An essay on the Vietnam war
Jun. 14th, 2009 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThe Soviet secret services - although so enormous as to amount to a really new dimension in the very idea of spying - were not often brilliant or successful. The reason is that they worked on Communist premises, and those premises were wrong; when, indeed, they were not just the detritus of ignorant pre-revolutionary prejudices preserved in amber in the insulated and paranoid environment of the top Soviet echelons. Take, for instance, their relationship with the Vatican. Ion Pacepa tells the story of an effort to locate "secret documents" in the Vatican, using Romanian agents disguised as priests, that lasted for a decade and ended up with Andropov himself - the head of the KGB - admitting that if they had known before what they knew then (in 1972), they would not have bothered. Why was that effort a complete failure? Because it was based on then Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev's ancient anti-clerical peasant prejudices: he thought that "these priests will do anything for a kopeck", that they were all in it for the money, and that therefore money had to be both the language to talk to them in and the motivation to pursue. Khruschev was the last Soviet leader to have been an adult before the revolution, and carried into office the petrified and reinforced attitudes of a cantankerous peasant which had drawn him to the revolutionary forces in the first place. Obviously, someone who has this kind of notion of the Vatican will not even be able to locate its sins and crimes, let alone its real reasons for action. As a result, large resources and many trained operatives were kept pursuing figments of Khrschev's imagination to no purpose at all, even after Khruschev himself had fallen.
(A side effect of this campaign had rather more success. It was as a part of the Soviet campaign against the Vatican that German writer Rolf Hochhuth wrote his infamous play "The Vicar", which inaugurated the misrepresentation of Pius XII as "Hitler's Pope". This was successful, not because Hochhuth or his employers had gained a better understanding of the Vatican, but because his Western public were as ignorant as he was, and took his lies at face value. Indeed, in the shadow of Humanae Vitae, perhaps they were eager to. Hochhuth tried it again with another play, defaming, this time, Winston Churchill; that was a complete and resounding failure, since the public was rather better informed, and from then on his usefulness to the Soviet Union was over.)
That being the case, I think it would be rather too much to assume that the colossal and bloody trap into which America blundered in Vietnam had been conceived from the start by the Soviets. It would suggest a long-term cleverness and insight into American and Western society that the crew in Moscow did not often show elsewhere. On the other hand, it achieved strategic goals that had been at the forefront of Soviet thinking since the late twenties, and gave them a long-term strategic advantage that dwarfed the issue of the single region in which the war was fought. Certainly the enemy made use of it to achieve these goals, and did so, alas, brilliantly. But the Soviets, in my view, simply took advantage - perhaps even with an incredulous pleasure - of American blunders and misunderstandings. What I want to argue is that the American leaders were faced with the same problem as the strategists of all sides during World War One: the sudden appearance of a largely new way of fighting war and politics that demanded new ways of thinking. And unlike Field-marshal Foch and Field-marshal Diaz, they failed to get there.
Before 1963, Vietnam was nothing but one of a number of Third World chessboards where West and East were playing their more or less bloodstained pawns. A few years earlier, the British had successfully broken the back of a fairly similar Communist insurrection in Malaya; in 1968, on the other hand, they were forced out of their colony of Aden by a popular Arab uprising with Soviet support. That sort of thing went on all the time, and while the various victories and defeats seemed important at the time - and perhaps were - none of them had any really serious effect on the balance of powers. Indeed, such an effect was almost impossible. The two great powers had both shown that they were not disposed to seriously interfere in each other's spheres of essential interest and risk a world war. In 1948, Stalin had left the Greek Communists to be destroyed by royalist forces backed by the Western Allies (and by popular hatred of Communist violence); in 1956, Eisenhower had returned the compliment, allowing the Soviets to recover by brute force a country they had comprehensively lost, Hungary. The two major post-war changes in the strategic picture - the fall of China in 1949 and of Cuba in 1960 - had actually come as unwelcome surprises to Moscow; both had been carried out by local leaders pretty much on their own, and without any Moscow control. They had, however, certainly done nothing to deny the widespread suspicion that Communism just might be the wave of the future. But even Cuba had not been allowed to alter the strategic relationship between the powers: faced with the choice between a humiliating withdrawal and risking war, Khrushchev had cosen withdrawal.
America might have let Vietnam go with little serious disadvantage. As it turned out - after the expenditure of monstrous amounts of capital and 55,000 American lives, let alone untold hundreds of thousands Vietnamese and allies - the effect on the actual balance of powers was close to zero. All that the Vietnamese Communists managed to achieve was a war between comrades with their even more bloodthirsty neighbours in Cambodia, and the establishment of a folklorically backward Communist tyranny occasionally visited by Asian or European tourists in search of vanished flavours. The argument that the defence of Vietnam prevented a "domino effect" spreading as far as Singapore and beyond is moot at best, especially since the war in fact spread to and ruined the neighbouring countries of Cambodia and Laos. All the time, the tiger economies of the Asiatic rim, and the more distant giants, Japan and India, kept growing at the same time as they gained a firmer hold on the methods and values of democratic politics.
But whether or not it was necessary for America to fight "a land war in Asia", what is certain is that it was fought by the worst methods possible and in the worst way. As I said, the two great powers were committed not to risk a world war. This created a strategic stalemate, clearly illustrated by the overall fiasco of the Korean war, where, after years of savage fighting and bloodletting on both sides, the end result was pretty much what had been there at the beginning - one Communist tyranny in the north, one military tyranny in the south. We, half a century later, can see that the eventual advantage was with the West: just by preserving a Western ally in the south, the foundations were laid for a state that was to develop not only into a genuine and rumbustious democracy, but also into a major economic power. But what should have been clear to everyone even at the time - when one could not tell that Synghman Rhee's tyranny in the south was any better or more promising than Kim Il-Sung's in the north - was that to deploy vast armies in a situation where nobody dared go for all-out war was a complete waste of time and resources. Russia and Red China were not going to let go of North Korea and expose China's northern frontier and Russia's Pacific harbours to Western threats; and America was not going to let go of South Korea and bring the enemy within sight of Japan. Stalemate.
The deployment of vast American forces in Vietnam ten years after Korea shows that the American top brass simply had not drawn the right lessons from Korea. They were still living in the world of the two world wars, in which prevalence of industrial power had guaranteed victory after long slogging matches; but such a war, by definition, was no longer possible. To defang Communist aggression, the USA should have invaded North Vietnam; but to do so would inevitably have drawn China and possibly Russia into the war - something no American wanted. The result was to place hundreds of thousands of American conscripts in the situation of a baited bear, tied to a pole and under assault by many smaller beasts. It is commonly said that the Americans won the battle of the Tet offensive (early 1968) only to have it stolen from them by defeatist news reporting; but even if that were true, in a deeper sense the Tet was a Pyrrhic victory. The Americans may have annihilated the forces of the Viet Cong (the Communist front alliance that included Catholic, Buddhist and other nationalist parties leagued against the Saigon government and its American backers), but Moscow and Hanoi could keep the war going by the simple expedient of sending the regular North Vietnamese Army to fill the gaps. Beat one wave of Communist soldiers, and another would take its place. At one point, the Americans found that a whole Chinese division was fighting in Vietnam - and had to keep it secret, because to take open cognizance of it would have been to declare war upon China.
This created a sense of hopelessness among the American forces. Apart from complaints against biased and treacherous pacifists, nothing is more common among Vietnam vets than the sense that they were never allowed to use their strength fully. The baited bear, fully conscious that he was potentially much stronger than the dogs snapping at him, nonetheless could never reach hard enough and far enough to put an end to his own suffering. American troops went to Vietnam to become a target. The Soviets were bleeding America without losing one soldier of their own, for the expenditure of cheap and abundant Vietnamese and Chinese lives.
And now we have to take into consideration the larger strategic issues of the cold war. The core of the power of the West - and the ultimate reason why the Soviets, in spite of winning nearly every battle of the Cold War, eventually lost the war - was the West's overwhelming industrial and financial superiority. This superiority was not something granted and inevitable. When America was forced into the war on December 7, 1941, she had been subjected to twelve years of one of the most savage and debilitating depressions in history. When the war ended, all of Europe, formerly the economic centre of the world, was penniless and starving, because the Germans had not only devastated whole nations, but stolen every bit of capital and produce they could lay their hands on, to finance their war. In 1945, nobody had any particular reason to believe that the Western allies would necessarily prevail economically against Russia: to the contrary, the sequel of economic and political disasters that had marked Western experience since 1914 definitely suggested that the Western system had some fundamental fault that condemned it to violence and economic stagnation. To make matters worse, in 1946 the disastrously wrong-headed American demand that Britain should float the pound - possibly determined by the Soviet agent Harry Dexter White - devastated what was left of the British economy, leaving the world's largest empire as a bankrupt entity in urgent need of American help merely to eat. Even before the Marshall Plan, individual Americans were helping Britain to the extent of one hundred pounds of the time per head of British population; it was the generosity of individual Americans, in the face of the criminal folly of their own Treasury, that saved Britain, and possibly the rest of the West, from final collapse.
The Marshall Plan that followed certainly offered valuable relief to a devastated West. But what really guaranteed the years of runaway growth that followed was the system that had been put in place, even before the end of the war, at the economic conference at Bretton Woods. The Bretton Woods system of joint free trade (within limits) and fixed money exchanges (within limits) was the cradle within which western Europe and Japan exploded from post-war misery into literally unprecedented prosperity, while America kept rising above them all like a sun at the centre of its planetary system. It also represented the peak of American prestige in the world; I am just old enough to remember a time when people in Europe and elsewhere really wanted to be more like Americans, when America seemed like the ultimate model both in civic freedom and in economic prosperity. America not only prospered directly from the rise of allied economies, but also developed investments in those economies to such an extent that a leading French politician wrote a best-selling book about "the American challenge", arguing that American investments in Europe were themselves an interest large enough to be comparable to the whole American AND to the whole west European economies.
It is enough to damn the Vietnam war, to say that it caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The enormous, crushing espenditure America invested in the preservation of this corner of Asia (on top of the equally vast but rather more justifiable expenditure to send a man on the Moon, which I discussed elsewhere) forced President Nixon to float the dollar, with immediate and disastrous results for his allies. It was on this occasion that Nixon delivered himself of the elegant opinion that he "didn't give a fuck about the lira", apparently forgetting that the prosperity of America in the previous decades had been inextricably bound with that of her allies (remember "the American challenge"). Worse still, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the fall of the dollar led to grave economic problems for the oil-exporting countries, which, added to the shock of the Yom Kippur war, led them to force the price of oil to astronomic levels by a ruthless cartel action. This resulted in the disastrous inflation that was the ugly and peculiar characteristic of the seventies.
If the atrocious stumble of the Western economies and the brutal separation between oil exporters and importers were the only advantage that the Soviets had gained from Vietnam, they could well be pleased with themselves. But the economic aspect was only one part of the ruinous impact of the war on the West's internal relationships and external prestige, and, indeed, of America's own social cohesion.
America's commanders had been too succesful in both world wars. In the first, they had essentially been latecomers to the success achieved by rivers of English, French, Italian and Russian blood - and the blood of a few lesser nations; Belgium, Serbia, Romania, Portugal. In the second, they struck the final blow to a Germany that was already losing the war against an overwhelmingly more powerful and better organized Russia, and in turn overwhelmed a weaker Japan by sheer force of numbers. Even so, they took the wrong lesson from these wars. The most significant and decisive victory of the war against Japan, the battle of Midway, had been achieved when America was hugely inferior in men and means, and by the use of brilliant deception and audacious use of the battle ground. The victory in France was mostly the result of British planning and of espionage deception, forcing the enemy to concentrate around Calais while all the time the attack was meant to strike Normandy. Both had been the result of careful planning, the use of deception and reading the enemy's mind, and adapting the action to the terrain. Even more important, they had been actions aimed at the chief enemies, intended to engage and destroy its main forces, and so had been the whole campaign. In Vietnam, on the other hand, the prospect of engaging the chief enemy was nil, the prospects for strategic deception small - it was the American forces that were exposed to the enemy, not the reverse - and the opportunities for the enemy to deceive America vast. Nonetheless, America went into Vietnam as though it were fighting World War Two - or rather, its somewhat altered memories of World War Two. She fought as if just piling resources upon resources and men upon men could guarantee victory.
As a result, the world was treated to the picture of an overwhelming giant battering at a dwarf. The air bombardments, the napalm, the attempt to destroy the "Ho Chi Minh path" by burning the forests where it was supposed to lie, the vast number of civilians injured and killed, were a disastrous advertisement for American military power. The Soviet Union had been trying since the late nineteen-twenties to alter the international image of America from the benevolent, prosperous and progressive democracy to that of a brutal, bigoted, violent, imperialist giant with no brain; and for forty years their attempts had drawn a blank except for the minds of already committed Communist supporters. In the early sixties, the prestige of America was at its zenith; and in a few years, these damning and dreadful pictures achieved exactly what forty years of Soviet propaganda had failed. There were subsidiary reasons, in particular the civil-rights crisis; just by trying to finally lance this evil in its own body, America exposed it for the whole world to see. But the bad effect of TV images of Ku Klux Klan crowds and murders would never have been so pronounced if they had not gone along with the horrors of Vietnam.
Equally disastrous was to send to Vietnam, year after year, the conscripts of a drafted army. That was the main reason why every American ally, with the single exception of Australia, refused to support America in Vietnam; they knew all too well that you simply do not send conscripts to distant colonial wars. Conscripts are for home defence, and for wars in which the very existence of the nation is endangered; and in such wars, they will as a rule perform better than professionals. No professional army could possibly have survived the blows that the British suffered at the Somme, or the French at Verdun, or re-formed and fought again after being broken on the field as the Italians did after Caporetto; and on the other side, no professional army could have fought for five years while on the edge of starvation and against overwhelming opposition, as the Germans and Austrians did. But when the government, for whatever reason, needs a war to be fought in a distant country - a war on which important issues may rest, but which does not threaten the whole nation - then you employ professionals. That was why the British Army had for almost the whole of its history been professional, and that was why the French had created the Foreign Legion. But Americans insisted on shovelling their own civilian conscript children, year after year, into the hell of Vietnam, into that very place where America stood at bay like a baited bear, to be everlastingly under attack without ever being able to really reply. The American commanders expected that the crusading spirit that had led two generations of American conscripts to fight, and fight well, across four continents, could be kept going for a campaign in a distant country which had no importance to the average American, and under conditions that guaranteed that victory could not be won. The results ought to have been foreseen. Americans can in fact be congratulated on keeping their crusading spirit, in spite of all conditions, going for five years; but by 1968, the realization that the immense effort could look forward to no certain success was eating away at the national spirit. And still the most enormous efforts and expenses were ahead of the nation, rather than behind.
If the result of shovelling ordinary American kids to Vietnam was bad for America itself, that was nothing compared with what the war did to her alliances. Vietnam lies like a black stain across the path of the Western alliance. Until about 1965, America was nearly stainless in western eyes; from 1968 onwards, the words "imperialism", "police brutality", "militarism", clang to her like tar. Her prestige never recovered from the way she fought this war. And the Soviets never had to do a thing to bring this about: the collapse in American prestige that had been one of their strategic goals since the days of Sacco and Vanzetti fell into their laps like a ripe pear.
I can see my conservative American friends bristle at all these assertions. Well, this is not about America's moral character. As I said, Americans are, if anything, to be complimented for keeping up the will to fight, in such a hopeless situation, for so long. But the monstrous expenditure that broke the Bretton Woods system, the multiplication of effort in default of any achievable strategic objective, the abuse of conscripted youth in a distant war that mattered little to them, are the hallmarks of a colossal and culpable strategic error. By the time the Americans tried to "vietnamize" the conflict, it was far too late; the seeds of economic crisis and dislike between allies had been sowed. Since then, America's allies have looked on any use of American armed power, however justified, with concern and prejudice; a damage that has long outlasted the enemy who hoped to profit from it.
I would say more. A superstitious overvaluation of American strength, a groundless belief that America can achieve anything and do so by sheer power alone, is the common feature of several American strategic mistakes, before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. One could even go as far back as FD Roosevelt's foolish and doomed attempt to replace Charles de Gaulle as leader of France; that already embodied the absurd belief that America could simply take on herself to choose and reject who was going to be the leader of an allied country. De Gaulle first, and the French nation later, made short work of that folly; but it throws an ugly shadow on subsequent events. The last few years in Iraq have been blighted by the complete lack of a political plan for reconstruction; as though, once Saddam had been ejected, America needed to do no more than speak, and a democratic government would spring fully equipped from the ground. This is simply another manifestation of the same superstition. Power simply cannot do those things.
What first appeared in Vietnam was a new kind of war, one in which the issue was no longer overwhelming power but obstinate endurance. The war in Vietnam could not be won; but it could have been, at a much smaller price than was paid, prolonged for decades, till the North Vietnamese themselves lost the will and possibly the ability to keep sending troops to their deaths south. That is the kind of war that is right now being fought in Afghanistan, where the issue is not whether the West can muster the resources to go on, but whether we have the resolution to just keep going for decades. The American commanders in the sixties simply had never conceived of such a thing, and their reaction was, in practice, denial. One of the words that came out of Vietnam and went around the world - with a very bad overtone - was "escalation": if one ton of bombs did not stop the guerrillas, next time you poured ten tons, and if that did not work, fifty tons. That is evidently a symptom of imaginative impotence, of being unable to cope with facts on the ground. And that was how America came to break the Bretton Woods system, sabotage her own alliance system, and blacken her good name - for no good reason. Vietnam, with due respect to the unfortunate and courageous conscripts sent there to pay for their leaders' errors, was simply the worst strategic mistake in American history; one for which the whole world is still paying today.
(A side effect of this campaign had rather more success. It was as a part of the Soviet campaign against the Vatican that German writer Rolf Hochhuth wrote his infamous play "The Vicar", which inaugurated the misrepresentation of Pius XII as "Hitler's Pope". This was successful, not because Hochhuth or his employers had gained a better understanding of the Vatican, but because his Western public were as ignorant as he was, and took his lies at face value. Indeed, in the shadow of Humanae Vitae, perhaps they were eager to. Hochhuth tried it again with another play, defaming, this time, Winston Churchill; that was a complete and resounding failure, since the public was rather better informed, and from then on his usefulness to the Soviet Union was over.)
That being the case, I think it would be rather too much to assume that the colossal and bloody trap into which America blundered in Vietnam had been conceived from the start by the Soviets. It would suggest a long-term cleverness and insight into American and Western society that the crew in Moscow did not often show elsewhere. On the other hand, it achieved strategic goals that had been at the forefront of Soviet thinking since the late twenties, and gave them a long-term strategic advantage that dwarfed the issue of the single region in which the war was fought. Certainly the enemy made use of it to achieve these goals, and did so, alas, brilliantly. But the Soviets, in my view, simply took advantage - perhaps even with an incredulous pleasure - of American blunders and misunderstandings. What I want to argue is that the American leaders were faced with the same problem as the strategists of all sides during World War One: the sudden appearance of a largely new way of fighting war and politics that demanded new ways of thinking. And unlike Field-marshal Foch and Field-marshal Diaz, they failed to get there.
Before 1963, Vietnam was nothing but one of a number of Third World chessboards where West and East were playing their more or less bloodstained pawns. A few years earlier, the British had successfully broken the back of a fairly similar Communist insurrection in Malaya; in 1968, on the other hand, they were forced out of their colony of Aden by a popular Arab uprising with Soviet support. That sort of thing went on all the time, and while the various victories and defeats seemed important at the time - and perhaps were - none of them had any really serious effect on the balance of powers. Indeed, such an effect was almost impossible. The two great powers had both shown that they were not disposed to seriously interfere in each other's spheres of essential interest and risk a world war. In 1948, Stalin had left the Greek Communists to be destroyed by royalist forces backed by the Western Allies (and by popular hatred of Communist violence); in 1956, Eisenhower had returned the compliment, allowing the Soviets to recover by brute force a country they had comprehensively lost, Hungary. The two major post-war changes in the strategic picture - the fall of China in 1949 and of Cuba in 1960 - had actually come as unwelcome surprises to Moscow; both had been carried out by local leaders pretty much on their own, and without any Moscow control. They had, however, certainly done nothing to deny the widespread suspicion that Communism just might be the wave of the future. But even Cuba had not been allowed to alter the strategic relationship between the powers: faced with the choice between a humiliating withdrawal and risking war, Khrushchev had cosen withdrawal.
America might have let Vietnam go with little serious disadvantage. As it turned out - after the expenditure of monstrous amounts of capital and 55,000 American lives, let alone untold hundreds of thousands Vietnamese and allies - the effect on the actual balance of powers was close to zero. All that the Vietnamese Communists managed to achieve was a war between comrades with their even more bloodthirsty neighbours in Cambodia, and the establishment of a folklorically backward Communist tyranny occasionally visited by Asian or European tourists in search of vanished flavours. The argument that the defence of Vietnam prevented a "domino effect" spreading as far as Singapore and beyond is moot at best, especially since the war in fact spread to and ruined the neighbouring countries of Cambodia and Laos. All the time, the tiger economies of the Asiatic rim, and the more distant giants, Japan and India, kept growing at the same time as they gained a firmer hold on the methods and values of democratic politics.
But whether or not it was necessary for America to fight "a land war in Asia", what is certain is that it was fought by the worst methods possible and in the worst way. As I said, the two great powers were committed not to risk a world war. This created a strategic stalemate, clearly illustrated by the overall fiasco of the Korean war, where, after years of savage fighting and bloodletting on both sides, the end result was pretty much what had been there at the beginning - one Communist tyranny in the north, one military tyranny in the south. We, half a century later, can see that the eventual advantage was with the West: just by preserving a Western ally in the south, the foundations were laid for a state that was to develop not only into a genuine and rumbustious democracy, but also into a major economic power. But what should have been clear to everyone even at the time - when one could not tell that Synghman Rhee's tyranny in the south was any better or more promising than Kim Il-Sung's in the north - was that to deploy vast armies in a situation where nobody dared go for all-out war was a complete waste of time and resources. Russia and Red China were not going to let go of North Korea and expose China's northern frontier and Russia's Pacific harbours to Western threats; and America was not going to let go of South Korea and bring the enemy within sight of Japan. Stalemate.
The deployment of vast American forces in Vietnam ten years after Korea shows that the American top brass simply had not drawn the right lessons from Korea. They were still living in the world of the two world wars, in which prevalence of industrial power had guaranteed victory after long slogging matches; but such a war, by definition, was no longer possible. To defang Communist aggression, the USA should have invaded North Vietnam; but to do so would inevitably have drawn China and possibly Russia into the war - something no American wanted. The result was to place hundreds of thousands of American conscripts in the situation of a baited bear, tied to a pole and under assault by many smaller beasts. It is commonly said that the Americans won the battle of the Tet offensive (early 1968) only to have it stolen from them by defeatist news reporting; but even if that were true, in a deeper sense the Tet was a Pyrrhic victory. The Americans may have annihilated the forces of the Viet Cong (the Communist front alliance that included Catholic, Buddhist and other nationalist parties leagued against the Saigon government and its American backers), but Moscow and Hanoi could keep the war going by the simple expedient of sending the regular North Vietnamese Army to fill the gaps. Beat one wave of Communist soldiers, and another would take its place. At one point, the Americans found that a whole Chinese division was fighting in Vietnam - and had to keep it secret, because to take open cognizance of it would have been to declare war upon China.
This created a sense of hopelessness among the American forces. Apart from complaints against biased and treacherous pacifists, nothing is more common among Vietnam vets than the sense that they were never allowed to use their strength fully. The baited bear, fully conscious that he was potentially much stronger than the dogs snapping at him, nonetheless could never reach hard enough and far enough to put an end to his own suffering. American troops went to Vietnam to become a target. The Soviets were bleeding America without losing one soldier of their own, for the expenditure of cheap and abundant Vietnamese and Chinese lives.
And now we have to take into consideration the larger strategic issues of the cold war. The core of the power of the West - and the ultimate reason why the Soviets, in spite of winning nearly every battle of the Cold War, eventually lost the war - was the West's overwhelming industrial and financial superiority. This superiority was not something granted and inevitable. When America was forced into the war on December 7, 1941, she had been subjected to twelve years of one of the most savage and debilitating depressions in history. When the war ended, all of Europe, formerly the economic centre of the world, was penniless and starving, because the Germans had not only devastated whole nations, but stolen every bit of capital and produce they could lay their hands on, to finance their war. In 1945, nobody had any particular reason to believe that the Western allies would necessarily prevail economically against Russia: to the contrary, the sequel of economic and political disasters that had marked Western experience since 1914 definitely suggested that the Western system had some fundamental fault that condemned it to violence and economic stagnation. To make matters worse, in 1946 the disastrously wrong-headed American demand that Britain should float the pound - possibly determined by the Soviet agent Harry Dexter White - devastated what was left of the British economy, leaving the world's largest empire as a bankrupt entity in urgent need of American help merely to eat. Even before the Marshall Plan, individual Americans were helping Britain to the extent of one hundred pounds of the time per head of British population; it was the generosity of individual Americans, in the face of the criminal folly of their own Treasury, that saved Britain, and possibly the rest of the West, from final collapse.
The Marshall Plan that followed certainly offered valuable relief to a devastated West. But what really guaranteed the years of runaway growth that followed was the system that had been put in place, even before the end of the war, at the economic conference at Bretton Woods. The Bretton Woods system of joint free trade (within limits) and fixed money exchanges (within limits) was the cradle within which western Europe and Japan exploded from post-war misery into literally unprecedented prosperity, while America kept rising above them all like a sun at the centre of its planetary system. It also represented the peak of American prestige in the world; I am just old enough to remember a time when people in Europe and elsewhere really wanted to be more like Americans, when America seemed like the ultimate model both in civic freedom and in economic prosperity. America not only prospered directly from the rise of allied economies, but also developed investments in those economies to such an extent that a leading French politician wrote a best-selling book about "the American challenge", arguing that American investments in Europe were themselves an interest large enough to be comparable to the whole American AND to the whole west European economies.
It is enough to damn the Vietnam war, to say that it caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. The enormous, crushing espenditure America invested in the preservation of this corner of Asia (on top of the equally vast but rather more justifiable expenditure to send a man on the Moon, which I discussed elsewhere) forced President Nixon to float the dollar, with immediate and disastrous results for his allies. It was on this occasion that Nixon delivered himself of the elegant opinion that he "didn't give a fuck about the lira", apparently forgetting that the prosperity of America in the previous decades had been inextricably bound with that of her allies (remember "the American challenge"). Worse still, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the fall of the dollar led to grave economic problems for the oil-exporting countries, which, added to the shock of the Yom Kippur war, led them to force the price of oil to astronomic levels by a ruthless cartel action. This resulted in the disastrous inflation that was the ugly and peculiar characteristic of the seventies.
If the atrocious stumble of the Western economies and the brutal separation between oil exporters and importers were the only advantage that the Soviets had gained from Vietnam, they could well be pleased with themselves. But the economic aspect was only one part of the ruinous impact of the war on the West's internal relationships and external prestige, and, indeed, of America's own social cohesion.
America's commanders had been too succesful in both world wars. In the first, they had essentially been latecomers to the success achieved by rivers of English, French, Italian and Russian blood - and the blood of a few lesser nations; Belgium, Serbia, Romania, Portugal. In the second, they struck the final blow to a Germany that was already losing the war against an overwhelmingly more powerful and better organized Russia, and in turn overwhelmed a weaker Japan by sheer force of numbers. Even so, they took the wrong lesson from these wars. The most significant and decisive victory of the war against Japan, the battle of Midway, had been achieved when America was hugely inferior in men and means, and by the use of brilliant deception and audacious use of the battle ground. The victory in France was mostly the result of British planning and of espionage deception, forcing the enemy to concentrate around Calais while all the time the attack was meant to strike Normandy. Both had been the result of careful planning, the use of deception and reading the enemy's mind, and adapting the action to the terrain. Even more important, they had been actions aimed at the chief enemies, intended to engage and destroy its main forces, and so had been the whole campaign. In Vietnam, on the other hand, the prospect of engaging the chief enemy was nil, the prospects for strategic deception small - it was the American forces that were exposed to the enemy, not the reverse - and the opportunities for the enemy to deceive America vast. Nonetheless, America went into Vietnam as though it were fighting World War Two - or rather, its somewhat altered memories of World War Two. She fought as if just piling resources upon resources and men upon men could guarantee victory.
As a result, the world was treated to the picture of an overwhelming giant battering at a dwarf. The air bombardments, the napalm, the attempt to destroy the "Ho Chi Minh path" by burning the forests where it was supposed to lie, the vast number of civilians injured and killed, were a disastrous advertisement for American military power. The Soviet Union had been trying since the late nineteen-twenties to alter the international image of America from the benevolent, prosperous and progressive democracy to that of a brutal, bigoted, violent, imperialist giant with no brain; and for forty years their attempts had drawn a blank except for the minds of already committed Communist supporters. In the early sixties, the prestige of America was at its zenith; and in a few years, these damning and dreadful pictures achieved exactly what forty years of Soviet propaganda had failed. There were subsidiary reasons, in particular the civil-rights crisis; just by trying to finally lance this evil in its own body, America exposed it for the whole world to see. But the bad effect of TV images of Ku Klux Klan crowds and murders would never have been so pronounced if they had not gone along with the horrors of Vietnam.
Equally disastrous was to send to Vietnam, year after year, the conscripts of a drafted army. That was the main reason why every American ally, with the single exception of Australia, refused to support America in Vietnam; they knew all too well that you simply do not send conscripts to distant colonial wars. Conscripts are for home defence, and for wars in which the very existence of the nation is endangered; and in such wars, they will as a rule perform better than professionals. No professional army could possibly have survived the blows that the British suffered at the Somme, or the French at Verdun, or re-formed and fought again after being broken on the field as the Italians did after Caporetto; and on the other side, no professional army could have fought for five years while on the edge of starvation and against overwhelming opposition, as the Germans and Austrians did. But when the government, for whatever reason, needs a war to be fought in a distant country - a war on which important issues may rest, but which does not threaten the whole nation - then you employ professionals. That was why the British Army had for almost the whole of its history been professional, and that was why the French had created the Foreign Legion. But Americans insisted on shovelling their own civilian conscript children, year after year, into the hell of Vietnam, into that very place where America stood at bay like a baited bear, to be everlastingly under attack without ever being able to really reply. The American commanders expected that the crusading spirit that had led two generations of American conscripts to fight, and fight well, across four continents, could be kept going for a campaign in a distant country which had no importance to the average American, and under conditions that guaranteed that victory could not be won. The results ought to have been foreseen. Americans can in fact be congratulated on keeping their crusading spirit, in spite of all conditions, going for five years; but by 1968, the realization that the immense effort could look forward to no certain success was eating away at the national spirit. And still the most enormous efforts and expenses were ahead of the nation, rather than behind.
If the result of shovelling ordinary American kids to Vietnam was bad for America itself, that was nothing compared with what the war did to her alliances. Vietnam lies like a black stain across the path of the Western alliance. Until about 1965, America was nearly stainless in western eyes; from 1968 onwards, the words "imperialism", "police brutality", "militarism", clang to her like tar. Her prestige never recovered from the way she fought this war. And the Soviets never had to do a thing to bring this about: the collapse in American prestige that had been one of their strategic goals since the days of Sacco and Vanzetti fell into their laps like a ripe pear.
I can see my conservative American friends bristle at all these assertions. Well, this is not about America's moral character. As I said, Americans are, if anything, to be complimented for keeping up the will to fight, in such a hopeless situation, for so long. But the monstrous expenditure that broke the Bretton Woods system, the multiplication of effort in default of any achievable strategic objective, the abuse of conscripted youth in a distant war that mattered little to them, are the hallmarks of a colossal and culpable strategic error. By the time the Americans tried to "vietnamize" the conflict, it was far too late; the seeds of economic crisis and dislike between allies had been sowed. Since then, America's allies have looked on any use of American armed power, however justified, with concern and prejudice; a damage that has long outlasted the enemy who hoped to profit from it.
I would say more. A superstitious overvaluation of American strength, a groundless belief that America can achieve anything and do so by sheer power alone, is the common feature of several American strategic mistakes, before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. One could even go as far back as FD Roosevelt's foolish and doomed attempt to replace Charles de Gaulle as leader of France; that already embodied the absurd belief that America could simply take on herself to choose and reject who was going to be the leader of an allied country. De Gaulle first, and the French nation later, made short work of that folly; but it throws an ugly shadow on subsequent events. The last few years in Iraq have been blighted by the complete lack of a political plan for reconstruction; as though, once Saddam had been ejected, America needed to do no more than speak, and a democratic government would spring fully equipped from the ground. This is simply another manifestation of the same superstition. Power simply cannot do those things.
What first appeared in Vietnam was a new kind of war, one in which the issue was no longer overwhelming power but obstinate endurance. The war in Vietnam could not be won; but it could have been, at a much smaller price than was paid, prolonged for decades, till the North Vietnamese themselves lost the will and possibly the ability to keep sending troops to their deaths south. That is the kind of war that is right now being fought in Afghanistan, where the issue is not whether the West can muster the resources to go on, but whether we have the resolution to just keep going for decades. The American commanders in the sixties simply had never conceived of such a thing, and their reaction was, in practice, denial. One of the words that came out of Vietnam and went around the world - with a very bad overtone - was "escalation": if one ton of bombs did not stop the guerrillas, next time you poured ten tons, and if that did not work, fifty tons. That is evidently a symptom of imaginative impotence, of being unable to cope with facts on the ground. And that was how America came to break the Bretton Woods system, sabotage her own alliance system, and blacken her good name - for no good reason. Vietnam, with due respect to the unfortunate and courageous conscripts sent there to pay for their leaders' errors, was simply the worst strategic mistake in American history; one for which the whole world is still paying today.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-14 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-14 09:58 pm (UTC)Spot-on. We threw in additional material resources when what we needed was a different grand strategy.
There were two strategies, one offensive and one defensive, which might have won the war. Both would have required diplomatic changes. Neither were tried.
The offensive strategy would have been to drive into the North, with the ultimate aim of toppling the Communist regime and meanwhile of depriving it of the energy to carry out offensive operations in the South. This would obviously have risked war with China, and would have required that we act so as to deter the Chinese from large-scale intervention, through directly stating in advance that if China intervened, we would consider all China to be a potential battleground (meaning that we could have bombed Chinese cities, ports and rail junctions). This was not done, or rather was very half-heartedly done, restricted to air and commando raids.
The defensive strategy would have been to run a defensive line into Laos and Cambodia so as to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail, depriving the Communist forces in the South of supplies and hence of the ability to carry out offensive operations. This would have required a willingness to demand that Laos and Cambodia cease their pretense of neutrality and pick a side in the war. This too was not done, or rather was very half-heartedly done, again resticted to air and commando raids.
With neither a decisive offensive nor firm defensive strategy in place, we were simply offering the foe the opportunity to strike at us, for as long as they wanted.
Had we been willing to be really brutal in our airstrikes, at least as brutal as were in World War II, we might have won anyway. We could have dropped the Northern dams, flooded the farms of the Red River valley, and turned Hanoi and Haiphong into Tokyo-like firestorms. This level of raiding would have sapped the strength of the North and might have created an increasing demand for peace. But, inexplicably, we weren't willing to be brutal in the one way in which we had been brutal in World War II.
This was probably because we saw that it would have made good Communist propaganda. Perhaps, but it probably would also have won us the war, or at least weakened the North to the point where the South could have stood against its attacks with less assistance.
The American commanders expected that the crusading spirit that had led two generations of American conscripts to fight, and fight well, across four continents, could be kept going for a campaign in a distant country which had no importance to the average American, and under conditions that guaranteed that victory could not be won. The results ought to have been foreseen. Americans can in fact be congratulated on keeping their crusading spirit, in spite of all conditions, going for five years; but by 1968, the realization that the immense effort could look forward to no certain success was eating away at the national spirit. And still the most enormous efforts and expenses were ahead of the nation, rather than behind.
The problem with a crusading spirit is that it needs crusading results. When one chooses a strategy that cannot achieve the decisive defeat of the enemy, crusading results are impossible.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-14 10:16 pm (UTC)It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
The problem with a crusading spirit is that it needs crusading results.
As I said, the people of the US, if not their commanders, deserve congratulations for managing to keep up their fighting spirit for years in spite of increasingly frustrating circumstances. And perhaps, if someone had understood the kind of war that was coming upon them, and said clearly: "My fellow citizens, we are fighting a war that will last long, and our goal is simply to keep going as long as it takes", they might have gone on even longer. However, what the authorities did was to keep holding out a delusive expectation of victory which the Pentagon Papers proved they themselves did not believe. And if they did not believe it,why should the citizens and why should the soldiers?
no subject
Date: 2009-06-14 10:32 pm (UTC)It did anyway. I don't know if you are old enough to remember; I am - just about - and I can tell you that the news we heard left the impression that Germany and Japan had had it light as compared with Vietnam. Plus, there was the special nastiness of napalm and Agent Orange. Since the Soviets were getting their poundsworth of propaganda anyway, you might as well have gone in hard.
Yes, I know. And in fact napalm (and other incendiaries) were used during World War II as well. It's just that in World War II the international media weren't focusing on this.
And the media has stuck with that template. Wars in which extreme care is taken to avoid bombing civilians, such as the Iraq campaign of 2003-09, are described as "America bombing civilians." Sometimes, through an excess of enthusiasm, as "saturation" or "carpet"-bombing of civilians, as if these adjectives were merely amplifiers and did not have specific military meanings.
Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 07:36 am (UTC)We got the opportunity to bleed the Soviets even further with their ill fated invasion of Afghanistan. I was in Kabul when the Communists took power in April of '78. Being young and foolish, I went looking for tanks (and such like) while riding a bicycle around downtown Kabul. Ducked into a (dry) fountain when some machine gun bullets were aimed nearby. I then went home and waited until the next day when the new regime was firmly in power to leave. Did get to watch the jets bombing and tanks firing at each other from our second story porch. Even picked up some shrapnel from the alley outside our front door.
Another way that the Soviets lost the 70 year War was that we could (and did) outspend them on military items and research. Our secret service knew about a number of their operations in the US, to the point that we "let" them "steal" technology that we had sabotaged. (Think of the natural gas explosion that was so large and bright it was at first thought to be a nuclear explosion). I have met spies on our side that told of how easy it was for the US to infiltrate the Soviet system - one of the ways that the US knew who was spying on it). It was a great deal more difficult for the Soviets to put their own people in the US. They had to use "fellow travellers" that were sympathetic to their cause. Their own people just did not have the mind set to act like americans (see your comments on Nikita).
Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 09:43 am (UTC)You:Another way that the Soviets lost the 70 year War was that we could (and did) outspend them on military items and research.
No difference, is there? The Soviet Union beat and battered itself to death against a marble wall of wealth that it never managed to dent. Even the vicious economic crisis of the seventies did not reduce the imbalance. The only reason why the Soviet Union was a great power in the first place was that practically all her available resources of power were focused on external aggression, subversion and advance; whereas the rich societies of the West regarded foreign policy as only one of many concerns, and aggressive expansion for its own sake as immoral "imperialism". The enormous difference in size between the Western and Eastern undercover apparati, for instance, meant that on a whole series of issues, including the control of culture, the West was constantly on the defensive or even unaware of being under attack. In a different way from classical Prussia, Soviet Russia was all sting, all aggression.
Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 03:58 pm (UTC)Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 03:59 pm (UTC)Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 04:28 pm (UTC)Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 05:44 pm (UTC)Re: Vietnam, a different take
Date: 2009-06-16 10:55 am (UTC)interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 11:30 am (UTC)- Churchill is famous because of his determined stand against the Nazis. If Pacelli had taken a similar stand, his reputation would also be proteced by his fame. There is a lesson here for all those who try to 'avoid taking sides' when the issues of honour killings, terrorism and jyhad come up: the title of "Bin Laden's Bishop" is likely to be thrown sometime in the next generation, and it'll stick as hard as "Hitler's Pope" has.
- Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. From the Warsaw Uprising to Tet, the local communists ended up dead whenever the Soviets were about to roll in. And if we look at, say, Yugoslavia, we can see why: locals whose powerbase is within the country could steer their own course, as Tito did. Once they were eliminated, power devolved from Moscow, creating puppet states.
- Vietnam had been in constant warfare, well, forever. What we call the 'Vietnam war' to them is the 'American war' sitting between the French and (latest) Chinese wars. Most of the vietnamese fighting weren't concerned with the international aspects; they were fighting the village across the river that they'd been fighting for centuries.
- until, of course, after Tet: when the North Vietnamese were using a conscript army to fight. Given they won, doesn't that undermine your argument?
- the domino effect spread as far Indonesia; they're still antsy about their communists. Further, access to South Vietnam meant that the Soviet submarines had free access to the Indian and South Pacific oceans: a considerable achievement.
- a major failing in the use of conscripts in Vietnam was that they were there for a tour. During the world wars, soldiers were there for the duration: they had a vested interest in winning the war as they couldn't go home until it was won.In Vietnam, conscripts knew that their tour would end before the war did, stripping away their motivation. This isn't cowardice; knowing that you won't *see* victory is deflating, no matter how patriotic or professional you are.
- there's nothing new uder the sun. Superpowers thumb wresting is not new. The intricate politics as Byzantium and Persia circled each other come to mind; and that ended with the first Islamic expansion.
Nor is the use of guerrilla tactics by rural communities.
- the USA's economic acendacy was ensured by what they were building during WWII: ships and planes and jeeps. Sure, the ruskies build fine tanks, which meant they could then build tractors; their rockets were adapted to start the space race (and put space exploration *back* a century) - but what is factory that turns out artillery supposed to do during peace time? What is the artilleryman supposed to do?
The Americans build two things - transport and infrastructure. That was their contribution to winning the war, and it won them the peace.
- at Midway, the US lost 1/2 their carrier fleet, the Japanese lost 1/5th. In attrition terms, the Americans lost Midway. The American victory in the pacific was won by their submarines, cutting the supplies of oil, rubber etc to the factories in Japan; the resources that the Japanese had gone to war to secure couldn't get through.
- by denying the democratic heritage that they inherited from Britain, the Americans have come to assume that democracy spirings up quickly and naturally. It's not like that. Before the American Revolution, every American colony had its own regional, elected government; and the colonists had grown up in Britain herself. It takes generations to learn how to live in a democracy.
During the Whitlam Dimissal, my mother working in the civil service, and were nervously asked by a romanian immigrant what it was all about. She explained the constitutional background, and how this would trigger an election, and so forth - but he just grew more and more nervous. Finally he burst out: "what I want to know is this - will we all be taken out and shot?"
It's a different world, and you don't change it by changing the names. People need to learn that it is safe to hold and express opinions, and that takes a long, long time.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 02:47 pm (UTC)2 - Bullshit. I have published about this particular lie several times and I don't want to repeat myself. The lie about Pius XII only got believed because, one, most of the people who remembered how things really were were dead, and, two, the world Press and media had a vested interest in attacking the Church. Don't you believe what you read in the papers - especially where the Church is concerned. As for Hochhuth, the only question about him was whether he was a Communist propagandist or a Nazi one; he might have been both, but the fact that "The Vicar" was staged by Erwin Piscator, colleague and successor of Berthold Brecht, strongly suggest that Pacepa is right in charging the Communist apparatus with it.
3 - That is utterly irrelevant to the American result. To say otherwise would be the same as to say that just because it suited Stalin, therefore the SS who destroyed the Warsaw ghetto and then the whole city were manoeuvred by him.
4 - The French war ended in 1954. The American war started in 1963, That is nine, count'em, nine years in which any trouble within South Vietnam did not involve any foreign protector. And as I said, it could have gone on for ever, if the Americans had understood what kind of war this was. The problem with the Americans is that they see everything as a "problem" to be solved, when often it is simply a "condition" to be endured.
5 - The North Vietnamese could get their conscripts to believe that they were fighting for their fatherland - like the conscript armies of the two world war. The Americans, obviously, were not.
6 - That the Indonesians are scared about Communists does not mean that Communists were a threat. It may rather have something to do that after the massacres of 1966 (IIRC), Soeharto taught them all that he had rescued them from the big evil Communist threat - whereas real, CIA-fingered Communists were only about 5,000, and the other half million who were butchered were just people whom Soeharto's faction wanted out of the way. Indonesia would do better to worry about its Islamists.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 03:54 pm (UTC)Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 02:47 pm (UTC)8 - Crap. The Romans and Persians had fought each other directly, and to destruction. The peace that followed Herclian's undexpected recovery of Roman territory was the peace of exhaustion; neither empire had the resources to do anything any more. That is proved, even before the Arabian invasion, by the continued collapse of Roman Italy into Longobard hands. And when the ragged Muslim bands emerged from a region that had so far done nothing more than supply the odd low-level auxiliary to the two empires, they found no place in any condition to defend itself. My point is that the cold war was just that, cold. Wars of great powers will never happen again.
9 - And your point is? The Western alliance - Western Europe, North America, Japan, and later the Asiatic rim countries - was collectively overwhelmingly richer and more productive than the Communist countries. That won the cold war. The Soviet Union won nearly every battle in the war, but could not overcome the immense difference. I well remember, in the seventies (!) seeing a few Lada cars in the streets of Rome. They were models we knew well, for Lada built on outdated Fiat models whose production facilities and designs were passed on when the Italian manufacturer no longer had any use for them. I said at the time, that it was pathetic to think of the Great Revolution, the Hope of Mankind, being reduced to making cheap knock-offs of one of the lesser Western brand names just in order to have cars at all. That was before mr.Gorbachev and long before the Wall came down. I did not know it at the time, but I had seen the destiny of Russia. I think that it was at something like the same time that I read that Russia, the largest grain field in the world, was having to import Canadian wheat. Think about it.
10 - Your attempt to be overclever here shows that you do not understand war. The point is that the Japanese lost four carriers they could not replace; the Americans could easily have lost Midway, which was their baited hook for the enemy and did not in itself matter a jot. The dockyards of the American continent were already producing carriers by the dozen. The whole Japanese gamble relied on keeping their sea and air fleets - painfully built up over decades - intact and keeping the Americans from recovering. Once the elite pilots and crews of the four carriers were lost at Midway, neither they nor their vessels could be replaced, and Japan was in effect one enormous floating corpse waiting to be slowly butchered.
11 - And your point is? In case you had forgotten, the people the Americans were supporting in Saigon were hardly democrats. Van Thieu and Cao Ky were tyrants by anyone's standards.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-18 01:21 pm (UTC)8. [blinks] Right, so as a historian, you're prepared to state that "Wars of great powers will never happen again"? Care to explain how this is different to Nobel's pronoucement?
9. I am well aware of the differences; China has been importing Australian rice since the 1950s (and rememeber that growing rice is very water intensive). My point is that the USA came out of WWII with the best transport network in the world, and that made them the first superpower. You simply can't *have* a decent economy without transport.
10. Japan *could* take those losses, as you well know - or you wouldn't have included the Asiatic Rim countries in point 9. Yes, the allies would have won eventually, no matter what the Axis powers done: but that's not why Japan lost. The submarine war in the Pacific was as important as it was in the Atlantic - the difference was that in the Pacific the subs won.
11. Yes, they were tyrants. So where were the the plans for building democracy within Vietnam? Despite the clear importance of 'hearts and minds' for winning?
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 02:49 pm (UTC)Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-17 11:35 pm (UTC)1)Because lying was his life. Choosing to turn away from a world of lies doesn't break the habits of a lifetime. [shrugs] And I gave Trifa as an example, as that was a case where the 'slanders' he spread were true.
2) Sure, you're tired, I'm tired, we're all tired of this. I can't be bothered explaining to mentalguy why Zolli is a really bad example to use, you're not going to give D.G.Dalin as a better example. Thus the beginning of my point: the title is going to stick. None of us have the energy to deal with it.
The main point: has anything changed? Not really. In North Korea, Saudi Arabia and so on there are millions of Christians and others who the governments will quite happily use as hostages to punish every time their evils are condemned. If this generation of leaders falls into the trap of buckling to that threat, they'll be condemned by future generations as well.
3) irrelevant to the American result? Sure. But the Soviets weren't blundering, they had specific goals they were working towards, and achieved.
4) Continuing from fellmama - fair enough.
5) Hmmm - I'd want to see evidence of that. Granted my selection of witnesses is skewed, given that the Vietnamese communtiy here is largely from the South, but that isn't the impression I get from them.
6) Background on Indonesia, given that's one of the many regions where propaganda has succeeded:
Indonesia isn't "the world's biggest Muslim nation". Indonesia is an archeapelagio of Christian/Animist nations, with important Indian trading ports on Bali and Lombok - ruled with an iron hand by the Javanese Muslims. The islands are constantly simmering on the edge of revolt. The communists could easily have started a revolution there: and maybe it would have been a good thing if they had.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-18 05:21 am (UTC)2) The title is going to stick? Oh no it is not. Even journalists cannot keep a lie going for ever - and besides, old-style journalism is dying.
3) That is what I said in the very opening paragraph of my essay, and at several other points. Why repeat it? My point was that the Americans blundered into a trap, whether or not pre-designed by their enemies, and did so because of certain very specific American superstitions.
9) The vast majority of Indonesians are Muslim, and the internal dynamic of the Muslim community is from a nominal adhesion to a more committed (and violent) pursuit of Muslim values. Christians are frequently murdered in Borneo and Sulawesi, and there is all-out war in New Guinea (Irian Jaya) against the local tribals. Even the Bali bomb was as much a strike against the local Hindus as against Western tourists that adore that beautiful island. And the Javanese are not the only Muslims in the archipelago; indeed, their ways are altogether too tolerant for the real fanatics in Aceh and the rest of Sumatra. In other words, the real danger to Indonesia is not and never has been Communism, it is and always has been Islamism. It is against Islamism that Soekarno set up his five-faiths ideology, in much the same way as Ataturk tried to muzzle it at the other end of the Muslim world.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-19 11:57 am (UTC)2) The title will stick, because of the anger of ex- and lapsed catholics. As the result of a mixed marriage, I come from a similar position: my introduction to the concerning Pacelli was having him 'defended' by RC clergy, smugly quoting a fragment of a speech in which he supposedly condemned the fascists. Then, years later, I learned why they only used a fragment: becuase it was a condemnation of the communists, and they'd snipped it to hide that fact. That deception has been practiced on millions of people: and as each learns how they've been duped, each individual assumes that Pacelli must be guilty! Otherwise, why lie?
Now, these verminous 'teachers' lie about Mary, the apostles and even Jesus Himself, so I realise that no one is safe; but that thought occurs to very few people.
And it gets fed in other ways. The obvious defence is to turn to the testimony of Jewish witnesses and scholars; yet when the IJCHC asked for access to Vatican records, they were refused. Consider your own quote on Putin's "Ministry of Truth" - when a combined Catholic/Jewish commission is refused access to the relevant records, how do you think that looks?
3) We seem to be talking 'past' each other here, sadly. Oh well, it happens.
9) There is all-out war *everywhere* in the islands. Borneo and Papua have been actively colonised, with towns created by Javanese immigrants used to effectively gerrymander the vote. nationalism and fundamentalism feed each other - Aceh has been given semi-autonomy becuase this draws them in, a spearhead for Sharia law *and* reducing resistance to the nationalist agenda. The 'danger' to Indonesia is that the nationalists lose local control, as happened in East Timor, and the nationalists use and are used by Islamists to prevent this. The nationalists want power over island that should be free, the islamicists are determined to crush the other religions.
Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-19 01:09 pm (UTC)Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-19 05:42 am (UTC)Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-19 06:11 am (UTC)Re: interesting, but.....
Date: 2009-06-16 03:43 pm (UTC)He did, but his reputation was not, thanks in large part to the passage of time and people who repeat such charges without bothering to verify them.
Pius XII made an extraordinary stand against the Nazis, to the extent of personally organizing a pan-European escape network for Jews and sheltering them in his own residences, never mind working against the Nazis in other ways. There is a reason that the Jews of Pius' time counted him among the "Righteous Gentiles", and that the chief rabbi of Rome was impressed enough with the Pope's example that he took Pius' name, Eugenio, when he converted to the Catholic Faith after the end of the war.
And yet Pius is condemned because it is said he didn't make enough public statements against the Nazis? It is worth remembering the kind of things which Hitler did in retaliation when Church leaders in Nazi-occupied/allied countries did make such public statements -- for instance, when the Dutch bishops issued their public statement condemning Nazi racism, they soon discovered that they had effectively signed the death warrants of all the country's Jewish converts (which is how Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross died).
But actions speak louder than words. Churchill could safely be vociferous in his condemnation of the German regime, but with Churchill and Pius XII both, what really matters is what they did about it.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-07 08:07 am (UTC)From WWII, they had got the idea that "stalwart citizen-soldiers can win anything," even though WWII and Vietnam couldn't have been more different situations. Many of the men who were reluctant soldiers, or who resisted the draft or fled the country rather than be drafted, in Vietnam would have volunteered happily to fight in a war analogous to WWII.
And they thought that since a "demilitarized zone" across Korea had kept the peace between North and South Korea (more or less) since 1953, the same idea would work in Vietnam. The difference is that while Vietnam is long and narrow, it is not a peninsula, and the communists were quite well willing to go around the end of the DMZ.
In his book Soldier, Anthony Herbert, a "mustang" officer (one who started out as an enlisted man and worked his way up to colonel) says that another problem in Vietnam was that the men in charge were mostly men who had started their careers in WWII...and had not done very well then, but had stayed on in the Army because it was familiar and not too difficult to gain advancement once the real stars were gone. I cannot speak to this myself, but it sounds reasonable if you look at the time frame. There had been problems with this in Korea, but the long-service NCOs in Korea had earned their stripes in WWII and knew their jobs; by Vietnam the vast majority of those men had retired, or did retire once they saw how ineptly the war was being run.