https://twitter.com/DonallGeoghegan/status/1578470776516186112?t=0_0_9nnddRpIXcI5ier5Cw&s=19
Even a chess master think pokers is the correct analogy.
I think the potential geopolitical benefits of completely sidelining Russia from international legitimately and influence are likely significantly underrated. (At least assuming US maintains minimally competent leadership.)
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The person who disagrees with you is literally more upset about expanding NATO than about Russian genocide. Reducing Russian power is not a good thing if their genocide is not a bad thing.
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Vietnam and Korea are not contradicting when you think in terms of Kim Il Sung being an authoritarian and Ho Chi Minh being a freedom fighter who just aligned with authoritarian communists because they were the only ones who would support them against imperialism. We viewed him as an extension of Mao when he was really the George Washington of his county. Somewhere along the way USA got it wrong by switching from thinking in terms of freedom vs facism to thinking in terms of capitalism vs communism.
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I should probably read more about the Vietnam War from non-US-centric sources. Do you have a book or perhaps I may be so lucky as to get an article you recommend on the subject?
True but that is after quite a while. South Korea was mostly authoritarian until 1987. 320000 South Koreans got sent to fight in Vietnam because they had an authoritarian government that was aligned with the US.
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I did start with “true”. Did you notice that?
But that’s a lot of alternate history and no one knows what the situation in 2022 would be if things in 1952 happened differently.
Things were quite shitty in South Korea in the 50s and 60s. It was the poorest country in the world or very close to it.
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I got Vietnam in high school, but it was very US-centric, and actually liberal: the US was super paranoid about communism taking over the world, and we should not have gone, but we did, and then My Lai happened, and then Tet, and then we decided to pack it in. The perspective and aims of the Vietnamese were basically ignored, and that is a blind spot for me.
What’s dishonest?
There’s more to Korea remaining poor for 20 years than the legacy of Japanese occupation and it has a lot to do with the same thing that led them to send 320000 people to fight in a war for the US.
If the US had not fought in Korea (or set up to fight there immediately after WW2) it would have been a Soviet satellite. Poland was in a similar position. The US did not fight in Poland. Czechoslovakia a few years later. Poland a little different because Russia was already there. In South Korea the US and USSR raced to meet in the middle.
Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam is the best book I have read on the war. I don’t remember if or how this specific topic is addressed in that book but my understanding is that basically Ho Chi Minh was begging for support of the allies to make Vietnam a free country and US instead tried to give France back imperial colonies to prevent De Gaulle aligning with the Soviets in the 1950s.
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Feel like this is a very standard experience in US high school education.
Interesting. I can’t recall ever having heard this perspective, so thank you. Although from this perspective, Ho Chi Minh would be considerably more righteous than a George Washington. He’d be more like a Native American leader throwing out the colonists entirely rather than someone leading the colonists to independence from the homeland but still in a position of dominance over the colonized.
My comparison was not really about righteousness it’s about both leading and winning guerilla warfare against the greatest power of their eras and both being statesmen who were essentially above the political debates of their day. With Washington that was more like the presiding over the constitutional convention but not taking sides in most of the actual debates. With Minh it was about pragmatically aligning with whichever ideology would support his people against colonialism. But yeah the North Vietnamese probably had a more just cause than the us founding fathers.
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US invasion of Grenada was a success. People there celebrate the liberation as their Thanksgiving.
WW2 also a success.
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That ginormous difference wasn’t so ginormous for the first 30 years. That’s long enough to make it quite speculative what would have happened if you changed history in 1951.
Who knows what NK would have turned out like. You know how badly the US destroyed NK in the war? 85% of structures in all of North Korea were destroyed. Do you think that set them on a good path? Do you think that had anything to do with all those terrible years?
Can you be more specific by what you mean here? Because while various freedoms and political rights improved for South Koreans later on it was never ever close to North Korea.
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I think NK would have done a lot better if they hadn’t started a war of aggression, and think that blaming the us for the results of that war, which you seem to do here, would be ridiculous
100000 Koreans died in fighting from 1948-1950 when your history book said the Korean War officially started.
But you can just brush off the fact that the US utterly annihilated NK and all the houses and lots of humans who were not Kim-Jung-Anything if you want. You are a good patriot. America flattening an entire country? Shoulda been a better country. The country gets worse after being flattened? Shoulda been a better country. USA just gets to flatten countries. Drop millions and millions of bombs on people. Endless flights of tens of thousands of planes dropping millions of bombs. Shoulda been a better country. You got famines after your country was flattened? Shoulda been a better country.
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You don’t know what the political freedoms were in 1960 SK under Rhee vs NK. Per capita income in SK under the authoritarian Rhee government was under $100/year though and lower than Haiti.