Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Russia on the offensive again" video.
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@marvinegreen Hey, Marvin. I was just a kid at the time of the Vietnam War. Maybe I was more aware of it than some at the time. I remember that the older brother of my best friend was in high school ROTC, and he was very informed of events, and would tell us about the conflict, including the tactics being used.
His father was Korean War vet, and his grandfather was a code talker in WWII. A couple of the family’s older cousins had served or were serving tours in VN. (Just as an aside, you won’t find Americans more patriotic and more willing to lay their lives on the line than Navajos.) Anyway, the older brother was quite hawkish, up until the time he graduated. I think his family members with war experience had been trying to break through his idealism to tell him the realities of war. And now that it was going to be his turn soon, they finally got through to him. He didn’t become anti-war, but his ardor cooled.
Anyway, he enlisted and went through officer training and was sent to Germany. By that time we were drawing down. It was the period of Vietnamization, Nixon’s policy of turning more and more of the war to the South Vietnamese.
I also remember my father, a liberal and active Democrat. Despite being a Democrat, he always said, “Respect the President”. (This was pre-Watergate). He was a veteran of WWII, and he also said, “Whether you agree with the policies of the government, we support the troops.” To be clear, he was firmly a liberal but he was not a dirty hippy. He was a fierce centrist liberal Democrat. But he gradually became anti-war as the conflict dragged on.
As I grew older and went to college, I studied the Vietnam War more in depth. I try to keep my childhood memories in a separate category from what I later learned, and not let it color my opinion. And here it is. Our leaders didn’t truly understand the nature of the war we were fighting. They thought it was one thing, but really it was another. They understood the nature of the Cold War, but they didn’t understand Vietnam.
Sure, they understood that it was an insurgency, but they didn’t fully understand the nature of that insurgency at a fundamental level. They didn’t understand Vietnam and its history. They didn’t understand that the North Vietnamese communists could be fiercely communist, but with an independent streak a mile wide. The bottom line is that if your policies are based on a false appraisal of the nature of the war your military strategy will not succeed.
With regard to the current conflict in Ukraine, the obvious parallels are obvious. The less obvious parallel is that Russia doesn’t understand the nature of the war they are fighting. They don’t understand who they are fighting. They don’t understand at a fundamental level the nature of Ukrainian resistance, nationalism, and independence.
The Russian leadership really believes its own propaganda and ideology. They don’t get why their domino theory of NATO expansion is flawed. They don’t understand that Ukraine’s primary motivation is its independence and survival as an independent nation. If they did, they would withdraw. Because they don’t, their strategies will always be flawed and insufficient.
Now we come to the thing you don’t understand. Why is “NATO North” more enthusiastically supporting Ukraine than is “NATO South”? Why are they more enthusiastic members of NATO? One reason might be that they have joined NATO more recently. But I think the strongest reason is how much they suffered under the Soviets.
Thanks for reading my overly long spiel.
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Your teacher was talking about martial arts, which is a sport, and (probably) personal defense. He wasn’t talking about war. There are similarities between competitive sports and war. Both involve adversaries in contention, each trying to win. And each adversary will (hopefully) leverage its strengths (size, endurance, skill, physical strength) to win.
But the differences are too large to apply your teacher’s lesson to war. Maybe it applies to the tactical level, but it falls short as you move up to higher levels.
And the main difference is this: in competitive sport, you and your adversary are fighting for the same goal, to win a game. If you don’t achieve a better score (or pin or knock out your opponent), you lose. There are other differences (rules, time limits, agreed upon dimensions of the area), but this is the main one.
In war, the two adversaries often are fighting for different goals. I’ll go so far as to say they almost always are fighting for different goals. If one side fails to understand this and fails to understand their adversary’s goals (including the reasons for those goals), they will misapply their advantages and/or their advantages don’t really apply. Size or firepower don’t win the war if you fail to understand your adversary and his goals and motivations.
What about self defense? Isn’t that a much closer analogy? It is, but it still falls short. You and your adversary have different goals, but the goals are quite easy to understand. Your adversary wants to harm you or rob you. You want to prevent him from harming or robbing you. Strength, size, and/or superior firepower are paramount in self defense.
Your teacher was motivating you to develop your skills, to put in the work required to perfect them, to practice, and to improve your physical body. He was training you in a sport that also has self defense applications, up to a point. But if he was only training you for self defense and nothing more, he’d be a firearms instructor. 😂
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@jesan733 I don’t think I’ve seen that put better anywhere else. You demolished runethorsen’s bad faith argument. Or let us say you “runed” his arguments.
I’m past sick and tired of soft-brained leftists and pro-dictator trolls using emotionally charged rhetoric, like “American Empire”. Is the U.S. a hegemonic power? Does it try to impose Western Democracy and values on other parts of the world? I think that is more or less true. But does it act like a traditional empire? No. If we want to see imperial ambitions, we need only look at China, Russia, and Iran.
I’m not saying the U.S. is perfect. If it is the world’s policeman, there are times when it acts like an abusive cop. U.S foreign policy and defense policy has made big mistakes with tragic consequences for others. This is all true. But it is also true that the U.S. checked the Soviet’s expansionism and has helped weaker nations maintain their independence against stronger belligerent nations. And it has not done this alone. It forms coalitions and alliances. Hell, the U.S. was the motivating force behind the U.N., making its two chief rivals permanent members of the Security Council.
Despite the mistakes, despite the sometimes mixed intentions of the U.S., the Pax Americana has been a net benefit for world. The conditions created by American “imperialism” has allowed hundreds of thousands, if not billions, of humans to pull themselves and their nations out of poverty.
American is not above criticism. It might not always listen to it, even when it comes from close friends. But it doesn’t prevent those friends or anyone else from voicing criticism and disapproval. It doesn’t persecute internal dissent. Not like China and Russia or various other smaller dictatorships do.
About the left: I only condemn the knee jerk anti-American left, its intellectually dishonest grifters, and its cud chewing followers. Once upon a time they were far on the fringe and/or limited to minor fields of academia. I don’t lump the liberal or progressive left with them. Once upon a time the childish revolutionaries were a trivial annoyance.
It troubles me that they seem to be gaining influence. It’s not as troubling as what’s happening on the right side of the political spectrum, but the lefty loons are becoming a threat—they sap our ability to fight the proto-fascist right, for one thing.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic. But the point is, if the U.S. is a hegemon, it’s a soft hegemon, the softest the world has ever seen. It ceased using violence to expand its borders in the 19th Century. People like runethorsen are either dumdums or wicked power worshipping nihilists, trying to “colonize” our minds with dishonest rhetoric.
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