leblanc@rochester.UUCP (Tom LeBlanc) (11/30/83)
From: Tom LeBlanc <leblanc> Why is "Nicaragua is another Vietnam" accepted as gospel when the only thing they have in common is that the US supports the party in power from the right and the USSR supports the party not in power from the left, while "Greneda was a potential Iran" is ridiculed as nonsense by the same people. Reason: Reality is easy to imitate, but difficult to manufacture.
wall@ucbvax.UUCP (12/02/83)
Come on now folks. Let's at least get the players right in Central America. I believe the contemporary saying is "El Salvador: Another Vietnam", *NOT* "Nicaragua: Another Vietnam". El Salvador could very well turn in to another Vietnam because it is clear that there is no way of achieving a quick military solution to the problems down there, but I hate the saying "El Salvador: Another Vietnam" because I think that too many people were against the Vietnam war because *AMERICANS* were getting killed (53,000 to be exact), but these people don't have the same sympathy for the thousands of *VIETNAMESE* that were killed. I'm afraid that the same thing may happen in El Salvador (people not really caring until joe amererican is the one being killed), which is a real shame. Come on folks, the death of an American is no more horrible than the death of an El Salvadoran/Vietnamese/Grenadian/??.** I think our *real* goal is to see that no one life should be valued more than another so that we can all live together and try to work our problems out peacefully. Steve Wall wall@ucbvax ucbvax!wall ** I realize that I may have to suffer the consequences for this statement.
pollack@uicsl.UUCP (12/03/83)
#R:rocheste:-400000:uicsl:16300041:000:2191 uicsl!pollack Dec 2 13:03:00 1983 ***** uicsl:net.politics / rocheste!leblanc / 1:06 am Dec 1, 1983 From: Tom LeBlanc <leblanc> Why is "Nicaragua is another Vietnam" accepted as gospel when the only thing they have in common is that the US supports the party in power from the right and the USSR supports the party not in power from the left, while "Greneda was a potential Iran" is ridiculed as nonsense by the same people. Reason: Reality is easy to imitate, but difficult to manufacture. ---------- I don't know who manufactured your reality, but there are some problems with it. There are truths and then there are analogies. For instance, "the party in power from the right" versus "the party not in power from the left" is clearly an untruth and shows you probably don't even know where Nicaragua is or what is going on there. The analogy with Vietnam is convenient because it brings to mind the tragedy of fighting for a cause unpopular with both the people of our country and of the battleground. The dimensions of the analogy include the slow escalation of US involvement, the massive amounts of Propaganda fed into our media system, the regionalization of the war, and the maximizing of probabilities of an "incident" allowing for convenient invasion. The analogy fails because Nicaragua has a stable and popular government, and it is closer, so their people are more human (i.e. less animal) and many Americans are sympathic to their plight. The proper time for the analogy of Grenada to Iran was in 1979, when the revolution occurred displacing a Pro-American Right-Wing Dictator with a popular movement. The analogy would be complete if they took hostages THEN, not now, and if we encouraged and covertly supplied a slow and balanced war between Grenada and, say, Barbados. For those who read history, much better analogies exist between Nicaragua and Guatemala in 1954 (The popular democratic government, the embargo, the training of mercenaries) and between Grenada and the Dominican Republic in 1965 (diplomatic embargo, political chaos, Marine invasion). Iran and Vietnam are good targets for analogy because they serve up, respectively, patriotic and anti-patriotic sentiment. Jordan Pollack