It was "Auntie Pinko" who offered rational for Viet Nam War Re: Proxy war

[oscarguy]

for a perhaps legitimate reason for the Viet Nam War. A proxy war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. at that time. This was at least a year or more ago and this rational was in response to an inquiry about the current war in Iraq and similarities to the Viet Nam War. She stated that the situation between the US AND USSR was quite different then than now and that there was at least a reasonable argument that a show of a willingness to fight back on the part of the US against an aggressive USSR could be made. I am paraphrasing, but that is the gist of it. The reason is that this is the way I feel and felt about the war as an active participant and made a statement to that effect and got slammed bigtime in the DU forums for stating such. I found "Auntie Pinko" at BARTCOM or something similar then. She left it up to whomever to decide for themselves. ...Oscar

[knowbody0]

1. i agree

war games, war toys between the two super powers

[sui generis]

2. wars are fought by the young for the sins of the old

I believe that Auntie P may have a point as a posthumous observation, but as a rationale for war, executed by intent, that would be deplorable of any nation.

The world is full of stupid, violent people who believe that other people should die for their values. If every politician was required to keep a child in the marines or first deployed ground infantry military, I think we'd be a lot better at foreign diplomacy.

[oscarguy]

3. If the US and USSR had gone to war directly, against each other...

there was the very real possibility if not probability that it would be a Thermo-Nuclear war that would totally destroy both Nations and quite possibly the entire World. It was a very different time then and our Nation and the World did face these difficult problems. World events were and are rarely RIGHT OR WRONG, GOOD OR BAD. The sequence of WWII, THE KOREAN WAR, AND VIET NAM are in a way a progression of events that followed each other with a certain sort of deadly logic that could not be ignored. ...Oscar

[sui generis]

4. that's cutting the suit to fit the cloth

What caused that buildup of nuclear arms to begin with was a value system that said it's okay to kill large civilian populations in a war, that the guy with the most weapons wins, that competition for resources on this tiny planet always wins over collaboration for resources.

I agree that you can say in perfect hindsight that everything happened as it was meant to for us to be here today - that's the viewpoint of the victor, though probably not the viewpoint of anyone who got napalmed.

Realistically, discussions of right and wrong or good or bad aside, there are other paths to the same goal. We are a warlike, arrogant, contentious people on the whole. We have these odd notions of cultural and political superiority to every other country and culture on earth, reinforced in our churches and schools and media and virtually every call to "patriotism" and "nationalism" we issue for perceived problems as various as drug addiction (war on drugs), poverty (war on poverty), and evil gay married terrorists (The Cultural War).

In hindsight, I wonder what we will end up saying about those unwinnable contrivances.

[oscarguy]

5. I never said or implied"that everything happened as it was meant to".

I honestly do not understand how you could have interpreted what I posted in such a way. I do not believe in fate or any other related things. Go back and read what I posted, that I will respond to. ...Oscar

[sui generis]

7. it's okay - no need to get dander up

it was a civil discussion, no offense intended.

-sui

[oscarguy]

8. Hello sui, dander not up. Sorry if I came across that way towards you.

[bryant69]

13. to be fair there is also the fact that Capitalism and

the brand of Communism practiced by Stalin and Mao were incompatable. The underlining philosophies mandated conflict. Co-Existence was seen, by both sides, as not desirable (yeah there was rhetoric, again from both sides, about getting along, but it was only rhetoric at that time).

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[sui generis]

14. heh - I was going to give a lecture on Stalin's

vision of communism and our perception of it but chickened out. In more general terms, wasn't our own propaganda machine also compounding some of the post revolutionary rhetoric into something considerably more sinister than it actually was?

The end result was the same though - a race to try to get the biggest stick to keep everyone else in line.

I think it really goes back to this post industrial paroxysm we as a planet are experiencing, where our old geographical and cultural boundaries are being blurred, but not the ownership of resources, or the management of trade of those resources. In primarily agrarian cultures and heavily superstitious cultures it is much more difficult to evolve stable democracies from entrenched monarchies. The church and the monarchy (and cronies) own all the land in the former, but in an exuberantly capitalistic society, corporations end up owning all the land too.

When the industrial age developed, worker rights became an issue. When the press was used for more than printing bibles, communication of political ideas was done more readily. When anyone could own property or (theoretically) make choices about their lives that didn't involve subsistence farming for another generation, we began to have the groundwork for taking a drastic step away from social institutions like the Russian monarchy. In contrast, the Russian monarchy sought to tighten its grip and became even more disconnected from the very real people of Russia, with disasterous consequences for the monarchy, and created an opening for a political philosophy that was an opportunistic perversion of a social ideal.

All power seeks to remain in power, so churches don't like it when their members are gay and don't reproduce, and don't like it when sex is done for anything but procreation, and don't like birth control, and don't like their members marrying outside the faith.

Countries, sovereign monarchies, petty dictatorships, and grand democracies alike, don't like their "members" marrying outside their nationality. Don't like their members failing to make babies. Don't like their members not pledging blind allegiance to its symbols.

And all political philosophies, if they believe themselves to be superior, eventually seek to change competing philosophies to their own, so "co-existence" is always seen as undesirable, whether that is accomplished in short order by physical war, or over the longer term by economic war, or by controlling information.

The most obvious shortcut is to have weapons that can threaten large populations of civilians to give a nation the leverage it thinks it needs to enforce its own goals. I think the most obvious thing that would unite this itty bitty little planet to work cooperatively rather than competitively would be a global problem that doesn't impact resources (fuel, drinking water) but rather is an external problem that we have to work together at 100% capacity to overcome. A comet heading our direction, a verifiable signal from an alien civilization, a global catastrophe, a precipitous freefall decline in the human birthrate. It's not going to happen for free, and it's not going to happen without a reason to look at the planet and our species as a whole through different eyes, and that means we do indeed have ages of interregional conflict ahead of us.

We're now building our own bio-weapons and chemical weapons programs again. We are once again talking about nuking a civilian population. We are allowing mind boggling trade warfare to trounce us in the form of China so that a few American corporations and individuals will profit at the expense of the many, and so that we can hide our war debt in new borrowing and trade offs.

One thing is certain, we cannot achieve peace in an arms race. We cannot force political, cultural evolution and economic change by having the most weapons. Texas doesn't have nuclear weapons ready to lob at Oklahoma because we're essentially a loose federation of open border interdependent states. That basic model HAS to grow to be universally global or we will be chasing nuclear weapons programs and decrying egregious human rights violations until the end of time.

It would be nice if someone gave us a realistic roadmap though, wouldn't it.

/insane ramble

[bryant69]

15. That sounds interesting - but i do know my stuff when it comes to

communism. I wrote my Master's thesis on American Communism in the 30s and 40s.

It's tricky knowing when you can get along with communists - assuming they are broadly following leninist communism, their philosophy should largely be that they are in favor of destroying our society (the United States being the most successful Capitalist nation). But obviously not all take their philosophy seriously.

At any rate I would strongly disagree with any analysis that lays the blame for the Cold War completely at the feet of the USA. We do bear our own share of the blame, though.

I agree that an arms race is unlikely to lead to peace, but I don't know how you get around it when two sides have a bone deep antagonism.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[sui generis]

16. agreed

I'm sure I'd enjoy reading the thesis if you have it in electronic format and willing to share - PM me if so.

My interest for purposes of this discussion is probably at a higher level - the interregional dynamic that is driven by more than just cultural antagonism or incompatibility of political philosophies. Maybe the "social anthropology" underlying WHY we compete rather than cooperate is really where the solution to looking for peace lies. I also think it's evolutionary - that as technology and human communication networks evolve we begin to realize the precepts of gaming theory that suggest that cooperation is a better survival tactic than simply bombing your adversaries off half the planet.

Visited website - it's a little boggley for work today, but will look closer this weekend. I think/believe that the crude social values which underlie competitive regionalism drive the idea that threatening huge civilian populations is an effective war deterrent. Until those social values change ("what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine"), the path to stable peace and global disarmament will be a very long and arduous one.

The solution, eventually, has to be some form of global governance that we can all learn to agree to and abide by, and the only way to do that effectively is to have a reason to marshall global resources. I don't believe that global warming is that pretext, nor even a global flu pandemic. Petty bureaucrats try to unite warring factions all the time by giving them an external human enemy - jews, non-believers, gays, "muslim extremists", etc., but it will take a concrete event, not something as abstract as a social caste, to unite the world.

[bryant69]

17. Hey you ever ready Alan Moore's Watchmen?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[sui generis]

18. comic book, right?

I used to love looking at the pretty dudes. Not very intellectual, I know!

Hey, I was a teenager, my hormones were raging. Anything in a slinky butt flexing superhero costume looked pretty darn good to me.

Unfortunately don't remember much else about it though.

Was a military brat overseas - every time we moved my dad threw out my comic books and paperbacks because you only were allowed to ship fifty pounds per kid or something like that.

[bryant69]

19. Well Watchman isn't for kids

And it has as one of it's characters someobody who proposes doing more or less what you are talking about - you ought to check it out sometime.

Bryant

[sui generis]

20. interesting

I have to explore this if I read that comment right.

Let me clarify my statement. We won't have a choice in the highly unlikely event that there is some global event, but to pull together. But that's science fiction, and you can't plan for science fiction.

I guess I could have just summed it up by saying I agree with you; the crap that's kept us warring against each other this long will continue to do so for the forseeable future, barring unlikely science fiction scenarios or enough time to further evolve.

Which character? Curious now. Hopefully not . . .captain crackpot! :P

[bryant69]

21. No the Characters name is Ozymandius

And he basically creates an alien invasion - and the heros fail to stop them, thus ushering in a golden age. Maybe.

[oscarguy]

6. I am trying to grasp what you mean. This "Cold War",US vs USSR...

was a very real series of events that date at least to the very beginning of our entry into WWII. At the end of that war, Stalin`s Red Army was without any doubt, the most powerful military force existing, except for the fact that we had ATOMIC BOMB capabilities he did not have. This is what stopped him from attacking us and our allies at the end of WWII. The Russian Armed Forces had defeated fully 80% of the Nazi armed forces. That is right. The landings at Normandy and all that followed would not have been possible had it not been for the fact that 80% of the German Army was fighting a losing action against the Red Army. The Germans could not transfer more than a very few of their forces to the Western Front. The Russians had better tanks and so many more men etc. than the Western Allies, had we not had the ATOMIC BOMB I doubt he could have been stopped and he most definitely had his own plans for World conquest at that time. He was not a nice guy. ...Oscar

[madokie]

9. so sad we use the lesser for the gain of the most'er

welcome to the DU fold, a likable bunch, at least some are.

[oscarguy]

10. Hi madokie. DU is mostly a likable bunch. Life is so very sad,as I...

get older , the times being what they are, I feel that way more and more. At times I simply cry at my inability to do anything about it. I really do cry. I will always fight back and never give up until I die. Hey, I just checked out the musical " Hair " and will watch it. Whatever did happen to the DAWNING OF AQUARIUS ? I think it lasted a year or two maybe. ...Oscar

[oscarguy]

11. Self-response: Wifey has ordered me to get off Web and I am obeying.

WHAT A PATHETIC DICKHEAD I HAVE BECOME. Goodnight all. ...Oscar

[sui generis]

12. Oscar we all have our more and less colorful days

that's a good thing! The world would be pretty drab if it was all in shades of gray.

Sometimes I have a little too much color here and the DU color police show up; it's all good though. I think if I had to choose between schizophrenia and being comatose I'd just go ahead and take my crazy pill. Here's to many more thoughtful future posts!

Michael