Word: podhoretzes
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...history chokes Podhoretz's imagination; in his pachydermish outlook. George McGovern is not much more than another Henry Wallace, and the early 1970s Congressional inquiries into the CIA are just about the same as the McCarthy hearings. This antiquarian outlook keeps Podhoretz from under-standing that the opposition to the war spring from something more than Communist tendencies or native. The unstated backbone of Podhoretz's argument is that there were really only two possibilities in Vietnam--Stalinist totalitarianism, or American-backed authoritarianism. What the New Left was saying--correctly--was that neither of those was any good, neither...
...determination by preventing elections in the 1950s. "The main reason for opposing these elections was that they would in all probability have resulted in a victory for Ho Chi Minh," not through deceit but because "possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted" for him. (The problem, says Podhoretz, is that though he would have been democratically chosen he would not have ruled democratically. It is an interesting argument, that people should not be permitted in free and open balloting to support one of the world's two dominant political-economic systems: at the very least, it points...
Beyond that, Podhoretz makes no attempt to class any of the pathetically weak strongmen who took our orders in the South was more than a tyrant. He credits Diem with jailing tens of thousands, assisting local officials, and the "wholesale suppression of political opposition." Life under Thieu, he adds, included "rigged elections" and "those underground 'tiger cages' fit only for wild animals. "It seems reasonably clear why the South Vietnamese of the 1950s were not terrified of choosing undemocratic...
...were brutal in Korea is no excuse for Vietnam-cruelty is not governed by rules of precedent. And the antiwar movement paid much less attention to the My Lai's and Son My's than it did to the day-in and day--out operation of the war. Nothing Podhoretz says matters...
Where the left was wrong was in their estimation of the North Vietnamese. As Podhoretz currently points out, the steady stream of folk singers and Nation writers flowing into Hanoi really thought it was a benevolent government. They were wrong in thinking that Ho Chi Minh stood for justice, peace and poetry. But they were not wrong in thinking those goals worth pursuing...