Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (12093)	8/24/1998 12:33:00 AM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

The Hanoi regime had been killing its opponents for years, it's one of the reasons a million northerners fled south at the partition. They knew the nature of the Hanoi regime even if its American apologists hid the truth. The idea that the communist regime in Hanoi only became murderous after the war 'hardened' them isn't supported by history. Ho Chi Minh attended the First International in Moscow in the early '20s, there are movies of young Ho on the dais with his hosts Stalin and Lenin. He understood revolutionary terror as well as they did, and practiced it throughout his career. Ho spent his time turning in Vietnamese nationalists to the French and Japanese to remove any rivals. Japan is, of course, part of Asia, and rather xenophobic at that. It wasn't necessary to "conquer the countryside", despite the fact that Japanese don't particularly welcome foreigners, and despite the fact that we had just killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, many of them civilian non-combatants. The North Viet Namese aren't some new order of mankind, and there's no reason to believe they would have been any more eager to fight against an American occupation than the Japanese were. We had little trouble in the years that MacArthur ran the show in Japan. Americans, unlike the French, weren't seeking a colony, and didn't find the need to oppress the Japanese. We don't hear horror stories about the American occupation of conquered Japan. To remove North Viet Nam as a military threat to the South you needed to cut off its access to supplies, since they didn't manufacture any themselves. This meant closing Haiphong harbor, which wasn't done until Christmas of 1972. Mountains to the north make supplying from China difficult, and Viet Nam has a thousand year history of resisting Chinese domination. The threat of Chinese intervention was doubtful for both geographical and historical reasons. Invading the North in 1965 and capturing Ho would have been every bit as effective as removing Hitler and Tojo had been. These leaders were as charismatic to their people as Ho was to his, but the fighting stopped when they were removed. All of Viet Nam would have been spared the disaster that the Hanoi regime brought to them, and they would now be one of the Asian Tigers. Instead they are an impoverished socialist backwater, years behind their neighbors, and along with Cuba an example of the sort of paradise that the "agrarian reformers" championed by the American left have brought to their unfortunate citizens.