Lest you should miscontrue my lengthy silence to be my tacit agreement with your views, let me just say,
"let us agree to disagree." You were taken hook-line-and-sinker if you honestly believe that US fighters in Vietnam smoked marijuana that grew on 18-ft. tall trees. Too bad you seemed ignorant of the fact that some enterprising US personnel smuggled out of Vietnam heroin and hashish in the hollowed-out torsos of their dead comrades flown home in body bags. Their jig was eventually uncovered in Hawaii.
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I was away from 29th Oct. to 12th November during which I made a brisk jaunt through Beijing, Xian, Lhasa (Tibet), Chengdu, Chongqing, a cruise down the Yangtze River to the Three-Gorge Dam site and to Yichang and thence I flew to Shanghai and then back home to Canada! Progressive telescopic changes have occurred over the years and, as I write, progressive changes in rapid kaleidoscopic succession are happening all over China!
By the way, I recall that John Foster Dulles (a former US Secretary of State) once refused the proffered hand of Chou En-Lai way back in the late 1950s because he regarded the Red China of of his time as "The Yellow Peril" and Communism as the scourge of "The Free World". Oh, how wrong he was!
"The Yellow Peril" was no peril at all. That turned out to be nothing more than the self-righteous perception and/or unwarranted morbid fear of Communism on the part of the self-appointed policemen of the world. Imagine one McNamara (Sec. of Defence & a one-time treasurer under Johnson's watch) was convinced that China had long-range ICBMs poised to be lobbed over and down on US cities! In the end it turned out that Communism was just a "Paper Tiger", and "The Yellow Peril" was more of a help than a real menace to the US during the inflationary times following Reagan's watch (and even now). And, following Nixon's historic example in 1976, a couple of US presidents and droves of US businessmen have gone to China to kiss ass. What a dramatic about-turn! Yellow Peril indeed! What a joke! Remember the internment of Asians to the interior during WWII (an acknowledged shameful episode in US history)? And the Oriental Exclusion Acts? And the random slaying of Chinese stowaways in San Francisco in the late 1800s and early 1900s? And the expulsion of a very brilliant Chinese mathematician and rocket scientist (falsely accused to be a communist) who went back to China to help to end the US nuclear blackmail on his country and help launch what turned out to be an on-going successful space program?
Which only go to show most strikingly how mistaken about people and things the US was in the past. It is now wrong again with respect to Iraq. Yea, history repeats itself! To be sure, the Bush Administration has told us all a bald-faced lie about Iraq. To be sure, all the shenanigans, dissembling and prevarications and obfuscations of the Bushies cannot and will not let Bush Admin. off the hook! My! What another shameful episode in US history! |
