AHC:PRevent the AMerican "Doltchstosslegende" After the Vietnam war

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by The Vulture

Good job of completely derailing an interesting question, everybody. Take five.

In regard to the actual OP, I feel the best opportunity is to perhaps change the face of the antiwar movement. Naturally there will be a definite counterculture element. However, if the press had focused more on the persons within the movement who met the standard of respectability for polite society (ie, employed people with closed-tow shoes), then we might at least lessen the "we shoulda shot all them traitorous hippies" stuff I see on my cousin's Facebook.

People were expecting another war like Korea or Europe, or a cakewalk like the Dominican Republic. When it was a protracted and grueling battle with no small amount of moral decrepitude on both sides, it became something of a shock to the American people. The Greatest Generation was unwilling to accept that the US military could fail or fight anything less than a virtuous fight. Thus, the blame had to be shifted onto the long-haired freaks. Just some thoughts.

That's a good thought, and if the lion's share of the anti war movement had been composed of short haired people with jobs in "Real clothes" the movement would have been IMPOSSIBLE to villify.

[The Vulture]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

That's a good thought, and if the lion's share of the anti war movement had been composed of short haired people with jobs in "Real clothes" the movement would have been IMPOSSIBLE to villify.

Basically, I feel like a peace movement like that would if nothing else give people pause. As it is, it appeared to be and often was nothing more than a lunatic fringe, particularly once we had things like the Madison bombing.

[RousseauX]

Originally Posted by pnyckqx

Except in the imaginary world of central bankers, cash is not a commodity, it is a measure of value.

Yes, and there is no reason why the value should remain consistent relative to everything else of value in your system.

Now you don't like the idea of the free market setting value for used or obsolete goods? Good. i'd like to trade my 1998 Ford F-150 Pickup with the 200,000+ miles for the same value that i gave for it when it was purchased new. Which, adjusted for the inflation you seem to think is beneficial, would just about pay the cost of a 2012 Ford F-150 Pickup with substantially less mileage.

Notice why I specifically said "ipod" and not "Ford", because even if I have my ipod 3 still in its package never opened, it will lose exchange value once Apple comes out with the Ipod 4, thus this is by your definition "theft". You have a problem if the $100 which can be exchanged for an Ipod in one year can no longer do so the next, but you seem to gloss over the fact that you seem perfectly ok with the reverse, in the sense that my Ipod 3 can no longer be exchanged for $100 even though it could have being the year before. This makes no sense.

i've already made that argument. Inflation of the currency is theft. Theft is morally unacceptable in any society.

That is a moral argument, not an economic one.

Really? i would think that one would see opportunity for expansion in a hyperinflated situation with all that liquidity laying around. You really need to make up your mind on that.

If this was the mid 1970s the fear-mongering might work, but you are talking about a period when inflation have being at a historical low, so you just come across as having no idea what you are talking about.

No leaps of faith. Inflation of currency is supposed to be good, so why is hyperinflation bad? The technique is called Reducto Ad Absurdum, and is perfectly valid. Funny, that Kenysians seem to blame von Mises advocates for a lack of logic when they're presented with the absurdity of their position and don't have a handy answer.

You cannot be serious when you are asking me why 2-4% inflation is different from hyperinflation. The answer is that inflation/deflation is sliding scale, obviously in most circumstances going one extreme or the other is bad. The fact that you have to pin inflation of any sort with hyperinflation demonstrates exactly how little of a real argument you actually have against the current rate of inflation.

Only in Bizzaro world does reducing the value of the Dollar to increase the amount of available currency cause an increase in wealth. What increasing the monetary supply does...printing more of the toilet paper...is to redistribute existing wealth from individuals to large entities, which is, if you're honest about it, the entire point of the exercise. If my wage remains constant, and i'm today paying $3.40 for the gallon of gasoline that i was paying $1.80/gallon four years ago, how am i any wealthier because there is an increased supply of money?

Inflating currency is theft, plain and simple.

I never claimed that printing money created additional wealth, you should really try not to strawman and trotting out the same FAKE MONEY argument. I'm arguing that an increase in monetary supply reflects the increase in wealth overall, not that it generates it.

An absurd argument. First off, inflation will always exist. It will NOT be due to currency manipulation with a commodity based currency, rather through simple laws of supply and demand as the market determines the price of goods and services at any given time. It will also not be on the same goods and services at any one time. Conditions of supply and demand fluxuate with many factors.

Second, i do not propose constriction, though it would be nice to deal with smaller numbers. i don't care if i'm paid $1.38/day or $562/day, as long as both figures provide the same amount of goods and services on that particular day. The deflation issue is a straw man.

The problem is to get there you you require massive deflation which will crash the world economy by destroying aggregated demand. If I think things are going to be cheaper tomorrow than they will be today, I will hold on to my cash and not buy anything. This will lead to a huge drop in demand and induce a global depression as factories shut down since everybody would rather hold on to their cash than buy anything factories produce.

And yes, i would prefer a 0% inflation rate of the value of my money. i can live with inflation caused by market factors involving goods and services.

That's great, I just don't care very much about your personal opinion on inflation used as an argument.

which brings us back to the origin of this discussion/digression. Namely that Governments, including the US Government inflate currency to pay off war debt. That was the case in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and our present adventures.

It is theft. At least raising taxes would be a more honest system.

A better way would be to carefully consider the cost before engaging in conflict.

We didn't do that with Vietnam, and as a result both Ford and Carter had wonderful second terms, and right now (it could change) things don't look too good for the present administration for the same reason.

Oh look some more unsupported assertions

[BlondieBC]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

That's a good thought, and if the lion's share of the anti war movement had been composed of short haired people with jobs in "Real clothes" the movement would have been IMPOSSIBLE to villify.

No, they would have found another way to vilify them. Look at the socialist in WW1 who wore respectable clothing.

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by BlondieBC

No, they would have found another way to vilify them. Look at the socialist in WW1 who wore respectable clothing.

Yeah, there is that, I hate to admit it.

[The Vulture]

Originally Posted by BlondieBC

No, they would have found another way to vilify them. Look at the socialist in WW1 who wore respectable clothing.

Very true. I think we need just the right sort of people in the public eye, civilized church-going types who don't work Pinko jobs like education. Even then, the best we can hope for is minimizing the hatred rather than removing it completely.

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by The Vulture

Very true. I think we need just the right sort of people in the public eye, civilized church-going types who don't work Pinko jobs like education. Even then, the best we can hope for is minimizing the hatred rather than removing it completely.

What we REALLY need, and this may very well be ASB, is we need Macnamarra and his whis kids to grow a conciounse and write some "Falling o ntheir swords" books.

[serbrcq]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

What we REALLY need, and this may very well be ASB, is we need Macnamarra and his whis kids to grow a conciounse and write some "Falling o ntheir swords" books.

Actually, McNamara did write an admission of his failure, but it was years later and (according to the Amazon reviews) still didn't show total understanding of why he screwed up.

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by serbrcq

Actually, McNamara did write an admission of his failure, but it was years later and (according to the Amazon reviews) still didn't show total understanding of why he screwed up.

That one was more, "Don't be mad at me" than a genuine Mea Culpa.

[BlondieBC]

Originally Posted by serbrcq

Actually, McNamara did write an admission of his failure, but it was years later and (according to the Amazon reviews) still didn't show total understanding of why he screwed up.

When I read his book, it sounded like a half hearted apology. He had to admit mistakes because of societal pressure, but deep down, he still believes he did the right thing with some "minor" tactical errors on his part. Much like Charlie Scheen, he has not accept responsibility for his own actions.

[TxCoatl1970]

@ Vulture - you nailed the civilian expectations of the US military square on the head. Nam wasn't a straight-up fight to the finish- a la WW2 where we'd eventually march on Hanoi and declare final victory, nor was it a quickie "intervention"/demo of force a la Dominican Republic or Lebanon.
Korea hadn't been adequately processed for lessons learned either by the time Nam was spooling up.

Nam was something that hadn't been encountered since the Cuban and Philippine insurgencies post Spanish-American War, a low-intensity conflict that didn't need what we were throwing at it post-1965.

Unfortunately for the US military, after the fall of Diem, Nam got an international sodium-arc glare of media attention it couldn't control that created a lot of political pressure to "do something" with the full force of American might.
LBJ was first and foremost a politico wheeler-dealer, not a military professional, who inherited a bunch of overqualified frenemies from JFK as his Cabinet. Chances of him doing something silly to look tough and in charge were ~100%.

@ BlondieBC & SgtHeretic- I think an honest evaluation of the American strategies, tactics, political and military assumptions, and so forth during the Vietnam War was beyond McNamara's scope and powers.
Mac wanted to apply the same quantitative management/system analysis to miltary ops as running a car company and it proved a massive distraction and distortion of effort to say the least.
It strikes to a fundamental flaw in his approach and how could Mac admit, our approach was inapplicable and disastrous from start to finish?
One could certianly hope he had the humility to admit it.

@ SargeH re: the antiwar movement- Many elements of the antiwar movement were clean-cut, Establishment figures, church groups, Nam vets against the War, and so forth.
That swung opinion away from it just being hippies protesting the war and built a lot of political capital in Congress.
IMO, as I've said before, you had the perfect storm that politically hamstrung the US actively angaging itself in Nam from 1970 on.

• The media covered Tet and My Lai and everything going horribly wrong in Nam. Any official spin saying that victory was imminent or significant damage had been done to the VC or stopping the NVA Easter Offensive was considered suspect by a huge chunk of the viewership.
• Too many veterans had come back and told folks about the conditions prevailing in Vietnam and as you've pointed out the feckless incompetence demonstrated by the RVN regime.
• According to my parents, Richard Nixon was Lucifer but he had a far better handle on how to end it than LBJ did. Of course, he came into office with that goal in mind. The trouble was, he had no political capital to do anything else, especially when Watergate broke when the military and CIA via Project Phoenix had finally found a way to neuter the VC.

[Mr.J]

Originally Posted by pnyckqx

i've already made that argument. Inflation of the currency is theft. Theft is morally unacceptable in any society.

So, if we go back to the gold standard, and I find a sunken pirate ship and sell the gold, am I a thief?

I'm inflating the currency, after all.

[Mr.J]

Originally Posted by SergeantHeretic

What we REALLY need, and this may very well be ASB, is we need Macnamarra and his whis kids to grow a conciounse and write some "Falling o ntheir swords" books.

Hmm. What if Lyndon Johnson lived a little longer, and wrote a book about how he was duped by the whiz kids into escalating Vietnam?

[Matt Wiser]

MacNamara, before his passing, never admitted his own micromanagement or mismanagement, to my knowledege. Not even in his memoirs. Nobody ever asked him if a fear of a repeat of October 1962 hamstrung his decision-making, and that of people like SecState Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, etc. Add LBJ himself: He was quoted as saying "I can't ask American boys to go into combat with one hand tied behind their back," and yet he was the one who did just that-and did the tying. Lying hypocrite.

[pnyckqx]

Originally Posted by Mr.J

So, if we go back to the gold standard, and I find a sunken pirate ship and sell the gold, am I a thief?

I'm inflating the currency, after all.

First, why would you sell the gold? If the nation is on a gold standard, you already have the money, and (at least) my blessing. No need to sell anything.

Second, How would you be inflating the currency by putting more of the commodity it's based on in your thought experiment on the open market? If anything you'd be deflating the currency. Quite likely you'd do nothing to the currency. There's a reason it's called a gold standard. You're merely causing fluxuation by virtue of normal supply and demand of the commodity on the free market, not as a pseudo-government policy that causes the currency to drop in value from the original $20/oz to today's value of $1,581.80/oz

The point of the whole exercise and my unfortunate digression is that wars cost money. There are two ways to pay for that war, inflate the currency and pay off debt with devalued currency, or add war taxes to the citizenry.

War taxes have a virtue: they're honest. The tax payer knows what his/her money is paying for. It's right there in front of his or her eyes every time he or she looks at the pay check.

Inflating the currency takes spending power away from the consumer, because wages never keep up with inflation. It is theft just as sure as the counterfeiter is committing theft (hell, the principle involved is the same). The consumer must begin to cut discretionary spending to pay the bills he or she needs to pay. That causes a contraction of the economy. Contract it far enough and you get a recession. Contract still further, and you get a depression. i'll let other people argue about where those limits are.

The advantage of inflating the currency is that one is stealing from EVERYONE...or so it appears, but that is a topic for another time and place. Nobody gets to have exceptions written into the tax code on their behalf.

But it is still theft. Don't write the exceptions into the tax code, and you don't have the problem of people not paying.

No matter how a government decides to liquidate it's war debt, the original point is that wars are damned expensive things, and that a nation should really count the cost before engaging in one. What the cost of Vietnam did to our economy in the late 70's is beyond dispute, as is the cost of the so-called War on Terror today.

Some wars can't be avoided. Government does have the responsibility to protect it's people from invasion...i'd have to put the beginning of our recent Afghanistan actions in that category...They're still no less expensive.

Now i don't know whether or not the economic mess of the 70's that finished off both the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations would have caused a different attitude about the outcome of the Vietnam war. i'd have to say that it is a question that merits a hard look.


...So how was that for a segue back to topic?

[SergeantHeretic]

I have three suggestions, two of whitch may be ASB.

1)The culprits of the Whiz Kid Mafia write a series of well writted widely read mea culpa books in which they fall o ntheir swords and admit they THEY mismanaged the war straight into the ground.

2) The ANti-War Movement is comprised not of college kids in wierd clothes, but instead od working people upset about the following caveat.

2a) A war tax is added to the listed FICA and deducted from EVERY paycheck in the country to pay for the VIetnam war. This causes a large minority of lower middle class and poor people who are PISSED AS HELL at the money this "Rich man's war" is costing THEM. Their reasoning is that not only are THEIR kids being conscripted to fight it, but THEY are getting stuck with the check!

3) The release of the "Washington" Papers reveals that neither the Pentagon nor the Civilian leadership has the slightest inkling of a plan or a strategy on how to fight the Vietnam war. They have no idea what they are doing even from day to day let alone year to year, Washington D.C. is literally just making it up as they go along and hoping for the best.

[Matt Wiser]

It's likely to be option 1....none of those....creatures ever admitted their own faults, as far as I'm aware of.

[Killer300]

Here's an option, why not reveal how utterly useless the Saigon government is?

If this is going to be a blame game, why not blame the South Vietnam government, which was incapable of ever gaining loyalty from its citizens, or fighting Vietcong on their own?

[SergeantHeretic]

Originally Posted by Killer300

Here's an option, why not reveal how utterly useless the Saigon government is?

If this is going to be a blame game, why not blame the South Vietnam government, which was incapable of ever gaining loyalty from its citizens, or fighting Vietcong on their own?

Now that is an option, just reveal them to be a collection of charecters from a marx brothers or Three Stooges movie that are so pathetically inept that two years after the U.S. Withdrawel they fall apart like an icecream cake i nthe sun.

[Snake Featherston]

This requires major *cultural* changes as opposed to military ones. The US defeat in Vietnam was the product of a dual military reality ensuing: the USA was defending Stupid Evil from Smart Evil, and the USA was doing this without any coherent leadership among any of its branches of service and with a war whose skill in planning can be judged by the superiority of Soviet small arms over their US counterpart. US defeat was a product of the invisible sides of war like logistics and strategy, but in the visible tactical manifestation the USA invariably wins all its battles (and after a while forgets that the purpose is to save Saigon, which winning battles alone is never going to do).

In Korea, the USA faced enemies that sought to wage a conventional war of army groups and found a leader more than able to match those leaders and to outlast them in a conventional war of bodies v. bullets and bombs. In Vietnam the USA had no less than three wars at minimum, not counting those of South Korea and Australia and the USA's other allies, all working at cross purposes with each other and those of the Saigon regime. To most Americans a war where they win every battle and lose the war looks like someone was sabotaging it even when they really weren't at all and the defeat was the simple, mundane process of logistical no-win situations having their mind-numbing effect.

The bigger problem is that in the 1960s the USA was under an assumption derived from WWII and Korea that its system that hadn't necessarily worked great in either war was working just fine, as the USA at least stalemated those wars. In Vietnam when that system began to erode and blow up in the USA's face, this is the ultimate root of the Dolchstosslegende. A country that had gone from seemingly inevitable ability to turn around disaster wound up presiding over an ignominious clusterfuck and was defeated by an enemy deemed racially inferior, no less.

Avoiding the Dolchstosslegende from that witch's brew of cultural memory filtered through ideology would require quite a bit of doing.