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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (224143)	3/14/2007 1:52:44 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Pol Pot. He had a very impressive kill tally. And he's more directly related to this topic than Lincoln et al. That is, if personal responsibility for kill tallys and VietNam are the criteria. "During his time in power Pol Pot instigated an aggressive policy of relocating people to the countryside in an attempt to purify the Cambodian people as a step toward a communist future. The means to this end included the extermination of intellectuals and other "bourgeois enemies". Today the policies of his government are widely blamed for causing the deaths of perhaps 1.5 million Cambodians." en.wikipedia.org

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (224143)	3/14/2007 4:19:32 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

And they didn't have the moral high ground in that battle. Who was your favorite Communist dictator? Lenin? Stalin? Mao? Ho? Pol Pot? Who? This has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. You are showing that if an argument can't be fight into your "good guy bad guy" mentality, you can't deal with it. Like Procrustus, you have to chop it up to force it to fit your categories. What was going on in Vietnam in the 20s through the 50s was a colonial war. The French pulled out in '54, and the Dulles brothers couldn't stand that, so they took their place. The US became saviors to the 20-25% of Vietnamese who were French supporters, and enemies to the rest. The "communism" of Vietnam was never very deep, it was far more traditional rural than truly "communist," even though they certainly had some affinities with each other. We stepped into the middle of a potential civil war in Vietnam, and managed to inflame it many times over by supplying training and supplies to the French leftovers. There likely still would have been a war if we hadn't stepped it, but it would have far shorter and less bloody than it turned out to be. Yeah, a lot of people died and were killed after we left. Well, duh, they had civil war and people died. What a shock. Ho was a butcher, some say. Do they call Lincoln a "butcher"? Jefferson Davis? Lee? Grant? Sherman? Well, they're go your favorite arguments against GWB. Or Did you know there's a thing called the "Lincoln Memorial" on the Mall in DC? I have no idea what you are trying to say here. My point was that people die in civil wars. Plenty of people died in our civil war too. Like, duh. We call Ho a "butcher" because people died in the Vietnamese civil war. But we don't call American leaders "butchers." Except some people do, as someone noted, call Sherman a butcher, especially people in the south. We "understand" what drove our civil war. You apparently don't have a clue what drove the Vietnamese civil war. You only see "communism vs. capitalism/freedom/whatever your word is here, fill it in". But that was a sideshow. It was first and foremost a colonial war that became a civil war when the US egged on the interests that the French had favored.