================================================= CONTEXT OF "PAX AMERICANA" I have written "Pax Americana" chapters as posts to a particular discussion thread of a Yahoo list. I have initiated the thread and chosen the title which points to the longest period of peace in European history resulting from USA having saved Europe from Nazis and imposed post war measures which made this peace possible. The thread has been started with my following assertions: 1.The world tends necessarily towards mondialisation which implies some form of domination by a single power. 2.Eliminating sad comedies such as the UN and powerless committees such as Europe, the real mondial power options seem to be: Russia, China, Islam and USA. 3.Of these options I have postulated USA, or "Pax Americana" as preferable by orders of magnitude. 5.Best not necessarily meaning "ideal", nor even "good", I endeavored to indicate drawbacks of the USA option which may prevent it from reaching the domination, as well as some of its disadvantages for the eventually dominated world. The worst of them is IMO the "American View", the complex of beliefs, cliches and prejudices governing American social and political reason and behavior. Particular chapters of "Pax Americana" try to illustrate on some important examples how the originally laudable American enterprises may get muddled in detail by the American View, sometimes to the extent of turning into catastrophes and crimes against humanity. The objective of the thread is to foster discussion and investigation which could indicate how the American View could be modified so that Pax Americana may become efficient as well as beneficial to the mankind. ================================================= Pax Americana VIETNAM =============================================== GENERAL EVALUATION ------------------ USA support of South Vietnam (SV) against the Gulag Empire was morally and humanly right. Nevertheless, while supporting SV the USA committed disastrous errors which finished by turning the originally right thing to the wrong side. NOTE: I use the term "Gulag" rather than "Socialist", or 'Communist' in order to avoid misunderstandings. Socialism and its utmost consequence, Communism is an ideology, a class which has good and bad instances. Socialist Sweden, Communist Kibbuzim Shomer ha Zair are most human societies that ever existed. Communist Tito saved Yugoslavia from Gulag. Trade Unions, Health, Age, Unemployment Insurances, etc. are aspects of Socialist Ideology realized in Democracies. Gulag Empire, whether Soviet or Chinese was simply a modern versions of Ivan the Terrible's tyranny and had strictly NOTHING to do with Socialism or Communism else than name. =============================================== DISCUSSION ---------- ----------------------------------------------- The Geneva Peace Accords. Signed by France and Vietnam they represented the worst of all possible futures for Vietnam. Under pressure of Soviets and China, Vietnam's delegates agreed to the temporary partition of their nation at the seventeenth parallel to allow France a face-saving defeat. The Gulag superpowers feared that a provocative peace would anger the USA and did not want another confrontation with the West so soon after the Korean War. Vietnam would be reunified after elections in 1956, which, like those in Poland and other countries dominated by the Communist Party, would be a dummy formality attaching unified Vietnam to the Gulag Empire. In order to stop Gulag's expansion in Southeast Asia Eisenhower and Dulles supported the creation of a counter-Gulag alternative south of the seventeenth parallel through a series of multilateral agreements that created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). In 1955, with massive American help the South Vietnam was born. IMO it was a good thing, like anything preventing Gulag's metastasis, like anything keeping some people out of Gulag's KZ's, genocide, terror and abuse. But there it is. Everything done afterwards has been done wrongly and should be a hard and cruel lesson for us who enter the most dangerous crisis the Democracies ever faced. ----------------------------------------------- Ngo Dinh Diem. Pehaps the worst enemy of the USA is, what we defined in WWII as "AMERICAN VIEW (AV)". We said that AV is dogmatically based in "WASP" principles and that as any dogmatism it knows only flat logic and ignores dialectics. But reality is dialectic. Refusing the dialectic approach results in refusing to understand it, in taking it at the face value and in wishful thinking. In Yalta AV worshiped the Soviet Union but soon afterwards jumped to the opposite and started demonizing Socialism and Communism. Now, it so happens that in the Third World most if not all honest, upright people adhere to socialist ideology. One may say that a person carrying there any social weight is either a socialist, or a gangster, or a religious fanatic. Any honest, reliable ally against Gulag would call himself paradoxically socialist or communist. Just like the communist Tito was the best anti- Gulag ally. But AV, incapable to grasp the paradoxes, or rather the dialectics of reality rejects invariably all upright people and teams up with worst corrupted pimps and gangsters such as Diem. From the moment when USA made him win elections and helped him to arrest, to keep without bringing charges and to murder thousands of people vaguely suspected to be against his regime, the war was lost. USA lost the popular support and maintained the war for years against any sense, causing unnecessary suffering and death of hundreds of thousands. ----------------------------------------------- POLITICS -------- But even with well chosen allies and with the popular support the USA would never win the war keeping their "would like but doesn't dare" politics. Northern Vietnam (NV) designed the strategy known as "hit and run". They would come from behind the seventeenth parallel, hit and run behind the parallel, which US soldiers were forbidden to cross. If you have some bloody line which you don't dare to cross, you better don't go to war. Scared of WWIII? But the practice has shown that Gulag gives in to real threat. Not to idiotic and criminal napalm on Hanoi. For Stalin, or Khrushtchov one or two million of Vietnamese or, for that matter, their own people count no more than a button. But WWIII would bring danger home, to the very holy person of the dictator himself and that would make him think twice. The lesson: when going to war, go and neutralize the enemy, whoever he is, wherever it takes you and at whatever cost. Or, if you are scared, surrender. Patton said in 45 about the Soviets: < If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on, we will get weaker and they will get stronger. > Unfortunately, USA Presidents who screwed up the Vietnam war forgot those words. ----------------------------------------------- ONE WAR BEHIND -------------- In the 30th Germans developed their strategy based on mobility supported by the technology of the time. One says that the French stayed with their Maginot Line "one war behind". And so stayed the Americans with respect to the tactical version of NV's "hit and run" guerilla warfare. Like the French believing in Maginot, the Americans believed in qualitative and quantitative technological superiority in pitched battles. But there were no pitched battles. The enemy hit from nowhere and vanished before being located. We shall discuss this point in more detail in the chapter on Jihad. Indeed, if Americans were "one war behind" in Vietnam, they risk to be "two wars behind" against Jihad and the Vietnam lesson may prove essential for their very survival. ===============================================