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Originally posted by SignyM:
Magons- People tend to think of the Soviet Union as one giant undifferentiated bloc of misery, like East Germany and Stalinist Russia. But within the eastern bloc, and even within Russia itself (over time) there were areas and times where the government was not so intrusive: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and the post-Stalin era within Russia. I don't think it's useful to paint with such a broad brush, it obscures a lot of information.

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Its the "ends and means" problem which I have become SO familiar with on this board! Bad means seem to inevitably create bad ends. So, for example, you can't create a fair society at the point of a gun, you can't impose democracy militarily, and you can't decrease violent crime with the death penalty.

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I don't know where corporate heads have got together to plan mass exterminations as we have seen some regimes do - their brutality is more through lack of care, particularly in developing countries.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Oh, Geezer, you asked how this was the fault of the US alone. Hmm... well, since you haven't repeated your question, I assume that you've googled up several sources and confirmed what I posted.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
But the fault isn't the United State's alone.

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Originally posted by SignyM: Because right off the bat, I can tally least five million murders (two million in Vietnam) caused by the USA alone...

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Where the US came in was in supporting French colonial rule (before 1954) and the non-democratically-elected regime in the south post-1954, fomenting (in essence) a civil war within Vietnam.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Did you miss my other post? "Where the US came in was in supporting French colonial rule (before 1954) and the non-democratically-elected regime in the south post-1954, fomenting (in essence) a civil war within Vietnam."

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It would be as if France sent millions of troops in to support the Union side during OUR Civil War.

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Did you miss my other post? "Where the US came in was in supporting French colonial rule (before 1954) and the non-democratically-elected regime in the south post-1954, fomenting (in essence) a civil war within Vietnam."

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So when was it that South Vietnam attacked and tried to conquer North Vietnam? Diem was, from what I can find, happy to run his own patch and take his graft. Ho wanted both North and South under his regime. I guess I'm trying to find by what moral authority you believe that, after partition, the North had a right to first foment revolution in the South and then actually invade.

Was it to liberate them? Go there now and try to start an opposition political party, or newspaper, or radio station.

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It would be as if France sent millions of troops in to support the Union side during OUR Civil War.

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Or tens of thousands of troops, supplies, and a couple of fleets during OUR Revolution?

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Diem was, from what I can find, happy to run his own patch and take his graft. Ho wanted both North and South under his regime. I guess I'm trying to find by what moral authority you believe that, after partition, the North had a right to first foment revolution in the South and then actually invade.

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The entire country was made a French "protectorate" in 1883. Under French colonial rule, the Vietnamese were prohibited from traveling outside their districts without identity papers. Freedom of expression and organization were restricted. As land was progressively co-opted by large landholders, the number of landless peasants grew. Neglect of the education system caused the literacy rate to fall. Vietnamese anticolonial movements began to coalesce early in the 20th century, but were vigorously suppressed by the French.

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The United States supported and backed the first president of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem primarily because he was not a communist. However, his reign of power saw extreme corruption and exploitation of citizens.

The Geneva Accords of 1954 had planned to establish a nationwide election during the entire republic of Vietnam in 1956 with hopes to unify the nation. The United States set an agenda to find the perfect candidate to emerge and defeat the immensely popular Ho Chi Minh, of course a Communist. Realizing this would not be possible, the elections were canceled and many citizens were outraged.

In The Vietnam Wars by Marilyn Young, she describes Diem's 1957 campaign to "denounce communists" as being brutal and torturous. Diem and his police not only arrested and tortured current and former communists in Vietnam, but also their family members and others in their village whether they had communist connections or not. As one Viet Minh veteran described it,

"Every arrest was synonymous with barbarous tortures. Even if an arrested person was ready to turn traitor, to cooperate from the first moment, he could nto escape the preliminary torture. A man who had once belonged to the Viet Minh but since 1954 claimed loyalty to Saigon was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to five years without trial"

Aside from unfair and unjustified arrests and torture, Diem's reign saw other acts of corruption to Vietnamese citizens. Diem returned many lands to landlords which forced thousands of members of the peasant class to becomes landless and even more poor. Diem also brought back old taxes, forced labor on many citizens, and exposed much corruption in the government.

Young said, "It was the accumulation of grievances, large and small, that angered villagers and moved many of them to respond to those who sought to resist the government". These corrupt acts mixed with a constant stubborness to accept US policies and ideas and the disapproval of the general public caused the downfall of Diem and his reign.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Geezer- Did you just advocate spending billions of dollars, 58,000 American and 4 million SE Asian lives supporting a guy whose BEST characteristic is that he just wanted his little patch of tyrannical corruption?

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Ho Chi Minh was to Vietnam what George Washington was to the United States.

"All people are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are the right to live, the right to be happy, and the right to be free".

Sound familiar?

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Ho Chi Minh's goals for Vietnam were reasonable: Freedom from foreign rule, unification, free elections, land distribution (not collectivization), universal education, and an 8-hour day.

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Which to choose?

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No I asked why you think that the North Vietnamese aggression against a country that had no designs on the North was morally appropriate. Why did the North spend countless lives and resources trying to conquer another country?

To paraphrase your earlier comment, If Ho had been content to rule North Vietnam, none of this would have even happened.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Odd that you'd take North Vietnam to task for the same kinds of actions which we've undertaken this decade.

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Freedom from Foreign Rule? The French were gone from both North and South.

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Why did the North spend countless lives and resources trying to conquer another country?

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Even odder that SignyM would defend North Vietnamese aggression on the grounds that the country they attacked was not too dangerous, but just too corrupt.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Geezer, might you not want to do a little soul searching and see if you can figure out why you wind up on the side of slavery and dictatorship, even tho you're a reasonable person?

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Of course, you didn't see the reports about how the S Vietnamese government mistreated and killed people, did you? Not your department, I guess!

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If there was a justifiable intervention, it would have been on the side of the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords, which would have required free elections. An election would have been held, the will of the people would have been known, the problems would have been sorted out.

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Instead, we placed ourselves in service to a guy who just decided, willy-nilly, that he wanted to keep a part of Vietnam for himself, and re-create a system of rich and poor, torture and kill, and rob the national treasury.

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Why do you keep supporting such action? It's not like there weren't more credible, more just alternatives.

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I know you keep thinking of yourself as a browncoat, but you slide over the inconvenient fact that browncoats never sided with foreign occupation, corruption, or slavery.

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they didn't invade other folks' nations

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they didn't invade other folks' nations.

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North Vietnam could have continued to demand elections and request that the U.N. support them.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
The north didn't "invade" the south.

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The Viet Minh were in the south all along, part and parcel of population, just as they were in the north, and represented a fair portion of the population everywhere in Vietnam, not just the north. Ho Chi Minh had a lot of support in the south and the Viet Minh had been there a long time...

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they didn't invade other folks' nations. Wow, you really ARE resistant to factual history, aren't you?

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And, if we were going to deploy 560,000 troops, why not deploy them to MAKE SURE that elections were held, instead of reflexively propping up "the other side"...

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Are elections good? GOOD! Let's support it! Let's use our troops to make sure its fair and free.

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By what moral authority you believe that, after partition, the North had a right to first foment revolution in the South and then actually invade?

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Oh, and going back and revising your posts after I've responded to them is...apparently all right with you if it meets your needs.

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hundreds of thousands of people were brainwashed and worked to death

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Unfortunately, this didn't apply to the villagers in the South when dealing with the VC. I worked the I Corps comm center in Hue in 1970-71. Every day were several reports, direct from the field, like this. "Squad of VC entered village of ... Executed village chief and family. Executed school teacher and family. Burned village school. Kidnapped five young men. Took 15 cans of rice."


Unification? Why? Was Ho the Alliance?


Education? Okay one of five. But I bet they learn the Party line.


"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Again, read this slowly and carefully...

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Haven't done that. We may have cross-posted.

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Oh, and

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hundreds of thousands of people were brainwashed and worked to death

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is 80-99.9% hogwash.So I'm just gonna pull a Geezer and say "Cites please?". 'Cause I've looked it up, and you're just making shit up.

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The re-education camp remained the predominant device of social "control" in the late 1980s. It was used to incarcerate members of certain social classes in order to coerce them to accept and conform to the new social norms. This type of camp was one feature of a broader effort to control the social deviant and to campaign against counterrevolution and the resistance. The concept of re-education was borrowed from the Chinese communists and was developed early in the First Indochina War, at least in part because the nomadic government of North Vietnam was unable to maintain orthodox prisons. The process was continued in the North in 1954, but it came fully to the world's attention only after North Vietnam's takeover of the South in 1975

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After the Communist takeover in South Vietnam in May 1975, the Communist government established New Economic Zones (NEZs). Ostensibly this action was taken to alleviate overcrowding in the cities, whose population swelled with refugees fleeing the war, but the NEZs were inextricably intertwined with the notion of reeducation camps. Although there was no revolutionary reign of terror following the Communist takeover in the south, up to a half-million people, mainly members or supporters of the anti-Communist Republic of Vietnam regime or the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, went through short-term reeducation, while up to 100,000 people were sentenced to long-term reeducation. The reeducation camp programs ran parallel to those of the NEZs.

Though nominally voluntary, hundreds of thousands of people, especially urbanites suspected of disloyalty to the new regime as well as political and common prisoners, were sent to a series of remote camps along Vietnam's isolated border region. There they were subjected to harsh physical labor, including land reclamation and agriculture work, because the zones were supposed to be self-sufficient. Although the zones were hypothetically established before people were sent there, with rudimentary infrastructure, tools, seeds for crops, pumps, and farm equipment, in reality few NEZs were prepared for the influx of urbanites, and the living conditions were exceptionally harsh. The camps had woefully poor infrastructure, including minimal health services and other social programs. The internees were also forced to undergo political indoctrination classes. Unprepared and unskilled at making a living in the harsh rural interior, a large number of urbanites fled Vietnam in what became known as the exodus of the boat people.

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According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps.

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Minh, who like most other factory employees refused to give his full name for fear of company reprisal, was one of 40,000 workers who participated in a wave of wildcat strikes late last year and early this year to protest low pay and poor working conditions.

"Everything that you use, food and drink, has become more expensive, and we find that we are struggling to live," said Minh, who earns less than $2 a day. "We are protesting to have a better quality of life."
...
Six months before the first wildcat strikes in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), 10,000 employees walked off the job at the Hong Kong-owned Key Hinge toy company in the central city of Danang. The workers, who manufacture plastic toys found in McDonald's Happy Meals, told Lao Dong newspaper that if they didn't work 12 hours a day without overtime, they could be fired.

Key Hinge workers also complained to the media that they were allowed only two bathroom breaks a day, were given no sick days and could be fined for any mistake made on the assembly line.

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Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Japan, the biggest country donor to Vietnam, suspended development aid to the Southeast Asian nation, saying stronger measures must be taken to fight corruption.

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Earlier this month, Vietnam’s top anti-corruption agency, the Government Inspectorate, completed its annual investigations in the country’s central, central highlands, western and southern regions, and to no one’s surprise, nobody found dust in his own home, although they found plenty elsewhere.
“The higher levels only detected corruption in lower levels. Provinces detected corruption in districts, districts did the same with communes. No one said they had found corruption in their own organization,” Bui Ngoc Lam, Deputy Head of the Government Inspectorate, told the press. Apparently in the minds of many state officials, if there are problems, they must exist elsewhere.
This attitude has become pervasive. Last year, in a similar investigation 28 ministries and sectors as well as 58 provinces and cities submitted their reports to the central government. The result? Only six of the units reported corruption. The rest happily declared, “No corruption here.!”

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Transparency International, a global counter-corruption watchdog, ranks Vietnam as the second most corrupt country in South-East Asia (after Indonesia), based on a survey of international businessmen. The Vietnamese government itself recently estimated that light-fingered bureaucrats cream off at least 20% of infrastructure spending. At the National Assembly in July, the prime minister, the speaker, and the secretary-general of the Communist Party all identified corruption as one of the government's main challenges.

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The much-feared bloodbath did not occur. Instead, nearly 100,000 persons, almost all of them former Saigon Army Officers and government officials, were imprisoned for years (the number of years depended on the prisoner's rank and record) in "reeducation camps". Conditions were grim, but the reeducation camps were not like Nazi death camps or the Japanese prison camps of WWII in which half the inmates perished. Ninety four thousand of the reeducation camp prisoners survived and were released.

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Consider instead the other partitions that happened during that period after WWII. Korea and Germany. These were compromises, instead of forcing entire nations and populations to live under competing and pretty different political/economic systems. Instead, partition allowed choice that unification would not.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
According to OTHER published studies, fewer than 6,000 died.

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Everything you accuse the north of, the south did the same or worse. Or have the "tiger cages", summary street executions, and death-ending torture slipped your mind?

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But that wasn't my point. My point was that IF we had intervened EARLY... We could have used minimal troops to arrest Diem and turn him over to international authorities instead of supporting him militarily... and by clearing Diem from the scene we could have prevailed for a national vote since it was he who canceled it.

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We SHOULD be on the side of education, development, democracy, transparency, and open communication anywhere and everywhere.

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It's obvious I'm not gonna convince you that the Vietnamese Communists are anything other than white knights of liberation

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Where'd you have to go?

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And once again, if the North had used diplomatic, instead of military, means and displayed any evidence that they were interested in a free country

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I think they could have been white knights at one time (with our nudging) but our massive death-dealing response kinda screwed that pooch.

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My first point is... with all of our military might, we could do much good. But we (EDIT) ALMOST ALWAYS side with corruption and tyranny. Why is that?

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I think there are a couple of reasons, but the MAIN underlying reason is that our military is often used to support monopolistic corporatism (which IMHO is what capitalism always becomes, given time.)

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I think if you look at our REAL interests... and by "ours" I mean most Americans, not the power elite... you'll find they revolve around peace, prosperity, education, communication and transparency.

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War is a poor tool with which to build peace, destruction a poor tool with which to build prosperity, and tyranny a poor tool with which to build freedom.

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MORE than lack of care Magon. People are shot and killed over things like unionization and working conditions. Do you think that corporations get rich in a "benign" fashion? Don't you think that most of our wars were prompted by corporate interests?

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Anyway, what I think you're reacting to is "perceived risk"... the risk, in this case, of being killed by an inimical force, whether that force is Megatron Corp or The Beloved Leader.

People respond to risks differently, so although you have a FAR higher chance of being killed in an auto accident, or dying of lung cancer (if you smoke) people are a lot more tolerant of THOSE risks than they are of a terrorist act or violent crime.

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In order for corporations to succeed ... especially at their bases of power (where they control a world-significant military through government cooperation) is to give people a sense of control... without, of course, giving up much ACTUAL control. So people are told... and believe... that they are the masters of their destiny, and they are... in small things. 20 kinds of toilet paper, 200 different channels all saying the same thing, the "right" to compete for increasingly scarce jobs. and the "right" to own (by comparison) a popgun. But in the BIG things- what you want your society to look like, how much environmental or financial or health risk do you want your society to take, do you want to direct your collective resources to rebuilding the environment or education (for example) or towards fighting wars of oppression and building prisons - phfffft!

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But I find you argument smacks of a bit of desperation to prove that the US is as bad as regimes like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. To compare the two insults the experiences of the multi generations who were hoarded on the cattle trucks and taken away for slaughter or slow death. They just are not the same.

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In some places the Reagan Doctrine was meeting a shove with every push it enacted. For many “El Salvador” became Spanish for Vietnam. During his presidency, account after account was reported of U.S.-trained soldiers (more commonly known as death squads- similar to those seen in Chile in the 1970s) raiding towns in El Salvador, torturing civilians, cutting off genitalia, death-squads_el-salvador1and murdering infants. One such event occurred in 1981 in El Mozote, El Salvador. In December of that year there was a systematic execution of nearly 1,000 civilians. The entire town was ravaged by a U.S.-trained and sponsored government battalion. The event was completely denied by both the U.S. and El Salvadoran governments for years. Yet, as time passed and excavations of El Mozote revealed hundreds of bullets manufactured in Lake City, Missouri, the truth became difficult to deny and the public difficult to deceive. It has been projected that in just two years, 1981-1983, more than 100,000 Mayan peasants that were resisting to the changes that Washington was sponsoring were executed. Many U.S. reporters were pulled out of the country during this time; children were drowned in front of their mothers; infants were bashed against rocks; peasants were burned alive; families were made to drink the blood of their pets; farmers were made to bathe in sewage and made to try to outrun soldiers wielding machetes; pregnant women had their stomachs cut open and their fetuses pulled out; young boys were kidnapped and made to fight with the government, raping women and girls (Grandin’s EW, 90). This is not WWII Poland, this is not even Vietnam, this is El Salvador a mere quarter of a century ago.

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An ex-Navy officer from Argentina, Adolfo Scilingo, said in an interview that in 1970s Argentina, not only were political prisoners routinely dropped over the sea to drown, but they were made to dance first in a macabre celebration of the freedom they were told awaited them

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Okay, you want to keep going, then.

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VC started operations against the South in the Mid-50s, long prior to pretty much any U.S. military presence in Vietnam.

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There weren't that many U.S. troops in combat until after NVA regulars from the North entered the country through Cambodia and Laos.

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There was never an opportunity to hold peaceful dialog with North Vietnam because we were already intent on taking the South by military means.

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I can't speak for all the decision-makers since whenever, but I'd say that for the last 60 years or so, it's because the government has thought that the guys on the other side were more tyrannical and corrupt, and more interested in aggression, than the ones we supported.

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And I'm not even going to go there, since I don't argue religion with True Believers.

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You keep saying this, but the country you hold up as the exemplar for these desires has almost none of them. I do note you left out mention of 'Democracy' and 'free and fair elections' this time.

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Maybe the United States should have considered this before they decided to use military force to capture and subdue the South?

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Okay Signy, you win. The US is the worst, most horrific regime in history. You and you alone have committed all the worst atrocities in history. No one else has done anything else to compare

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Okay Signy, you win. The US is the worst, most horrific regime in history. You and you alone have committed all the worst atrocities in history. No one else has done anything else to compare

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Magon, may I say in the most polite terms possible that you're a dick?

I never said we were "the worst". If you were to tally up the deaths on "our side" and "their side" I'd say were were about even. But we ARE the pre-eminent military power, and we SHOULD learn from the past how our military was used and misused. So, if you want to go bury your head in your arse, feel free. I'm not gonna stop you. Just be aware that's what you're doing.

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I don't think you can simply tally up deaths from one side or another

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{I} would rather than at this point in time the US was a world power, rather than have a single Nazi or Stalinistic world power, or some hideous combination of the two.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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I don't think you can simply tally up deaths from one side or another

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Why not? What's the point of a society, an economy, or a government if it isn't to make life easier and more possible?

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Okay, you want to keep going, then.

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Yep.

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VC started operations against the South in the Mid-50s, long prior to pretty much any U.S. military presence in Vietnam.

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You're missing part of the time period in question... just before and during WWII.

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These presidents saw the word "communism" and their butts puckered, although the goals of the Viet Minh were actually pretty tame.

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Vietnam

Nong Duc Manh, Communist Party secretary-general

He is one of the architects of the relentless crackdown on opposition groups and dissident publications in Vietnam. Two journalists and around 15 cyber-dissidents have been sentenced to long prison sentences since January 2007. They include Catholic priest Nguyen Van Ly, who was given an eight-year term on a charge of “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” for launching an underground magazine called Tu do Ngôn luan (Free Expression) in the central city of Hue. When one of those who helped him, Nguyen Phong, was given a six-year sentence, he told the judge: “I will continue to fight for the values of freedom and democracy.” Nong Duc Manh has decided to use every means possible to silence the human rights and pro-democracy activists who got together to form Bloc 8406 and who have defied the government by launching two underground magazines that are distributed abroad and clandestinely within Vietnam. Regarded as an economic reformer, he also distrusts the Internet and had several people arrested in 2007 for demanding more democracy on online forums.

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I'm under no illusions that life is not pretty crappy for a vast numbers in the world, but I've no illusions that it would be crappier under a world regime involving the likes of Hitler or Stalin.

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You're citing 'capitalism' as the form of government which has caused the figures you continue to quote. A pretty broad stretch, given that you've included the Irish potato famine and any war that you perceive as being fought in the name of capitalism by any country over a vast period of time.

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