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Comment by mort1merp0 | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend who served as a tank gunner in Vietnam. Has was wounded and sent home. He ended up with 4 teeth left after his jaw has been shot.

He refused to accept that the US lost. No amount of reasoning would make him budge on that opinion. I dropped the subject as it was a risk to our friendship.

I understand where he is coming from though. To have lost so many friends in addition to his personal injury, it would mean to him that it was all for nothing if he were to acknowledge it as a loss.

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Why would you be friends with someone like that?

Millions of innocent people died for nothing, and the US learned nothing, and did it all over again many times, because so many Americans, like your friend, were unwilling to concede that there was anything wrong with Vietnam.

Suppose your friend were instead an injured Al Qaeda member who felt Al Qaeda was right. Would you accept that?

But the US has killed _hundreds_ of times as many innocent people as Al Qaeda - ten times as many just in Vietnam.

it wasn't all for nothing. there was time when Americans cared about advancing a free world. Free from soviet style communism. And this was an ideal worth sacrificing for. Unfortunately, Americans have been demoralized by propaganda to the point of seeing freedom as something not worth dying for.

When I think of the word "propaganda", the first two things that come to mind are the Nazis and the "fight against communism".

Because South Korea would be so much better off today had it fallen to Kim Il Sung rule...

Impossible to say definitely. North Korea military spending has been around 25% of its GDP, which is said to be one of the top reasons why its economy plateaud in the 70s. Would it have needed to be so high if they had annexed the whole peninsula, and would they had closed up like they did if they had decisively won the war? Perhaps not: Vietnam certainly did better.

Around 20 percent of their population got also killed during the war.

>Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”

And instead of Marshall help they got global economic sanctions.

https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hat...

The carpet bombing of North Korea was one of the great war crimes in history. 15% of the population died. 85% of the buildings were destroyed. Many, many cities were wiped off the map forever.

All this for a country that had never offered the slightest threat to the United States.

If exporting freedom involves bombing civilians you're supposed to free and spraying their country with herbicides, then perhaps you should rethink your strategy.

The Vietnam war was a lost cause all the way from the start, just like more modern endeavours of trying to make ultra-conservative societies of Iraq and Afghanistan democracies by invading them. Pointless waste of money and lives.

Clearly, you are not a citizen of a nation who has been the target of one of the US's efforts. Crippling sanctions, extra-ordinary hypocrisy and outright lies/propaganda in the name of 'freedom', support of hard-core and insane terrorists as 'freedom-fighting' rebels, etc.

The US has historically been perfectly happy to advance its agenda of "freedom" by installing or supporting brutal dictatorships that suppress all political opposition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta....

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