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Ford Urges All Americans to Salute Our Vietcong Rulers

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...did i read that right...? "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld"????

WTF!?!?!?!?!? lol

Cabinet Members Under Ford

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger (Cont.)
Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon (Cont.)
Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger (Cont.)
Donald H. Rumsfeld, 1975
Attorney General William B. Saxbe (Cont.)
Edward H. Levi, 1975
Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton (Cont.)
Stanley K. Hathaway, 1975
Thomas S. Kleppe, 1975
Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz (Cont.)
John Knebel, 1976
Secretary of Commerce Frederick B. Dent (Cont.)
Rogers C. B. Morton, 1975
Elliot L. Richardson, 1976
Secretary of Labor Peter J. Brennan (Cont.)
John T. Dunlop, 1975
William J. Usery, Jr., 1976
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar W. Weinberger (Cont.)
F. David Mathews, 1975
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development James T. Lynn (Cont.)
Carla A. Hills, 1975
Secretary of Transportation Claude S. Brinegar (Cont.)
William T. Coleman, Jr., 1975



...LMAO!!!

Just to set you straight over the casualties...its not 1.5m.
In 1984 the US state dept released their assesment of the number of dead which was Vietnamese: 3.8m, Laotians: 800,000, Cambodians; 800,000 which is a total of 5.4m...

The Vietnamese govt say they lost around 5.5m though...

Some of you peakoilers might be too young to know how the Vietnamese transported their supplies from the North to the South.

So, FYI, they loaded bicycles with almost a 100 kg load (200 pounds), attached a bar over the steering handles, and pushed the bicycles on narrow jungle trails, often in steep terrain. It is a long way, I think I remember from the reports that it could take a month, but still...

I have always found it fascinating that the strongest military power in the world in the 20th century was defeated by bicycles. Well, of course combined with the spirit and dedication of the Vietnamese.

With bicycles people can transport lots of stuff even after PO. Even when the surface has crumbled on our superhighways, they will be a lot easier to use than trails in mountain jungles.

nocar

We could have won that easily. Hell, if you had let me to do it, I could have "won" the war. Bomb every major settlement and throw those people back into the stone age. We did not do everything necessary to win that war. We lost 58,000 soldiers because we refused to take the gloves off and win. It would have been much easier to bomb a 10 mile strip across the country and create a de-facto DMZ between North and South. Napalm and other chemical weapons could have been used to deforest that strip of land. Anything that crosses that line could have been destroyed nearly instantly. Rome didn't go easy on Carthage. Rome didn't avoid civilian casualties in Gaul. If the United States military wishes to win wars, it must use its full potential.

But you must ask yourself, “Do we want to win?” Winning is relative because the cost is hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. But if your goal is to win a war, force must be used. I personally would not want to win that way and would not support anyone suggesting it. However, that person (a genocidal maniac he might be) would at least be telling it like it is. The world is a brutal place. Sometimes brute force is necessary to secure victory.

So to conclude, don’t tell me that we couldn’t have won the Viet Nam war. We could have, we just chose not to. We don’t like committing mass murder (thankfully) and avoid it at all costs. This makes us look better to the rest of the world, but it costs us boys between the ages of 18-25.

You've got to love revisionism. If America had "blown the piss out of them", to copy the classic phrase from Day Of The Dead, would that be winning? The original objective was to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam, but America would have lost more than it gained. It's easy to forget how close America was to civil war back then, but you can be pretty sure that genocide would have combined in far more unrest, and the economic slump of the 1970's could have merged with this to change everyone's lives forever. Fortunately, America "chose" to lose that war.

Of course, if you're a strict objectivist (in the war sense rather than the philosophical sense) you'd have to say that we lost the war in Europe, as Poland still ended up under the iron hand of dictatorship. The same thing happened with Czechoslovakia, but at least Austria stayed free.

As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the defeat of the Americans by rice farmers and coconut girls in Vietnam, we must begin to ask ourselves the question about war damages.

With the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to pay war damages to the nations it had attacked during WWI. This sum amounted to 132 billion Reichsmarks, which would mean a sum of some US$ 1100 billion today.
Germany has also paid the survivors of the extermination of the jews huge sums of money.

We must now ask the same logic of reparations for the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian victims of the brutal and illegal war of the Americans in South East Asia.

If we know that, on average, holocaust survivors received around US$ 10,000 per capita, and at today's value, Versailles reparations amounted to approximately US$ 1000 per capita (we calculate this as a sum per victim), how much should the US pay the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who survived their aggression?

Knowing that the Americans killed around 3 million Vietnamese, 200,000 Laotians, and 500,000 Cambodians (grand total: 3.7 million women, children, babies, old men, rice farming boys and girls), we offer the following poll options:

Again, mysteriously, a third poll option disappeared (Aaron, there's something wrong with the machine).

The third option was: "US$ 10,000 per capita - a fraction of what the US spends on tanks, cannons, aid to Israel, bombs, WMD and other slaughter machines each year"

Aaron, there's something wrong with Lorenzo and his posts. Every third brain cell in his addled pate seems to be misfiring and I can no longer see his posts.

Actually, Domus Albion, if we accept that wrongdoers should pay compensation, then what's wrong with putting a figure on it.

It was my -perhaps addled -recollection - that a figure for US compensation to Vietnam had already been proposed, I think in the UN, and the US had dismissed the idea of paying a penny. Nor about Bhopal either.

I prefer the option of letting them lend us money, followed by a planned reduction in the value of the currency. The net result is that they pay us.

http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/ Americans are evidently well liked in Vietnam. Seems they see the situation as being similar to the US - UK friendship that has developed since the US won independence in The Revolutionary War. Far from wanting reparations, they want closer ties. In the potential conflict between the US and China, Vietnam may well prove to be on the American side.

I don't believe handfuls of cash would do anyone justice. The moral thing to do would be to accept that our WMD's continue to devastate large portions of the population and to head a humanitarian effort to assist the Vietnamese in combating these effects.
What's that saying, 'Give a man a fish...."

Don't feed the brainless anti-American trolls.

Pay Vietnam reparations? Man, that is one truly nutty idea. It's so nutty it must be some kind of joke.

EB

NiKfUrY69 wrote:Lock on and launch nukes!

The spooky thing is that when the shit does hit the fan and we are looking at real end times, I do think that the nukes will fly - primarily at China. Its not a pretty thought but if DIE-OFF is staring us in the face then it will be a case of 'whatever it takes.'

I wouldn't pay viet-nam a dime but I wouldn't mind buying lorenzo and jane fonda BOTH one-way tickets to hanoi.

jdelagado

I guess my earlier post just didn't get across to anybody. Oh well, I'm not proud. Vietnam DOESN'T WANT REPARATIONS THEY WANT TO BE OUR FRIENDS. Get it? Those days are gone. And the times they are a-changin'.