VLVL 4: War, politics and love

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL 4: War, politics and love


> on 31/8/03 3:26 PM, Otto at ottosell at yahoo.de wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Good for you. My knowledge is based on the first-hand accounts of many
> hundreds of South Vietnamese refugees living in the local communities I
work
> with, most of them pretty certain they'd been living in a sovereign state
> all their lives until they were forced to flee, and also pretty adamant
> about the social and political differences between their own people and
> their North Vietnamese oppressors.
>

I'm sorry but these people naturally tell things only from their point of
view which isn't, given the fact that they've left Vietnam, very objective.
Many of the so-called "boat people" over here aren't refugees (except the
ones who worked for the corrupt government or the US-troops) but came for
economical reasons. I wouldn't base my knowledge of WW-2 on tales of Germans
who went to Argentina or Paraguay.

>
> In 1954 the Geneva Conference partitioned Vietnam along the 17th parallel,
> leaving a communist Democratic Republic in the north (capital Hanoi) and,
by
> 1955, a non-communist republic in the south (capital Saigon). So, they
were
> two sovereign states from 1954 until 1975.
>

That's historically untrue. The partitioning was only an interim stage and
the dictator Diem refused to implement the Geneva accord. South Vietnam has
never been recognized by the UN, never has seen elections.

> I wasn't comparing the Vietnam War with the invasion of Iraq.

I'm glad to hear that 'cause that's been Doug's argumentation.

> I compared the
> fact that wrong information was used as a justification for American
> aggression in both instances.
>
> And as to your third point, you're again disagreeing with something I
> haven't said. My point there relates to the terrorist attack yesterday on
> the Shia cleric and his congregation, and the looming threat of civil war.
>
> best
>

Ok. By the way I don't think that the recent terrorist attacks are backed by
a broad Iraqi majority. I try to get some extra information on Iraq from
this website:
http://www.iraq-today.com/

Otto