Posted on 07/21/2015 8:13:33 AM PDT by C19fan
After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle.
Since then, however, Hanoi has transformed itself more dramatically than almost any other city in the world. Today, the city is an explosive capitalist volcano, and Vietnam is rapidly on its way to becoming a formidable economic and military power. “Many revolutions are begun by conservatives,” Christopher Hitchens once said, paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes, “because these are people who tried to make the existing system work and they know why it does not. Which is quite a profound insight. It used to be known in Marx’s terms as revolution from above.” That’s exactly what happened in Vietnam, though the revolutionaries weren’t conservatives. They were Communists.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
In the end fascism doesn’t work either. It just keeps production declining at a slower rate. Fascism is Mercantilism for the whole economy. Mercantilism was great for making a select few merchants and politicians wealthy. For the common people, not so much. Obama seems to be negotiating something very like a mercantilist system in his trade negotiations.
Ho Chi Minh was a trained COMINTERN agent, who used the issue of Vietnamese independence from France to advance the cause of his Soviet masters.
Thank you for that. I used to start great arguments on FR saying that.
Absolutely. Interesting comments.
Yep. Capitalism is a record of how how people behave over time. Political governance and morality determine how it is expressed.
Your second sentence was right on. These people use the “ideals” of communism to amass power and enrich themselves and their inner circle. You don’t need to scratch your head over the MSM’s actions.. They wrongly believe they will be in the inner circle. The “useful idiots” smooth the journey
Vietnamese are and have always been natural traders and have enough Christian admixture in the society that they have learned to trust the other party in a deal without being related to him. That extrafamilial trust is the main secular gift of the Jews to the world.
Vietnam was a Soviet client, they did not get along with the ChiComs, they even had a small war in 1979.
The elections they have are for the Party Congresses which then choose, or rather rubberstamp, the candidates for office offered by the Party. They have loud noisy trucks driving around all over when election time is coming up but no one pays any attention. On voting day some people go to the polls and vote their actual choices but it doesn’t matter because the votes don’t go anywhere except the incinerator.
Capitalism is the use of surplus production i.e. capital, that which is produced over and above that necessary to stay alive, to enable more production and to increase efficiency. It is the use of savings. Communism is a theory of the use of capital and is thus capitalism but the theory is nonfunctional in real life. Mercantilism is another theory of capitalism. It is marginally more productive than Communism. What we are used to calling “capitalism” is </i>free market</i> capitalism.
The Soviets didn’t have the food to send at that time. China had been providing food during the war. I suspect the USSR subsidized it.
“Like China, they have shifted somewhat from being a totalitarian communist state to being a totalitarian fascist state.”
We’re heading in the same direction, in fact we’re pretty much there.
When you consider all the federal, state, local agencies that essentially micromanage every aspect of business, are there really any private businesses in the US? And these agencies are totally unaccountable to the voters. One could argue that they are the most powerful branch of government.
Looking around the world, it seems that fascism is by far the most popular form of government, it’s as though, regardless of what “ideal” form of government one starts with, be it communism, “free market”, or some theocracy, eventually it will devolve (or evolve?) into a form of fascism.
And it’s easily explainable by the nature of human nature.
The most fundamental aspect of human nature is that people look out for their self interest first and foremost. That includes people in power (probably more so). Therefore it should be no surprise that the ruling class everywhere will try to consolidate its power by centralizing and controlling as much of society as they can muster for their perceived interest. Some do it in a very heavy handed way, others in more sophisticated way, but the end result is still some form of fascism.
Eternal vigilance is the price of individual freedom, but few people will bear that burden over the long haul.
Look what happens to your business if you refuse to make a cake for sodomites.
>>They were Communists.
And now they’re the brainworks of Corporate Oligarchic Collectivist hives.
Quack, Waddle...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oligarchical_Collectivism
There lie Hui and here Lie Wee, under the spreading chestnut tree.
>>We’re heading in the same direction, in fact we’re pretty much there.
...
>>The most fundamental aspect of human nature is that people look out for their self interest first and foremost.
“I don’t need to know the truth, I’ve got kids”
—A. Manager
Vs
“OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES, AND OUR SACRED HONOR”
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