Okay Bartleby, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. If anyone at bbs knows we’re all in this together, and has been regularly trying mightily to get the rest of us to see that, it’s @Wanderfound.
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I’d say moralising the actions of cogs in a machine is largely pointless, whichever way one looks at it.
Vietnam happened. The many reasons for an individual soldier being swept up in the conflict, let alone the individual actions of each person in that conflict, makes moralising on participation in it as a basis of judgement of a person pointless in my opinion.
He served America in more ways than most, and for that I believe he deserves respect - just as I believe respect is owed to the soldiers who were cogs in the machine of the North and South Vietnamese efforts.
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And I’d say you’re contradicting yourself when you then go on to moralize like this:
Well, which is it? Should we regard them with pure, cold instrumentality, like mere pieces of metal (“cogs in a machine”), or should we moralize them into nobility, as people who deserve respect?
When it comes to those U.S. soldiers who “served” during Vietnam, I’d choose neither of those options. I can’t blind myself to the choice they had, in an era when so many people were refusing to serve and otherwise speaking out loud and clear against a racist, imperialist war.
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2 things:
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I think McCain’s service to America is greater than what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam.
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The reasons for someome ending up in Vietnam are wide and varied. I don’t know the history of McCain’s decision/otherwise to sign up, but it’s not as if people at the time were exactly told what was going on, so without that context it’s impossible to gauge a person’s culpability in participation.
I had a lot of very serious differences with McCain but anybody who pissed off Trump that much must have been doing something right.
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Oh WOW…
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Are you seriously trying to suggest that all the people who died, children included were vietcong or that they weren’t trying to fend off from their point of view a foreign invasion?
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Yeah, all those protests and draft-card burnings, what could those have been about? And I guess you’re right, almost no one had ever heard of a certain boxer who refused to go and kill.
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The Vietcong committed atrocities too.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/12/16/opinion/16vietnam-sturWeb/16vietnam-sturWeb-master768.jpg
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/vietcong-generals-atrocities.html
Opinion | The Viet Cong Committed Atrocities, Too
Under the cover of night on Dec. 5, 1967, a coalition of Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese troops set the village of Dak Son on fire as its inhabitants slept. The assailants used flamethrowers and grenades, and they had their rifles ready for anyone who tried to escape. Villagers who awoke …
Did someone here say they didn’t?
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^ someone said that right here.
No, you’re making assumptions on what I meant.
My point was that many of the people killed were civilians, including children. Many children. That was by US soldiers, Vietcong, and Vietminh. The Vietcong and Minh, from their perspective, were fighting off an invading force. We were there for no reason, and the brutality of that war was in part because of that fact. Is that an excuse for brutality on the part of any one? No, but it is a reason.
McCain, like him or not, was part of an invasion force. That’s just a historical fact. We had no reason for being there.
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Yep. Except . . .
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We destabilized the whole region (leading to not one, but at least 2 other brutal communist regimes), had a major hand in the deaths of a million people (at least), not counting the people who got sick from agent orange, and screwed up the lives of thousands upon thousands of young men in America (the ones that came back). If ever there was a candidate for a useless war that illustrates the futility of the thing, Vietnam would be it.
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But but, don’t you see? We just had to destroy the country. In order to save it, you see.
/s, obvs
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“Do I need to elaborate further?”
I guess I do…
What I mean is that we may see ourselves (our ideas, feelings, experiences, what we draw from those experiences and so on) as our own little unique platypuses but we are, anyway, more ore less the same as the next unique little platypus over. And the one next to that one, and so on.
Therefor, if s/he thought it, saying that nobody else thought it…
Well… doesn’t hold water under the premise that all us all just are not that different.
True. Decent people fought in Vietnam because of the draft. Decent people have joined the US military for economic reasons. Decent people fought in Iraq because by the time they noticed it was wrong, it was too late to leave. And decent people find in all kinds of wars because they never noticed it was wrong, or because they genuinely think what they are doing is right. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is not.
I’m not saying they’re bad people. I’m just saying they shouldn’t be thanked for either having no choice or choosing wrongly (in hindsight). They’re not heroes.
So, instead of thanking them or praising them as heroes, recognize them as victims. Support them and apologize to them for letting them fight in a pointless war.
No, it didn’t. Maybe it did prevent America from actively intervening on Iraq’s side in the Iraq-Iran war in the 80s. Or maybe America wouldn’t have done that anyway.
But the experience of World War II did prevent World War III. At least the one where Germany nuked Paris. There was a major shift in German and Austrian society after the war, and to a large extent, even countries that were on the winning side went along with it. Or maybe France only followed suit during the Algerian War. I don’t know.
Whereas in America, the ideal of the soldier bravely sacrificing for his country, no matter whether the war is right or wrong, is still very much alive. The Vietnam war just weakened the militarism of American culture temporarily.
So…
To do everything possible to weaken the culture of militarism. To discourage the next generation from proudly doing their duty when reluctantly doing it would be preferable, and heroically refusing it would be best. To make it easier for the general public to oppose a war without needing to worry about supporting the troops at the same time.
In short, to save lives.
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True.
For example, I hereby want to honor McCain for speaking out against torture when hardly anyone else in his party, and far too few Americans in general, did.
McCain is firmly in the large category of people some of whose views I despise, but who have convinced me that they are not entirely evil but actually human beings trying to do what they think is best.
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This article summarizes my feelings pretty well.
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