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I saw this today and wept

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Nickyjo

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The picture at the top of the column linked below broke my heart, and I thought of the cruel folly of men. It reminded me of my thoughts when I discovered at a class reunion that a friend I hadn't heard about in 50 years had died in Vietnam decades before, that the war never ended.

Some Pope centuries ago remarked that not even the beasts of the forest assemble in battle formation.

But in my case, movies tell the story best, the ending from "Paths of Glory" by Kubrick, where a German girl forces to perform by French soldiers shames them with the beauty of her voice, or the last scene in "Planet of the Apes," when having left the race of apes, Charlton Heston finds the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on a beach, and cries out to the leaders of his race, "God damn them to hell!"

Opinion | America, Please Don’t Forget the Victims of Agent Orange (Published 2021)

Victims in Southeast Asia have never received compensation from the chemical giants that supplied herbicides during the Vietnam War.
www.nytimes.com
 

Minamata: Homage to W. Eugene Smith

In Japan, Minamata disease is known as one of four major health crises that helped turned the tide against industrial pollution. Less familiar is the role played by photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in alerting the world to the tragedy of Minamata and the dangers of pollution.
www.nippon.com

When not doing it to others, we do it to ourselves. For money.


As a species, we really do deserve extinction. But we'll soldier on.
 
I laugh sadly when I hear people talk about the world coming to an end. Humans will come to an end, the Earth will remain. Depending on the extinction level event, it is also likely there will be time for another completely different planet dominating life form to evolve.
 
See the sign it says the end is a comin'
We can all start countin' it down,
When it does, you can try runnin'
In the end we're all goin' down.
 
And "soldier on" reminded me of yet another ending to a film, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," and Alec Guiness -- whose character had perversely soldiered on during the movie -- and whose last words were, "Madness... madness."
 
less right said:
See the sign it says the end is a comin'
We can all start countin' it down,
When it does, you can try runnin'
In the end we're all goin' down.
Click to expand...
Or maybe we can change the arc of our future by facing it.

"“However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there's life, there's hope.” S. Hawking
 
It would have been so much better had we not engaged against the communist expansion and allowed them to turn their whole country into one giant North Korea. Imagine how swell life would be for all of them.
 
If we can only continue until we can escape completely into the virtual world. Most will think it is heaven. I'm not so sure.
 
ho chi min using 2 million people as cannon fodder for a disgusting ideology, let's pretend that didn't happen.
 
Can't wait. Will we still have baseball? And cable?
 
KLATTU said:
ho chi min using 2 million people as cannon fodder for a disgusting ideology, let's pretend that didn't happen.
Click to expand...
Gee, I thought it started with French colonialism. Ho, much like Washington -- whose struggle he made reference to -- sacrificed lives for independence. Probably not a good idea in either case.
 
Nickyjo said:
Gee, I thought it started with French colonialism. Ho, much like Washington -- whose struggle he made reference to -- sacrificed lives for independence. Probably not a good idea in either case.
Click to expand...
-well washington's ideology worked out ok,didn't it?
 
VanceMack said:
It would have been so much better had we not engaged against the communist expansion and allowed them to turn their whole country into one giant North Korea. Imagine how swell life would be for all of them.
Click to expand...

 
KLATTU said:
-well washington's ideology worked out ok,didn't it?
Click to expand...
Ask the Indians and slaves. But on balance not bad, and an inspiration, even to groups in other countries we saw fit to crush in our perversion of that ideology.
 
mrjurrs said:
Or maybe we can change the arc of our future by facing it.

"“However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there's life, there's hope.” S. Hawking
Click to expand...
The key phrase being "where there's life".

The lyric is actually from a song taking a cynical look at the notion that the end is a comin'.
 

North Vietnam had been independent for years by the time US direct involvement began.

As for the rest......the British Empire was one of the most brutal and, in many cases, outright evil regimes to have ever existed....albeit the one with the best PR. Fighting to break free from their yoke was absolutely a good thing.....and the American example led the British to take a lighter hand with the rest of their colonies down the line.

The British captains kidnapping Americans to serve on their ships(which, gee, was one of the main reasons the war was fought) wouldn’t have cared that you were a “conscientious objector”.

Lol yeah, how “moral” to condemn untold millions to decades of suffering under the thumb of the slaver tyrants because you think they’ll “come to their senses” at some point.

How is thousands of Americans being killed in an attack on a US military base a “dumb excuse”? The idea that fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan wasn’t justified is absurd. The Japanese were rampaging across Asia committing atrocities that even make Hitler’s pale in comparison.
 
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Nickyjo said:
Ask the Indians and slaves. But on balance not bad, and an inspiration, even to groups in other countries we saw fit to crush in our perversion of that ideology.
Click to expand...
#woke!
 
VanceMack said:
It would have been so much better had we not engaged against the communist expansion and allowed them to turn their whole country into one giant North Korea. Imagine how swell life would be for all of them.
Click to expand...
You're commenting on the morality behind fighting.

This is about the morality of how the war was fought.

And you can say, war is hell. But understand, that then makes you an ends justifies the means sorta guy. Which puts you on the same level as the liberals you revile.
 
less right said:
That's a factoid that brings no comfort.
Click to expand...
That actually brings me great comfort. The thought that, no matter how monstrously we **** up...it won't be so bad that life itself will end on earth.

That one day...stories will be told again.
 
Tigerace117 said:
North Vietnam had been independent for years by the time US direct involvement began.
Click to expand...
++ True, but my point was on the origin of the war, resistance to French colonialism. I have to assume that as much as we saw it through the "domino theory," -- that as some actually told me, we had to fight them there or they would be swarming thru the Golden Gate, that all Commies are alike, denying that other countries or people have history, SOP for empires and those that act like them -- the Vietnamese saw it as resistance to yet another imperial power.
++ Pearl Harbor was the spark, aka the incident, that started the war with Japan. It was not the cause, any more than Ft. Sumter was the cause of the Civil War. As to atrocities, the US committed the greatest acts of terrorism, albeit successful ones, to end the war with Japan. We killed civilians for a political objective. It was functionally no different than what Osama did on 9/11, also killing civilians for a political objective. We got unconditional surrender from the Japanese, Osama got the US out of Saudi Arabia, apparently one of his beefs that led to the attack. As to the Nazis, no idiotic WWI, no necessary WWII.
 
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No...I wouldnt say its a question of the ends justifying the means, any more so than claiming asbestos is a chemical weapon. We learned a lot AFTER the fact...at the time it was seen not as a means of harming individuals but as a means of removing the cover used by a combat opponent.
 

Again, North Vietnam had been free of “French colonialism” for years by the time they started attacking the South.

Except, of course, for the large number of Vietnamese people who didn’t see it as any such thing and resisted the communist attempts to take over their country.

The US was under no obligation to continue trading with a regime whose literal official military policy was “kill all, burn all, loot all”. The Chinese lost between fifteen and twenty MILLION people during World War Two. That’s VASTLY more than Japan lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki— neither of which were “terrorism”, by the way. It was vastly different than 9/11; the Japanese were not going to surrender unless they were forced too, a conventional invasion would have cost vastly more lives, and starving them out is not a particularly “moral” alternative either.

There are still some US troops in Saudi Arabia, so not sure where you got that idea either.

The US couldn’t have stopped World War One, and talking about how “idiotic” it was is not an excuse to avoid fighting against genocidal maniacs.
 
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