the Communists have taken over we don't hear about these things anymore and the repression is more complete so such an act matters nether here nor there.
Still happens tho.
If a tree burns in the forest , where the other trees are forbidden to notice , has a fire started?
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China had famines for centuries before Communism. Most were caused by droughts, floods, and civil wars, and only some of the latter were caused by foreign meddling. China no longer has famines, and seems to have maintained a growth rate for a longer period than any nation in history. The Chinese are financing Juniorbush's stupid war, in fact. If there were not extra capacity in China, there would be no money to lend.
In 1959 till 1963 China had a famine , depending on who you ask itwas either the worst famine in all human history , or a bookeeping error .
Ther were millions of people gone missing , but perhaps it was because the earlyer census was poorly conducted , yea, that is the ticket.
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<<Vietnam has less to brag of than it could have>>
Don't we all?
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In 1959 till 1963 China had a famine , depending on who you ask itwas either the worst famine in all human history , or a bookeeping error .
Ther were millions of people gone missing , but perhaps it was because the earlyer census was poorly conducted , yea, that is the ticket.
Posted on: Today at 01:21:36 AM
Posted by: Plane
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Chairman Mao was an incompetent boob. His Great Leap Forward was in the opposite direction. But this is all in the past, and right now, the Chinese are feeding their huge population and have enough left over to lend bazillions to Juniorbush to squander on his misbegotten war.
The guys running Vietnam aren't likely to win any prizes for competence, but it is still best that they are running our own country, and a bad thing that we pissed away all that money trying to retain them as a colony.
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Chairman Mao was an incompetent boob. His Great Leap Forward was in the opposite direction. But this is all in the past, and right now, the Chinese are feeding their huge population and have enough left over to lend bazillions to Juniorbush to squander on his misbegotten war.
If they're "feeding their ... population," then how come they have an agricultural product trade deficit? Sure, they're not starving, but they're feeding their people by importing food. And because of industry and ecological damage, their arable land decreases every year.
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Chairman Mao was an incompetent boob. His Great Leap Forward was in the opposite direction. But this is all in the past, and right now, the Chinese are feeding their huge population and have enough left over to lend bazillions to Juniorbush to squander on his misbegotten war.
If they're "feeding their ... population," then how come they have an agricultural product trade deficit? Sure, they're not starving, but they're feeding their people by importing food. And because of industry and ecological damage, their arable land decreases every year.
They are learning , they pegged their currency to the dollar .
I would not have told them this was a good idea , but it turns out to have worked well so far.
If we are lucky they won't mind when we peg the dollar to the Yuan.
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<<All the good of Communism is lies , every bit of it.>>
Ah, then the Red Army DIDN'T kill more Germans than all the other Allies combined? Interesting. And the astonishing double-digit growth of the Soviet economy in the 1930s was all lies too? Holy shit.
<<Where the USA has won we have not enslaved nor removed any pride . . . >>
Tell that to the Guatemalans, the Indonesians, the Saladoreans, the Hondurans, the pre-Revolutonary Cubans, the victims of Pinochet, the Filippinos . . . Who do you think you are kidding?
<< if you think we have , then how would you explain France and North Korea as being our slaves or free from pride?>>
I don't get it - - what, apart from participating in roughly equal numbers alongside British Empire troops in the D-day invasion and subsequent E.T.O. campaigns, did the U.S. have to do with the liberation of France? And when did the U.S.A. ever defeat North Korea? IIRC, they were driven out of North Korea and finally had to sign some kind of truce agreement at Panmunmon.
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<<All the good of Communism is lies , every bit of it.>>
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No statement that says anything is always false is likely to be entirely true, unless it deals with arithmetic.
Communism united China once and for all. It put an end to the regular famines. .
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<<All the good of Communism is lies , every bit of it.>>
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No statement that says anything is always false is likely to be entirely true, unless it deals with arithmetic.
Communism united China once and for all. It put an end to the regular famines. .
Communism killed or imprisoned all the Chineese that didn't like Communism , if that is Unity Unity is not worth the effort.
Communiosm made the regular famines worse but hid them there is no controversy about whether there was a large famine in 59-63 only a controversy of how bad it was , a little less communistic is a little better fed ,they will shuck the whole idea and eat well someday.
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<<Communism killed or imprisoned all the Chineese that didn't like Communism , if that is Unity Unity is not worth the effort.>>
plane, not only do I have no idea where you get this nonsense from, but I'm amazed how you can parrot that crap with no reflection whatsoever. There's over a billion people in China, almost a billion and a half in fact. Do you have any idea how many people would have to be killed or imprisoned if they had to deal with "all the Chinese that didn't like Communism?" They generally go after enemies of the regime.
<<Communiosm made the regular famines worse . . . >>
How'd they do that?
<< . . . but hid them >>
How'd they do that?
<< there is no controversy about whether there was a large famine in 59-63 only a controversy of how bad it was , >>
So what's the range of difference? What's the big estimate and what's the small estimate?
<<a little less communistic is a little better fed >>
That is ludicrous, China was plagued by famine for millennia before anybody every thought of communism. It was endemic to the country
<<,they will shuck the whole idea and eat well someday.>>
I've been there once and my wife's been there twice, and from what we've both seen, they're eating pretty well already.
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<<All the good of Communism is lies , every bit of it.>>
Ah, then the Red Army DIDN'T kill more Germans than all the other Allies combined? Interesting. And the astonishing double-digit growth of the Soviet economy in the 1930s was all lies too? Holy shit.
<<Where the USA has won we have not enslaved nor removed any pride . . . >>
Tell that to the Guatemalans, the Indonesians, the Saladoreans, the Hondurans, the pre-Revolutonary Cubans, the victims of Pinochet, the Filippinos . . . Who do you think you are kidding?
<< if you think we have , then how would you explain France and North Korea as being our slaves or free from pride?>>
I don't get it - - what, apart from participating in roughly equal numbers alongside British Empire troops in the D-day invasion and subsequent E.T.O. campaigns, did the U.S. have to do with the liberation of France? And when did the U.S.A. ever defeat North Korea? IIRC, they were driven out of North Korea and finally had to sign some kind of truce agreement at Panmunmon.
If the German Army hadn't had Soviet Help in building aircraft , tanks and training troops the German Army would have had not the wherewithall to make any troubble in Spain , perhaps not even enough to Blitzkrig Poland either.
If Stalin had not purged all of the competantce from his officer corps to make the whole army more communist (or controllable take your pick) they might have been able to fend off the attack somewhere short of Stalingrad.
Hitler claimed that the Sviet union was so weak that a kick on thedoor would collapse the whole house , well he was half right. Stalin was the Stupid leader that Communism deserved , but the Soviet people and the Soviet comon soldier had a lot more heart than he could have imagined in his dry little Facist heart.
In spite of Stalins incompetence and the inherent weakness and enforced ignorance of Commnism the never say die spirit of the ordinary Russian was never quashed , the fortitude of the phesant combined with the severity of the weather corrected for the incredable foolishness of Stalin . Stalin o course was pleased to claim all of the credit for the brilliace he demonstrated so what did he do brilliantly anyway?
Was he Brilliant to allow the Germans to build tanks on Soviet territory , or wa he brilliant to allow them to build aircraft on Soviet territory , or was he brilliant to shot all of the Red Army officers who had ever been to Germany?
Let me posit that without Soviet aid the Facists would never have taken over Spain ,what might have happend after that?
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<<Communism killed or imprisoned all the Chineese that didn't like Communism , if that is Unity Unity is not worth the effort.>>
plane, not only do I have no idea where you get this nonsense from, but I'm amazed how you can parrot that crap with no reflection whatsoever. There's over a billion people in China, almost a billion and a half in fact. Do you have any idea how many people would have to be killed or imprisoned if they had to deal with "all the Chinese that didn't like Communism?" They generally go after enemies of the regime.
<<Communiosm made the regular famines worse . . . >>
How'd they do that?
<< . . . but hid them >>
How'd they do that?
<< there is no controversy about whether there was a large famine in 59-63 only a controversy of how bad it was , >>
So what's the range of difference? What's the big estimate and what's the small estimate?
<<a little less communistic is a little better fed >>
That is ludicrous, China was plagued by famine for millennia before anybody every thought of communism. It was endemic to the country
<<,they will shuck the whole idea and eat well someday.>>
I've been there once and my wife's been there twice, and from what we've both seen, they're eating pretty well already.
Yes , Mao is dead and Communism isn't feeling so well either , they have allowed millionaires to reappear , and private hands to aquire capitol , thus they are better fed.
Famine need not have occured in the aftermath of WWII There were Americans who wanted to suport Chinese agriclture , notably Claire Chenout who wanted to help the people directly that had helped him so much . The Common Chineese citizen who would build airfeilds bare handed and rescue downed Americans at great personal risk , just to help fight the Japaneese.
Europe recovered better in part because of the Mashall plan , China just kept on haveing war , fighting off the potential of a Marshall plan.
Communism does cause famine , it does this diectly , if this is not demonstrrated by enourmous famines in Maoist China then is it not demonstrated in recent North Korean famines?
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<<Yes , Mao is dead and Communism isn't feeling so well either , they have allowed millionaires to reappear , and rivate hands to aquire caitol , >>
They're sure as hell taking communism in a new direction but they still have a firm grip on the steering. You know communism as a governing philosophy has to be a little bit flexible and accommodating. This happened in Cuba, where I saw that Fidel instituted mercados libres for small farmers to sell limited amounts of their own produce, and then he shut them down; in Viet Nam when the Viet Minh first allowed for small landlords to keep their holdings and then they turfed them out. In the U.S.S.R. concessions were made to capitalism and then revoked when no longer needed.
There's even a name for the policy: "Two steps forward, one step back."
All you know is where the Party leadership has taken the people to for now - - unless you have a crystal ball, you can't see whether the next step will be forwards or backwards.
<< . . . thus they are better fed.>>
Well, now you know better than the rest of us. On what do you base your conclusion (a) that the Chinese ARE in fact better fed? and (b) that if they are better fed, it's because they allowed the private control of some amounts of capital? and (c) that if they are better fed, it's somehow due to the fact that China now has its first millionaires? Because personally I can't see the connection.
<<Famine need not have occured in the aftermath of WWII >>
You gotta be kidding. The Japs devastated the fucking country. There was a huge famine (1944) during WWII.
<<There were Americans who wanted to suport Chinese agriclture , notably Claire Chenout who wanted to help the people directly that had helped him so much. >>
LMFAO. Claire Chennault was a well-paid agent and gun for hire (The Flying Tigers) of the Soong family, the richest family in China, of one of the Soong family's daughters, Mme. Chiang Kai Shek and of her husband, the Generalissimo. Chiang was the leader of the KMT (Nationalist) Party, which was fighting the CPC (Communist Party of China) and its attempts to free the country from foreign (American) domination. Chiang and the reactionary fascists and warlords who supported him, grew rich off the misery of the workers and peasants of China. The support of Claire Chennault would have been the kiss of death to any agricultural project - - the Chinese had finally been roused to demand national independence, not a chance to live out their lives as one more Amerikkkan puppet state.
<<The Common Chineese citizen who would build airfeilds bare handed and rescue downed Americans at great personal risk , just to help fight the Japaneese.>>
I think you can safely assume that this was due much more to widespread hatred of the barbaric Jap invaders than to any particular affection for the Americans. The Chinese, especially in the coastal areas, never forgot the cruelty and brutality that accompanied the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion by the Western Powers, nor the Opium Wars that let the foreign opium traders into their country in the first place, in defiance of the Emperor's ban on the importation of opium. There was an enormous popular resentment of Westerners, despite the wartime propaganda designed to show the great love affair between the Chinese and American peoples.
If you want to read a fictionalized account of a real-life WWII firefight between American troops in China and a band of Chinese Nationalist army deserters, during a retreat from a major Jap advance, as witnessed by an American war correspondent, Theodore White, who was there, take a look at his book, "The Mountain Road," which examines the burning anger of some Chinese foot-soldiers towards Americans generally. I recall reading, I believe in LIFE magazine, White's non-fiction account of the same battle, with photos.
<<Europe recovered better in part because of the Mashall plan , China just kept on haveing war , fighting off the potential of a Marshall plan.>>
They evidently knew what they were doing. Marshall Plan aid came with a lot of strings attached. Chairman Mao knew all about strings and Trojan Horses. He didn't want the Marshall Plan, China was going to pull itself up by its own bootstraps if necessary, but it would after centuries of foreign colonization and arrogance, finally be master once again in its own house.
<<Communism does cause famine , it does this diectly , if this is not demonstrrated by enourmous famines in Maoist China then is it not demonstrated in recent North Korean famines?>>
I can't even begin to count the reasons why this last statement is ridiculous - - 1, because China always had famine, had it for millennia before Communism was even a gleam in Karl Marx's eye, 2, there was no "enormous famine" during Mao's regime and whatever the magnitude of it, if it even existed, there had been much bigger and many more famines before the alleged famine of Mao's time and 3, I have never seen a shred of evidence that the famines of North Korea are in any way to to communism as opposed to Western and South Korean sabotage, blockade, crop poisoning or other dirty tricks.
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Crop poisoning?
Tell me you just made that up , hehehe.
South Korea has a large middle class and a pretty powerfull business class that spans the middle and wealthy , this ensures that capital is not only produced but that it keeps moveing ,keeps reproduceing itself.
North Korea has a very strong central planning system , which ensures that every change in conditions is coped with promptly after it is over.
Korea is too small to claim that the weather is diffrent in one from the other , the North had more mines and factorys after WWII than the south , the only real diffrence is that Communism is stodgy and Capitalism is nimble .
This may be an oversimplafacation , but it is a fact that the Koreans are as nearly pure a scientific experiment as can be produced to test the virtues of their respective systems.
South Korea is not perfect , but it does not take two generations to change leadership.
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<<Crop poisoning? Tell me you just made that up , hehehe.>>
Why would I make that up? You really think the CIA has moral scruples that would keep it from poisoning crops? Ever hear of Agent Orange?
<<South Korea has a large middle class and a pretty powerfull business class that spans the middle and wealthy , this ensures that capital is not only produced but that it keeps moveing ,keeps reproduceing itself.>>
What it ensures is wage slavery, progressively lop-sided distribution of wealth and a guarantee that the earth will be put to whatever uses best serve the profit motive of the industrialists who can buy their food anywhere and not the interests of the masses, who require cheap, locally grown food.
<<North Korea has a very strong central planning system , which ensures that every change in conditions is coped with promptly after it is over.>>
Cute theory. Central planning can't adapt to change, capitalism can. HA! When anything really important has to be done in a fast-changing environment, notice how it gets done: the Manhattan Project and the Allied Expeditionary Force, two examples only of top-down planningand centralized command; not Ike AND Montgomery, but Ike over Mongomery and Patton and everybody else. History proves that regimes with central command and control did fine. China is one good example, Cuba another.
<<Korea is too small to claim that the weather is diffrent in one from the other . . . >>
Well, sorry, I'm no expert on the geography and climate of the Korean Peninsula and neither are you. Nor are we experts in Korean agriculture. When I hear an expert explain the difference if any between agricultural conditions in North and South Korea, then I'll form an opinion and till then I won't.
<< the North had more mines and factorys after WWII than the south . . . >>
The North's priorities were not its mines and its factories. It needed to re-unite the Peninsula, rather than leave half of it under an American puppet dictatorship.
<<the only real diffrence is that Communism is stodgy and Capitalism is nimble.>>
The only real difference is that Kim Jong Il refused to allow the rape of an entire population for the benefit of Amerikkkan puppeteers whose aim was to establish a ruling class paradise and a workers' hell.
<<This may be an oversimplafacation , but it is a fact that the Koreans are as nearly pure a scientific experiment as can be produced to test the virtues of their respective systems.>>
How do you figure that? One used low-paid wage-slaves kept in line by a vicious, murderous right-wing dictatorship to enrich a small ruling class and gain U.S. financial and military support, the other used low-paid wage slaves kept in line by a vicious, murderous left-wing dictatorship to build a powerful military force with its own nukes. Who's to say in the long run which system ended up better off?
<<South Korea is not perfect . . . >>
Well, at least you got THAT right.
<< . . . but it does not take two generations to change leadership.>>
No, but it sure took a helluva lot of dead human bodies.
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<<Crop poisoning? Tell me you just made that up , hehehe.>>
Why would I make that up? You really think the CIA has moral scruples that would keep it from poisoning crops? Ever hear of Agent Orange?
So you did make it up.
For the rest of your answer I accept it as a perfect reversal of reality , North Korea is hell for anyone who likes freedom or likes to eat. South Korea isn't hard to emmigrate from if you don't like it.
Communism promises exactly what it destroys .
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South Koreans went through some hard times under dictators like Syngman Rhee and his successors, but since the mid-90's, South Korea has become a prosperous nation where pretty much everyone has a fairly decent standard of living.
North Korea is backward and unlikely to advance at all. What North Korea has is not so much Communism as a monarchy with a singularly incompetent monarch. All this Great Leader and Dear leader worship is not Marx, it's just medieval.
Koreans are very hard-working and determined people, and under South Korean democracy they have prospered. The North will have to wait until Kim Jung Il dies or is overthrown.
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South Koreans went through some hard times under dictators like Syngman Rhee and his successors, but since the mid-90's, South Korea has become a prosperous nation where pretty much everyone has a fairly decent standard of living.
North Korea is backward and unlikely to advance at all. What North Korea has is not so much Communism as a monarchy with a singularly incompetent monarch. All this Great Leader and Dear leader worship is not Marx, it's just medieval.
Koreans are very hard-working and determined people, and under South Korean democracy they have prospered. The North will have to wait until Kim Jung Il dies or is overthrown.
I agree mostly with your assessment , when given a chance people often work for their own benefit , this applies politically , and a South Korea has become more politically free it has become more liable to become even more free.
One of the chief problems with Communism is the vain promise that the harsh state controll will ever fade , there is no mechanism to cause or encourage this and no matter how well the communist government starts , without the element of democracy the trend is to devolve into Monarchy.
Chin is struggling with momentous decisions , but still many of those decisions are made in a small ogliogarcial circle from the top. Mao told his people that the real leader was the people whose wishes would be understood and served by the leadership , strange that with this idea having the leadership chosen by election was considered a bad idea , Mao couldn't risk his revolutions success in the hands of another.
George Washington on the other hand ,understood that to make a king of himself would have been the destruction of his revolution. We were very lucky to have had such a wise leader early on , from Robespierre to Mao the folly of holding too much power too long and too centrally has been demonstrated and the example of Cincinattus and George Washington has been borne out as especially wise.
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China has always been a collectivist society, because of the huge population. As for voting, your personal vote in a country of 300,000,000 like the US is a lot less (about 100 times less, actually) influential than it would be in Costa Rica, which has under 3,000,000. In China, which has 1,200,000,000 people, one vote is worth only one fourth as much as a vote in the US. I don't know about you, but I have voted in every election since I was 18, and my vote has NEVER swung any election. Had I never voted, it would have changed nothing. Most of the time, I am forced to vote for people that offer no real logical choice. JUniorbush is too despicable and mronic to even consider, and John Kerry was hardly my favorite Democrat.
The men controlling China can certainly be faulted for the pollution problem, as well as other problems such as the massive dislocations of people for the Three Gorges Project, and the suppression of Falin Gong, but you also have to admire the expertise of a constant growth rate of 10% annually for an unprecedented time with a bearable inflation rate. No economic planners of any political persuasion have ever done this before.
China is a far different case from North Korea. China is a Communist government with a laissez-faire economy, for the most part. North Korea is a hereditary monarchy ineffectively disguised as a Communist state.
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The men controlling China can certainly be faulted for the pollution problem, as well as other problems such as the massive dislocations of people for the Three Gorges Project, and the suppression of Falin Gong, but you also have to admire the expertise of a constant growth rate of 10% annually for an unprecedented time with a bearable inflation rate. No economic planners of any political persuasion have ever done this before.
When you take the grip off the throat amazeing that breathing happens so much better.
There is nothing wrong with the Chineese that woud have prevented them from the same pace of progress tha the Japaneese enjoyed throuh the Sixtys and Seventys , it was te government interfering with absolutely every market decision that kept the air out of the Chinee economys lungs.
China was a Monarchy for a very long time , and a Comunist nation for few decades , they are catching up to what might have been earlyer if the people were not so weighted by government .