Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.elections,alt.war.vietnam
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: Stockdale is a Bumbling Idiot
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 20:24:21 GMT
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The sad thing here is that David obviously knows that he is wrong - if
he thought he was right he wouldn't need to distort the positions of
the people he is debating against.

See below...

In article <1992Nov6.093945.23354@Princeton.EDU> niepornt@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (David Marc Nieporent) writes:
>In article <1992Nov5.204935.29624@oracle.us.oracle.com> mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman) writes:
>>In article <1992Oct31.142450.12037@athena.mit.edu> wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr) writes:
>>>In article <1992Oct30.022004.342@rational.com> msmiller@Rational.COM (Mark Miller) said:

>>>> Your fight is with the politicians who created the war, NOT with the
>>>> people who fought and died in it. Stockdale survived 7.5 years worth
>>>> of something you wouldn't have lasted 7.5 minutes worth of.  If
>>>> nothing else, he deserves more respect than you have shown.

>>>I think that your first sentence may reflect much of what people are
>>>complaining about Stockdale about.  ("Syntax meltdown decloaking off
>>>the starboard bow, Captain!" :-)  Stockdale, in some recent comments
>>>about the Vietnam antiwar protests, at least appears to be blaming the
>>>protestors for his captivity, rather than the politicians who got him
>>>into, and prolonged, that mess in the first place.  To me, this
>>>doesn't necessarily brand Stockdale as a hypocrite, but he sure does
>>>give the impression of being someone who just doesn't get it.

>>Excuse me, but if the North Vietnamese were taunting US POWs with news
>>about anti-war protests back home and stating that the US anti-war
>>movement convinced them that if they could just hold out long enough
>>they could win they you're the one who just doesn't get it whereas
>>Stockdale had his nose rubbed in it for seven and a half years.

>And why, exactly, should he believe them?  Are captors often in the
>business of telling POWs what their leadership's policy decisions are
>based on?

Of course not.  Please note that I never claimed this.  This is one of
the distortions that I mentioned above.

On the other hand, outside of James Bond flicks the people who hold
POWs are human beings.  Most of them are not thoroughly trained in
psychological warfare techniques.  When they say "We know we can win -
your own people will make you stop fighting" it doesn't matter if the
leadership believes it.  As long as the average Joe believes it that's
all that matters.  He keeps fighting.

>And this is silly, anyway.  Anyone who had studied the history there
>would have noticed that the Vietnamese had been fighting for decades
>when there was no anti-war protests in their enemy's countries.  They
>weren't likely to surrender simply because there were no anti-war
>protests in the US.

Distortion number 2.  No one ever claimed that they would surrender
because there weren't protests in their enemies' country.  They would
have surrendered because everyone has a breaking point and if you can
keep smashing them and if you can convince them that you will keep on
smashing them then they give up.  The only question is how long it
takes.  The second part of the equation was missing because the
anti-war protesters gave the Vietnamese the hope that the US would
give up.  It doesn't matter whether or not they did make us give up.
As long as the Norht Vietnamese people had a reason to hope that was
enough to make them fight.

>And Stockdale *still* doesn't seem to get the idea that if our
>government had LISTENED to the anti-war protestors, the war would have
>ended sooner, with less people getting killed or taken prisoner, and he
>would have been home sooner.

Perhaps... or perhaps the North Vietnamese would have believed that we
were even softer than we were and they would have tortured, murdered,
and kept behind even more US soldiers than the actually did.

And you still don't seem to get the idea that if we had put the kind
of effort into Vietnam that we did in WWII the war would have ended
sooner, with fewer Americans killed or taken prisoner, and the
Vietnamese who violated the Geneva Convention and tortured and
murdered American POWs could have been prosecuted and executed.
-- 
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Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,talk.abortion