Barry Bull
Donor
China failed to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia and failed to end border clashes. The PLAN and PLAAF were ordered to refrain from active operations to avoid escalations. All the aforesaid hardly sound like a PRC win.
WI The US won in Vietnam
- Thread starter PhoenicianLegacy
- Start date
China failed to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia and failed to end border clashes. The PLAN and PLAAF were ordered to refrain from active operations to avoid escalations. All the aforesaid hardly sound like a PRC win.
It also showed just how bad the Chinese army was at the time. At the time it i found it ironic that the Chinese was more arrogant that the Nixon administration.
As for my earlier post which it seems you are referring to. I'm not saying or implying that the US has not done bad things over the years, Just that every country has. History is just that and actions done in the past need to be learned from, but they also need to be taken in the context of the time.
Yes I'm American. No I'm not suggesting that America invade anyone. I have no clue where that came from.
I do have lots of exposer to other cultures, I live just south if the Quebec Border. I have family in England and Germany, I live just outside a small multicultural city,it being one of the refugee resettlement cities in New England.
I also speak a couple of languages and know how to say I don't speak several other.
Oh and where pray tell are you from?
As for my earlier post which it seems you are referring to. I'm not saying or implying that the US has not done bad things over the years, Just that every country has. History is just that and actions done in the past need to be learned from, but they also need to be taken in the context of the time.
Yes I'm American. No I'm not suggesting that America invade anyone. I have no clue where that came from.
I do have lots of exposer to other cultures, I live just south if the Quebec Border. I have family in England and Germany, I live just outside a small multicultural city,it being one of the refugee resettlement cities in New England.
I also speak a couple of languages and know how to say I don't speak several other.
Oh and where pray tell are you from?
OK then, how about in the same league as North Korea? If South Korea was worth saving, why not South Vietnam? And what right did the north have to conquer the south? Personally, I do regard North Vietnam under the communists as an evil regime, worthy of destruction, but I am not willing to debate the point. [And I acknowledge that Vietnam today is quite a different country from the bad old days]
My grandpa served in Vietnam (and in Laos back when the president was telling everyone that we most definitely did not have troops in Laos or Cambodia) but he sure as hell didn't bomb the hell out of civilian targets or advocate killing half the country just to show them commies what for or whatever it is you guys wanted from that war.
^North Vietnam was not like North Korea, certainly not like modern North Korea which is more of a Nazi regime than a socialist one. They committed their fair share of atrocities and had bad sides, but there wasn't any moral superiority on the side of the US or South Vietnam, which persecuted a religion which the majority of their own population adhered to. They killed hundreds of Buddhists in a single raid that was so bad the US had no other option than to depose the president in a coup. The president of an allied country, mind you. Whoever said the US coulda won by keeping Diem in power by the way is just as wrong and has just as backwards a solution as the "kill half of Vietnam" solution.
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amphibulous
Banned
This is also true, which is why I would also have said that a poster who claimed that the Chinese gave the Viets an "ass-kicking" was being silly.
amphibulous
Banned
1. All indications are that Ho Chi Minh was the man that the South and North wanted to lead them; you cannot "save" people from the government they want by killing them! What you are doing is called "Committing a war crime."
2. The North was hardly conquering the South: the South was governed by a bigoted and corrupt Xtian minority who the typical Southerner wanted gone, and the typical Viet wanted a unified nation.
3. Hello, Dr History calling for a Mr Hypocrite??? He wants to talk about the US Civil War???
4. Why would Vietnam be in the same "league" as North Korea? Putting the US in the same league as Nazi Germany - Westerners, White, both commited genocide - makes much more sense. All the Norks and Viets have in common is that they are sort of brownish and not liberal democrats. They both call themselves Communists, but their governments are very different, North Korea is collapsing from famine, and Vietnam has one of the world's fastest growing economies and a general lack of the massacres that the Norks have committed.
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amphibulous
Banned
I can't think of any other nation that has committed genocide in living memory and which "apologizes" by making movies showing how it should have won and how the victims deserved to die, which it helps justify with silly myths about US POWs...
Really: if the Germans made Rambo and showed Jews still torturing German Xtians, with the message that the wrong side won WW2, wouldn't you be say "WTF German people??!!?" Because there really isn't that big a difference:
- A bunch of people were minding their own difference in another country
- They tried to change to a system of government you didn't approve of
- And you killed several million of them when they wouldn't do what you want
To a non-American, this isn't very different to the Holocaust.
Of course, if Leni Rifenstahl had made Rambo it would have been a much better film...
amphibulous
Banned
..And what you people won't comprehend is that the above is the biggest "What if?" connected to Vietnam - the permanent loss of US moral credibility. Any talk of "victory" which ignores this factor and whether it would have been made even worse by the means used is utterly crazed.
Now, you might find such things unpleasant. If so, don't have threads about the US in Vietnam! Because you cannot have them without such factors being discussed - because they are at the center of how the US was able to fight the war, and what the consequences of the war were.
Now, you might find such things unpleasant. If so, don't have threads about the US in Vietnam! Because you cannot have them without such factors being discussed - because they are at the center of how the US was able to fight the war, and what the consequences of the war were.
Feel better now that you've vented.
Look I don't know who you are or where you're from, I am getting an Idea of what you're like.
Keep this in the back of your mind. For many of us this isn't ancient history. It's history that we lived. No I wasn't in Vietnam, I lucked out as they stopped drafting people 2 months before I was 18.
I remember my friends older brothers coming home in a box, or in a wheelchair for life or just very strange for a number of years. You have declined to state where you are from, are you afraid that we will dump on where you live. Not that I really care. Get over yourself.
Look I don't know who you are or where you're from, I am getting an Idea of what you're like.
Keep this in the back of your mind. For many of us this isn't ancient history. It's history that we lived. No I wasn't in Vietnam, I lucked out as they stopped drafting people 2 months before I was 18.
I remember my friends older brothers coming home in a box, or in a wheelchair for life or just very strange for a number of years. You have declined to state where you are from, are you afraid that we will dump on where you live. Not that I really care. Get over yourself.
amphibulous
Banned
Well, doh. Why do you think I used the pjrase "In my lifetime"?
Actually I was too busy explaining stuff that actually matters to you. Which you obviously failed to comprehend. Because "This happened in my lifetime" is not a morally adequate excuse for morally trivializing genocide - we don't say to Germans; "Hey, you lived through WW2 and had friends of friends hurt - make all the hate films about Evil Jews and how you should have won WW2 that you want!!!"
Yes, it sucks to be in a wheelchair. But also: man the fuck up! Millions of Vietnamese - often children - were murdered. The suffering of USians is tiny by comparison, and it was a war that America chose to inflict on the Vietnamese. For you, the barely injured aggressor, to demand that your comparatively minimal suffering means that facts should be distorted is unacceptable. If you don't want to read honest threads on Vietnam, simply don't have any or avoid the ones that occur.
And I'm British - and note that, no, we did not find it necessary to, ohhh, kill a quarter of the population of Ireland over the "Troubles". And we don't have any popular movies showing how Irish people are evil (as opposed to beer companies who promote St Patrick's Day) and that therefore we should have killed another million or so.
Quite simply: KILLING SEVERAL MILLION PEOPLE FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN THEY WOULD NOT DO WHAT YOU WANTED IS EVIL. And the more people you murder this way, the fewer friends you would have. If you want to know what the effects of using more violence in Vietnam would be then
1. You'd be despised
2. If you won, then you would have to keep a Vietnamese dictatorship in power, using US troops, forever - because the Viets would hate you and elect an anti-US government as soon as they got the chance
3. The Chinese and the Russians would be welded at the hip
..You might well reach a point - eg the Arab oil oil embargo - when the US's allies repudiate it completely. Meantime in the USA you'd have hundreds of thousands of troops who'd been trained to in brutal repression. Not great! You could have a nice timeline where the USSR Glasnosts earlier and the US is isolated and then becomes a quasi-dictatorship.
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Are you American? Y/N
If yes, you do not recognize the sacrifices that anecdotal friends' older brothers made to accomplish (?)
If no, QED.
Yes and the British didn't export wheat and other grain out of Ireland during the potato famine causing mass starvation, Cromwell didn't burn and terrorize Ireland, during the forties the English didn't let the great famine in India continue. Why do you think that the IRA had so much financial help from Boston during the troubles? The UK was a world spanning Empire during a time when most people didn't care about such things,as long as they weren't being done to you.
Barry Bull
Donor
....The PLA itself acknowledged it had done badly in the war. I have not encountered anyone that claim the PLA gave the PAVN an ass-kicking.
Barry Bull
Donor
To say Ho was the man that the South want is exaggerating the ground truth. The South Vietnamese government(s) were so bad continuously that anyone seems like improvement, but that doesn't mean the South Vietnamese want a unified communist Vietnam.
Of course, the comments above is not disagreeing with the talents of Ho and Giap.
I'm not sure the present day British people glorify the Irish famine, or Cromwell's conquest, or the Indian famine during a time Japan occupied Burma.
The majority of South Vietnamese didn't want a US-backed dictatorship that oppressed the vast majority of them for being Buddhists and went around murdering priests, dissenters, and anybody else left and right. And I don't think killing half the population of the North Vietnam would endear the South Vietnamese any more to their country. Especially considering the Viet Cong weren't even North Vietnamese and many if not most weren't even communist.