VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2003 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: VLVL 4: War, politics and love
>
> > "The Enemy" is a people of peasants
> > fighting the biggest military machinery of the world. According to your
line
> > of argument every American soldier fighting in Vietnam sold out his
humanity
> > by killing women and children, dropping napalm, spreading agent orange.
>
> That's not my line of argument at all, thanks. You seem to have a fairly
> lop-sided understanding of the Vietnam War. Communist guerrillas (i.e. the
> Vietcong), backed by Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese government, had been
> murdering innocent South Vietnamese people since 1960, and innocent South
> Vietnamese people continued being murdered into the late '70s and '80s. It
> was an actual war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, which were
> sovereign states until 1975, when the North Vietnamese army finally ousted
> the South Vietnamese government.
>

My knowledge of the Vietnam War is based upon books like Mary McCarthy's
"Hanoi 1968", Daniel Ellsberg's "Papers on the War", the two Bertrand
Russell/Jean-Paul Sartre Vietnam Tribunal-books and alike. Actually there
hasn't been a South Vietnam before the USA took over the French colonial
enterprise after the Dien Bien Phu debacle (between 1950 and 1953 alone the
French got three billion US$ from the Truman government as direct military
support, 648 million in 1954), thus there wasn't a civil war in which the US
took sides but only an American agression against the whole of Vietnam by
installing a dictatorship in Saigon after the French were defeated in 1954
and the emperor's (a French puppet) resign. The 1954 Geneva Conference did
not speak of North and South Vietnam but only of Vietnam. There has never
been a sovereign South Vietnam recognized by the UN, Ngo Dien Diem (like his
successor Van Thieu) was an employee of the US-government until he was
assinated in 1963.

http://www.photo.net/vietnam/luong/timeline.html

> Mobilisation of US troops occurred after LBJ's Tonkin Gulf Resolution in
> 1964. Like the recent invasion of Iraq, the justification for deploying
> American military forces was based on wrong information.

I don't think that you can compare the Vietnam War to the Second Iraq-war
which freed the country from a murderous dictator. First, the Vietnamese
hadn't suffered for decades from such a dictator but were trying to liberate
themselves from colonialism after the defeat of Japan. Second, there hasn't
been a UN-resolution on Vietnam. Third, even Eisenhower admitted in his
memoirs that according to all political advisors he had spoken with Ho Chi
Minh would have got 80% of the votes if free elections had taken place.
There is no such person/party in Iraq.

> And, as it seems
> might be happening in Iraq now, the American military intervention
actually
> did more harm than good to the people they were supposedly trying to
assist.
>

I have to disagree again. The US-lead troops should simply leave the country
in a few months when the basic Iraqi administration structures work and
after Saddam Hussein is either dead or captured. This maybe will lead to a
civil war between the different ethnic/religious groups but I don't think
that the Baathists ever will regain power. But I doubt that the current
US-government will be able to admit that it's the presence of Western
soldiers that attracts terrorists and strengthens Islamistic fundamentalism.

Otto