Well, I can't even bear to think closely about beheadings and am slightly nauseous reading this description. But the Vietnamese resistance wasn't very nice either as far its methods went. The order of the day for the NLF included exemplary executions of traitors and collaborators; summary "justice" (i.e., lynch law), punsihment, including killing of the families of "enemies of the people"; torture and burning alive, both for information and deterrence. And life in the Hanoi Hilton for US POWs wasn't what we'd consider up to Geneva convention stnadards either. So the difference isn't that the Vietnamese resistance was pure in word and deed and the Iraqi resistance is icky. Btw, as Noam Chomsky tirelessly reminds us, European resistance movements have conducted their activities in exactly the same way.
Hard to say what the diff is. Maybe because the Vietnamese resistance unambigously professed aspiration to humane, socialist, and Enlightement ideals, whereas the Iraqi resistance includes a lot of rather confused stuff, some of which is really retrograde.
--- Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> > The deed was done using a knife held with bare
> hands. It's very messy - . . . a veteran peace
> > activist whom I admire quite a lot (I'm not
> mentioning his name because I
> > didn't ask if it was ok to quote him) told me that
> one reason he thinks
> > the antiwar movement has nearly died out is
> because of the brutality of
> > the resistance. As he put it, that means that it
> "lacks a certain 'edge'
> > of legitimacy which the Vietnam war had.
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/