Posted on 10/11/2009 11:34:51 AM PDT by kristinn
>>> European governors were far better than the native rulers. <<<
Don’t mention the Belgian Congo! I’ve read that Dutch colonialism in the Netherlands East Indies wasn’t exactly a bowl of cherries, either.
I think that the appropriate response to AndyJackson’s point about colonialism is that 1.) Ho Chi Minh’s effort to unify South with North Vietnam had a lot more to do with doctrinaire Communism than anti-colonialism; 2.) by the time the US began to deploy ground forces — early 1965, I think — I don’t think anyone was seriously considering either making Vietnam a US colony or re-instating French colonialism there.
>>> the media was not overly sympathetic to the Yippies and Hippies <<<
I was quite young at the time, but I don’t remember the media being very sympathetic to the US effort in support of South Vietnam — in the early 70s or later. Hollywood certainly wasn’t!
The media actually did support Vietnam till Tet...Howard K Smith lost a son there I think...or it may have been Severied(?)
even after Tet, all the anchors did not follow Walter
the media was not nearly as overtly in the lefty tank like today and they openly scorned the counter culture..
Hollywood had lefties yes but it still had patriots then too and the patriots were big box office
The media actually did support Vietnam till Tet...Howard K Smith lost a son there I think...or it may have been Severied(?)
even after Tet, all the anchors did not follow Walter
the media was not nearly as overtly in the lefty tank like today and they openly scorned the counter culture..
Hollywood had lefties yes but it still had patriots then too and the patriots were big box office
Obama fought and hard in order to call the war in Afghanistan his own. I bet he never thought it would bite him as hard as it has. I bet there is true trouble within the party of this. Senate and House critters who have large Military bases in their districts don’t like to have to deal with so many grieving families who have valid reasons to be angry. The ole Pigeons Coming Home to Roost phrase comes to mind.
>>> I don’t like him, but he did a good thing writing this opposition to zer0’s naive plan. <<<
I agree, he did a good thing. I was just pointing out the fact that he couldn’t help “nuancing” his position contra Obama’s dilly-dallying over Afghanistan.
>>> Zer0 tries to preach to us like an anthropology professor on how the “indigenous society” is best for the residents even if they live in the 11th century. <<<
I have a MA in anthropology. If the only thing that I knew about Obama was that his mother had a PhD in anthropology and was interested in peasant studies/gender studies/colonialism/weaving(!), I feel that I would know enough to realize that he is a man who should not be trusted with any US elected office.
What you say makes sense, since my earliest memories of TV and other mass media — Quisp vs. Quake, the Apollo moon landings, etc. — begin soon after 1968.
Don’t remember enough/haven’t read enough to disentangle which news anchors/editorial pages were on what side. I have a clearer recollection of the post-1975 war protestor gloating over the fall of South Vietnam.
Actually the reason that a lot of colonial natives were allowed to return to the "home" country after anti-colonial wars booted out the European colonizer is because many of them were "collaborators" with the colonialists, there lives were in genuine danger, and the colonialists, not being the totally heartless brutes they were accused of being, allowed them in. Not always. I doubt the Belgians accepted many from the Congo, nor did the Germans take many from Tanganyika.
Your viewpoint is entirely irrelevant in that. So is mine or anyone else's on this thread.
I think it had a lot more to do with Emperor Ho's quest for uncontested power than either doctrinaire Communism or anti-colonialism. Communism was merely cover for one man's quest for absolute power, and the recreation of Vietnam's Indochinese empire (including Cambodia and Laos). It took a Chinese punitive invasion in 1979 to put an end to Vietnamese ambitions.
You are arguing from a native standpoint. I am arguing from an objective standpoint that compares the treatment of natives by other natives, with that by European colonizers. It's not politically correct to put up the facts side by side and compare them, but the truth is that Europeans rulers treated the natives far better than native rulers. The one respect in which native rulers were superior was in agitating against the central power. In all other respects, they were inferior.
Actually, a lot of colonial administrators were absorbed into new native governments because of a lack of native expertise. The real problem was that many of them came from minority ethnic groups that had either previously ruled the majority in pre-colonial days, or had traditionally been oppressed by majority ruling ethnic groups. Either way, they weren't traitors - they were shoehorned into European empires through no particular desire of their own. If anything, they were the greatest victims of decolonization. But here's the thing - the bulk of the illegal immigrants you see in Europe do not come from these groups - they come from the anti-European natives who fought against their European "oppressors", and have brought their racist and revanchist ideologies with them to Europe. This is why they are almost impossible to assimilate into European society - they are determined to carve native colonies onto European soil.
>>> I think it had a lot more to do with Emperor Ho’s quest for uncontested power than either doctrinaire Communism or anti-colonialism. <<<
After the examples of Lenin and Stalin and Mao, it wouldn’t surprise me if Ho either confused his personal quest for power with a tradition of national Communism or saw no essential difference between the two.
You argue like Clinton. Don't like a point, you change the subject. No one debated that isssue.
Again, you have a very hard time keeping track of the point being argued. The original point had to do with US bungling the war in Vietnam by failing to instill an effective counterinsurgency strategy. Counterinsurgency has to be waged from the perspective of the population you are trying to win to your side of the war. Your or my viewpoint on what is best for them is entirely irrelevant. It is what they think is best for them that counts.
Let me quote your words back to you:One of the problems with Vietnam was that socially, economically and politically we were not on the right side of the war.
I read "right" to mean morally superior. You appear to be parsing "right" to mean whatever floats the natives' boats at any given point in time, much as Clinton defines the word sex pretty flexibly. My mistake.
My main point wasn't even morality. It was that insurgencies, like non-insurgencies, are won by some combination of superior generalship, manpower resources and/or material, not by the support of the people. In the Orient, "the people" generally "support" whomever they think is going to be on the winning side, and it's a piecemeal kind of thing that has to do with avoiding getting killed in the here and now while the guerrillas are in control of your hometown rather than any abstract principles. For people in non-guerrilla controlled areas, it's a matter of avoiding reprisals when the guerrillas win. (Where the guerrillas appear to be losing, this scenario happens in reverse - non-guerrilla-controlled areas support the government to avoid future reprisals and guerrilla-controlled areas are filled with government spies and turncoats to forestall future government reprisals).
The North Vietnamese only managed to win when Uncle Sam cut off supplies to South Vietnam, even as the Soviets provided billions of dollars in new equipment to North Vietnam on credit. I think it's silly to say that we were on the wrong side of the war. We were on the right side of the war. The real problem is that the non-communists had poor military leadership. Nonetheless, we plugged the gap. By the time we left in the 72/73 time frame, communist guerrillas were a spent force. It was the regular NVA that crossed the border with tanks, Migs and artillery.
The biggest mistake we made - and the reason massive American intervention became necessary - was in our killing the single unifying figure in South Vietnam - the man who could hold his country together, Ngo Dinh Diem. We wanted a George Washington-like figure and Ngo Dinh Diem was all the South Vietnamese had. I think it's poetic justice that the moron who engineered his death, Kennedy, had his brains blown out a couple of weeks later. It's the least that could have happened to Kennedy, given the almost 60,000 GI's that went to their deaths after South Vietnam started unraveling, post-Ngo.
Then you replied "I read 'right' to mean morally superior."
Well, first, we somehow failed to convince the peasantry in South Vietnam that we were morally superior, even if you thought we were. Second, I don't know how morally superior we are when we kill how many millions and then give up.
If we were morally superior, we would have been promoting and delivering something positive for the South Vietnamese. Anti-communism is not a positive program - I know hard core cold-warriors don't exactly see that - and a million dead "gooks" is not exactly a positive moral program either.
A positive morally superior program would have lead the folks we were fighting for to feel that they were better off year by year with us there than without us being there. Somehow we failed to close the deal.
In fact, our measure of progress was the infamous body count reported daily to the White House.
Moral superiority and superior propaganda are different things. The lesson of the Western colonial experience is that we can be right on everything and still lose in the court of native public opinion. The bottom line is that locals are more likely to believe someone of the same skin color, no matter how outrageous the lies and libels. My contention is that hearts and minds is chimerical. The reason the North Vietnamese won is superior firepower. They held on to South Vietnam after victory without having having to deal with an insurgency because they executed and starved to death hundreds of thousands of former government officials, while driving over a million refugees into the shark-infested waters of the South China Sea.
You are the first person I have ever heard from who suggested that we lost to the VC because they had superior firepower. Quite the contrary. We had overwhelmingly dominant firepower, kill ratios that almost exterminated the VC and we still managed to lose because we fought the wrong war for the wrong purpose. The only folks who didn't know that were LBJ, Gen Westmoreland and, now, struggling in across the finish line, you.
"Cultural Darwinism" and "white man's burden" aren't European inventions - the words are different, but the concepts have been a propaganda staple of state- and empire-building since the first tribal leader annexed his neighbor tribe (i.e. killed the menfolk and took their hunting grounds and women). Heck, people in Mesopotamia and Mohenjo Daro were doing it when European were running around in animal skins and living in caves. They're just new labels. Do you really think the Chinese and Javanese empire-builders said outright that we're here to steal your land and take your women? Spare me the nonsense that Europeans invented empire-building, and that what they did was uniquely bad. It wasn't.
You are the first person I have ever heard from who suggested that we lost to the VC because they had superior firepower.
I don't know what you're talking about. We exterminated the VC during the Tet offensive. After that, it was NVA participation all the way. The VC did not take Saigon in 1975. It was the NVA that crossed the border with tanks, Migs and heavy artillery.
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