John Kerry Memorial

[quote=“Mother Theresa”]
I never said the VC were fine and in fact I stated not long ago in a different thread that I believe the govt of Vietnam is corrupt and oppressive and the people of Vietnam will be better off when their govt changes.

As as for your point #1, the American soldiers invaded their country, torched their villages, shot, tortured and napalmed their people (including old folks, women and children), poisoned their food supply (as a result of which the Vietnamese have suffered and continue to suffer from extremely high rates of deaths and birth defects). Can one blame them for killing Americans. If the VC had invaded the US and did the things in our country that the US did in theirs, I’m sure you’d be eager to kill some of the bastards.

Point #2: yes the VC committed atrocities. So did the South Vietnamese. So did the Americans:

pbs.org/wgbh/amex/Vietnam/tr … mylai.html

War is hell. I never said I respected the VC. But I think I can understand a little how they might have felt about wanting to expel foreign intruders from their country. How many decades did they have to fight in order to do so?[/quote]

the original comment was a rant at americans who cheered nlf victories. you have laid out why you believe it’s ok to cheer nlf victories. at this point i don’t think there’s anything i can add. :slight_smile:

I’m not sure what your statement means but apparently you are twisting my words and attributing statements to me that I didn’t make. I’m sorry for US soldiers who were killed in Vietnam, and for their families. I’m also sorry for S Vietnamese and N Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who were killed in the war, and for their families. War is terrible.

I never rooted for the VC and during the war I was too young to understand what was happening. But I understand now that the people of Vietnam have a very long history of their country being overrun by foreign invaders, so I can empathize with Vietnamese who have fought to expel those various invaders over the centuries and in the case of the US invaders those locals happened to be VC.

[quote=“Flipper”]I’m sorry, are you claiming that “ho, ho, ho chi minh! nlf is gonna win!” was a creation of right-wingers to slander the anti-war folk?

good thing we have jane fonda on camera. otherwise we’d have people on the left claiming that she never supported the north.

btw, richard, did you not notice mt above justifying supporting the north vietnamese? maybe mt doesn’t exist and is just a device i created to question the patriotism of the anti-war left for propaganda reasons. [/quote]

No, I am claiming that these were a substantial minority in the anti-war movement. I don’t think you will find many Americans who will agree with Mother Theresa on this point as well.

[quote=“butcher boy”]So many, so many, so many.

the phrase ‘so many’ is a little ironic in that its tells us ‘so little’. How many is ‘so many’?

Is it more than a few?
Is it a more than a lot?
Can it be quantified,
Majority or not?
So many so many,
What does it mean?
You are waffling my friend
So much hot air and steam.

(ok ok, I promise, never again :blush: )[/quote]

“so many” is a subjective and not an objective measurement. i am not using the term to specify a number. i am using the term to express the feeling that there were “too many.”

to give you an example of this kind of usage:

“why are there so many reality shows on tv?”

you see in this instance i am not commenting on the specific number of reality shows. a majority? a duality? 10? 75%?

the sense of that phrase is “too many”. so, in my example sentence, i would actually be saying “there are too many reality shows on tv!”. but in the original rhetorical question format, “too many” doesn’t work that well. ergo the use of “so many”.

i hope i have made myself clear. :slight_smile:

[quote=“Mother Theresa”]
I’m not sure what your statement means but apparently you are twisting my words and attributing statements to me that I didn’t make. I’m sorry for US soldiers who were killed in Vietnam, and for their families. I’m also sorry for S Vietnamese and N Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who were killed in the war, and for their families. War is terrible.

I never rooted for the VC and during the war I was too young to understand what was happening. But I understand now that the people of Vietnam have a very long history of their country being overrun by foreign invaders, so I can empathize with Vietnamese who have fought to expel those various invaders over the centuries and in the case of the US invaders those locals happened to be VC.[/quote]

here is the original comment which set off this series of exchanges:

if you were not justifying the celebration of a vietcong victory, i am not sure what the point of your response to that comment was in the first place.

On what point? The point I was actually trying to make or the point that I never made but Flipper is trying to attribute to me. Flipper erroneously suggests that I celebrated the VC victory, or would have if I was old enough to understand what was going on at the time. That’s totally false. If I was older I might have joined most other Americans in celebrating the fact that our troops were coming home. . . or most of them anyway (while I was just a kid I remember the POW/MIA banners and I found those as distressful as anyone else would). The only point I was actually trying to make is that I can empathize with Vietnamese soldiers who fought to expel the Chinese, the French and the Americans from their country.

You may be right, Richard, that most Americans wouldn’t understand why people in foreign lands don’t throw rose petals in the path of US troops when we invade their countries. Maybe they should try to understand.

Why is that? The Vietnamese succeeded in evicting Chinese and French occupiers from their country. Shouldn’t they also have had the right to evict the US and Catholic intruders? Just curious.[/quote]

The use of the term “Catholic intruders” is objectionable as is the suggestion that the US were invaders, although I can see why the VC would think that. It still doesn’t excuse any American for celebrating a Vietcong victory over our troops.

It was a bad war that shouldn’t have been fought and we should have learned something from the experience so that those who died would not have died in vain, but apparently we didn’t learn anything because we are doing it again.

Why is that? The Vietnamese succeeded in evicting Chinese and French occupiers from their country. Shouldn’t they also have had the right to evict the US and Catholic intruders? Just curious.

Incidentally, I wonder if you realize TC that your quotes about Kerry are taken verbatim from the Internet hoax that is disproved at the Snopes website that BFM provided a link to.[/quote]

In reply…Again you are a liar. Why must you lie with every post you make? You constantly are caught in your pathetic attempts to raise your stature by belittleing others.
I provided the resources for verifying my post. And yes…one of the sources listed by Google is Snopes.com…which verifys the picture, its location and the reason it was included in the museum.

Don’t you tire of public displays of ignorance?

No, you are a liar. Nya nya nya. :raspberry:

If you go back and reread the snopes link you will see the quotes you posted in an attempt to make Kerry look bad are included by snopes as an example of an Internet rumor which snopes then argues is inaccurate. To wit, you quoted without further explanation as follows:

Snopes says:

[quote]The significance of the photograph’s presence and placement within the museum is subject to considerable debate, however. The picture on display does not capture John Kerry engaged in an anti-war activity (although such photographs are plentiful and easy to obtain), nor does it depict or describe him as an anti-war protester. The picture shows Senator John Kerry, a duly authorized representative of the United States government, meeting with Vietnamese officials in 1993 (long after the end of American military involvement in Vietnam) as part of a “high-level delegation” sent to Vietnam by President Clinton “to press for further progress on unresolved POW/MIA issues.” The caption below the photograph makes no reference to John Kerry’s anti-war activities, nor does it even identify him by name

A moment’s reflection on the photo shows Kerry’s clearly much older than he would have been in the '70’s and the communist officials are in western-style business suits and none of them appear to be the leadership from the Vietnam War era. Communist officials from that era would have been wearing Mao-style revolutionary garb.

I went back and reviewed Kerry’s statements and other activities from the latter Vietnam era and didn’t find any of the sweeping indictments of US soldiers that I expected to find based on the many second-hand accounts I’d heard during the presidential campaign of his behaviour during that period.

Having grown up in California and heard many an aging leftist portray the NLF and North Vietnamese government – and even the Khmer Rouge on occasion – as positive forces of enlightenment and liberation, it was easy for me to believe that Kerry was part and parcel of that movement but it appears I misjudged him.

When I read his actual statements rather than summaries of them by others I find that all he said was that atrocities by US forces were common in Vietnam – rather than the radical leftist position attributed to him that all US soldiers were war criminals wantonly killing civilians on a daily basis.

He particularly focused on “free-fire zones” in his testimony for example. The vast majority of US soldiers never participated in them but they were a common special forces tactic in Vietnam. Perched in a tree popping bennies with orders to shoot anything below that moves doesn’t leave much latitude for taking names and checking ID’s. What it does lead to is the indiscriminant deaths of 10-year-old kids, water buffaloes, grannies and old men making their way home after dark – and the occasional VC.

Moving up a river in a Swift boat and shooting the hell out of anything that moves on either bank also crosses the line in my bible. Too many innocent people die that way.

It appears I stand corrected on John Kerry.

Christ, right-click on TC’s pic, select properties, and you’ll see it comes from worldnetdaily.com. I think it was in the same issue as the monkey boy born to a white girl who’s b/f was named Tyrone and who thought she … :loco:

Now, see all that vitriol you’ve all wasted? What more do you need to know, fer chrissakes?

Why would anybody read that kind of lurid crap? TC, you might try to cut out the worldnetdaily.com and frontpagemag.com cites due to the overall looniness factor they ‘offer’ to forumosa forums - just saying.

Oh, and you too, fred smith! (frontpagemag.com is one you sometimes reach out to when you’re desperate for some kind of documentation, any kind of documentation, we know, we know…oh yeah, and the NYT and Jayson Blair and CBS and the Leftist Media, we know, we know…)

:unamused:

On the topic of Kerry, I seem to remember him actually having been in Vietnam fighting. I think that gives him a far better perspective of what war means than Bush, who never did any real military service and instead was partying around.

and mccain, who spent FAR more time in vietnam than kerry, has an even better perspective. and he fully supports the war in iraq. and the swift boat vets also spent much more time in vietnam than kerry’s short stint. so they must have better perspectives of what war means than kerry according to your formula, right?

Perhaps it’s objectionable, perhaps it’s accurate. I guess it depends on who you ask.

[quote]The Catholic Church must be considered as a main promoter in the origin, escalation and prosecution of the Vietnamese conflict. . .

President Ngo Dunh Diem of South Vietnam was a practicing Catholic who ruled South Vietnam with an iron fist. He was a genuine believer in the evils of communism and the uniqueness of the Catholic Church. He had originally been “planted” into the presidency by Cardinal Spellman and Pope Pius XII. He transformed the presidency into a virtual Catholic dictatorship, ruthlessly crushing his religious and political opponents. Buddhist monks committed suicide by fire, burning themselves alive in protest against his religious persecutions. His discriminatory persecution of non-Catholics, particularly Buddhists, caused the disruption of the government and mass desertions in the army. This eventually led to U.S. military intervention in South Vietnam. . .

Diem started at once to set in motion the Vatican U.S.-CIA grand strategy, directed at the preservation and consolidation of South Vietnam. His eagerness as a political prot

yes, because the communists established a state with freedom of religion so the buddhists could practice peacefully. oh wait, they didn’t:

ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Bu … -Communism

[quote] Ven. Quang Do was
prominent in the An Quang Buddhist peace movement in South
Vietnam before the war ended in 1975. After the war ended the
government proceeded to suppress Buddhism and arrested the most
prominent monks, including Ven. Quang Do. In 1978, he and his
colleage Ven. Thich Huyen Quang were nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize by two Irish peace activists who had won the prize
the year before.[/quote]

it’s ok to think the us involvement in vietnam evil, but for goodness sakes at least try not to idolize the vietcoms.

Yes, it’s quite clear that the US labels as ‘democratic’ countries that benefit its interests whereas countries with democratically elected leaders that are cautious about or opposed to US interference are considered nondemocratic. In the case of Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua and several others, true democracy is a surefire way to bring on intervention and a coup or worse.

worldnetdaily.com? Weren’t those the geniuses who photoshopped Perot in with a bunch of space aliens? Really credible stuff these Republicons come up with…

[quote=“flike”]Christ, right-click on TC’s pic, select properties, and you’ll see it comes from worldnetdaily.com. I think it was in the same issue as the monkey boy born to a white girl who’s b/f was named Tyrone and who thought she … :loco:

Now, see all that vitriol you’ve all wasted? What more do you need to know, fer chrissakes?

Why would anybody read that kind of lurid crap? TC, you might try to cut out the worldnetdaily.com and frontpagemag.com cites due to the overall looniness factor they ‘offer’ to forumosa forums - just saying.

Oh, and you too, fred smith! (frontpagemag.com is one you sometimes reach out to when you’re desperate for some kind of documentation, any kind of documentation, we know, we know…oh yeah, and the NYT and Jayson Blair and CBS and the Leftist Media, we know, we know…)

:unamused:[/quote]

flike…admit it…you got nothin’

I even included instructions on how to Google for multiple sourcing…lol

You got nothin’. :sunglasses:

Let’s see, the photo that supposedly proclaims John Kerry as a Great Hero of the People of North Vietnam actually only says that the photo is of a group of US representatives visiting NV, and he’s the one who’s “got nothing”?

Imagine if Taiwanese had risen up against Chiang Kai-shek around the mid-1960’s, and began receiving aid from Communist China. Taiwan becomes divided into an ROC north and an, um, DPP south. (Work with me here.) The U.S. military supports the north.

So, who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys? And why?

(Feel free to amend the example if you think the analogy misses some crucial point.)