Jane Fonda was partially right in comparing the Viet Cong to our heroes in the Revolutionary War. She was also catagorically wrong. Excuse me, how was that again? Sorry, I just go off on tangents sometimes. My mind has been on World War I a lot lately, it'll be 100 years ago this year that it started, and nobody seems to give a rip.
My thinking had gone in this direction: a lot of the battles of WWI came down to a strategy of attrition, which is basically throwing thousands of bodies of good young soldiers at the enemy in the hope that this will somehow wear them down. It never worked, yet we practiced the same 'strategy' in Iraq, and before that in Viet Nam which is where Jane Fonda just popped randomly into my thoughts,
People my age will remember (some better than me assuredly) that in 1972 or thereabouts Jane Fonda famously compared the Viet Cong fighters to our people fighting in the American Revolution. Let me just say I have no animosity toward Ms. Fonda; I have no bitter hatred toward her for that statement, nor have I ever had. But people tend to get uppity about such cracks, and fail to put them under a metaphorical microscope for analysis.
Well, yes it is true the Viet Cong were a rag tag army fighting the most powerful nation on Earth, and like our heroes they too were trying to repel a foreign invader. Their nation like colonial America is a strip of coastal land which they shouldn't have had a chance in hell of winning. Its at this point that the similarities end.
For one, the American colonies were not divided by an arbitrary line drawn in the map, a characteristic this war shared with Korea. For another, our rebels never practiced torture, and we never threw British prisoners into squalid hellholes to rot; there were no 'Hanoi Hiltons' in our Revolution. The 'foreign invaders' in fact were fellow Englishmen the vast majority of us were reluctant to fight, at least until Common Sense ignited our collective ire.
I suppose the biggest difference was that our leaders did not immediately turn on us once the war was won. The first eight years of our nation was under a weak central government under a weak constitution known as the Articles of Confederation. The states did not contribute their share in tax revenue, we often did not even have a quorum in Congress to conduct silly business like foreign relations and trade; and the 'President' of Congress had no power to compel Congress to act. Hell, he had to act as his own Secretary, sorting through all correspondence, foreign and domestic, without even the help of a clerk. You can see how our present Constitution is a distinct improvement.
Anyone who grew up in the 70's knows the united Communist Vietnamese government was no friend of the people. There was the usual war on intellectuals, and re-education camps. You don't think there would be so many 'boat people' risking their lives at sea in dangerously rickety boats if their government was a model of good will and generosity, do ya?
That's just my thoughts for the day. I would hope in the future some people would think things through before running off at the mouth with the first thing that pops into their heads, but we can;t expect as much from this generation of political hair-lips, can we? Thanks for the listen.
