Posted on 03/04/2003 2:08:45 PM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Tuesday, March 4, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
Was communism ever a real threat to the nations of the world, or was it just a phantasm infecting the minds of the cold warriors who for so long supported Containment Theory? As my previous column noted, Containment Theory argued that America had to aggressively confront the power of the Soviet Union, wherever the latter made inroads, or threatened to make them. The main means of confrontation was in putting American troops in the Soviets' path.
As omniscient Marxist academics now tell us, Containment Theory has "little or no intellectual content." In my previous column, I noted that the claim that a political takeover was actually a "nationalist" phenomenon, and thus could not have been "communist," is a popular dodge among academics. Tenured Marxists typically re-define North Vietnamese communism, for instance, as a "nationalist" movement that suffused all of Vietnamese "culture." One such Marxist academic is George Mason University history professor, Michael O'Malley. Those of us who do not have to choose between echoing academic propaganda and getting a failing grade or fired from our jobs, however, have the luxury of trying the truth, for a change.
Were we to take the O'Malleys of the world at their word, we would be able to use them to CONDEMN the North Vietnamese. For have leftists not condemned every expression of American nationalism since at least the 1960s? But for those same Marxists, "nationalism" is a beautiful thing – as long as it isn't American nationalism. Mainstream conservative writers ascribe such equivocation to "moral relativism." But the people who attack America – call them Marxists, multiculturalists, or racial socialists – are not moral relativists. Their hatred for "America" is absolute; they merely use moral relativism as a tactic.
It was Marxist academics who originally invented the phony dichotomy between "communism" and "nationalism," as a variation on the communists' older distinction between "socialism" and "fascism." (Hence, the false notion that of necessity, "socialism" must be leftwing, and "fascism" rightwing, which begs the question as to what "leftwing" and "rightwing" mean.)
The unbridgeable gap between "socialism" and "fascism," so often remarked since World War II, was invented by the communists, who earlier had a more, shall we say, "flexible" attitude towards Nazism. ("Fascism" and "Nazism" were two different political movements. For instance, racialist pseudo-science and genocide were integral to Nazism, but played no roles in fascism. Socialists find it convenient to ignore such distinctions.) Beginning in 1935, American communists began softening their image, via the Moscow-orchestrated "Popular Front." The American Communist Party was nominally led by Earl Browder, who got his orders direct from Moscow. Based on Stalin's flipflops and shifting alliances, American communists sometimes changed their dogmatic positions over night, a practice which George Orwell would creatively work into his landmark novel, 1984.
Such continuous equivocation and changing of alliances is the thread of continuity between 1930s communism, the 1960s New Left, and contemporary multiculturalism (or as I call it, racial socialism).
(Academic racial socialists would be constantly shown up for the charlatans that they are, except that most tenured conservatives are too cowardly or lazy to do so. If you doubt that, consider the examples of two men who, by themselves, have set the multiculturalists back on their heels, David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes.)
During a March 10, 1939 radio address, Stalin spoke of the "kinship" between communism and Nazism. Initially, American communists wanted America to stay out of the "imperialist" war in Europe. That Moscow-dictated position was due entirely to the non-aggression pact that Stalin had entered into with Hitler on August 23,1939, when the dictators forged their secret plan to divvy up Poland. At that point, the communists (like American Nazis and many America Firsters) thought Hitler and his murdering band were fine fellows. Not that communists ever had any problem with murder, in the first place.
But on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, Hitler betrayed his good friend Stalin, and invaded Russia. Overnight, American communists became the country's biggest hawks. They wanted to put America at the service of Soviet "socialism in one country." It was the "democratic" thing to do. The Soviets then formulated the insuperable dichotomy between bellicose "fascism" and peace-loving "socialism" that leftists have parroted ever since. (Never mind, that national socialism wasn't fascist; one showed one's loyalty to the cause by one's willingness to swallow lies, not truths.)
In reality, there are few rallying cries with less power to motivate men to fight to the death, than the call to serve the workers of the world. Religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, regionalism are all more effective motivators. Effective communist agitators and leaders have almost always used more concrete loyalties to rally the troops. It was the invocation of Mother Russia, not the Comintern, that Stalin used to inspire the Russian people and the Red Army to overcome what was initially one of the worst beatings in military history, and ultimately savage the Wehrmacht's Eastern Command.
(A Russian reader responded to my February 23 column, that the Soviets' real inspiration was none other than Hitler himself, who turned a successful, conventional military operation into an exercise in genocide, and thus forced the Russians themselves to think in ethnic, genocidal terms, in order to survive. After Hitler took the option of surrender off the table, the Russians were faced with the alternative: Win or die, Teutons or Slavs. My correspondent argued convincingly, and not without regret, that D-Day was the best thing that could have happened to the Germans, since absent the Americans' restraining presence, the Red Army would have slaughtered millions more German civilians.)
And so it went in North Vietnam, where communism and nationalism also got along famously.
The supposed "racism" of the Americans towards Vietnam, in concluding that the North Vietnamese (a distinction that O'Malley ignored) cherished life less than did Americans, was based on hard-won experience. Viet Cong practices, including the murdering of newborns through hooking them up to booby traps that would blow up them and the American GIs whose humanity impelled them to try and rescue the abandoned, helpless babies, made a permanent impression on all Americans who survived or grew up during the ordeal.
Michael O'Malley seeks to humanize the "Vietnamese," by speaking of a mother weeping over her dead child. But that was a South Vietnamese mother; O'Malley notwithstanding, no one ever doubted the South Vietnamese's humanity.
In response to my February 25 column, Orrin Judd, of the great Brothers Judd review site and blog, sent me a link to his review of Lewis Sorley's 1999 work, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam.
If Judd's brilliant review doesn't break your heart, you are beyond the help of any wizard. According to Judd, Sorley argued that the saturation bombing of Hanoi during Christmas, 1972, forced the communists back in earnest to the negotiating table in Paris. But Nixon and Kissinger sold out the South Vietnamese. They gave the communists ridiculously favorable peace terms that let them keep troops in the South after the ceasefire, and the U.S. failed to provide the air support it had promised, when the North violated the peace agreement. And yet, Sorley admits that the war had gone on too long for the taste of the American public, and that military and civilian leaders had been caught lying so many times, that like the little boy who cried wolf, no one believed them, when they finally told the truth about the winnability of the war.
Ultimately, as one FReeper observed at Free Republic, we were doomed by our defensive posture never to win the war. On the ground, we let the Viet Cong take the war to us, which is always a losing strategy.
The debacle in Vietnam destroyed the American people's taste for war. That in itself is not a bad thing; having a taste for war suggests that someone is either a blowhard who expects others to fight for him, or lacking in humanity. And yet, the post-Vietnam aversion to war was as irrational as America's earlier embrace of war. We went from dwelling overly on our successes in two world wars, to dwelling overly on our failures in Vietnam.
Foul Weather Friends
When the "Evil Empire," as Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union, fell, many nations stopped having to be polite to us anymore. When we lost our great enemy, we also lost most of our "friends" (e.g., the West Germans), who no longer needed our protection – or the petty humiliations we sometimes visited upon them. Nations and groups – most notably Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda (which had earlier fought alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan) – who were once glad to accept American handouts, turned on us. Now, when foreigners speak of "American arrogance," "bullying," and "imperialism," and compare us to the Roman Empire, that is less an expression of honesty, than of the freedom that America's power has won for them in the post-Soviet world. The problem is, in politics, gratitude to a large degree derives from fear. If America were truly arrogant and brutal, a la the Roman Empire, many nations that today insult us, would mind their manners.
American policy makers and political thinkers must come up with a new theory – call it what one will – to fill the gap left by containment theory. The new theory must simplify foreign policy, so that America is not faced with a world of constant trouble, yet is able to gain a rational understanding of possible wars she may have to prosecute. Otherwise, she will find it impossible to navigate between the Scylla of constant terrorist attacks inspired by the perception of American cowardice, and getting sucked into the Charybdis of constant, American-initiated warfare.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
I propose we call it the "kick ass on anyone who even so much as looks at us funny" theory.
I propose we call it the "kick ass on anyone who even so much as looks at us funny" theory.
LOL
This is a very important point to make in this "nationalism is bad" arguement made by communists. They just hate American and western nationalism.
Rule number one. I will stay on my side of the fence as long as you stay on yours. It is the agreeing on where the fence is that could be the rub
This is a very important point to make in this "nationalism is bad" arguement made by communists. They just hate American and western nationalism.
Yup. They're the biggest imperialists around.
You wonder how they could ever call anyone else an imperialist with a straight face. Their belief, ultimately, is for imperialism for some people, just as they believe in nationalism for every nation but America.
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