one more time
Robert McNamara in his book, *In Retrospect * said it was a mistake before, during and after. The book was written 30+ years after the fact, still, it seems to put this ‘debate’ to bed. I have no doubt the military knows what they need to win, and if not given it to them they can hardly be blamed for failure. However, war is the extension of diplomacy by other means. The military serves the civilians and it should never be the other way around. MacArthur wanted to nuke China afterall.
Yes, they were.
Depends on what one means by “Communist.” From Ho’s perspective, “Communism” meant “Great power willing to give aid in the ouster of the French.” Following WWII, Ho actually disestablished the Communist party in Vietnam, only reorganizing it after it became clear that there would be no support from the European and North American “democracies” (whose attitude appeared to be that non-Europeans had no basic right to Democracy). For that matter, the Communists, themselves, had pretty much given up on “World Communism” before WWII. Trotsky had to flee the Soiet Union and was eventually murdered for his adherence to that principle. Stalin wanted to make the world safe for Russia and Mao wanted to re-establish the grandeur of China prior to the European invasions, but neither one spent any serious effort promoting the Communist ideal and their adventures outside their own borders were little more than the mirror of the U.S. and U.K. in an extension of the Great Game in which superpowers arranged for the slaughter of other peoples as they jockeyed for their own positions of power.
Piffle. It was a continuation of the Great Game in which power mad big countries routinely turned smaller countries into dictatorships to carry out the will of the larger countries. Ideology had nothing to do with it except as ideologies were employed to wave the appropriate banners. If the “Western democracies” were so interested in ideologies of freedom, why did their involvement nearly always result in establishing and supporting tyranny? Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, Philipines, Indonesia, South Vietnam, etc. The West lost several of those battles–probably because it was clearly not supporting any morally superior entity, and doing so ineffectively. However, the goal was power and position, not democracy, freedom, or any other “moral” goal.
Then why didn’t they make their country free after they won?
Doesn’t the installation of Communist regimes in other countries count as “promoting the Communist ideal”? The regimes Stalin and Mao installed in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Mongolia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia looked awfully Communist to me. The Communist parties Stalin backed in western Europe certainly promoted the Communist ideal, and if they had won France, Italy, and Greece would have been very different places.
Well, that’s because outside of the cynical Moscow-appointed types who ran the show, the rank-and-file of these parties were mush-headed “useful idiots” who clung to the Communist ideal because they hadn’t a clue about the reality.
Despite the pretty way they dressed it up, promoting and installing communism was about power, not equality.
They did. They made Vietnam free of foreign influence and domination so that they could mismanage their own country in their own way. (Much as the U.S. declared its intent to promote life and liberty, then spent the next 91 years continuing to enslave people and 114 years killing other people to take their land.)
No. Conquering neighboring states and installing puppet regimes has everything to do with exercising power (and creating buffer states through whom any attacker would be forced to fight before reaching the mother country) and nothing to do with overthrowing the bourgeoisie and creating the stateless worker’s paradise that was the purported goal of the followers of Marx. Dabbling in the politics of Albania. Peru, Cuba, and other places not contiguous to the mother countries had everything to do with playing power politics with the West and nothing to do with spreading the Marxist revolution.
As an act of power extension, the Soviet Union supported the Communist Party of many nations, but no serious effort was made to extend the Marxist ideology after the early 1930s.
From a nationalist perspective, they did.
During the Spanish Civil War, in fact, the Soviet government insisted the nominally Communist Spanish government crush a social revolution as a condition of military support.
But is also worth noting that the Soviet’s made very little inroads into the Republican side – yes, there were a few true-Red Communist in Spain, obviously on the Republican side, but they never amounted close to anything to a majority. And ultimately, Soviet involvement in the Civil War (mainly due to the conditions you mentioned) amounted to little more than ideological and financial support. Meanwhile, fascist Germany (who experimented with many a weapon they were later to employ in WW-II) and their ideological cousins, Mussolini’s Italy (largely regarded as ineffective soldiers, though they made that up in generous arms supplies/contributions to the Nationalists), ultimately tilted the war towards the Franquistas.
Looking back in history, it was likely one – if not the most – of the more idealistic wars ever fought. Which has always left me wondering what would have happened if the International Community (beyond all those individual brave souls that made-up the International Brigades) had gotten behind those ideals…
In another world that might have even stopped Hitler cold right then and there.
ISTM that Communism has by now been tried in enough places, from Russia and China to Cuba and Nicaragua, that we have to assume it’s no coincidence that all Marxist governments have all been oppressively paternalistic in practice, with the main difference being the degree of ruthlessness they’ve brought to the game.
There comes a point when, IMHO, we have to abandon “Marxism has never been truly tried” for “like it or not, this is what Marxism is.”
I dunno. Hitler’s ambitions mainly involved attacking eastward. Would a Republican Spain really have made that much strategic difference?
I’m not sure of your point. Marxism was never a viable ideology. It was never going to work.
The problem with most “anti-Marxist” rhetoric, however, is that it equates totalitarian socialist states with the long abandoned ideology. Thus, it encourages us to set up puppet governments and fight hugely destructive wars in places like Vietnam or to aid in the overthrow of duly elected governments in places like Guatemala and Chile for the idiotic notion of “fighting communism” when we are really simply playing power politics.
I would have like to have seen us leave Guatemala alone and actually offer Ho Chi Minh and Salvador Allende support for their people–with appropriate strings that the aid would be tied to genuine representative government. Let socialism fail on its own terms while promoting democracy and then wave our dollars in the faces of those who stuck to totalitarian ways.
Instead, we have established ourselves as power mad fools who will support any bloody dictator who gives lip service to “fighting communism” while enslaving his own people. Ultimately all such dicatorships will fall, and when they do, there will be an excellent chance that the people who overthrew them will treat us with the contempt we have earned. (Or “our” dictator will be replaced by someone else’s dictator and we will have a new enemy while the people continue to suffer–witness Iran. And in the coming years (or weeks) keep an eye on Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other “allies” now that Islamism has begun to replace “communism” as our boogeyman.)
This is not intended to be a snarky comment, but what leads you to conclude that the goal of the US in any of those instances was “liberating people”? The US gets militarily involved when it is perceived to be in the national geostrategic interest, not because of idealism - else we’d be in Burma, Sudan, and would have kicked Boer ass in South Africa thirty years ago. The goal in Vietnam was not to make Vietnam better off, but the US better off - and if the Vietamese were in fact made better off, that would be a nice bonus.
Sua