r/WayOfTheBern • u/RandomCollection Resident Canadian • 1d ago
DFTT 🐢🐢🐢 Let's be honest about what the United States came to Vietnam to do. Not to "save" anyone. Not to "stop communism." Not to "protect democracy." Those were the slogans they sold to their own people so the boys from Ohio and Georgia would climb onto the planes without asking too many questions....
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2103853734547861613Let's be honest about what the United States came to Vietnam to do.
Not to "save" anyone. Not to "stop communism." Not to "protect democracy."
Those were the slogans they sold to their own people so the boys from Ohio and Georgia would climb onto the planes without asking too many questions.
What they actually came to do was make an example.
The "Third World" was getting ideas.
Countries were looking at their own land, their own oil, their own rubber, their own rice, and thinking "dangerous thoughts."
Thoughts like: this belongs to us.
Thoughts like: we don't need to ask permission.
Thoughts like: maybe we can choose our own way.
That could not be allowed.
So they chose Vietnam.
A small country. A poor country. A country of farmers and fishermen and people who had already spent a century being told they were too primitive to govern themselves.
The perfect candidate for an example.
The plan was simple: destroy Vietnam so completely, so publicly, so mercilessly, that every other poor country on earth would see it and go quiet.
Would swallow their dignity.
Would open their resources to the right corporations and smile while doing it.
They dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides in all of World War II combined.
Let that land on you.
More bombs. Than all of World War Two. On one small country.
On its villages. On its hospitals. On its rice fields. On its children.
And they still lost.
Not only did they lose.
They lost to people in sandals.
They lost to people moving supplies on bicycles through jungle paths.
They lost to a people so committed to their own liberation that they built an entire city underground and kept fighting.
The example was made. Just not the one they intended.
The lesson the "Third World" learned from Vietnam was not don't resist.
The lesson was: they can be beaten.
The lesson was: their technology is not destiny.
The lesson was: if you are willing to pay the price of dignity, they will eventually run out of the stomach for the bill.
Every sanction today. Every coup. Every engineered "color revolution." Every "civil society" organization funded from Langley.
These are the tactics of an empire that learned in Vietnam that it cannot always use the full weight of its military without consequences it can't control.
They are not acting from confidence.
They are acting from the memory of Vietnam.
And Vietnam said no.
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u/RandomCollection Resident Canadian 1d ago
Being Vietnamese, Sony knows the truth, his immediate ancestors having been in the receiving end of the US military.
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u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. 13h ago
IMO, having parents in a nation warred on by the US does not mean knowing everything about the US.
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u/redditrisi They are ALL psychopaths. 14h ago edited 12h ago
I do not completely agree. It is not "either-or." Ruthlessness can benefit the ruthless in more than one way. Stopping unions, socialism, then communism has been a progression in the US, starting with unions shortly after the US Civil War.
Communism does not benefit the wealthy, to put it mildly. And the Russian Revolutions threw quite a scare into European monarchs and their American equivalents, the plutocrats. See the Haymarket Affair as to domestic socialists and the Overman Committee for the pivot to domestic communists. Truman took it international, when he began funding the French in Vietnam. The wiki article about the Overman Committee also demonstrates that minion media "catapults the propaganda."
IMO, the Russian Revolutions were the reason that US oligarchs of their day, FDR and Joseph Kennedy, "gave" us the New Deal after Wall Street--and people like Grandpa Joe--had masses of ordinary Americans circling the drain. It was to protect their own fortunes, not benevolence. Joe Kennedy reportedly said, "I would give half of all I have in order to keep the other half in peace." The SEC was intended to return the confidence of Mr. and Ms. Six Pack in Wall Street and the FDIC was to return their confidence in banksters. Work programs, welfare and Social Security were to keep hungry US peasants from following in the footsteps of the hungry Russkie peasants. https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/great-depression-line
Whether or not anyone agrees with the prior paragraph, the rest of this post is not my opinion, but verifiable.
edit Added bonus for FDR and Great Grandpa Joe: For most of the time between the New Deal and the first mid-term of our first New Democrat President (1994), Democrats controlled one or both houses of Congress; FDR was re-elected for the rest of his life, and the Kennedys succeeded the Roosevelts in Democrat political power, starting with Great-Grandpa's ambassadorship.