RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GreedyTop
RF . .I agree.. he has the right to say what he wants, just as I have the right to figure him for a twat based on his denigration of military personnel.
I do not think of those who have been killed in conflict as having dies 'for me'.. rather that they have died fighting for an IDEAL.. the ideal of freedom in every sense of the word.
and i SO agree about the politicians in combat thing...
(how ya doin', btw?)
Oh absolutely, hence my italic and bolded comment  However, as one who sometimes makes the odd darkly comic comment himself, I did feel he was on a hiding to nothing. Not that I found it amusing, you understand.
The slight issue I have with the “freedom” mentality is that the “ideal” was (and indeed still is) fundamentally flawed. As I said, you can mark WWII down as a “just” war, and also UN and other “peacekeeper” missions/conflicts too, especially Bosnia/ Serbia etc (although way too late). Vietnam wasn’t about freedom, in those terms; it was about 2 superpowers going to war by proxy, and killing (or allowing to die through inaction, in the USSR’s case) millions of people, if you include the aftermath. Would things have turned out differently if the superpowers had stayed out of things and allowed the country to sort itself out? We’ll never know. What we do know is that, when intelligent people look back at the history of that country, they can see that becoming engaged in a war there has always been a recipe for disaster for outsiders; something the USA failed dismally to take notice of, either at the time, or many times since, elsewhere. And you can substitute Afghanistan for Vietnam in the above comment and it remains (and will remain) as true. I adore America as a country, having lived there for some time in my youth, and visited several times since - there is so much to applaud in its constitution, freedom of speech, people and terrain. But the one thing that grinds my gears is the automatic assumption that it has, as a nation, either the right, or the moral justification, to police the world.
What I do recognise is the personal bravery and sacrifice made by individual human beings (on both sides) in defence of their brothers in arms, and of the personal price almost all of them paid, in terms of the psychological after-effects of those times and those acts – what the speaker said about Galen’s comment rings all too true, and I also believe in George Santayana’s comment that “only the dead have seen the end of war” – it is for that reason that I think politicians should somehow (and I have no idea how this could be worked in reality) be part of the situations they help create; it’s way too easy for old men to go to war. And way, way too easy for young men and women to die (or be mentally scarred) in those wars.
And me? I'm fine, very sweet of you to ask. And yourself? All well?
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An Incredibly Moving Speech By a Vietnam Vet - 
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