The theories are that Ho and Castro were driven into the arms of the Soviets because they didn't get their way with one or more of the nations of the Free World. These theories are most likely valid. During the Cold War, the Free World expected, reasonably enough, that a third world faction that desired to wield power reject the totalitarian monstrosities that threatened enslavement and genocide on a grand scale. The Castros and Hos, in their lust to rule their people, made their deals with the devil at the point where the devil seemed to offer them the easy way to the power that obsessed them. The Rumanians and Hungarians, a few years earlier, made similar deals with an alternative devil, Adoph Hitler, for similar reasons. The Hungarian and Rumanian people suffered immensely from these totalitarian alliances, and the peoples of Cuba and Vietnam did as well. The point being that neither Ho nor Castro served their people with any distinction, but rather condemned them to the worst cauldrons of the 20th Century hell. While such decisions may have been difficult for them at the time, what made them so difficult was the hypocrisy of megalomania, and the pure lust for power.
Charles DeGaulle subtly suggested to Henry Kissinger that the US should withdraw from Vietnam and let both the Vietnamese people and the world simply see what the implications of accepting communism as "freedom" really are. In retrospect, that seems to have been advice worth considering-though perhaps 10 years earlier than it was proffered. The contemporary American left has never learned DeGaulle's lesson, and thus the revisionism of the Vietnam era continues... |
