monsieurdl

It was a good thing- we could not carry on by ourselves.

I never said the protesters were heroes- no, in fact most of them were not.

A7X

Those anti-war types came in three different ways:

Women
Cowards
Commies

parallel

In my view, the protests were a street-level rejection of the Truman Doctrine. The US was watching as it slowly lost its hegemony while the rest of the world rebuilt from the destruction of the war. This was unacceptable to those in power. The government/political desire to stay on the top blinded us to the need for more coodinated efforts.

The protests were the people's recognition that the cost was too high and the risks too great. The world was no longer a prize of the largest empire. The interconnectedness of the world economies and communication as well as WMDs meant that we could no longer count on dominance by war or the threat of war. Of course, that is more in retrospect than the thoughts of the time. Although I do think the protesters believed that the US was being too confrontative and felt that was no longer effective.

skizzerflake

A truly enlightened comment. You forgot plague carriers and coffin thieves.

Moishe3rd

The above is written as though the ideas that "the cost was too high and the risks too great," were actually, in fact, true.

To briefly take apart your response:
The rest of the world was rebuilding from WWII directly due to the United States of America. Those under Soviet or Communist domination did NOT rebuild and remained backward and squalid prisons of despair.
The US did not "lose" its hegemony. It briefly surrendered to Soviet hegemony and the world suffered greatly due to this surrender.
I do not know what you mean by "coordinated efforts."

The Soviets attempted to make themselves the "largest empire" by force and terror. The main force stopping them was the United States. When we failed, their hegemony did expand and millions suffered and/or died.

The Soviet Union ultimately collapsed because they could not compete economically or militarily - they lost because of "the threat of war."

Confronting the Soviet Union was extremely effective when it was done. They backed down in the Cuban Missile Crisis and they lost the Afghan War because the US confronted them.

The protesters were dead wrong if they thought that confrontation; dominance; and the threat of war was not effective. It was.

parallel

I suppose you could blame it on a defeatist American attitude, but clearly the people of the time did believe the costs and risks were too high. A look at the polls taken on the war would confirm this.

The problem with confronting the Soviet Uniion was the risks of nuclear war only look insignificant in retrospect. The tension of the time was a daily life-fact which made each step a potential disaster. It would have only taken one misstep to cause immeasurable harm. We opperated under that assumption at the time. We didn't "surrender" hegemony; it was simply a fact we had to deal with.

In some ways, I'll agree with the premise that we spent them under the table, destroying their economy and "winning" the Cold War. However, the Communist regime in the USSR might well have faced the same diffculties that China is currently facing in controlling their economy and people. Finally, the conditions under Communism in the Soviet Union were "squalid" but better in many ways than under the Tsar and had it not been for the destruction caused by WWII, of which the USSR bore more than its share, those conditions would probably been significantly better.

By the way, I'm in no way defending communism as we can clearly see that the system is a failure, but I do believe we as a nation didn't need to confront it at every turn to brush it into the trash heap of history.

Belgarion

Troll

MrKap

The politically correct reply is, "child abuser".

I am just kidding because I know you are not a child abuser, and certainly not a phedophile (that term is very popular these days).

But you are correct, short replies which might be more witty in nature can come off as less than a formal contribution the thread. It's welcome, it shows you might be reading and learning. ect...

SirOrmondeWinter

Children, children, I know this is an emotive topic but still, behave yourselves, you'll get us banned.

So for the most point it seems that most agree that the protesters were right but sometimes went too far. I think that tarries to my personal view, it was right to try to save South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and spare them tyranny and genocide (you wonder what the anti-Vietnam protesters think when they watch The Killing Fields or witness the boat people fleeing persecution in their 100,000s). Whatever the faults of the Saigon regime (and they were LEGION!) they were still inifinitely better than the communist regime that replaced it. Had South Vietnam survived it would be like South Korea today.
That said I see the point of view of the protesters, they were expected to send their sons overseas to die in a war for a corrupt, brutal and largely undemocratic regime. In itself that wasn't unusual but the media also brought the war home in a way that hadn't happened before, frankly the Allied forces in Vietnam didn't do anything they hadn't done in Korea, WW1&2 etc
It was the futility of it which was the problem. Hamburger Hill was a case in point, sending troops time and again to assault a meaningless objective at huge cost which was abandoned again afterwards, the NVA once again slipping into their safe havens in Laos and Cambodia. The protesters view is that it was senseless was inherently correct. Nixon's concept of 'Vietnamisation' was probably the only way to go, bolstering the ARVN so that they could stand on their own two feet.

A7X

This entire post is incomprehensible.