"It’s past time to pull it down... That damned flag: it’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam. We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies."
Here is a link to the flags Wikipedia page.
TPM is not a parody site, so what is going on here?
Via Weasel Zippers
14 comments:
How dast Americans care about missing servicemen?
And how could we be so obtuse and racist as to not see all the nuance that made Charlie such a sterling figure?
because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists
Of course, they would have never come up with stuff like this on their own. Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
And here I thought it was Charlie who did that.
PS I note he goes all outraged over what The Donald said about Junior McCain. He neglects to mention how Junior and Lurch killed the inquiry into missing POWs to the great profit of Lurch's family.
It's a flag that recognizes people who went missing without a trace.
How does that smother anything? Prog-tards are so tedious.
So the South Vietnamese were racist against the North Vietnamese?
And what about the treatment meted out by the North Vietnamese on their own people?
Racism?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Oh shit, it WAS because ... colonialism.
Methodology imported by them harbl waaat pipl.
The Viet Nam was an eden (a collectivist one, of course) until the caucasian snakes showed up with their guns and disease and capitalism and torture methods and war.
Anything having to do with guns, disease, capitalism, and torture is per se racist because it all originated in Yurp and was exported and imposed on innocent brown and black people. Voila, colonialism. Except, small problem, none of the above is true. Firearms were invented in China (so far as we know) and used and developed there with great enthusiasm. Disease occurs whenever long-separated populations meet up (see, e.g., native American tribes devastated following Columbus and syphilis in Europe around the same time and also the devastation wrought by bubonic plague in Europe). Private ownership and control of industry and trade as an acknowledged political/economic system is a recent invention but it's aspirational existence is as old as humanity (my wildebeest; I raised/killed it). As for war and torture, is there objective scholarship on whether one population is more enthusiastic about these things than another? (Rhetorical question: To ask is to presume this can be answered.) Certainly if a population (say, seafaring Europe) has had more contact with other populations they're going to be more versed in the matter having been exposed to a wider range of torture options and war scenarios, among many other aspects of humanity. And who is to say that the Vietnamese did not have their own home-grown human urge to torture and war? Who is to say the Vietnamese were the original inhabitants of Viet Nam (they weren't) and didn't take over and drive/wipe out previous inhabitants with extreme prejudice (who knows). People have moved vast distances around this earth for longer than history, longer than we will ever know. It's a human urge (like war). "Colonialism," like raaaaacism, is just a way of leveraging political power by pretending to competent objective neutrality and then taking sides as between shifting human popluations, infantilizing one and undermining the other as inauthentic and rapacious.
You think if it was "racist" it would have taken a lot less time to discover.
Liberal blog declares something "racist"?
I find that hard to believe. That very rarely happens, because they are extremely careful about throwing that label around. It's something they really hate to do unless absolutely necessary. They understand better than anyone how serious that charge is and how important it is not to dilute it through trivial unthoughtful application, or just as a way to say: hey look at me. That would be lazy, and treat racism and the suffering it has caused as some kind of toy to be played with. It would treat real minority people as pawns to be used for base political games. They would never stoop that low. They are good, patriotic people who understand the suffering that war can cause, especially to the people who have lost a love one. They are compassionate, sensitive people, that we all should emulate.
Tits
This asshole isn't worth the effort it would take to get pissed off.
Does anyone remember the fall of Saigon? Do you remember those agonizing pictures of the Vietnamese clinging, clinging to the landing rungs of the American helicopters as they took off from the roof of the American embassy? Some of them held on even as the helicopters rose...and then they let go and fell back. I'm sure those falls must have ended in injuries. That's how desperate they were to stay with the Americans, to escape their "liberators." I called those pictures agonizing but they weren't agonizing to me. I was too young and callow to appreciate the horror unfolding on the TV. But my Dad was standing next to me and he was ashamed, terribly ashamed and distraught. And somehow it was conveyed to me....how terrible for the Vietnamese, how terrible for America.
Newsweek. Desperate rage click-bait. I refuse to dares la satisfacción, no hacerlos satisfecho. Like the song goes ♬ I can't give no-oh, satisfecho-oh.
Yea, I didn't click it either. Do you really have to? Everything is racist, so what's there to see?
These people can't die fast enough and in the most horrific way possible.
I have Viet Nam veteran friends who have been back there, and they report that the Vietnamese love Americans.
I forgot to mention that Rick Perlstein is a fucking idiot.
Racism eh? Well it is a black flag. Clearly a symbol of opression.
Does anyone know or care about the POW's or the dead from the Third Indo-China war in 1979? Tens of thousands dead reported by both sides in a three week border war over Cambodia and hurt feelings between commies. The Vietnamese not surprisingly buddied up with the Soviets over China and that ruffled some feathers.
Oh, that was just commie on commie? Oriental on oriental? No colonialism there! No racism. Move along, nothing to see here! Please disperse!
I certainly would never advocate any violence towards Perlstein, but if some veteran sniper gave him some new freedom holes, and I was on the jury, the prosecution would have to do a very convincing job to get me to vote for "guilty."
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