So maybe we got it all wrong

[Hax]

About the Vietnam war; there are several issues that immediately come to mind when I see the United States failure to effectively "win" the war. As you stated, there was now real objective set, apart from turning North Vietnam into one big crater. Some other issues are:

- Fighting an unjustified war for a tyrannical government that was far worse than Ho Chi Minh, who I find a lot more agreeable than Nixon or Johnson. The Diem regime was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to Vietnam

- The "ends" justify the means. The Vietnam war was like the dire half-dragon version of that. It was a war based on the near-complete annihilation of a nearly invisible foe to preserve the very limited South Vietnamese version of democracy, which included rape, torture, mass conversion and many other nice western traditions. And now I haven't even mentioned the horrors of the child prostitutes on the streets. The United States governmen't didn't care about the basic human rights of Vietnamese citizens, but what's at least on par with the acceptance of the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese citizens, they actually sent in thousands upon thousands of their own citizens to fight this useless war for a useless cause, a cause that had been corrupted and hollowed out, I think, just about after the Korea War. John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen have explained this way more eloquently than I ever could, though.

Now that I'm fired up, I'd like to say this as well:

I have a huge problem with the way the conservative right in America seems to choke up every time a band starts playing bombastic music and flags are raised and soldiers are pointing their phallic objects in the air. To be honest, it doesn't impress me in the least. I think it's an absolutely horrible thing to feel pride in the fact that our tools of death our better than "the enemy's (Germans, Japanese, Vietcong, Afghani's, Muslims) tools of death and that we should feel some sort of weird heroism over the fact that our soldiers are going out to shoot those people under the guise of bringing democracy. It's absolutely horrible. By now, I will probably, among the McCarthyists, I will probably have finally settled myself as another Godless Communist/Liberal/Socialist, but I couldn't really care about that either.

I for one closely align patriotism, nationalism and fascism and as such, the raising of flags and the before-mentioned bombastic music doesn't impress me. Rather, it leaves me with a foul taste in the mouth. For me, it's patronizing and immoral and it comes creepily close to a misplaced feeling of superiority. When will we learn that in the end, we're all humans?

EDIT: I might have come across as a hater of America, which would be totally weird because

1) I don't feel hatred towards people/institutions/nations in the first place.
2) I deeply respect the diversity and general tolerance that is present in some places in the United States...San Francisco, for example.

As such, I am inclined to say that I just have a large problem with the pro-war/life (think about that for a moment) faction in the United States that seems to have quite some power at the moment.