Posted on 12/24/2008 4:32:38 PM PST by dbz77
And, the US was defending the Republic of Vietnam from an invasion. Whatever the US administrations and military leaders did wrong, THAT was not one of them.
Let's put things in their proper context, for starters. You're talking about an authoritarian communist regime which, during the 1950s, was murdering many tens of thousands of North Vietnamese civilians, stealing the property of everyone else, and using terror tactics to subject the whole population of North Vietnam to a total destruction of rational social order. None of the usual excuses from historical revisionsists like you apply here: this wasn't self defense because the French were gone; the US was not in North Vietnam during that decade.
This was not a spontaneous uprising or well-intentioned attempt to make a "better society". Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 (in exile in China). Before that, he was trained by the Soviets while in the USSR. These murderous thugs planned to conquer and enslave their own countrymen before moving on to their neighbors. They did both. Thirty years later, the people in Vietnam are STILL oppressed by their government and living in a failed economy, ruined by the denial of their freedom.
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