Are you actually reading my posts or just picking apart the statements I make on my own? The whole second quote from the article is the support for my statement about war on the population in general. Not only did I cite the article, I cited the sources they cited.
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Oh, let’s see. It’s 1860. I’m from Washington, DC, and I support the abolition of slavery and the restriction of “states’ rights”. My friend from Arlington, on the other hand, supports the maintenance of the ‘peculiar institution’ and is willing to back secession from the Union in order to do so. Sounds like a difference in ideology that could separate neighbors - and divide families - to me.
As for your statement that the majority of the Vietnamese population was scared for their lives in the face of the NLF - you’re forgetting that Viet Nam had come off some 15 to 20 years of fighting to get the French out of the country, a fight which garnered much popular support. You honestly think they’d sit down and let the U.S. muscle its way in after that? I don’t have the article I quoted earlier in front of me, as I’m at work, but I do remember reading that the South Vietnamese landlords were taking some 30% of renters’ incomes as rent, whereas the Viet Cong reduced such rents to 10% or less. The only people that would have scared is the landlords themselves.
None of this is to say that I believe Viet Nam is a communist, or even socialist, country. There’s little in common there with a real Marxist idea of a communist society. On the other hand they fought against two imperialist powers, both of whom had blood on their hands up to their elbows in this, over three decades and finally won their liberation. If the U.S. hadn’t been so eager to piss on every tree in SE Asia, there’d be 58,000 more men and women still alive today.
I am challenging those conclusions you have drawn that I do not see supported by the evidence you produced. You presented no evidence that the U.S. spent five years making war on the entire Vietnamese people. You drew a conclusion (faulty in my estimation) that there was no Vietnamese opposition to the NLF and then concluded (without providing any further substantiation) that the war was waged against all Vietnamese.
As to your Civil War example, that man is made of straw. When the 2d Michigan or 4th Ohio marched through a section or Tennessee or Georgia, how many of the citizens of those states were engaging in supportive activities? Few to none, because it was mostly a regionally defined war.
If you want to see an actual civil war in which neighbors of one side clearly suppressed their neighbor opponents, look at the U.S. War for Independence in which even John Adams (James Madison?) estimated that only 1/3 of the population actively supported revolt. In the first two years of that war, there were several Loyalist militias raised, particularly in New England. Between the bumbling heavy-handedness of the British commanders and the house burnings and executions engaged in by the rebels, it was not possible to identify any Loyalists in New England by 1780. They did not all leave, they simply shut up, kept their heads down, and went back to their farming, hoping not to be shot.*****
Your selective non-response to the issue of the boat people and the re-education camps is as significant as my apparent “picking and choosing” of issues to which I have responded.
Despite your attempts to re-direct this discussion, the issue is not whether the U.S. should have allowed its paranoia of the Red Menace lead it to continue the colonialist practices of the French. I am already on record as having said that I believe the goals and the strategies were in error.
The issue is that you choose to paint the entire war in tones of pure black-and-white/good-and-evil and you are willing to condone murder based on that simplistic judgment.
*****(The Loyalists were also good at terrorizing the rebels when the Loyalists were in the majority, but as the war progressed, the Loyalists were overcome. The majority of the Loyalists who fled to Canada after the war were the ones in British-protected enclaves such as New York City who fled with the retreating British Army. The individual farmers and artisans living in New England often had no funds or resources to allow them to flee, so they fled into silence–just as I suspect a very large number of South Vietnamese did in the face of the NLF.)
I stand by the sources I quote. The article quotes several books by authors who studied the conflict in detail. Short of actually going out and interviewing Nam vets myself, I’m not sure what evidence or citations will satisfy you.
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You’re making no sense here. You’re saying you can only understand the American Civil War based on where it was fought, but the Vietnam War only on why it was fought? So the question “Why did the American Civil War happen in the first place” isn’t relevant? Sorry, no dice. The American Civil War occurred over ideological and political differences. Same with Viet Nam. If the Confederate populace hadn’t backed the causes fronted by the Southern politicians who formed the government, the Civil War either would not have happened or would have been won by the Union a lot more quickly.
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The refugees and the re-education camps in the South obviously only occurred after the fall of Saigon in 1975. I don’t support what the NLF did to establish its power over the population after the U.S. pulled out. And it really isn’t germane to the debate here, which is about the conduct of the U.S. military during its involvement in the war. Criticism of the latter does not imply condonement of the former. Ultimately, however, you can’t equate the atrocities committed by a colonial power in the effort to maintain its hold on a colony and the fights of the local population to kick that colonial power out. Once that goal was accomplished in 1975, we get into what the new powers did to establish themselves and gain control of society. You want to debate the merits/defects of the Vietnamese government from 1975 onwards, let’s start another thread.
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There was the indiscriminate murder of Vietnamese civilians.
There was the murder of foot soldiers who didn’t want to fight and got sent to the slaughterhouse for a few feet of ground and a grove of defoliated trees. (Who was that Nam vet who died in 1997, whose death was cited as combat related?)
And there was the murder of officers who would not listen to their soldiers because they were bucking for that promotion or another medal from a bountiful harvest of Charlie, and sent their troops to die. Push people far enough into a corner and they’re going to fight back. I have no sympathy for the fragged.
The quotations you submitted provided only someone else’s opinion without providing any of their purported evidence. The conclusion that Tet proved that there was no South Vietnamese opposition to the NLF is an unsubstatiated conjecture based on what you have provided. It does not match my memory of the events at the time. Without something better than raw assertions, it looks like simple propaganda.
As to your confusion over the civil war issues:
You said:
and later
(By which I assume you mean the South would have simply folded up without the resolution to make war.)
My point is that different wars are fought in different ways. Any comparison between Vietnam and the U.S. Civil War is damaged by the fact that the U.S. conflict occurred between people in different locations. A better comparison is to a conflict in which all the participants live intermingled in the same location. There was a fierce civil war in New England at the outbreak of the War for Independence. The people we consider the “good guys” won (just as the guys you consider the “good guys” won in Vietnam). And just as we have generally written the Loyalists out of U.S. history, you would like to write the Vietnamese opposition to the NLF out of history simply to make the U.S. into a two-dimensional evil figure.
The point of the boat people and re-education camps is that all those people in 1975 are the same people that you claim did not exist in 1973 and earlier. The people who fled (including many peasants, not merely rich landlords) obviously were trying to escape the government associated with the NLF. For those incidents to be unrelated to the civil war that you deny was occuring, all those people would have had to have simply woken up one morning in 1975 and decided to flee their long-desired liberators. All the people taken away to be re-educated would have, overnight, gone from enthusiastic supporters of the NLF to reactionary saboteurs of the glorious new order. Denying that there were any people who opposed the NLF in the face of the evidence that many people were willing to risk death to avoid the NLF is not exactly a strongly logical argument.
There were incidents of murder that occurred in more places (but on a smaller scale) than at My Lai. Turning that into “there was indescriminate murder” needs to be documented.
And your assertion that every fragged officer was simply a glory hound who deserved to die is simply without foundation unless you have the evidence for each death that occurred.
You are free to give or withhold your sympathy wherever you want. However,
-posting one-sided diatribes that lack evidence (rather than third-party conjecture),
-insisting on a two-dimensional portrait of the U.S. government that demonstrates a rather serious lack of understanding of the motivations and events that led up to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
-and failing to recognize (actually denying) the demonstrable fact that a civil war was in progress,
makes you look a bit strident and does nothing to pursuade anyone else that you actually understand what you are proclaiming.
You apparently feel that enough propaganda on one side of an argument justifies any evil done against your opponent. I submit that that exact mindset is the one demonstrated by Lt. Calley.
If you poked some eye-holes in your mask of sanctimony, you would not run blindly into opinions. That might have the additional benefit of letting you see that the Vietnam war is more complex than you would like it to have been.
However, I believe that Olentzero’s point is that the actions of the U.S. were driven by evil and that My Lai was a natural outgrowth of those motives. From that perspective, the U.S. should be held accountable for every death that resulted after its involvement, with My Lai simply being a very visible action that “even” citizens of the U.S. would condemn, while we ignored the hosts of (purported) atrocities and even simple battle deaths for which the U.S. should be held accountable.
I object to that line of reasoning on the grounds that both our involvement and our actions while involved are more complex and not as easily condemned as his portrayal of history would allow.
An overall judgement that our decisions were in error (sometimes from the best of intentions and sometimes with cruel cynicism) I will support. The blanket condemnation of all the actions by denying certain realities I will not.
The one final thing I’d like to say here is that I do not believe the U.S. actions were driven by ‘evil’. They were driven by the logic of imperialism, and the whole of the U.S.’ involvement in Viet Nam is condemnable.
After reading the debate thoroughly, tomndebb, I’ve found that you’re basically saying the same thing, in scores of paragraphs, that KarlGauss said in one line: you don’t buy my sources. Figuring you can just dispense with them since you’re certain they’re just opinions, you can progress to my ‘sanctimony’ and ‘black/white reductionism’ in relative safety. My evidence is suspect simply because you don’t agree with it so therefore I’m just propagandizing.
So be it. At least I tried to bring arguments from other sources as backup, instead of relying on my own memory of the times.
Not one of your sources said “There was no civil war.”
The opinion put forth by your source that
is an opinion, nothing more. You (or your sources) have not provided any more than one assertion that the rationale “was no longer believed by anybody” (despite the fact that many people continue to belive that rationale, today) and one assertion the the government and ARVN were “clearly hated by the people” (against the clear evidence that nearly a million people tried to flee the country when that government fell who had not tried to flee while it stood).
Pointing to a pundit who makes assertions in the face of facts (the boat people are very real), is not providing other sources as backup, it is providing like-minded opinions as backup.
I have not rejected your sources; I have denied that their quoted opinions carry weight in the face of other evidence. Tet showed that there was much more support for the NLF than the U.S. had imagined. Nothing in the citations you have supplied indicates (or even guesses at) what the actual numbers were of supporters of the NLF vs those who opposed them. The quotation simply concludes that since there was more support than expected, there was no opposition. That is not evidence, it is opinion. Your authors may have provided that information in their book, but you have not provided it here. I have not attacked your sources; I have pointed out the inadequacy of the quotations that you have provided.
I have no problem recognizing that the U.S. was surprised by Tet. I do have a problem with your authors’ assertion that all the support for the NLF was obviously voluntary when you have denied (without evidence) that the silence could have been coerced. Your author asserts that “millions” had to have known and kept silent about Tet. If he explains how he knows that, you have not provided his evidence.
It is not enough to post a few quotes and then complain that I am denying your sources. There are huge gaps between what you have quoted and the evidence to support those claims.
As to my “memories of the times,” if you think I have cited a fact in error, I will be happy to provide a citation or retract it.
You have yet to prove (even quoting your own sources) that
You have also made the following assertions on more than one occasion without providing any evidence:
-All fragging was carried out only against incompetent or vainglorious officers who deserved it;
-The U.S. military carried out indiscriminate slaughter;
-The U.S. involvement was purely imperialistic.
I am not dismissing your sources, here, you have provided none.
Where is your evidence that all fragging occurred under the circumstances you described. Drawing a conclusion (that may even be legitimate) about how the practice began does not establish that the practice continued for only those reasons.
Where is your evidence for indiscriminate slaughter? I am sure that My Lai was not the sole incident in the war. However, the North Vietnamese and the NLF were using that as a major propaganda piece (legitimately) for months before the U.S. addressed the issue. If indiscriminate slaughter was the constant practice of the war, we should have heard much more from the NLF about this practice, yet My Lai is the worst incident that anyone brings forth–and there are not hundreds of others; there may be dozens. Each event is horrible, but it does not constitute a practice of indiscriminate slaughter.
The idea that the U.S. policy was purely imperialistic is (unless you simply claim that by definition all actions by any superpower is imperialistic) without merit. Note, that I do not claim that imperialism had no part in the decisions, but limiting all motives to that single word is no different than simply claiming that the U.S. acts for evil purposes (from which statement you have tried to distance yourself).