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Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

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Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#581

Post by camillomiller »

sandworm101 wrote: post #541
camillomiller wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always known that, yes. Yet, as an Italian kid of the 80s I've been raised by American and American-influenced media way more that I would like to admit. I knew the US were wrong, but there was still a disconnect between that and the depiction of the American War (as they call it in Vietnam) I took as "standard" for so long. My wake up call was 2017, during the first of a few trips to Vietnam. The War museum in…

You hadn't heard of Mi Lai? That's like know about the Iraq war but not Abu Ghraib, the war on terror but not Gitmo. If I had to list things to know about the Vietnam war, Mi Lai would be in the top five. If people are hearing about the Vietnam war, but not that part, then American media indeed has problems communicating history.

Consider that in Italian high school study plans, history "stops" at WW2, sometimes right after. I never got exposed to the Vietnam War as a history topic, and I've got my information like many others in my generation in Italy mostly from Rambo movies. Want another one? I had no idea Nixon bombed Cambodia secretly for five years until I visited Cambodia, also in 2017, and visited the landmine museum near Seam Reap.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#582

Post by mthoms »

alephnan wrote: post #122
mthoms wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really not sure what point you're arguing. That Japan is many times richer than Vietnam? (You don't say!).

People are subject to a low standard of living. That’s literally the definition of poverty. Issues like this may merely be a proxy indicator of poverty, where it is debatable whether it is just a symptom. Nevertheless, it impedes people to go about and pursue greater economic activities when they have to worry about having clean water to drink, as another example . I wish you luck drinking tap water or even the ice c…

You're reading things that aren't there. Literally no-one has argued Vietnam or its people are rich (or even suggested anything close to it). No one.

Recap: The commentator you replied to said it's gotten better in the best decade (factually correct) and suggested it's considerably better than most Westerners think it is (an opinion/observation that also correlates with my experience, but YMMV).

From that comment, you brought up flooding in Saigon to which it was pointed out (to illustrate the absurdity of even bringing it up), that one of the richest cities in the world also has parts of it that flood.

You took that to mean they think Vietnam is wealthier than Japan (?) and that flooding is worse in Tokyo (?). No one said either of those things.

Look, you seem articulate and intelligent but no-one has even come close to saying what you keep suggesting. Please re-read the thread with a less combative mindset and realize we are all pretty much in agreement.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#583

Post by greedo »

marcusverus wrote: post #548
greedo wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A democracy? Not for Blacks in the South...

Black folks couldn't vote in the North in 1860, either. In fact, when Lincoln started the war by calling up 50,000 volunteers to "put down the rebellion", there were more slave states still in the Union (DC, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) than there were in the Confederacy! Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee seceded only after they realized th…

This is just more "Lost Cause" tripe. If you think the Civil War was about "states rights" etc etc, read the Confederate Constitution.

“In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#584

Post by lightgreen »

bavent wrote: post #576
lightgreen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People were out protesting the murders of black men by police, and you refer to them as looters and rioters in your prior comments No, I referred to people who were looting and rioting. Also, it was not murder. George Floyd case was manslaughter at best. I think it is not even manslaughter, but I'm not a lawyer. Again, as I said before, it's hard to talk to people who redefine words for their advantage. > along wit…

Yeah no thanks. “Junkie criminal” as if you knew him personally. And to think the protests were about a single person - clearly you don’t care enough to be informed. I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever. Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part, oh great defender of free speech who also som…

> “Junkie criminal” as if you knew him personally

I did not get that. Do I need to know him personally to know that he has junkie and a criminal?

> And to think the protests were about a single person

Sure protests were for all good and against all bad.

But there were too many posters about George Floyd and other black criminals, there was too many lies in crime statistics posted by left-wing media supporting these protests, so let's say these protesters were misinformed at best.

> clearly you don’t care enough to be informed.

Well, you have formed your opinion about what I know and what I don't (not the first time in this thread). It's not my job to convince you otherwise. Continue living in an imaginary world where everyone who disagree with you is literally nazi.

> I am of the opinion that you should not be on the side of nazis, ever.

Thank you for your opinion, but I'm not on the side of nazis. I'm on the side of freedom of speech and other human rights.

> Siding with people who want to take away the rights of everyone who doesn’t look like them is kind of a little hypocritical on your part

I'm not "siding" with these people. I try protect their rights and freedom as well as rights and freedoms of anyone else.

I'll try to explain the difference, but it is so obvious, so explanation might be hard.

There are two reasons: humanist and practical.

First, even serial killers and rapists deserve humane treatment, right to fair trial etc. Including free speech. Abandoning eye for an eye principle is also a great achievement of the western civilization.

Second, if society today decides it is acceptable to take speech rights from nazis, tomorrow it will decide it can take speech rights from communists, day after tomorrow you won't be able to talk freely. It happened too often throughout history, even in modern times, literally in the last decade (I'm not talking about the US, but it applies to the US to some degree).

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#586

Post by offtop5 »

michelpp wrote: post #343
chewz wrote: post #328

My ex-wife Grandmother had spent over 10 years (1964-1975) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a reporter on the Vietnamese side during the Vietnam War and consecutive conflicts (Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia 1978). She was the first European to walk all length of Ho Chi Minh trail, lived in Saigon undercover during American occupation and wrote couple of books about the Vietnam Wars. She was telling a lot of stor…

> Unfortunately her books had been not translated into English. Sounds like an excellent opportunity. Has anyone considered crowd sourcing a translation? I'd chuck in 10 bucks to read it and there's certainly a lot of history buffs out there looking for a fresh perspective.

That sounds like a very good startup idea. Crowdsourcing for translations, with each chapter being a stretch goal.

Of course you would need to navigate international copyright law, but I could definitely see a market for this

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#587

Post by marcusverus »

pmoriarty wrote: post #550
marcusverus wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, the US fought itself to free millions of slaves in it's own Civil War. This is simply not true. The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union. It was only afterward that it was re-imagined as a war of liberation. This reimagination makes perfect sense from a propaganda perspective. After all, the Confederacy was a democracy. Its people voted to leave the Union. The Yanks, for the stated purpose of…

"The North prosecuted the war to preserve the Union." This is known as the Lost Cause myth, and it's investigated in an Atlantic article titled "Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist?" From the article: It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what i…

There is a common little rhetorical tool, utilized frequently by politicians, where when you find yourself asked a question which you don't like, you choose instead to pretend that you've been asked a question with which you're more comfortable. That's what you've done here, by ignoring the points that I've made, and instead attempting to associate me with some other bucket of claims which you feel more comfortable responding to.

> The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people.

The states that seceded in 1860 seceded purely to preserve slavery--that's a matter of fact. I don't see how that changes anything I stated above, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

> The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

This is an odd statement, because it contains two assertions, one true and one false. The Confederacy was created by white supremacists who wanted to preserve slavery. But they didn't start a war, they started a country. A country which was, for all the odious motivations underpinning its inception, just as much a democracy as the one that was founded by the Washington and Jefferson. When the United States declared their intent to wage war on the South, they were just as much a foreign power as the British were in 1775. The idea that Southerners were not defending their communities is simply bizarre.

None of this has any bearing on the assertions made above. Slavery is evil, we're all on the same page there. The Confederacy was created to preserve slavery. That was evil. But that doesn't change the fact that the North did not fight the war to free the slaves, but to subjugate the South and to preserve the American Empire. The fact that Confederacy was founded to preserve slavery doesn't have any bearing on the simple moral fact that imperialism is evil, too. And that nations don't get to start imperial wars, kill a million people, fall ass-backwards into taking an important moral action, and then pretend that the war was about that moral action all along.

If the North had fought the war to free the slaves, then you could make the case that it was a moral war. But they didn't, and it wasn't. It was an evil war which happened to bring about the end of an evil institution. We're adults, and we should be able to entertain nuance in our appreciation of history. It is okay observe that the end of slavery was a beautiful thing, and that we're glad that it happened, AND that the Civil War itself was a moral abomination and nothing to be proud of.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#588

Post by caycep »

geraneum wrote: post #478
pembrook wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the world is a chaotic reflexive system and trying to manipulate it always creates unintended consequences. The US absolutely does dumb stuff all the time, and power always gets abused. But for a contrarian view on the “US Bad” narrative, check out a book called The Accidental Superpower Here’s a good summary of the book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-a... It presents an interesting…

I agree with you that a “US Bad” view which paints everything America as evil is misguided. But also the other extreme which portraits US as a savior and protector is also not true. From the book: > American disinterest in the world means that American security guarantees are unlikely to be honored. Competitions held in check for the better part of a century will return. Wars of opportunism will come back into fashio…

I would say the US is a hegemony like any other...with the benefit of structural hedges of the Madisonian system to avoid the most egregious abuses of power. Not perfect but better than tyrants of the past...

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#589

Post by dillondoyle »

somesortofsystm wrote: post #366
baybal2 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's the wider goal of not wanting to poke the Russia bear too much while simultaneously not letting Russia run too wild (arguably they are..). Excuse me, but the goal should be that exactly. Not leaving an inch of flesh of the bear unpoked. If you resign your emotions, and try to think about it seriously, it makes a lot of sense strategically to conduct a massive provocation. Right now, it's completely the othe…

Nonsense, NATO is literally surrounding its so-called 'enemies' with endless streams of base-building. NATO is not groveling or shivering - it is slowly invading proxy countries and extending the US empire, creep creep ..

* I agree. But also parent has a point, Crimea, election hacking, extrajudicial poisoning on British etc soil didn't have a robust response - that we know of at least.

I do think Trump was very dangerous and damaging in regards to NATO and pushing our allies away. By not understanding that 'america first' means so much more than simply scraping a few billion more from allies. That's playing checkers in terms of only being able to think in slogan-first 1st order logic. 2nd order or more is understanding why NATO was formed in the first place and the current role it has advancing our interests.

And I think it's critical to actively work against movements of authoritarian nationalism and hold Europe and our allies together.

I'm glad and think Biden is doing a better job in the Pacific in that regard.

Re: Vietnam War images from the North Vietnamese side

#590

Post by cycomanic »

JPKab wrote: post #506
andrepd wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> promoted freedom as a cultural aspiration rather than rule by a monarch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in... Iran '53 and Guatemala '54 are some of my favourites, as is Timor.

Both Iran and Guatemala were operations undertaken by the CIA with absolutely no knowledge by the American public. You do understand this right? At no point were the American public consulted by the intelligence agencies when they did these operations. It's rather childish to retcon history by implying that declassified operations that were deeply unethical were endorsed by the American public at the time. These oper…

But nobody said they were endorsed by the American public. The discussion is if the American actions were for a force of good, just because Americans were lied to by propaganda doesn't wipe away the actions. What do you think the people in the USSR thought (and knew about?)?

Moreover, many of the US operations were not really secret, people either ignored them, or favoured them. Also you say crimes 70 years ago? The US implemented the largest mass surveillance system in the world very recently, strong-arming many allies and infiltrating the internet infrastructure of other allies as well as likely violating their own constitution in the process. Also note that the US has by far the largest proportion of their population incarcerated (although the unknown numbers on China's internment camps adding some uncertainty).

Now nobody is saying China is better. The issue is that very often people (typical Americans) portrait the US as the main force of "good" in the world, but as soon as somebody points to all the atrocious things the US (the state not the people) have done, they get accused of anti-americanism, or people bring up "but China"

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