babble home
rabble.ca - news for the rest of us
today's active topics


Post New Topic  Post A Reply
FAQ | Forum Home
  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» babble   » current events   » international news and politics   » The Vietnam Revisionists

Email this thread to someone!    
Author Topic: The Vietnam Revisionists
Coyote
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4881

posted 03 October 2007 06:56 PM      Profile for Coyote   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
One of the survivors of the Weather Underground, I forget which one, said in the documentary dedicated to them that "Vietnam drove America crazy." I think that might be true, to an extent. Certainly it has always seemed that there were two wars being waged simultaneously: the one (military) that America could never truly win; the other seemingly mystical, whereby the Right has fought tooth and nail against the reality of failure, loss, and the brutal and vicious legacy of America's actions in Vietnam.

It seems the revisionists are having a moment. I won't go into the details of the essay, but it's well worth a read. Historian Rick Perlstein takes a stab at their delusions.

The Best Wars of Their Lives:

quote:
Conservatism's cherished fantasy of American omnipotence has died once again, this time in the sands of Iraq, and the grieving process has begun. But conservatives mourn differently from you and me. They begin with denial, anger and bargaining, just like everyone else. And that's where they stay--forever paralyzed by a petulant refusal to acknowledge their fantasy's passing, a simple inability to process reality.

The denial: Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative godfather and Rudy Giuliani adviser, confidently posits that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction all along--but somehow surreptitiously shipped them to Syria. The bargaining: The White House's fervent remonstrations that if we squint at the problem in just the right way--counting "sectarian violence" but not car bombs, say--civilian killings are actually declining in Iraq. The anger: How dare the liberals refuse to understand that under our new commanding general, with his brand-new "strategy" that magically wipes the slate clean of everything else that's happened during the past four years, we're actually on our way to victory?

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. Eventually, the articles, op-eds, press briefings and speeches now rehearsing these fantasies about Iraq will be complemented by books, and the holes in their reasoning will be big enough to march a combat division through. The contradictions, between them and among them, will be embarrassing to any but the conservatives desperate to embrace them. But embrace them they will, just as they have embraced a recent batch of right-wing revisionist Vietnam books--titles like Unheralded Victory, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam, Stolen Valor and Lost Victory. Their arguments used to be limited to a rarefied coterie of disillusioned veterans and right-wing propagandists. Now they've gone mainstream, in the Republicans' desperate attempts to justify Iraq. Giuliani recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, "Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress.... But America then withdrew its support." Whereupon, said President Bush, veritably completing the thought in his August speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"



From: O’ for a good life, we just might have to weaken. | Registered: Jan 2004  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 03 October 2007 09:59 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Whereupon, said President Bush, veritably completing the thought in his August speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"

Yes, Dubya was only off by one covert CIA campaign to support Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ... in Cambodia and later Thailand.

Corporate profiteering under normal circumstances realize profit margins of anywhere in the 12 percent to 20 percent range, But when war's on and taxpayers are footing the bills, profit margins can grow upwards of 300 to a thousand percent depending on how well their political connections can cover it up.

The Vietnam war was not a total loss. American taxpayers doled out an estimated $130 billion dollars over the length of that war. And this one in Iraq dings in at almost $500 billion and expected to cost anywhere from $600B to $1 trillion dollars by the time the party's over.


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 03 October 2007 10:12 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An interesting article;

quote:
The instigator was a Vietcong agent, Moyar insists. How does he know? By inference, not by evidence. He claims the monasteries were lousy with Communist infiltrators, even, perhaps, among their highest counsels. And how does he know that? The Communists said so. It is more than passing strange. On one page Moyar knows what every good right-winger knows: Communists are liars ("With characteristic exaggeration a Communist history stated that..."). On others, however--it is one of the reasons conservative reviews have found him so impressive--he uncritically accepts Communist sources as his key proof texts.

Moyar doesn't read Vietnamese. He commissioned a translator to render official North Vietnamese histories into English. Moyar was good enough to send me some of these texts upon my request. A typical passage describes a ten-day march in which "people of all ethnic groups...happily came down from their mountain homes and enthusiastically worked as coolie laborers to support the front lines." To say the least, such Communist accounts do not read like reliable history. They read like ideologically compromised history--written to get past an audience of commissars. And yet Moyar quotes them as reliable documents, freely and uncritically--when they support his own ideological claims.


I find this double standard in play often.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 03 October 2007 10:35 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Diem is Moyar's hero. His villains are those Western diplomats and newsmen who viewed Diem as a monster, fond of cutting off his rivals' heads.

Sounds like he's pretty mixed up.

Attacking our Memory John Pilger

quote:
Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the “democratic” regime in the south was an invention.

One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be “president” and a fake government was put in place. “The CIA,” he wrote, “was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media].”

Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as “free and fair,” with American officials fabricating “an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror.”



From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 490

posted 04 October 2007 09:47 AM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as “free and fair,” with American officials fabricating “an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror.”

And to think they used to trash the Commies in the USSR and Eastern Europe (as well as Lukashenko in Belarus these days) for fabricating 90+% majority votes.


From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Krago
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3064

posted 04 October 2007 10:56 AM      Profile for Krago     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Fidel:
Yes, Dubya was only off by one covert CIA campaign to support Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ... in Cambodia and later Thailand.

Gee, the CIA and Noam Chomsky
both supported the Khmer Rouge? How could they lose?


From: The Royal City | Registered: Sep 2002  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 04 October 2007 11:06 AM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Viet Nam was one big lie in the western world. They lied to U.S. troops and they passed lies to the news media. I think eventually the doctor and the madman even began believing their own lies.
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 518

posted 04 October 2007 12:21 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
One of the survivors of the Weather Underground, I forget which one, said in the documentary dedicated to them that "Vietnam drove America crazy."

I saw that movie, and was struck by that thought, which I think was articulated by Mark Rudd.

But I think he actually said "The Vietnam War drove US crazy." He was talking about his faction, the Weather Underground. I think he meant that the feeling of absolute powerlessness we all felt, coupled with the knowledge that Vietnam's people were being napalmed into ashes, drove people to desperation. When people don't know WHAT to do, and when the status quo is basically mass murder, it doesn't take long for people to start talking about "We should bomb them right back if they insist on bombing in Vietnam".

That way lies madness.


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594

posted 04 October 2007 01:52 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
And then ordinary Americans: teachers, nurses and construction workers joined in the protests. I think Nixon stepped down because they told him civil war was a possibility right there in the U.S. In Paris the slogan was, "No more replastering. The structure is rotten."

America is said to be as divided today as it was then. Half of Americans didn't bother voting in the 1990's and sometimes less than that.


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
Coyote
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4881

posted 06 October 2007 08:57 AM      Profile for Coyote   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by jeff house:

I saw that movie, and was struck by that thought, which I think was articulated by Mark Rudd.

But I think he actually said "The Vietnam War drove US crazy." He was talking about his faction, the Weather Underground.


You might be right about that. I would have to watch it again.

But if Mark Rudd didn't posit that Vietnam drove America crazy, I just might.


From: O’ for a good life, we just might have to weaken. | Registered: Jan 2004  |  IP: Logged

All times are Pacific Time  

Post New Topic  Post A Reply Close Topic    Move Topic    Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
Hop To:

Contact Us | rabble.ca | Policy Statement

Copyright 2001-2008 rabble.ca