On Dec 20, 2003, at 5:41 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
I am anti war. You lot are pro Saddam.
Back in the sixties, there were lots of good reasons to oppose the Vietnam war, notably that it was fought by conscription, and that McNamara's search for measures of war fighting efficiency and to create incentives for efficient production of war effort were demoralizing the troops, and instead of creating incentives to fight effectively, created perverse incentives to commit mass murder in place of killing the enemy.
But instead the opponents wound up chanting 'ho, ho, ho Chi Minh"
As usual, you generalize to the point of venality. I, and many others, were against the war in Vietnam without being supporters of Ho Chi Minh or the Soviets or anyone of that ilk. We were voters for John Hospers in 1972, who opposed the war in Vietnam without being a chanter of "Ho, Ho" or whatever it is your fantasies had us all chanting. (And, yes, I was at the 1970 "Mobe March" in D.C., the one in May 1970, just after Kent State, where Nixon surrounded the White House with buses. I finagled my way into the inner ring, and saw the speakers from a few feet away. Essentially _none_ of them were supporters of the Soviets or the North Vietnamese qua North Vietnamese.)
Ho Chi Minh was a senior KGB agent, who after spending ten years behind a desk in Moscow organizing the murder of Indochinese nationalists was sent from Moscow to rule what became North Vietnam. He purged 85% of the communist party, murdering a large but unknown proportion of them, and conducted a terror against the peasants of extraordinary savagery.
So? Not my problem. And rescuing others by using taxes stolen from Americans, or their bodies, is statist. Moreover, rescuing others is a moral hazard. Rescuing the Jews from their folly of spinning their dreidels and twirling their sidelocks was a particularly heinous moral hazard....they had been in favor of victim disarmament for centuries prior to the so-called Holocaust and their liquidation was predictable. For the American government to send boys to Europe to die to "liberate" Europe was one of the great crimes of the last century. All of America's "alliances" have either been based on one-sided use of force (the USA always goes to fight in foreign lands, they never come here to help us fight our battles with the negroes and Mexicans) or have been based on corporate interests (oil companies, manufacturers wishing to expand into dangerous countries, etc.). "Not my problem" is what the libertarian sentiment embodies. General Motors wants to set up a factory in Eritrea? Let them hire a private army, not use American cannon fodder. Squibb wants to sell baby formula in Paraguay? Intel wants to open a plant in mainland China? The answers are all the same: the U.S. armed forces are not "clearing operations" for corporations or do-gooders.
Anyone who opposed the war on Vietnam should have started off by asking "How shall we contain the Soviet Union and eventually defeat communism, and what is wrong with the way this administration is doing it.
"Containing" some political system in some foreign land is NOT MY PROBLEM. Nor is it in the U.S. Constitution that foreign wars would be launched to save _other_ people from themselves and their foolish decisions.
Similarly anyone who opposes the war in Iraq should start by visualizing himself as the heir of King John Sobieski, not the heir of Saladin. Anyone opposing the war in Iraq needs oppose it from the point of view that Americans and their way of life should win, deserve to win, and the raghead fanatics should lose, and their way of life perish.
All of you, and I do mean _you_, who take my money to spend on these kinds of foreign adventures ought to be taken out and shot...for your aggressions, not for your sentiments. Spend your own money. Become a mercenary. Fight Saddam and Muamar and Jacques all you want. But don't steal my money, either directly or through corporate taxation to do it. Use your own money. Got it? --Tim May "In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." -- Mark Twain