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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (86131)	8/23/2000 6:34:49 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Would the Sandanistas have had the mass support without funding from the Cubans? I doubt that.... The Sandinistas had mass support long before any substantial Cuban contribution was made. I think you badly underestimate the hatred Nicaraguans held for the Somoza family. Average Nicaraguans didn't much care what ideology the Sandinistas held, they just knew that the Sandinistas were the only ones who would stand up and fight against the detested Guardia Civil. Your WWII paragraph is one of the most extravagant exercises in revisionism that I've ever read... Hitler would have been willing to have made a peace with Britain that would have left it intact, and allowed it to retain its colonies, as long as it recognized the hegemony of Germany in Europe. I've no doubt that they would have made such a "peace", and that the result would have been the same as the peace that they made with the Russians. I don't think anybody in Britain doubted for a moment that Hitler would have used such a peace to consolidate and prepare for an invasion. Britain held out because they knew damned well that they were next in line. Additionally, the United States could easily have stood aside, allowed Hitler to have exhausted himself in the European war, and than gone to pick up the pieces afterward, allowing more time for a build up. I see no logic at all in this. If Britain had fallen - and at the time it seemed more than likely that it would - it would have been virtually impossible for us to "go in and pick up the pieces". Do you think we could have supported the equivalent of the Normandy invasion from a home base on the Eastern seaboard? the United States jumped in as soon as opinion could be swayed in that direction to save a recalcitrant Britain. Aren't you forgetting that little incident at Pearl Harbor? The United States jumped in because the Axis powers attacked us. The power that conducted the attack was Japan, not Germany, but I think the message was pretty clear: fight now, while you still have allies, or fight later, alone. What Mao and company were was really irrelevant. What mattered was that they were going to win, there was nothing we could do to stop them, and there was no reason to assume that they would necessarily ally with the Soviets. There is no way of knowing, of course, what would or could have happened if we tried to deal with and influence that movement instead of confronting it, but things could hardly have gone worse than they did. Did we win the cold war, or did they lose it? The question is not entirely academic, since we have people who aspire toward leadership trying to stick the Chinese into the "enemy" box, and proposing that we use the same methods against them. That course, I think, would be most unfortunate.

To: Neocon who wrote (86131)	8/23/2000 7:58:05 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

A personal story which may have some bearing on your comments about Lattimore: In the early/mid '80s, for complicated reasons, I set out to write a detailed report on the New People's Army (NPA), which was then fighting quite successfully against the Philippine Government. In pursuit of this end I spent several months bouncing around the hinterlands of Mindanao and the Luzon Cordillera in the company of NPA field units. (I also survived, mostly through dumb luck and quick ducking, several full-on gunfights, one aerial bombardment, and one thorough stomping at the hands and feet of a local militia unit; I can categorically state for the benefit of Mr. Smart that fear is NOT an illusion.) After retiring to the mountains to process the information thus acquired and soothe my somewhat damaged nerves, I produced an excessively long and polemical article concluding that the average NPA rebel knew and cared very little about communism, fought mainly because of personal grudges against the armed forces or local politicians, and would stop fighting if Marcos and his cronies lost power. Unfortunately, just about the time I sent this around, a prominent journalist breezed in for a round of interviews with the NPA top dogs, and published a well-publicized article describing the NPA as a bunch of bright red screaming maoists. Partly because of this, and partly because it was excessively long and polemical, the thing I wrote was greeted with no interest at all, and died the death that it probably deserved. It was close to a decade before I realized that the prominent journalist was right, and so was I. The top dogs were bright red screaming maoists, and most of the rank and file were as I described them. The distinction became quite clear when Marcos fell, and the NPA armed strength rapidly dwindled from 40,000+ to a little over 10,000. The ideologues stayed; the others didn't. These movements, especially in their early stages, are not as monolithic as they seem, and each one is different from the others. It is also, I think, a basic truth that in movements that face direct violent oppression, especially from a foreign antagonist, the most militant and least compromise-oriented elements will quickly rise to power. Note: since you believe that the Cold War was won through our efforts, may I assume that you believe that socialism is a viable economic model, and that socialist states can survive and prosper if they are not brought down by aggressive outside action?