Conclusion: By interfering, the USA was responsible in causation for the deaths of (correction 3)–5.1 million Vietnamese, give or take a few.
So endeth the sermon by Peter at
Lavartus Prodeo. Argueing from a lawyers viewpoint he posts an article with the sole purpose of sheeting the blame for an inflated casualty rate on the US. I have just attended a reunion of the 7th Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment at Fremantle in Western Australia and can only express amazement at Peter’s naivity, or is it blinded ignorance?
On the Indian Pacific a fellow traveller asks me why I was going to Perth, I mention the reunion and he says ah yes, Vietnam…such a waste. I enlighten him and for the first time in his lifer he thinks beyond the 10 second audio visual bites he was fed on the evening news. I tell him we who fought it don’t think it a waste. At the very least we stemmed the flow of the scourge of communism for a decade and depleted the coffers of the USSR and Communist China to such an extent that the events that lead to the fall of the Berlin War were set in train.
Millions escaped after the fall of Saigon by boat, by plane, by anything that would remove them from the hell that was coming. Millions didn’t.
Lefties still mintain the soft view of Ho Chi Minh that portays him as a nationalist with his only intention being to rid Vietnam of the French and later, the US, when from day one he was a marxist, schooled by the Soviets to take over both South and North Vietnam to form a communist bastion in the east.
To view a ten year war through the statutes of law seems a strange approach to me. I see men in suits arguening the case but the backdrop, the rear wall of the court room, is enscribed with millions of names of men who died and all Peter can do is argue for the aggressors. The communists invaded; the Free World forces tried to defend.
Maybe Peter was around when the war was on but somehow I doubt it. I was there and went back a couple of years ago to view first hand the results of 30 plus years of communism. The economy has been comatozed for decades and is just showing some life now the old Marxists are dying and losing power. Yet the people have a shadow over them of the millions who have disappeared or are still alive but shattered by re-education camps. Over the road from the bar I frequented a family lives on the profit from selling a dozen or so soft drinks per day…..in 2004.
How can educated men defend this?
School, Uni, Law School, employment with Smith, Smith and Smith, see the world through a law book. Never touch the dead just count them and use the stats to put a fallacious arguement.
Makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?
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kev, i agree, i was wrong at the time
Thanks for that post Kev. I think that we younger blokes were a little too young (if born at all) at the time to remember anything but what was media fed to us, then and since.
I guess over a period of time the truth becomes a little blurred to those who were not there.
I think it’s much like the conspiracies now springing up about September the 11th. In time the line between what actually happened and what the moonbats think happened will be blurred. Think of kids no more than 11 or 12 watching it all unfold on TV. Some of them are now 16 and 17 and are looking back on a totally different event to the one most older people saw.
We need people like you to remind us of the truth of Vietnam.
Kev, Peter is not a lawyer (shudder to think that he were). He has no legal training at all that I am aware of. He has no understanding of legal method at all, nor of the areas of law (in this case, bizarrely, Australian domestic contract law) in which he dabbles and from which he confects arguments which anyone with legal training can spot as the nonsense they are and easily shoot down.
As a lawyer it pisses me off to see the stupid and dishonest use of bullshit pseudo-legal arguments by Peter (or anyone else for that matter) to justify an essential position on everything which is that the US is responsible for eveything evil in the world and is, either by act or omission, responsible for every murderous act of every evil bastard in the world, including when it tries to stop them.
I spent considerable time and got considerable pleasure in my comments on his article in ripping his bullshit apart and exposing the complete crap that he was writing. If you have the time, read the comments section and see how it develops. It gets rather one-sided at the end, as it becomes evident that Peter is way out of his depth, and his arguments are torn apart shred by shred. Peter’s final post is a lovely little example of tantrum throwing. Other commentators weigh in on the non-legal stuff and none of them give him any support. I think you will find it a fun little read.
Hey, I’m with you Kev.
Didja see the analysis of the Vietnam War on the TV a few nights ago?
Done by the Poms.
Done is right.
This sums up the show…
VC good guys
Americans bad guys
We need re-education camps here I guess.
“As a lawyer it pisses…”
Enjoyed Greg M your evisceration of Peter’s argument from law, that’s being polite.
He needs some basic lessons in logic, in view of also his conclusion to his article.
In fact, stripped of that conclusion, his article reads entirely as having no point at all, as so much nonsense but that conclusion, the U.S. caused mass slaughter and of, 3-5millions, and, by inference Australia also, that’s something else again. That’s what he aimed to assert, it certainly reads so. He could have saved time by saying: the U.S. massacred all those vietnamese victims.
I don’t believe he realises what he has argued, inclusive of, Ho had a (legal) right to invade the South and the grotesque force of that.
He wouldn’t do well attending a gathering of Vietnamese refugees in, say, Sydney or Melbourne, and telling them what he asserted.
If I was rich like Packer or Buffett or B.Gates- I’d spend a fortune “sending” lefties to Cuba, North Korea, Iran, etc.. and leaving them there. Why not? They absolutely hate Australia and seem to always have a soft spot for the three latter nations.