The Not so Subtle Moral Decay of the US Military

If you agree with it I know it's pure Nazi BS and won't contaminate my eyes with it. I read Mein Kampf and, as any Nazi will be happy to tell you, that's all you need to know about them.

 

We are getting off topic! Let's get back to the "Not so subtle decay of the American military".
I came upon an unusual description about their torture practices and how the "Special Forces" purposely leaked sensitive material to the public. It shows at the least they still had some conscience left and wanted the American people to know what their Government was doing. I much commend them for that bravery.

O.k., here is the link:
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/08/30/the-rift-between-the-us-government-and-special-forces/

 

Unfortunately, the British soldiers, during a house search in May 1945, took the only copy we had of Mein Kampf away from us. I don't trust any new copies that have cropped up!!
It is far more important to judge Hitler by his deeds during his reign than his ramblings after WWI.

Now, this is the last time I will answer to your fanatical accusations of my parents and relatives who lived during the time of WWII!!!

 

All informed and patriotic Americans ought to be anti-Israel. No other country has exploited, manipulated, and harmed America quite as much as Israel has.

 

The genocide of the native Americans certainly went on for years.

 

Churchill's account of WW2 is a good example of a personal account shaped by the prejudices of the author, but given Churchill's central role in many of those events it isn't a good comparison with most works of history. It is really more like a giant version of the sort of 'my war' accounts that inevitably follow any major conflict. Participant accounts are a crucial resource for historians, but are generally not great history themselves.

Your broader point on asking questions is valid. The danger comes when people take an approach that declares everything equally suspect as a prelude to grabbing whatever accounts suit their prejudices. Everything should be questioned, but not everything is equal.

 

The 'lies' about the Gulf of Tonkin have been much exaggerated over time. There was indisputably one attack on US ships. The second 'attack' was almost certainly a radar glitch, but at the time the ship in question believed there was an attack. Johnson was foolish to use that questionable second incident as the legal basis for expanding the war.

That decision in itself wasn't fatal, had US strategy been different. Unfortunately Johnson was caught between a profoundly unstable Sth Vietnamese government incapable of defending itself and a Republican party at home that would use the 'loss' of Vietnam they way it had used the 'loss' of China in 1949 - as a battering ram. Johnson's decision was an accelerated war of attrition. First there was the air war - Rolling Thunder - designed to cripple DRV infrastructure and fighting capabilities and force them to negotiate. When that failed plan B was to use large numbers of US troops in operations designed to force the VC/PAVN into combat so US firepower could kill them. The risk there was that US combat deaths without clear progress would result in an unpopular war, as it had in Korea a decade earlier (people forget just how unpopular Korea became - polls tracking war support with rising deaths for Korea & Vietnam are close to identical). By mid-1967 support for the war was no longer in the majority. Johnson & Westmoreland talked up a decline in VC operations as proof that victory was in sight, but it turned out that was a prelude to Tet. After that opposition to the war remained in the majority.

Johnson gambled & lost. Le Duan & the Politburo had no intention of giving up the fight. They calculated that they could outlast the Americans, and they were right. My personal view is that the war was never America's to win or lose. Perhaps if a sufficiently popular, stable and competent RVN government could have been created by the early 60s it might have been possible for US material support with a few specialist troops thrown in (basically what Hanoi got) to hold the line. Even if US combat troops were needed the ARVN had to be capable of doing the heavy lifting. By the time that was the case the US was determined to disentangle from Vietnam entirely not just because of US losses, but because of the impact on politics & society at home.

The Vietnam war was likely never winnable, but US strategy turned out to be the wrong one.

 

The only war crime is losing.

 

The American public was not really for or against the war till the liberal intelligentsia allied itself with the enemy

 

With this post, you come across as one completely ignorant of certain treaties and laws to which we are signatory.

 

When a more advanced civilization meets a less advanced civilization, there will be a winner and a loser. Especially pre-20th century. And 90% of the American Indians died from disease, not military conflict.

But that’s a little different than the Japanese military systematically murdering and raping their way across East Asia in the mid-20th century.

 

BS.

 

You're adorable.

 

I love your humor! That's what we need here once in a while to loosen up.

 

No, not semantics, fact!

https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/asia-africa/se-asia/vietnam-war/us-involvement

We were invited there as allies of the Republic of South Vietnam, no invasion. The only invasion was from the communist north who didn't want a free and constitutional republic Vietnam. Our assistance was no different than what we gave Korea, only there was not much of an insurgency in Korea. Sure, the politicians screwed it up about as much as possible, it could only be winnable if we actually did invade, the north that is. Your being there means nothing. Soon after the 2nd Iraq war when people were starting to criticize Bush for the war because his reasons for starting it were falling apart. One National Guard soldier who was there heard these complaints and wrote to the newspaper and to those complaining by saying they seem to forget "a little thing called 9/11". My God, a soldier fighting in Iraq didn't even know what the reason was, I wouldn't expect a single soldier to see the big picture from his foxhole. Yeah, we bombed and we killed, that's what war is all about. It would have stopped if Ho would have kept the promise for his people to stay above the DMZ.

 

The big problem was that his currency was the lives of American soldiers.

Had Kennedy or Johnson had the guts enough to be honest the war could have gone much different.
1. Rolling thunder should have been a unrestricted bombing campaign against the North with targets chosen by theater commanders, not by Washington DC.
Furthermore it was treason for us to tell the North when and where we would attack.
Johnson should have been impeached for this.
Some of the targets that were off limits.
1. Hanoi, Hi phong. Or however you spell it.
2. Air bases
3. SAM sites under construction
4. Dikes and Levees
We should have targeted their leadership in Hanoi, Russian shipping at their ports, we should have destroyed their ability to have an airforce and we should have destroyed their surface to air missile sites as soon as we found them , even if Russian techs were still there.
This would have saved many American lives and billions of dollars and most likely tens of thousands of North Vietnamese at least.

Once we are in a war. I do not care one bit about enemy soldiers, I only care about what saves American lives.

I believe there were good reasons to be in Vietnam and there were good reasons not to be there as well.

Stopping the spread of communism was plenty good enough reason to be there. Our presence there likely kept Thailand from falling to the communists.
Unfortunately we didn't keep barbarians from their murder spree in Cambodia.
And fortunately after tet of 68 the Viet Cong were defeat. Had they been a significant portion of the invading force of the 70s the fall of Saigon would have been much more murderous.

It's too bad it took the conquerors another 25 years to realize how devastating communism is to it's people.

 

If we didn't invade Vietnam, how in hell did I get sent there?

You offer nothing but revisionist talking points as propaganda. Other people who think like you might be interested in such sophistry, but I'll take a pass.

 

Too bad we didn't roll north.

 

Too bad you weren't there.....

 

Correct you are, my biggest regret in life is that i didn't serve.. however i was born in 71, not even old enough to be an REMF.

 

The OP is way off.

1) The U.S. hasn't "won" a war because it does not try to actually win. Because of the Cold War and the presence of nuclear weapons since World War Two, the goal of the U.S. in a conflict has never been primarily to "win". Instead the goal is "containment" and "de-escalation". That is preventing a conflict from spreading and growing to the scale that it might draw in nuclear powers and thus raise the chances of nuclear war.

2) The U.S. and all militaries routinely commit various crimes in war zones. It is the nature of things. During the U.S. occupation of Japan immediately after World War Two, once prostitution was banned the number of rapes committed by American troops was in the tens of thousands each year.

There is nothing new here.

 

Moral absence due to the underlying psychology of over-extension, poverty (lack of just compensation), the psychology of entitlement, stress bring about a sense of inadequacy (sexual violence) that brings about thoughts of weakness which registers as inadequacy that culminates into drug usages that alleviates thoughts of weakness in the short term; in the long term, if not properly confronted will net suicide. Am I [pointing towards "toxic Masculinity", NOT AT ALL being that it (TM) is a myth meant to feminize the male populace. What I am pointing towards is the outlandish, but somewhat understandable drive and push to have soldiers numb themselves under the guise of making an efficient soldier. All of what I have listed are parts of the psychological trauma (abuse) that young men undergo which brings about abhorrent behavior. SOLUTION? STOP THE F'ING WAR MACHINE AND DISCARD THOUGHTS OF EMPIRE! This is the culmination of having government from and in the hands of people of war;a war-like people.

 

OFF OP TOPIC . . .
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Be careful of what you see because it could not actually be

This explains the website : https://www.lyrn.ai/2018/12/26/a-st...itecture-for-generative-adversarial-networks/

The above has been posted to confront those who think that I am "off my rocker" for posting certain topics.

 

I agree. But even insiders such as politicians and generals who have opinions that are supposedly more informed than those that are observing from the outside can be subject to bias in the heat of conflict and ideological self-justification.

I do agree that the tendency to search out material that confirms our own bias and to disregard that which does not is sometimes difficult to resist.

I guess that is one of the big challenges to each's personal integrity when studying and writing about history. It can be so subjective even for those that were actually there.

 

The liberal "intelligensia" saw the stupidity and brutality of an unwinnable war for a unjust cause.

We should keep that in mind...........