Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Lost My Past (2017)

glineq.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 193 posts

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#81

Post by clavicat »

kstenerud wrote: post #27
ARandomerDude wrote: post #13

> the liberation of Saigon That was a jarring phrase that helped underscore the great divide between East and West.

In this particular case, the North was in the right. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were just one more occupier in a long line of Western occupiers. And even though the Americans didn't intend to become occupiers, that's ultimately what happened (a theme that's repeated itself many times). The Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars with each other. So the North pushed out the occupier…

No post body was provided.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#82

Post by sofixa »

refurb wrote: post #46
kstenerud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, the North was in the right. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were just one more occupier in a long line of Western occupiers. And even though the Americans didn't intend to become occupiers, that's ultimately what happened (a theme that's repeated itself many times). The Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars with each other. So the North pushed out the occupier…

This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war. There was no “rightful” liberation. It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting fo…

> This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war

The difference is that with no outside meddling and support, South Vietnam wouldn't have existed or would have existed very briefly until a Communist electoral victory of the whole country. Without the US in Vietnamese affair, there is no North-South war.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#83

Post by PixyMisa »

cblconfederate wrote: post #58

Interesting thread by him about the economic growth in post-soviet republics: https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1470492667884851202 So to summarize (leaving Stalin etc out, in order not to complicate matters further) we have the average per capita income in "Euroasia" growing at: 1.6% pa during the last ~30y of Tsarism 2.1% pa during 18y of Brezhnev's "stagnation" 0.8% pa during 30y of "new capitalism".

Three sets of thieves in different clothes.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#84

Post by moksly »

refurb wrote: post #46
kstenerud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, the North was in the right. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were just one more occupier in a long line of Western occupiers. And even though the Americans didn't intend to become occupiers, that's ultimately what happened (a theme that's repeated itself many times). The Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars with each other. So the North pushed out the occupier…

This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war. There was no “rightful” liberation. It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting fo…

This is the sort of distorting of history the article speaks about. Vietnam was invaded by the French in the 1800 and turned into a colony. That colony was lost, and then semi-regained over the course of WW2 and the years following.

When the French lost and withdrew, America invaded and was subsequently beaten.

This is not a defence of China or Russia, look at how they are invading Tibet and the Ukraine, but the Vietnamese people weren’t invaded by China or the USSR, they were invaded by the US. South-Vietnam was an American fabrication during its invasion following the post French-Indonesian-war, because the Vietnamese people had a government in Hanoi, the US simply didn’t like it.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#85

Post by sofixa »

_0ffh wrote: post #61
thaumasiotes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self rule, just like you'd think. The CCP's primary claim to legitimacy is that they kicked out the Japanese. They were a little late to get to kick out the Manchus.

The way I heard the story is more like they mostly held back and rebuilt their numbers while the Kuomintang was left doing most of the actual kicking on it's own.

That's unfair to the Chinese communists. They fought a different type of war against the Japanese, a guerrilla one, attacking Japanese supply, isolated locations, etc.

In terms of pure numbers of men they certainly contributed less than the Kuomintang, but in terms of overall impact it's close to impossible to say.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#86

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

refurb wrote: post #46
kstenerud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this particular case, the North was in the right. As far as they were concerned, the Americans were just one more occupier in a long line of Western occupiers. And even though the Americans didn't intend to become occupiers, that's ultimately what happened (a theme that's repeated itself many times). The Americans and the Vietnamese were fighting different wars with each other. So the North pushed out the occupier…

This is the story that is told, but one can’t avoid the similarity between the South’s alliance with the US, AUS, NZ, Korea and the North’s with the USSR and China (which had many soldier stationed there). Without material support the USSR and China provided, the North never could have won the war. There was no “rightful” liberation. It was a civil war in its essence with two opposing groups of Vietnamese fighting fo…

> In the end the North did a better job (through both smart politics, good PR and internal support/oppression of opposition).

And torrents of blood.

Americans mourn 58,000 dead, but the NVC lost well north of a million.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#87

Post by lucian1900 »

galfarragem wrote: post #74

By visiting former Eastern Bloc countries and living there for some years after they joined EU, I believe I understand the author. He misses Idealism and Intellectualism and specially: time to pursue it. I miss it too - and I never lived there during that times. Everything is a trade-off and this is certainly part of the price we pay to have full shelves.

It’s hard to not be bitter about it. Shelves are full, but people can afford less and less every year. And it was done at gunpoint by the western imperialist countries, with wars, coups, propaganda and sanctions.

The author feels their past was lost, but many of us are furious our futures were stolen.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#88

Post by lucian1900 »

Findeton wrote: post #43
sofixa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, in the end, even if it started as direct opposition of imperialism ( to an extent; export of revolution was one of the tenets of Lenin and early Bolshevism, and that might be considered a type of imperialism). However i think the author is talking more about the smaller Eastern European communist countries in general ( Yugoslavia, East Germany are mentioned), not the Soviet Union.

I mention it because at the end of his blogpost he says: "there will be no wars in Europe in my lifetime, and imperialism has been defeated. " I'll also point out that: - The imperialistic part of the USA is the socialist part of USA (which does exist and gets larger every day). - Empires are not economically profitable as a whole, only a few people profit.

Which part of the US is socialist? There is none.

If you mean the army, it’s not socialist. The workers don’t have democratic control over the means of production. It’s just a planned economy, plenty of those exist in dictatorships of the bourgeoisie (like Amazon).

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#89

Post by PixyMisa »

jeroenhd wrote: post #53
anovikov wrote: post #19

[flagged]

Communism would be great if people would actually be good. It's hard to not feel enticed by a future where everyone has equal rights, where the plentiful resources of the world are shared among everyone else and where there is no need for class warfare. Sadly, time and again humanity has proven unable to do good at the scale of a country. The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil natu…

> Communism would be great if people would actually be good.

Communism replaces a multitude of small, localised optimisation problems with a single, centralised, completely intractable optimisation problem, and at the same time destroys the very information required to tackle that problem at all.

Communism cannot work on any but the smallest scale, and is utterly doomed when applied to any modern nation state.

J. B. S. Haldane - himself a socialist - pointed this out as far back as 1928.* Whether communism is inherently evil or not, we know for a fact that it cannot ever work.

> The laudable ideals of any political system will need to resist man's evil nature

The solution to that is not to permit the government the ability to cause great harm to its citizens in the first place.

* See "On Being the Right Size", an essay mostly on scaling in biology, but also touching on related subjects.

Re: I Lost My Past (2017)

#90

Post by refurb »

vidarh wrote: post #78
refurb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re really trying hard to draw equivalencies between two very different situations. In the US police kill less than 1,000 per year. Most are white people, many justifiably. So let’s overestimate and say 25% of those are murder. (Clearly not, but work with me). So 250 per year in a country of 350M. When the Kurds were gassed, a singular event, 3,000-5,000 people were killed. Random people, shelled by the Iraqi mili…

Misses the point which is not to justify or downplay either, but that most people lived a very different reality. That doesn't make the brutal mass murder of Kurds any more acceptable. It just underlines that trying to compress the story of those who lived in a given country in any period into just the atrocities is rarely going to be representative of everyone's lives.

Ok, I see your point now.

I do agree that these events don’t define the life of the general population.

Post reply on HN