New Mars Forums

This looks more and more like I once wrote. Man will land on Mars in 2047 (there will be another ten years of time delay). In mid september to be exact.

Fine by me. Good luck!

I simply hope for your sake that you realize your favourite president won't fly the rebel flag, since the actual interest groups who are his puppeteers really couldn't care less about the wants and needs of middle America.

Sense a basic misconception here since Bush is the one who would not let you secede. And yes, he would be backed up by George Soros and Hollywood to name a few.

Tom, much of your reply is confused drivel. I only described how events unfolded. I never said the Vietnam War was based on rational calculation, political sense or any sort of clear sighted vision. It wasn't. The United States simply let itself get dragged into that quagmire, knowing full well it wasn't viable or worth it. It could well have been avoided, had the men in power not consistently maintained a "don't confuse me with the facts" attitude, and created the monsters of their own propaganda, which in turn came back to keep them hostage. Examples of those are the idea that Vietnam for some unknown reason represented a "vital interest" to American foreign policy, or that communism would spread unchecked if it wasn't contained in Vietnam (it weren't).

However, I will reply to what seems to be at the heart of your confusion:

This is where you have got it all wrong. People aren't interested in democracy just because the United States happen to think it's such a nifty system. Peoples are interested in sovereignity, in deciding for themselves, to be free to create their own future. Yes, independence is the magic word. One might have thought that an American would have understood this, since it is the founding myth of your own nation.

Sure, they promoted democracy, alright. There was only the slight problem of the South Vietnamese leadership not wanting an inch of it. And for good reason, it would have been tantamount to signing their own demise from the gravy train and political power. Try getting this now, Diem and Thieu and the rest of them weren't popular with their own subjects. Their entire position and power rested on armed coercion (which was supplied by the United States).
Moreover, the effort of building democracy or nationhood or whatever can never be effected by an outside force. It must be an impulse of the people in question. This ought to have been a lesson of the Vietnam debacle. Instead we see the US unsuccessfully try the same superficial script over and over. It's really sad.
To reiterate, if the United States really had promoted democracy, the people would have elected the FNL and the Americans would have been forced to leave. That the US administrations in this case wanted to eat the cake and have it is just another feature of the fundamental self delusion of this entire endeavour.

Which is why it became such an unpopular war.

The fact that the German army was numerically inferior in 1940 wasn't a known or appreciated fact in 1945 or 1948. For decades the ruling idea was that the Germans in all respects were the big bad boogeyman, bent on subduing the entire world. That image, mainly created already by 1930's antinazi propaganda, was the ruling popular dictum. It has only begun to crack in recent years. As for "counting on the French" to defend Europe, don't blame me, blame Roosevelt and Truman. And yes, a communist France, albeit a flawed prospect, would have been a major disaster, anyway you cut it.

There you go again. The Vietnamese weren't interested in democracy, had no concept of it and felt no need for it. It was a foreign idea that America was trying to implant over their heads and without the courtesy of even asking first. Their struggle on the other hand was against foreign domination and imperialism, which to their mind America came to embodify, meddling in their affairs (and defoliating and bombing people to bits).

"So what?"

It means exactly what it sounds like. Vietnam has long had a strong sense of nationalism, struggling against a succession of foreign rulers. The Vietnamese communists were above all nationalists, and hence supported by the common man. That Ho Chi Minh became a communist was essentially a coincidence. He could have been any kind of southeast asian nationalist or national socialist, similar for example to Shiang Kai Shek of the Kuo Mintang.

This is a feature of southeast asian communism that the United States were unable to grasp then, and obviously still is, or at least some of you are.

Tom, when all's said and done, I must admit I admire your tenacity, if not your wilingness to be impressed. I have an assignment for you. To get a better understanding, I suggest you read the chapter on the Vietnam conflict in The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. It's a great read and good breakdown of the vital issues which I'm sure you will (actually) enjoy.

Best,
G

This sounds almost precisely like the spinning superconducter experiment Evgeny Podkletnov was pulling in a Helsinki lab in the early 1990's. Definitely zero point energy related. "Crank science" coming out of the closet by the backdoor, after being secluded for decades by the powers that are, just in time for the world waking up to the prospects of a looming Peak Oil crisis?

The expansion of the US into the west was fuelled by immigration almost exclusively from Europe. When the immigration patterns looked like changing in the early 20th century, a quota system was established where further immigration was based on the percentage of the US population of a certain national origin. This system remained intact until 1965 when borders were opened for people from all across the globe. The policy change was effected by a very small select of interrelated pressure groups who had actually lobbied for it ever since the quota system was established. No one asked the general US population if they favoured such a change.

The founding fathers imagined a United States dominated by European derived citizens. They would not have accepted the current multicultural discourse. In other words, a strategy of expanding from the original 13 states has nothing to do with multiculturalism. Read your own history.

Ever thought about that the cultures about to be absorbed perhaps might not agree to being absorbed? Your notion of expanding US territory at this point in time is no different from Hitler's ideas about enlarging Germany at the expense of Russia.

Blah, blah, blah... Face of Mars, Hollow Earth etc... it's not the same thing. Real conspiracies do happen, it's just a matter of following the evidence. Sometimes we historians unearth this sort of thing just like proving any other historical point, and you can't make it go away just by shouting "conspiracy, you're nuts!". One such episode from the top of my head is FDR:s fakery map, showing false Nazi conquest plans in America, as part of his efforts to drag the US into WWII. Germany, quite naturally, entertained no such ambitions:

FDR's policy of deception and deliberate provocation is here chronicled in detail, from the Gulf of Tonkin-like incident of the sinking of the Greer – supposedly on a "mail run," but actually involved in targeting German subs for the Brits – to the fake map of the alleged Nazi master plan for the conquest of the Americas, cited by the lying Roosevelt in one of his "fireside chats." The map the President spoke of was a forgery cooked up in the dirty tricks laboratory maintained by British intelligence in the US, which purported to show the reorganization of Central and South America under "five vassal states" under German dominion. Buchanan cites Nicholas John Crull, author of Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign Against American Neutrality in World War II, as saying that "the most striking feature of the episode was the complicity of the President of the United States in perpetrating the fraud."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j092099.html

You really believe I'm after "brownie points" with the Muslims? Man, you're off tangent here. I hate Islam. I hate the literal invasion of Muslim immigrants into Europe that is going to destroy European culture and eradicate Sweden by simple demographics, yet I detest even more the ideological forces that have pushed this upon us. For over 50 years the chant has been "if you're against immigration and multiculturalism, you want to rebuild the ovens of Auschwitz".
And guess who's promulgated this verbal poison? Mostly stupid liberals, but the ideas came in large part from, yes, I'm saying it, certain Jewish intellectual circles. Like in the US they and their ideas dominate the entire culture, academia and media sector, only you mostly have it in the Neocon/Zionist variety, creating ways of seeing, deciding what is allowed to think and say. You really believe Europe would commit collective suicide in this way, with politicians so terrified to be branded Nazi, racist and bigot they don't even contemplate protest, if it wasn't for 1945?

Also, in the perspective of total racial and cultural disintegration, do you really think I fear a single Islamist bomb or two? That's like chasing a mouse with a flamethrower while your house is on fire.

The way I see it, when you dig into the grit of things, it appears more likely than the official story. But no one really knows until an actual investigation into the 9/11 events takes place.

I'd love to stop beating the anti-US drum, but it requires that you stop being so intolerably obnoxious, imperialistic and full of yourselves while in reality you're just a tail wagged dog (so are we, but in different ways). We are all prisoners of the same fate, but war in the Middle East won't solve any problems, because the problems those try to solve, don't even exist, or at least didn't exist prior to 9/11. There is only one party benefitting, and they are riding your back, and they don't care how many US soldiers come home in boxes or if it makes you the laughingstock of the world.

Even though their God tells them so, at least in a way, I can only say it obviously isn't the case, and you know it. You're intelligent enough not be fooled by some fantasy worldview if you don't wish it. If you wish it, it's only because you want there to be 'good fights' to fight, so you can motivate a continuation of the martial virtues you believe in. Isn't that so, Cobra? If the Mideast wasn't a threat, you'd have to invent it.
Also, there is no risk Islam would ever conquer the west if we did not allow it. As it happens, they aren't doing it by force either.

No. That is simply unimaginable. What would such a conflict be about? How would Muslims be supposed to fight it? Under what leadership? Why?

I don't understand what you are trying to say here.

I think Europeans and Americans often speak past eachother when it comes to Palestine and the Mideast. It could be our perceptions have been formed by different ways of reporting.
If the US wants to entertain an activist line and use force in regards to Palestine, Islam, the Mideast and defending Israel, it is useful to know why you are fighting and what you are defending.

I think this documentary is rather illuminating, and I challenge everyone to watch it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid … 4384920696