People are entitled to their own opinions, even when those opinions are put in the form of an "ideal".

They are not, however, entitled to their own facts.

Muggaz, I think you should make sure to save these posts you make and then in several years go back and read them. The main problem I have with your posts is that you have a superficial understanding of events. Most of your "ideals" are charactertures and over simplification of the issues.

The Vietnam one is particularly appalling in its lack of knowlege of the facts.  The Bin Laden being supplied by the CIA is another such statement (the US helped Afghanistan against an aggressive invasion from the Soviet Union, are you actually arguing that this was somehow bad? That certain "bad people" like Osama Bin Laden may have benefited indirectly from this doesn't make it our fault anymore than we can blame the government for criminals in the United States because they attended public schools at one time).  Nearly every "ideal" you have listed is like that though.

What I find amazing is that anyone from Australia would have such double-standards (how those Tasmanians doing? Oh yea, they're all dead due to an Australian progrom in the late 1800s).

Your second problem is less severe than the issue of simply not knowing the subject matter you post about.  Your second problem is that you essentially just complain about what others do without offering an alternative.  For example, you state that the US did not have the (ahem) "right" to bomb Afghanistan.  So what would you have prposed the US do to take care of Al Queda which was based in Afghanistan and protected by the government of Afghanistan (Taliban)? Remember, the US tried to negotiate with the Taliban to turn over Osama Bin Laden and his cronies and they refused. So what would your next move have been?

If someone wants to come on and argue that the moon is made of green cheese they have that right. But that doesn't make the person who says it is not made of green cheese merely someone of a differing opinon or "ideal".

It's appalling because you have no idea what you're talking about. Where do we even start? How about the fact that the Vietnam people didn't want to "choose" a communist country anymore than Cuba wanted a communist government. The United States was defending South Vietnam. Not trying to conquer North Vietnam.

Secondly, about 50,000 -- not half a million, Americans died.

Do you even know (or care) how the end came for South Vietnam? Did the people of South Vietnam choose communism? No. After the United States left, North Vietnam conquered the south with ruthless military force killing somewhere between 300,000 to 1.5 million South Vietnese in the process and leading to one of the largest mass exoduses in human history as people tried to escape south vietnam for their lives.

Not that people like you care. Your hatred of America just blinds you to the real world results of American failure. The US pulled out of South Vietnam meant we stopped defending South Vietnam. And North Vietnam then violated its agreements and brutally conquered its neighbor to "unite" the country. 

It's people like you who would argue that the US had no business in liberating Europe. Maybe continental Europe wanted to be controlled by the Nazi's.  Please explain the difference between Nazi Germany conquering say Poland and North Vietnam conquering the south.

that's why your comments are appalling. Not only do you have no idea how many Americans were killed in it but you have only the faintest idea what the whole thing was about.  If the US wanted to conquer North Vietnam it could have done so quickly. It didn't. It just wanted North Vietnam to quit attacking the South.

The Domino theory you allude to was nothing sinister. It was based on history - once Hitler took Austria it then took Czech and then conquered Poland and then the low countries and then France and so on. The domino theory believed that history would repeat itself here. If North Vietnam with their Soviet backing were allowed to conquer the south they would then go on and take over other countries in the region and murder millions in the process.

Which, incidentally, is exactly what happened. Not that you left-wingers seem to care. You only focus on hoping america fails.  So after North Vietnam conquered the south and killed tousands if not millions of people there in the process, neighbor Cambodia went Communist too and murder 1.7 MILLION Cambodians.

So you tell me, which would have been a better outcome? South Vietnam keeping its freedom and Cambodia deciding for themselves what they wnat to do or what actually happened with the millions dead.

And you wonder why I think you should stand on the side-lines and educate yourself first?

. I see, so you take it as fact that the US just slaughtered all males in Vietnam (which is amazing since the South Vietnamese army was pretty big and full of males) to justify the undeniable fact that the north came down and slaughtered millions of people which caused survivors to flee to where you could talk to them.

If you could just get over your narrow mindedness you would see what is in front of you: Those people had to flee their homeland because the United States left Vietnam.  The rest of your statements are just sophistry.

Spoken like the perfect indoctrinated drone. So please explain what happened to Cambodia then. You do know about Cambodia right? An Laos?

Do you even know what the goal of Marxist/Leninism was? The spread of communism through violence.  These weren't peace protesters here, these were people who conquered another sovereign state.

But let me fill you in a bit about World War II since you apparently aren't very familiar with it.  Germany's argument was the same as yours: They just wanted to reunite Germany as it was supposed to be. So first they took over Austria because it was a Germanic state. Then they demanded part of Czech because there were Germans there. Then they wanted the Polish cooridor returned and that was their excuse for invading Poland.

In other words, the difference between Nazi Germany and Communist North Vietnam were remarkably similar. And once they conquered the south, they then set their designs on their neighbors.

Communism isn't just another form of government. I've never understood why you leftists recognize Nazism as being horrible and evil while giving communism a free pass.  Communism exterminated more innocent people, by far, than Nazism.  But yea, maybe the US should have just minded its own business in Europe too. Heck, maybe the US should have kept its nose out of Asia back in 1940 and let Australia deal with the Japanese on their own. 

After all, the Japanese wanted to create the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere. Isn't that nice? And we evil Americans stopped them.

The wanting to "unite" has been used as an excuse for centuries for conquest.

You want the killing to stop? Since when? You only seem interested in stopping US action. Action that generally results in saving millions of lives over the long run. During the gold war, people like you protested everything the US did even while Communism was exterminating millions of its own citizens in extermination camps. People like you thought Ronald Reagan was a monster even as his policies helped end communism and free millions of people.

It has been people with belief such as mine that have actually put a stop to killing by dealing with the world in a rational manner.  Because people like you convinced the US government to abandon Vietnam, millions of Vietnamese died in the aftermath. Millions of people in Cambodia were then exterminated as well. Where were the protests then? Where were the protests to stop Pol Pot? People like you carry signs calling our President "Hitler" while real-live evil fascists actually do horrible things.  Oh no, the US might put an end to Saddam's reign of terror and 10,000 civilians may die in the process so the US has to be "stopped" but you'll turn a blind eye to someone like Saddam who has murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, often in cruel and gruesome ways.

Good god, are you really this dense? The domino theory was proven correcty by what actually happened. Hello? US leaves South Vietnam and millions are murdered by North Vietnam. Communists take over in Cambodia and millions more die. Which part of this "generalization" do you not get? It isn't a theory, it actually happened.  What's next? Holocaust denial?

It's all part of the same pathology. For some reason, leftists know exactly how many died in the holocaust (12 million btw) but have no clue how many millions died due to Communish (1.7 million in Cambodia alone). And because they're so blinded by their anti-US position, they can't recognize that it wasn't really the US who lost in Vietnam. It was the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and elsewhere who lost -- their lives, their homes, their families.  Though somehow I'm sure you'll find some twisted way to make even that our fault. BTW, China murdered millions of its own people during the same time. Was that our fault too? Seriously, given that we live in an age where people like you blame the weather on the United States it's hard to tell where you draw the line on assigning blame.

Well, that's what they say, ignorance is bliss.

Huh? Do you know of a single case where communism was chosen by the people? Just one case in history will suffice.  In every case, communism was the result of a violent overthrow or foreign invasion. When the people are given a choice, as they finally got in the early 90s, they chose democracy.

Is this what counts as a rebuttal in your world? So now the US is bad for not doing it earlier? Classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I didn't compare Ho to Hitler. I compared the situations in general together.  But yes, you touch on an important difference in our world views - peole like you obsess over intentions. People like me worry about results. It doesn't matter if Ho wouldn't have approved of the extermiantion of millions of people violently (btw, Ho was actually quite ruthless), the bottom line is that the US leaving the area resulted millions of deaths.

Now, people like you would be the ones having demanded the US leave Vietnam in the first place while people like me would have argued that we need to ensure the safety of the people there because it's the right thing to do. But hey, how would people like me know that millions would be murdered if the north won? Because that's what always happens when the communists take over.  Stalin murdered millions of people in his "purges". Same thing happened in China. Cuba has the most prisoners per capita in the western hemisphere. So how did we know that millions would die in south-east Asia if the US withdrew its protection? Because people like us know history while protesters like you don't.

Oh I'm pretty comfortable that any sane person reading this exchange will conclude that you're out to lunch on these issues. If anything, perhaps next time you want to spread your opinions on historical topics you will actually try...you know...reading about history or something.

This from the guy who called me an "8 year old" and "little person" just a few responses earlier. .

Trust me, this doesn't take much time away from making millions of dollars annually. It's more of a sport.

And for those who followed the lengthy back and forth about the Vietnam issue, here again is what Muggaz posted originally:

It should be noted that Muggaz believes that his statement here has not been proven wrong. Which shows an amazing level of intellectual inflexibility on his part. Sure, he condeded the 500,000 deaths but the entire "ideal" is incorrect from a historical point of view (other than the US not liking communism -- though even there, his tone implies disliking communism was a  US thing).  The idea that the Vietnam people chose communism is sickeningly absurd.

Muggaz's problem isn't that he's an idiot. He's not. He's probably intelligent. His problem is that he confuses intelligence for knowledge. But his unfounded arrogance is his undoing.

Either he realizes he's ignorant on these issues and just being annoying or he's galactically arrogant and is oblivious to his ignorance. Either way, it still does him harm because other people reading this recognize that he's totally wrong on the factual basis of his "ideals".

This is a classic example of the inexperienced debater. He thinks that his ideals are merely a matter of left/right perpspective and therefore anyone on the left would agree with him. He's wrong (again). Facts don't care about ideology. Any educated leftist knows that the Vietnamese people didn't "choose" communism. 

Incidentally, any educated leftist knows the difference between "communism" and "Marxist/Lenninism" (i.e. I never said that communism strategy was violent overthrow, but Muggaz doesn't seem to recognize that communism is a theory whereas Marxist/Lenninism is an implementation -- one that believes in the violent overthrow over governments to install a communist government).

Like I said, facts don't care about ideology. The problem with your "ideals" Muggaz is that they aren't based on facts.

And ideals based on ignorance aren't ideals. They're indoctrinated propaganda.