If Brad wants to defend the idea that the Vietnam war was worth fighting??!!, or the Korean war!!??, because that contained Communism, or that these wars would have been worth fighting as long as it was just Asian boys dying to maintain corrupt right wing dictatorships (I believe this is his position), that shows something about the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of American liberalism.
I don't say, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! NLF Is Gonna Win! I don't support even fairly benign Stalinist regimes (like Vietnam). But I do support the right of the Vietanmese, Chinese, etc. peoples to determine their own destiny independently of US-backed puppets or compradors, to make their own mistakes and fight their own struggles. Brad, like most liberals of that sort, misses the fundamental point -- not a socialist point, but an Enlightment liberal point -- which is that we have No Fucking Business telling other people how to run their affairs. It's not like we do such a great job with our own, or could be trusted to act in the interests of the Vietnamese, Chinese, etc. people. In fact, we can be trusted _not_ to, as recent events ought to have once more hammered into everybody's thick skulls, even if they are armored with tenure at Berkeley.
jks
Brad, I like you, but you are, as they say, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
wrote:
> Or, to put it another way, the first three were
> native leaders of mass
> movements that defended their people against First
> World (primarily US)
> depredations and took harsh measures to promote
> modernization. The second
> triad lacked mass backing because they were corrupt
> agents of narrow First
> World interests. Given the choice, the first are to
> be preferred, although
> a libertarian socialist republic -- hardly possible
> under Western attack
> -- would have been preferable to any of them. --CGE
>
>
> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> >
> > ...In all three pairs, the first members are
> charismatic dictators who
> > believed in the abolition of markets, the
> collectivization of
> > agriculture, and the centralization of an enormous
> amount of power in
> > the hands of the states. In all three pairs, the
> second members are
> > corrupt comprador politicians of one sort or
> another. Answers tend to
> > go together...
> >
> > [childish abuse snipped]
>
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