VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[Don Corathers]

Some good books on the subject:

Vietnam, A History, Stanley Karnow

The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

Dispatches, Michael Herr

A Bright Shining Lie, John Vann

Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien

Cover-Up: The Army's Secret Investigation into the Masacre at My Lai 4,
Seymor Hersh

Don

----- Original Message -----
From: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL 4: War, politics and love


> ----- 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
>
>