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I'm not happy with that post.
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Dec 3, 2019 16:05
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| # ? May 8, 2024 21:59 |
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:I'm sorry, but I just don't think this is okay. Maybe if we'd had the volunteer force during Vietnam but the majority of the troops in country weren't Marines or Green Berets or whatever they were teenage conscripts essentially child soldiers who had the bad luck of being imperialist pawns. If you're so concerned about the poor conscripts then maybe you should direct your anger towards the fuckers in the government that sent them to Vietnam in the first place instead of the people who tried to stop that from happening?
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Dec 3, 2019 16:08
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Honestly, the Viet Cong could have shown a little more compassion for the people they were fighting.
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Dec 3, 2019 16:27
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So I was traveling for some 18 hours yesterday, and in the process I had gone through about 200 pages (out of 600) of Tom Clancy's Into the Storm, his historical account/interview with Gen Fred Franks, who commanded an army corps in Operation Desert Sabre, the ground offensive to liberate Kuwait and destroy the Iraqi army during the Gulf War. There's a lot of background starting with Franks's experience in the Vietnam War and the rebuilding/reforming process in its aftermath and in the leadup to the 1991, and here's a couple of takes I took notes on: ___ The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II were all categorized as wars of "national survival", as examples of when the American soldier has been forced to fight despite not being a warlike people. I'll accept that the first three were, but I'm pretty sure the last two weren't. ___ The book tells a story of how US forces would find flashlights as part of NVA gear upon checking bodies after ambushes and bombing raids. This was extrapolated to mean that the NVA troops could not see well in the dark after all, despite their reputation for "owning the night". Further, the army said that the NVA troops must have had bad night vision because of their "diet of fish and rice, with few fresh vegetables". The problem is that the idea of eating vegetables, and specifically carrots, as a source of Vitamin A to improve one's night vision, was a rumor started by the RAF to explain how their fighter pilots could fight so well against Luftwaffe night raids without revealing that they could be spotted with radar. So the army fell for its own WWII disinformation? ___ Agent Orange just gets a mention as a thing that did defoliate the jungle, but was bad because it did so inconsistently, as in there were still patches of jungle in the middle of open fields that were troublesome to clear out anyway. ___ There's a whole chapter on Cambodia when Franks leads an armored column across the border from Vietnam to capture a town and some NVA supplies (and gets his leg blown off in the process), but the illegality of the Cambodian invasion is never mentioned. It's just a thing that they did, because they were ordered to do so. And, in a similar vein, while the book does not quite go into full-on "we could have won the Vietnam War" militarism, it does say that the US failed to live up to its commitments to South Vietnam, and that the nation fell because the Air Force stopped bombing and providing air support. That this implies that the USAF should have just kept on bombing forever is not really interrogated. ___ During the Nixon administration, there was an initiative by the army, called Project VOLAR (VOLunteer ARmy) to implement reforms to try and make themselves more appealing to new recruits, as a way of anticipating the transition into an all-volunteer force once the draft expired. I'll link the wikipedia article here so you can see for yourself what it was about as described by wikipedia. In the book, it's described as painting barracks in pastel colors and making the army more "touchy-feely". Further, it attacks the project on the basis that trying to democratize the command process by giving enlisted men more of a say in the conduct of their duties undermined army discipline and tore at hierarchical structure of the organization, which was bad. That part specifically jumped out at me as a contrast to, say, what Russian soldiers demanded of the army in 1917. ___ General Donn Starry was mentioned as being the one who introduced the idea of a Soviet attack across the Fulda Gap as the thing that NATO forces in Germany should concentrate on preparing for, but I found the description odd because it seemed to suggest that this was based on his assumption that that was what the Soviets would do because the Fulda Gap was attractive to him if he was planning the attack, rather than direct knowledge that that was what the Soviets were planning for. That's not really unconventional, I suppose, I guess I just always assumed that the Fulda Gap planning was based on knowing that the Soviets were definitely going to go through there. ___ The book also says that the army got around to introducing operational planning (as opposed to tactical or strategic planning) in 1986 as part of its training reforms, but again it seems to suggest that the army didn't consider the operational at all prior to this, which seems like a huge oversight, unless the book is just written badly. ___ The invasion of Grenada was held up as an example of how much the army had improved in the years since Vietnam but prior to the Gulf War as a result of its reforms. ___ Finally, the part where I stopped at was Franks visiting Czechoslovakia in the late 80s and he got to observe how the Red Army worked. His description of them is very stereotypical, as in the Soviet troops had very little individual initiative, and learned and trained by rote memorization of procedures. He tells a story of how they observed a demonstration in the morning that finished early, and as an example of how "inflexible" the Soviets were, all of them waited in the falling snow for however many hours until the buses arrived at the original appointed time to bring them to the next event in their itinerary, rather than moving up the schedule to account for getting done sooner.
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Dec 4, 2019 05:04
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how are they saying that the vietnamese weren't getting fresh vegetables? it even notes that they're eating rice
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Dec 4, 2019 05:09
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Imagine defending Operation Rolling Thunder.
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Dec 4, 2019 07:15
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Serf posted:how are they saying that the vietnamese weren't getting fresh vegetables? it even notes that they're eating rice Rice is not generally regarded as a vegetable. gradenko_2000 posted:There's a whole chapter on Cambodia when Franks leads an armored column across the border from Vietnam to capture a town and some NVA supplies (and gets his leg blown off in the process), but the illegality of the Cambodian invasion is never mentioned. It's just a thing that they did, because they were ordered to do so. Does it really matter? It's not like North Vietnam really cared, at least as far as i know.
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Dec 4, 2019 08:00
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Does it really matter? It's not like North Vietnam really cared, at least as far as i know. I think it's irresponsible to talk about the invasion of Cambodia without so much as a mention that it was specifically crafted as an undeclared, secret (expansion of the) war. I mean, it's not like a book written with the late 90s wouldn't know about that, and it's a fairly bet that its omission was entirely deliberate on Clancy's part.
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Dec 4, 2019 09:44
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MonsieurChoc posted:Imagine defending Operation Rolling Thunder. "It has a cool name, and also I know absolutely nothing about how the air was actually was prosecuted."
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Dec 4, 2019 15:54
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So I've been slowly starting to work on listening to BBC4's "In Our Time", its longest running history podcast that started out as a regular radio show in like 2000 and sort of just kept going. It started off with a bunch of episodes on historiographic concepts in the 20th century - the relevance of statehood, large-scale conflict, modern politics, etc - and despite having a bunch of major intellectuals like all of these people are utterly doctrinaire in their adjacent-to-the-end-of-history Liberal triumphalist worldview. It's pretty funny hearing people talk about the "chaos" of the contemporary era and the danger of American "world policing" in 2000, especially combined with this general reverential sense that the problems of the 21st century are going to be an outgrowth of an increasingly infantile populace rather than a cynical, venal, ruling class accumulating absurd and unprecedented wealth. Like Gore Vidal went on for awhile about how politics suck now because the media has made the proles dumb or whatever, then some high-aristocratic accent british dude will give a long soliloquy about how the nation state is a critical source of "self-esteem and identity" and vaguely imply that the tories were nicer under Thatcher because the didn't even acknolwedge the existence of poor people while using phrases like "these beautiful islands of ours" or "our grand and collective British history" lmfao the weird thing is its actually, by the standards of modern history podcasts and radio in general, extremely good and comparatively erudite. it's just, even in the context of 20 years ago, suffused with such myopic fukuyama-esque complacency ed: the next episode, on labor and work in the 20th century, dialed up the whole thing and took it in a truly odious direction. it ended with a bit about optimism and faith in the capacity of corporations in the 21st century to prioritize long term sustainability over short term profits, which all the guests agreed was inevitable one of the guests was this woman who I looked up and is exactly what you’d expect based on her comments in the episode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_Phillips BBC has been a right wing propaganda machine for most of its existence but I didn’t think it was usually quite this explicit Frog Act has issued a correction as of 23:24 on Dec 12, 2019 |
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Dec 12, 2019 15:03
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All the episodes of In Our Time I've heard have had host Melvyn Bragg pester some expert to give him a straight and simple answer on something that the expert wants to give a long disquisition about and them getting very huffy about not being allowed to.
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Dec 14, 2019 02:57
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:All the episodes of In Our Time I've heard have had host Melvyn Bragg pester some expert to give him a straight and simple answer on something that the expert wants to give a long disquisition about and them getting very huffy about not being allowed to. yeah it rules, academics need to be more concise and melvyn wont let them pontificate for five hours
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Dec 14, 2019 03:22
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A crime against nature and divinity itself imo
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Dec 14, 2019 03:50
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Melvyn won't let them pontificate because he just wants them to say super nice things about the British empire or whatever, seems to be his thing
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Dec 16, 2019 16:28
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Bragg is annoying and breaks off his guests as soon as they're about to say something interesting so he can can shoot in his own lame rear end points.
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Dec 16, 2019 16:38
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Grevling posted:Bragg is annoying and breaks off his guests as soon as they're about to say something interesting so he can can shoot in his own lame rear end points. they're also almost always incredibly insipid points, like where he breaks in to be like "hmmm...you seem to think people are bad, and mean. why do you think people are mean? isn't it good when they're colonized?" ad inifinitum I mean to be fair most of the guests he's had in the first five or six episodes have been odious fucks who deserve to be interrupted. the one on the concept of "Just War" was a particularly incoherent back and forth that included Niall Ferguson on the panel and nobody even bothered to refer to his legacy of unbelievably corrupt reactionary defenses of British imperialism, especially when he was droning on about "just war" being an actual thing that makes sense
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Dec 16, 2019 19:03
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Frog Act posted:Melvyn won't let them pontificate because he just wants them to say super nice things about the British empire or whatever, seems to be his thing I haven't heard this but again I don't think I've listened to a lot of early episodes. It's hard with a short one subject show and a bunch of academics because everything is coastline paradox.
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Dec 17, 2019 06:11
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the one after that had Fukuyama and another contemptible hack talking about “bureaugomy”, the model where single mothers replace the role of the father with a “welfare agent” it was one of the most incoherent and offensive podcasts I’ve ever heard tbh, every part was at least that bad, and it treated Fukuyamas basic thesis about a “great disruption” as self evidently true
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Dec 18, 2019 19:31
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Frog Act posted:it was one of the most incoherent and offensive podcasts I’ve ever heard tbh, every part was at least that bad, You already mentioned it featured Fukuyama, yes.
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Dec 18, 2019 21:55
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Captain_Maclaine posted:You already mentioned it featured Fukuyama, yes. I’m familiar with his work in a general historiographic sense but I had no idea his like, day to day articulations of historical trends were that unambiguously racist and reactionary his bemoaning the loss of the industrial era family unit and the sexual revolution and divorce and poo poo was just a series of right wing tropes, which isn’t consistent with his general portrayal as a naive and academically counterproductive mainstream Liberal
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Dec 18, 2019 22:09
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VOLAR morghulis
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Dec 18, 2019 22:10
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Frog Act posted:I’m familiar with his work in a general historiographic sense but I had no idea his like, day to day articulations of historical trends were that unambiguously racist and reactionary He was/is a neocon in every sense of the word
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Dec 18, 2019 22:12
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I mean neocons were specifically not known for their disgustingly reactionary views in the same specific sense as traditional conservatives, thus the “new” part - they’re liberals and crypto fash but accommodated themselves to the Washington consensus and some of the Liberal social structures. the attitude displayed by Fukuyama there was definitely consistent with their economic attitudes but was more vehement and predicated in a weird large-scale analysis of some “great disruption” that’s not really an inherent part of neoconservative doctrine like, Fukuyama came up a lot in grad school, and the analyses I read were not at all consistent with the gross attitude he was manifesting there. he was and generally is treated as a liberal in the vein of like Mill/Weber but with a pop cultural veneer and neither of those writers were as malevolent as what I heard there
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Dec 18, 2019 22:16
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I wonder how badly fukuyamas brain broke after 2016. cant imagine that poo poo was sunshine and roses for mr. end of history
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Dec 18, 2019 22:32
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End of History, Beginning of Herstory Ladies start your engines!
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Dec 18, 2019 22:56
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cool dance moves posted:I wonder how badly fukuyamas brain broke after 2016. cant imagine that poo poo was sunshine and roses for mr. end of history this is from last year: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/10/francis-fukuyama-interview-socialism-ought-come-back
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Dec 19, 2019 14:57
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cool dance moves posted:I wonder how badly fukuyamas brain broke after 2016. cant imagine that poo poo was sunshine and roses for mr. end of history https://mobile.twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1052575565671223297
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Dec 19, 2019 15:47
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He's absolutely had some kind of inner reckoning, but the eye-catching headline leaves out the part where he says "well, not that kind of socialism." quote:“It all depends on what you mean by socialism. Ownership of the means of production – except in areas where it’s clearly called for, like public utilities – I don’t think that’s going to work. I'd also add that whatever soul-searching Fukuyama did started in the Bush administration, when he was comparing neoconservativism to Leninism.
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Dec 19, 2019 17:56
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Karenina posted:Yet the only plausible systemic rival to liberal democracy, Fukuyama said, was not socialism but China’s state capitalist model. “The Chinese are arguing openly that it is a superior one because they can guarantee stability and economic growth over the long run in a way that democracy can’t… if in another 30 years, they’re bigger than the US, Chinese people are richer and the country is still holding together, I would say they’ve got a real argument.” No matter what happens, number must go up!! Also quote:I'd also add that whatever soul-searching Fukuyama did started in the Bush administration, when he was comparing neoconservativism to Leninism. 
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Dec 19, 2019 18:44
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I sometimes compare the stuff I dig out of my belly button to neoconservatism.
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Dec 19, 2019 18:47
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cool dance moves posted:No matter what happens, number must go up!! quote:"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/after-neoconservatism.html
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Dec 19, 2019 19:44
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Karenina posted:I'd also add that whatever soul-searching Fukuyama did started in the Bush administration, when he was comparing neoconservativism to Leninism. But everyone already knows that its the trots who all become neocons
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Dec 19, 2019 19:52
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i'm not sure that says that much about trots in general as it does about just lots of politically involved people from that generation starting out as trots
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Dec 19, 2019 22:26
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quote:I'd also add that whatever soul-searching Fukuyama did started in the Bush administration, when he was comparing neoconservativism to Leninism. Steve Bannon also made a comparison of what he was doing with Leninism, though in his case it was kind of a surface-level comparison where it's only similar because he also wants to "smash the state"
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Dec 20, 2019 10:38
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Starting to think these guys just might not have the most solid understanding of what ol Vladimir was talking about, nor how he planned on accomplishing it!
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Dec 20, 2019 14:50
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luckily the BBC in our time episode about Lenin is coming next for me so I will be able to tell you all exactly what Lenin believed in afterwards
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Dec 20, 2019 15:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:Steve Bannon also made a comparison of what he was doing with Leninism, though in his case it was kind of a surface-level comparison where it's only similar because he also wants to "smash the state" hmmm, yes, when i, a professional historian of russia, think of leninism, the first thing i think of is smashing the state
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Dec 20, 2019 15:32
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Sounds like this fukuyama guy is a real dummy!
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Dec 20, 2019 17:26
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One Norwegian newspaper I read has a section with 100 year old news items on the back. Today there was something about a steamer called "America" carrying a peace delegation from Paris being arrested and seven men wounded by gunfire. Turns out it was something else. The Ogden Standard December 22 1919  IWW "agitator" was on board the USS America. It was apparently soon afterwards used to evacuate Czech Legion members from Vladivostok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_America_(ID-3006)#USAT_America_(1919_to_1920)  Meanwhile "anarchists" were being deported to Russia in the "soviet ark".    The whole paper if you're interested: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85058396/1919-12-22/ed-1/seq-1/
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Dec 23, 2019 08:40
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| # ? May 8, 2024 21:59 |
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Any good works on the collapse of the USSR?
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Dec 27, 2019 13:42
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