[QUOTE=Sampiro]
[One and only response and hijack]
Yeah, it’s called a joke. Keep reading and you come to an actual real response about the families of MIAs still passionate about Americans being tortured . Nice that you still managed to work in an implied impugn on my patriotism and a reference to southerners as inbread [sic] hillbillies though. (What is the root of your obsessive grudge with the south?) :dubious:
A bit more OP but I’ll still keep it within hijack brackets: There is nobody on earth I hate enough to wish upon them what men like McCain and Jeremiah Denton and thousands of others whose names are forgotten went through in those jungle hellholes, and if some eccentric mad billionaire were to offer me $100 million to spend one year in a place like the Hanoi Hilton I’d absolutely refuse. I do not minimize their physical suffering then or their ongoing emotional suffering or that of their loved ones.
That said, I probably find more offensive than you found the above the notion that surviving torture automatically makes one a brave and noble person deserving of praise. It does not. It makes them veterans and torture survivors.
They survived what for most is and hopefully will always be an inconceivably horrible ordeal. These men weren’t tortured for their beliefs and they weren’t martyrs- they were military prisoners who were, as mentioned above, captured by despicable and cruel enemy soldiers (many of whom it should be remembered had seen their families and friends and fellow countrymen literally burned to death).
These men who were tortured had often undertaken missions that, had they ordered by any other army, you would not hesitate to call them evil and demand revenge. They killed civilians- many of them children- and destroyed huge regions of two nations that were already among the poorest on the Earth and that did so without discretion or seeming regard for the consequences of their actions and not even due to personal malice or an attack upon Americans but due to political ideology of the leaders of a nation of starving peasants who had helped us in World War I. They set up the horrors that would lead to Pol Pot every bit as much as the VC did. I get sick and tired of hearing about “our brave men and their sacrifices”- let’s NOT forget that they were in a war zone killing people, they didn’t get kidnapped while delivering Christmas gifts (unless you count Linebacker II perhaps).
Again and again, what they endured I’d wish on nobody, but suffering alone does not make a deed heroic or a cause noble anymore than, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the fact somebody is willing to die for a belief makes that belief true. Calling them all brave and comparing them to self sacrificing martyrs just because they went through hell is a simplification that is… well, I won’t say unAmerican, but certainly sickeningly jingoistic with a serious nod towards racism.
[/One and only response and hijack]
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Your particular beliefs about the righteousness of the Vietnam War are irrelevant. When serial killers are executed, do members of their family cry? Yes, because they’re family members. The flag espouses no viewpoint on whether or not the war was just, it simply asserts “You Are Not Forgotten”, a noble sentiment under any circumstances, and one that you would be quick to express about any of your family members. These people are looking for a closure they’ll likely never get. What the hell is so objectionable about that that we need an off-key dissertation about the Vietnam War and its ethics in addition to a general maligning of these people as “wingnuts”, at minimum by association?
The answer, of course, is nothing. But God knows that you guys just had to work those in, so congratulations.