DesertFox
02-16-2008, 05:23 PM
Frank Dudley Berry
American Thinker
16 Feb 08
. . .
The Vietnam debacle was the second greatest trauma in the history of the United States. (First is the Civil War, without any serious contender, and we may all hope to God that it remains unrivaled on the list.) One respect in which it was not a disaster, however, was the moral perspective. The Vietnam War was colossally unwise. It was never immoral. Anyone who heard Tom Dooley once, let alone all summer long, knew -- or should have known -- that reality. At base, after all the heat, after all the millions of words, after all the sound and fury, what the war was about was a frightened, even terrified, people resisting the imposition of a relentlessly tyrannical and inhumane regime. The moral judgment should always have been weighed in their favor, and to their allies by association.
... The war was sold to the public on the wrong basis, duplicitous if not outright fallacious. But none of this accounts for the complete reversal in the moral polarity that occurred in the late 60's and early 70's, in which the Stalinist thug Ho Chi Minh was somehow transformed into the a native Populist, the actually elected South Vietnamese government perceived as a repressive state, and the assistance of the United States as some sort of imperial venture. It does not account for the vehemence, the shrill, shrieking hysteria that became the dominant tone of war opposition. The reasons for that lie elsewhere.
They have to do with the determination of the New Left and its fellow traveler draft resisters to characterize the opposition as a moral issue, a crusade, a matter of good versus evil. ...
The Vietnamese people -- the real flesh-and-blood kind, that live and die, suffer and hope (not the mythic 'People' of immemorial Leftist cant) -- began running from Ho Chi Minh in 1955. They kept running for the next two decades, as far south as the land would take them, then into boats and the open sea when the land ran out. The war was a dumb war, unwisely formulated, stupidly communicated, even more stupidly fought. But it was a just cause and a moral undertaking. It was the protest, with its utter contempt for the actual human reality, that was immoral.
More (http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/boomers_and_the_vietnam_shrug.html)
American Thinker
16 Feb 08
. . .
The Vietnam debacle was the second greatest trauma in the history of the United States. (First is the Civil War, without any serious contender, and we may all hope to God that it remains unrivaled on the list.) One respect in which it was not a disaster, however, was the moral perspective. The Vietnam War was colossally unwise. It was never immoral. Anyone who heard Tom Dooley once, let alone all summer long, knew -- or should have known -- that reality. At base, after all the heat, after all the millions of words, after all the sound and fury, what the war was about was a frightened, even terrified, people resisting the imposition of a relentlessly tyrannical and inhumane regime. The moral judgment should always have been weighed in their favor, and to their allies by association.
... The war was sold to the public on the wrong basis, duplicitous if not outright fallacious. But none of this accounts for the complete reversal in the moral polarity that occurred in the late 60's and early 70's, in which the Stalinist thug Ho Chi Minh was somehow transformed into the a native Populist, the actually elected South Vietnamese government perceived as a repressive state, and the assistance of the United States as some sort of imperial venture. It does not account for the vehemence, the shrill, shrieking hysteria that became the dominant tone of war opposition. The reasons for that lie elsewhere.
They have to do with the determination of the New Left and its fellow traveler draft resisters to characterize the opposition as a moral issue, a crusade, a matter of good versus evil. ...
The Vietnamese people -- the real flesh-and-blood kind, that live and die, suffer and hope (not the mythic 'People' of immemorial Leftist cant) -- began running from Ho Chi Minh in 1955. They kept running for the next two decades, as far south as the land would take them, then into boats and the open sea when the land ran out. The war was a dumb war, unwisely formulated, stupidly communicated, even more stupidly fought. But it was a just cause and a moral undertaking. It was the protest, with its utter contempt for the actual human reality, that was immoral.
More (http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/boomers_and_the_vietnam_shrug.html)