Understanding terrorism

[Urbane Guerrilla]

TW, this is going to be fun. For me, anyway.

Originally Posted by tw

Obviously, if Hanoi and Vietnam was a hell hole, then those boat people are still coming in the millions.

The quarter million that did come are sufficient to prove my case, leaving zero justification for your views. They did not run to Hanoi, but away from it, and in some cases more than once. Communist Vietnam was a hell hole, and it improved once they stopped trying to practice Communism on the streets of Saigon (I will not name a city after Ho.).

Tyranny was not N Vietnam.

Those reeducation camps for South Vietnamese with the temerity not to like the Viet Nam Cong San were what? Summer camps for underprivileged urban kids? The fruits of some figment-tree of right-wing conspiracy, postwar? The penalty for being politically incorrect from Hanoi's point of view was mostly slow death and occasionally a quick one. This is the surest mark of a tyranny, and it is one you missed by half a parsec. That's pretty incompetent thinking, TW. Don't do that; I'll bite big raggedy chunks out of you every time.

One is suppose[d] to learn history instead of rewriting it.

You can't even copyedit as well as I do, yet you expect me to take you seriously as a thinker? The bar's a bit higher than that, TW. Meet it or lose.

But then we cite specific examples. Who asked to be made a protectorate of the US? Ho Chi Minh. Whose Declaration of Independence is an example copy of the US Declaration of Independence? Vietnam's.

This was Ho's move to find a power sponsor who could back him against the French. It's interesting, but after that, what? How much substance is there in might-have-beens?

But UG blames Congress. Its called rewriting history.

The blame does not fall on the armed forces. It falls on trying to fight a polite war, which was done in the nation's capital -- an error which today's Administration, having experience of Vietnam, is determined not to repeat. Neither the Kennedy nor the Johnson Administrations knew how to win Vietnam, and in the losing of Vietnam, the domino theory was vindicated also: South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and additionally Burma fell into darkness. That not all the available dominoes fell is just our, and their, good fortune, not a disproof of the concept.

TW, were I your history teacher, I'd give you a failing grade. You're bad at this.