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The Incredibly Stupid One

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Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#81

Post by gedy »

thriftwy wrote: post #79
einpoklum wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> largely indistinguishable from if South Vietnam had won/continued Oh, it's not even remotely similar.

South Vietnam was so corrupt and badly run that I would expect Vietnam to look much worse upon its legacy. Maybe looking more like Sri Lanka today.

You may not realize how brutal, corrupt, and oppressive North Vietnam was, and well before any US involvement in their civil war, but my family does. The number of refugees from the North before 1975 and then from the whole country after 1975 is very telling (and not due to US ruining the country or other such propaganda). Vietnam only recovered after the USSR fell and they were forced to align with the west again, hence the original point about South Vietnam.

Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#82

Post by thriftwy »

gedy wrote: post #81
thriftwy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Vietnam was so corrupt and badly run that I would expect Vietnam to look much worse upon its legacy. Maybe looking more like Sri Lanka today.

You may not realize how brutal, corrupt, and oppressive North Vietnam was, and well before any US involvement in their civil war, but my family does. The number of refugees from the North before 1975 and then from the whole country after 1975 is very telling (and not due to US ruining the country or other such propaganda). Vietnam only recovered after the USSR fell and they were forced to align with the west again, h…

I'm not really sure that North Vietnam had opportunity of being corrupt since they didn't have much of an economy to speak of at the moment.

However, I remember some bad facts about South Vietnam either, such as US placing puppet top government officials there who were firebrand catholic, in a buddhist country, and who tried to hinder buddhism to the extent where the country was on the brink of civil war, and which also contributed to North having so many willing agents in the South.

> In 1963, the Ngô family's grip on power became unstuck during the Buddhist crisis, during which the nation's Buddhist majority rose up against the pro-Catholic regime. Nhu tried to break the Buddhists' opposition by using the Special Forces in raids on prominent Buddhist temples that left hundreds dead, and framing the regular army for it.

Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#83

Post by gedy »

thriftwy wrote: post #82
gedy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not realize how brutal, corrupt, and oppressive North Vietnam was, and well before any US involvement in their civil war, but my family does. The number of refugees from the North before 1975 and then from the whole country after 1975 is very telling (and not due to US ruining the country or other such propaganda). Vietnam only recovered after the USSR fell and they were forced to align with the west again, h…

I'm not really sure that North Vietnam had opportunity of being corrupt since they didn't have much of an economy to speak of at the moment. However, I remember some bad facts about South Vietnam either, such as US placing puppet top government officials there who were firebrand catholic, in a buddhist country, and who tried to hinder buddhism to the extent where the country was on the brink of civil war, and which a…

No one is claiming South Vietnam was a well run utopia, but it's equally foolish to believe North Vietnam was much better, when it was actually a lot worse in its oppression.

Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#84

Post by InefficientRed »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #78
InefficientRed wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's no middle ground between locking everyone up and letting people keep billions in ill-gotten gains /s.

I'm literally asking - genuinely asking - what a solution in the middleground would look like. The purpose of the sentence that has bothered you is just to stake out the other side of the spectrum from where we are now. That's all. Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.

>> Better to get all of them and a few more than let a single one go free…?

> I'm genuinely asking...

Your questions are not serious. You are not genuinely asking. If you want interlocutors to engage with your questions with anything other than dismissiveness, try asking questions that are not prime facie dismissive.

> Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.

I am.

Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#85

Post by Stratoscope »

einpoklum wrote: post #73
Stratoscope wrote: post #40

This reminds me of Jeremiah Denton, a POW in that same war who was interviewed on TV to explain that the prisoners were being treated humanely. As he gave the verbal answers his captors expected, he blinked his eyes in Morse Code: – ––– •–• – ••– •–• • T O R T U R E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code Epilog: A few years ag…

> It made me think how so few of us in each country really wanted to fight these wars. Don't make a false equivalence. The Vietnamese were occupied by foreigners and did indeed - on the whole - want to struggle and fight for liberation from the US. As for people in the US - they were sent off to fight for geopolitical advantages of the ruling elite, for rubber supply security etc.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I certainly didn't mean to make a false equivalence, only to mention that most people in either land didn't want this war.

Of course as you point out, once forced into it, the Vietnamese people really had little choice but to defend their home.

It reminds me a bit of another war going on right now.

Re: The Incredibly Stupid One

#86

Post by lern_too_spel »

refurb wrote: post #77
lern_too_spel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true in the sense that no government in South Vietnam had sufficient domestic support to stand on its own. For that matter, none had sufficient support to stand with American aid, with coup after coup until the US left. Imagine if instead of being red-baited into escalating the conflict in Vietnam, LBJ had directed the money to his Great Society programs. Generational poverty would have been drastically reduced,…

America left in ‘73 and the last coup was in ‘63. There was no “coup after coup until America left”. And LBJ did offer a Great Society funding scheme to the North and it was rejected as “trickery”.

It was rejected as trickery because the escalation in Vietnam was unfunded. Johnson knew that he had to raise taxes to continue the fight in Vietnam and implement Great Society, but he was tricked into believing that the government in South Vietnam was legitimate and would be welcomed as the true government of Vietnam with just a little help. When that turned out not to be the case, he failed to make the tradeoff explicit. Had it been explicit, the correct choice would be obvious.
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