This statement usually implies that people who act according to a moral framework that isn’t “Live with the minimum amount of intrusion to other people’s lives” are doing wrong. I personally don’t buy that.
When they are told, “Do not spread corruption in the land,” they reply, “We are only peace-makers!”
Indeed, it is they who are the corruptors, but they fail to perceive it.
- The Holy Qur’an (2:11)
And sent Russian troops in to pose as separatists.
It seems like ceding any territory now would lead to further conflict soon both in Ukraine and elsewhere based on both recent history and Russias statements.
Furthermore it would abandon those in these territories to privation and mass murder same as the soviets perpetrated against them in the past.
I feel utterly appealed at the HN users who support Russian genocidal state.
You can make all sorts of arguments as to whether or not it was moral to partition the original state of Vietnam into two separate states or whether it was moral for America to be involved at any point, but I'd make the general argument that the state starting a war with a literal invasion is rarely the moral party in such situations.
The vietnamese won their war of independence against france ( aka first indochina war). Then the US stepped in to protect 'european colonial interests' gave the southern half of vietnam to france with the promise that the vietnamese people will have a vote. When polls showed southern vietnamese were overwhelming for reunification with the north, we renegged on our promise and did not allow a vote. And hence the 2nd indochina war happened.
> The Vietnam war, or at least the fighting that us Americans refer to by that name, was started by the sovereign state of North Vietnam invading the sovereign state of South Vietnam
The vietnam war was the US fighting the Viet Cong. Do you know who the viet cong was? They were SOUTH vietnamese. The vietnam war wasn't the US fighting north vietnam. It was the US fighting south vietnamese freedom fighters.
Which is why the south fielded close to a million man army and the north had to murder several hundred thousand south Vietnamese when they won the war? They just wanted to reunify peacefully so badly?
What does this have to do with the fact that most south vietnamese wanted reunification? You mean governments are able to pay poor men to sign up for wars? Shocking.
So we are agreed that the south vietnamese wanted to vote for reunification and the US renegged on that vote. Nothing else matters. That's the crux of the problem.
> and the north had to murder several hundred thousand south Vietnamese when they won the war?
But most of the south vietnamese military supported the north. Especially towards the end of the war. If your assertion was true, then how evil must the US truly be to allow hundred of thousands of soldiers to be murdered? Oh wait, you are just making shit up. And if the north was murdering hundreds of thousands of south vietnamese soldiers, there would have been an uprising. Oh wait, there was no uprising. Stop making things up.
> They just wanted to reunify peacefully so badly?
Yes. It's why the vietnamese agreed to the partition. They foolishly expected that the US ( the self-proclaimed defender of democracy and freedom ) was negotiating in good faith. Hopefully the vietnamese learned their lesson.
You are outright lying about basic historical facts. Not sure why you expected to get away with it. Especially here.
The Viet Cong were able to pay those poor men too, but the vast majority of them chose to fight for and to be paid by the south.
>If your assertion was true, then how evil must the US truly be to allow hundred of thousands of soldiers to be murdered?
They were evil enough to allow tens to hundreds of thousands of south Vietnamese to be subject to torture and starvation in concentration camps.
If this is true why couldn't the South beat the North, or at least defend itself on its own? After the US left the South Vietnamese folded pretty quickly.
Just to be clear, my argument is that launching an invasion of the south was an immoral act.
It doesn't necessarily justify any immoral actions by america (or anyone else) but vice versa it's extremely hard to justify launching an invasion.
Hilarious how now we are calling revolutionaries who fought to merge their country with a totalitarian dictatorship "freedom" fighters.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The world is just too large and complicated for anything to ever boil down to just two sides. We can pretend it does for rhetorical purposes because otherwise political conversation gets hard; but it is important to leave space for the large group of neutrals who in all honesty probably have accurate interpretations of any given issue.
It also doesn't hurt that he said he would send red state militias into blue states to collect millions of migrants to be herded into concentration camps.
They have been running on destroying America while calling it saving it for 8 years. Meanwhile in their I know you are but what am I press strategy they are claiming that the other side is somehow destroying America despite all evidence to the contrary despite the only existential threat presented by business as usual being the widening gulf between their deranged super fans and the normals.
Arguably, the reason the Nazis came to power was that a great many right-leaning German voters looked at their options and thought "this Hitler guy seems pretty crazy, but that'll probably cook off, so long as he helps us beat the communists", which is a special kind of neutrality that people can never seem to shake free of.
I get what Kennedy was responding to, his sin was in failing to understand (just like the German right) that "leftist" != Stalinist/Maoist, and that a communist takeover need not look like the October Revolution, and the regime need not look like Russia ca. 1935, nor China ca. 1960.
I don't know that I would characterize giving pieces of another country to the Germans as "neutrality".
That said, I am referring specifically to the "this Hitler guy probably isn't so bad" phenomenon that happened inside Germany and Austria. It was a dramatic failure to take a stand against Nazism, by middle class people whose neutrality on the persecution of untermenschen was motivated by a fear of losing their economic position (and the perceived economic opportunity of seizing the persecuted's assets. That is where the "socialism" in national socialism comes from, by the way), which overrode their ability to see all the violence and hatred that the Nazis wore on their sleeves. Its very similar to the neutrality of the Swiss during the same period of time.
I would guess for every moral WWII, there are 10 (if not 100) other wars that use the language of WWII and result in a complete waste of lives and money and cause far more problems than they solve.
If it wasn’t that way, Dresden and Tokyo would never have been firebombed. No one thought those missions were moral or good. they were in the service of annihilating the enemy for survival.
I think with a hindsight of history, my view is different:
'The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who push people into active enmity claiming a moral crisis'
The Thirty Years War was a result of this and never needed to have happened.
More recently, and dealing with Kennedy, the Vietnam War was result of this kind of thinking. (Domino theory and that unless we opposed every single advance of communism the entire world would fall and be plunged into darkness).
The Cultural Revolution was another manifestation of this kind of thinking.
Someone, much wiser than both Dante and Kennedy once said: "Blessed are the peacemakers".
EDIT:
And even prior to Dante's time, there were the Crusades, where in the name of a "moral crisis", people were mobilized, and great atrocities were committed and much death and destruction resulted.