But there is a lot to indicate that out of a sense of survival, Vietnamese didn't really teach the next generation about the full extent of the war.

What generation ever does?

As you suggest, who would set out to really inculcate a new generation into the deep personal horror of war? Perhaps I don't get out enough but I have yet to meet a veteran who would ever wish that on their children.

If I were a Vietnamese rice farmer and the Viet Cong came along and said I could raise my children in peace, for the first time in 90 years, I would probably sing hallelujah Buddha and go communist right then and there, alongside everyone else.

They could command my economy and control my movements and tell me never to speak of the past, and I probably wouldn't care.

(At least, if recent history is any indicator, until I got a cell phone.)

One [Japanese American], whose parents were interned, confided in me that her parents were encouraged by the US government not to speak very deeply of the experience to their children. And not to even teach their children Japanese language or traditions; as a result, there is almost a complete lack of collective memory of that period in time among Japanese Americans of subsequent generations.

As for the language and traditions, that's a common experience all immigrants shared, especially around that time. Part of it was official indoctrination, but part of it seems to have been a profound feeling of having left the past and the old world behind so fully that the only appropriate way forward was to embrace assimilation. (The conventional wisdom is of course that the third generation reverses the trend and rediscovers its heritage.)

Even today, American pediatricians will tell immigrant parents that it's bad for their babies to speak the mother tongue at home. There is apparently a wealth of research to support this theory, all of it curiously enough entirely American-based. The main difference today is that the parents seem to know to ignore it and raise their children in happy bilinguality.

Are those countries that have the most antagonism towards us, the ones that we meddle with most frequently over a long period of time...

If it were just a question of how many times we meddle, surely the Haitians would hate us more than anyone.

I think, rather, the truth is that it's hard to truly hate people who aren't within arm's reach. The singular success of al Qaeda was in scraping together enough resources and volunteers to stage an attack on the United States directly. It was really more of a publicity stunt than an act of hatred for our X, where X = { freedom, decadence, imperialism, women, etc... }. Pure resentment just doesn't seem to be enough to bring about that sort of thing.

Most people everywhere don't want to be bothered to think big and worry about abstractions. Haters in general, and Muslim terrorists in particular, are no exception. They want to go home and kill Jews, or Sikhs, or Sufis, or secularists (or infidel occupiers) from their own familiar neighborhoods, not go traipsing off halfway around the world to blow up buildings inhabited by people they've never met.

He knows that American Might Makes Right, and that massive US Government Intervention, lead by super smart people like himself, is the answer to all that ails us. From war to human rights to the economy to the environment, the more meddling by the Feds the better, as long as it is done by smart and sympathetic people like him and not by evil bad stupid capitalists like Dick Cheney.

Or were you talking about torture? So what? It's not like it takes large amounts of ethical willpower to take the correct position, i.e. torture's bad, stand firm and remain principled (but as omooex has shown us this afternoon, icky principles are for uncompromising losers). Ondelette knows a lot of "facts" and torture trivia, it still doesn't change the fact that his love of US Intervention is fundamentally flawed due to his reliance on a force that will always undermine his "humanitarian" goals in pursuit of its own. His torture encyclopedia super brain doesn't patch up the cracks in his political ideology, which has been intellectually bankrupt for decades. A guy named Noam Chomsky has written many books about the subject.

It happens every time, some kind of non-torture event occurs and he is in here opining about how we need to get involved and "do something". Then acts shocked when anyone disagrees with him and complains that they don't know as many facts and figures as he does and therefore he doesn't need to argue, he will just disagree (because he knows that he is right from all his reading). It happens every time.

Prior to 2001, the so-called "Legal Government in Afghanistan" (run by the Taliban, and later crushed by the US) was recognized by all of three states - Pakistan, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The idiots resident here wouldn't know about that though.

Prior to 2001, the so-called "Legal Government in Afghanistan" (run by the Taliban, and later crushed by the US) was recognized by all of three states - Pakistan, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

So what? Who fucking cares?

It's a really simple question that all you super smart people keep avoiding, do you think we should be escalating the conflict there or ending it? That is what it comes down to, the rest is worthless obfuscation. You either want the fucking war to end or you don't. I don't care about all the bullshit excuses and apologizing, should we be ending the conflict or escalating it?

Why do you even try? Wouldn't it be more fruitful to get onto the redstate forum, or the free republic forum? That is true even if you are into masochism. But you might actually educate some minds over there.

There is a lesson to be drawn from the history of India, and that is - you had better worry about your neighbors and what they are doing, or else, one day, you will be overrun. In terms of being oblivious about what was happening to the west of the Khyber Pass or beyond the Arabian Sea, nothing matches the historical Indian indifference, not even the isolationism that the resident idiots here talk about. The results of that indifference are written in the history books, too.

-- I personally think that this isolationism - while couched in anti-war terms to make it palatable - masks a form of racism. :)