Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

[Mega]

God Bless you sir!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...eral-giap-dies

I had a poster on my wall of him & Ho....along with Mao & Che............But my fav was Fidel Castro.

Mike

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Giap was an atheist.

He also knowingly and willingly threw millions of his own people's lives into the meat grinder(granted people power was his greatest resource) to achieve his aims.

What I find most interesting is how it may have been entirely preventable:

http://www.historynet.com/ho-giap-an...ry-prunier.htm

FDR was supportive of national self-determination, but then he died and Truman was dealing with issues like the Berlin Blockade and that the UK/France were broke and needed to raise funds thru their pre-war colonies.

Missed opportunities, best exemplified by the reports of OSS Deer Team(who saved his life and the life of Ho Chi Minh).

Giap as a tactician was highly over rated.......he peaked at Dien Bien Phu as a logistician where he excelled, particularly in his "impossible" movement and emplacement of artillery which made the French position untenable.

Both the Tet Offensive(1968) as well as the Easter Offensive(1972) were military disasters for North Vietnam and Giap personally of epic proportions.

Inaccurate perceptions by western media? Different story.

It wasn't until the US had disengaged and Congress had eliminated funding to South Vietnam that a duplicate of Giap's highly premature Eastern Offensive plan successfully achieved his objective in 1975 after Giap was sidelined.

Giving credit where it's due, Giap achieved quite a bit for a guy with quite limited formal military training(provided by US OSS when fighting the Japanese), including being the originator of Armed Propaganda Teams in an insurgency/counter-insurgency environment at the tactical level. The west replicated them as Psy Ops teams(now called Military Information Support Operations) and continues the practice to this day.

Ho Chi Minh and Giap would have been interesting folks to talk to if only to better understand the missed opportunities with the US post WWII.

Che was personally responsible for the execution of many and personally pulled the trigger on quite a few....often for "crimes" such as being on the wrong side of the political spectrum.....hardly worthy of admiration.

Admiring Castro for running a totalitarian state while you rant and rave about the growing corporate totalitarian state in the UK, US, and elsewhere is a bit hypocritical in my opinion.

Sorry, just calling it as I see it.

[don]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

we actually won . . . pass it on

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

we actually won . . . pass it on

???

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in thinking my post is some sort of sour grapes post or if you're looking forward from here:

If you're thinking I believe the US "won if only" I'm not going to get into a wasteful debate of "coulda, woulda, shoulda". But it might be worth reading Vietnamese opinion on Giap.

If your post was referring to the opportunity ahead my opinion is that, in a way, I think the Vietnamese and US could both "win" moving forward.

Vietnam clearly wants to find a way to counter or shape China in the region(they did have a rather nasty and little known nasty border war in the late 70's).......what better way than to use the US as a lever to allow Vietnam to sit on the fence between the two?

It's a shame that relations between Vietnam and the US had to effectively take a break for 60 odd years and cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars(in current value) to get back to roughly where they were post WWII.

http://www.amazon.com/The-OSS-Chi-Mi.../dp/0700616527

[Mega]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Look at Cuba befoe Castro............look now.
Look what he did for his people, health & education......he had the US on his back from day one but he fought back. What a leader.

JFK
LBJ
Nixon (Who is to blame for the missle trouble because the CIA TOLD him what a brill leader Fidel was & US should back him)
Ford
Carter (What a wanker, Jimmy tried to get the middleclass to leave, all he got was scum from the jails & mental hospitals)
Regan
Bush
Clinton
Bush
Obama

...........he faced them ALL down.
Mike

[Mega]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

As for the "VC" what choice did they have ?
The NVA couldn't stand against a superpower....a long Bloody war was all they could do....1972 offisve was required because of the "peace talks" in Paris.....manpower was all they had.....yes he lost a lot people, but look at how many people were killed whom were not VC/NVA.............At lest America had some losses.....55,000 dead....1400 aircralf shot down...& a bankurpt nation.

Shame about the Petrol $
;(
Mike

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Look at Cuba befoe Castro............look now.
Look what he did for his people, health & education......he had the US on his back from day one but he fought back. What a leader.

You've posted quite a bit about US/UK/French foreign military adventures and your hatred for them.

You've neglected to take into account Cuba's own massive foreign military adventure in the 70's-80's in Angola/South-West Africa.

Cuba was given a rather substantial bloody nose.

100,000+ Cuban soldiers deployed to Angola over two decades.

Estimates of up to 10,000 being killed are probably reasonably accurate.

So Castro is "what a leader" but venom for the rest?

I find it hard to not lump them all together in the same grey pile.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

As for the "VC" what choice did they have ?
The NVA couldn't stand against a superpower....a long Bloody war was all they could do....1972 offisve was required because of the "peace talks" in Paris.....manpower was all they had.....yes he lost a lot people, but look at how many people were killed whom were not VC/NVA.............At lest America had some losses.....55,000 dead....1400 aircralf shot down...& a bankurpt nation.

Shame about the Petrol $
;(
Mike

The NVA man for man were a very well trained and capable force(and that's coming from many Vietnam War combat veterans I know).

The 1972 Easter Offensive failure is widely regarded as being a wasteful premature adventure unnecessarily destroying considerable numbers of 1st echelon trained soldiers and equipment as 3 years later the same plan consisting of a hollowed out army in terms of men and material achieved final victory.

I'm not arguing Giap's ultimate victory. What I am pointing out is the appalling level of human losses by North Vietnam where Giap was the ultimate architect.

Again, it might be worth asking the Vietnamese what THEY think of Giap.

A bit like asking the Russian what THEY think of Gorbachev.

I noticed you didn't respond regarding Che's documented executions.

You may want to read up on Giap's rise to power and how many people died at his command to consolidate his power base.

One interesting statistic is that beyond the horrific losses suffered by the Vietnamese people both North and South, if current battlefield trauma care techniques were available and trained for in the Vietnam War the US might have suffered 35-40% fewer combat deaths based on recent data comparison.

Lots of levels of tragedy in that conflict.

Giap liked to wear white suits in the early days.....which is an interesting choice bar the weather/fashion of the day what with all the literal and figurative blood on his hands.

[flintlock]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Giap hardly a "Napoleon". Unless you are talking about the Napoleon of Waterloo where he just threw forces headlong in an attempt to bash his way through. You can give Giap some credit for Dien Bien Phu but then the French stuck their own heads in that noose.

Tet was hardly a great move either! As for most top commanders in war, they always get both undue credit and blame.

Che like so many revolutionaries, started out with good intentions and then went astray. Same could be said for Castro. As they say, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

[Mega]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Che?
I read his motorcycle story (On a Norton).............
I feel deeply confussed by him........he could just never left Cuba, but he was a man on mission, a mission that was impossable. Yes you can throw the Western imprealist pigs of balance with sudden unexpected action.....but you unlikely be be a winner long time.

He should have, MUST have known that trying to get a bunch of dirt poor 3rd World types won't work..........they too busy being poor. You need nations with a middleclass that getting attacked..........

In the End he died a pointless death, perhaps he though it might spare others into action.............mind you the CIA F*cked up by shown his body.........he looked like Christ on the cross!

Mike

[c1ue]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

I find it hard to not lump them all together in the same grey pile.

Some of the grey pile pretend to serve a nation that is built on liberty and justice.

Some of the other part of the grey pile did what they said they would do: gain independence and built a socialist society.

The former grey pile couches its assassinations in terms of undeclared wars and kill lists.

The latter grey pile couches its assassinations in terms of class warfare.

The former grey pile was fighting on other people's land.

The latter grey pile was fighting on its own land against foreigners.

As for Giap - ultimately all that matters is that he won.

If we can celebrate Grant for using his manpower advantage, why can we not celebrate Giap for doing the same?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Some of the grey pile pretend to serve a nation that is built on liberty and justice.

Some of the other part of the grey pile did what they said they would do: gain independence and built a [pretend] socialist society. [where some are more equal than others]

The former grey pile couches its assassinations in terms of undeclared wars and kill lists.

The latter grey pile couches its assassinations in terms of class warfare.

The former grey pile was fighting on other people's land.

The latter grey pile was fighting on its own land against foreigners.[and domestic competitors who were liquidated]

As for Giap - ultimately all that matters is that he won. [unless you ask the millions of friends and family of the fallen in Vietnam whose opinions may differ regarding their loved ones]

If we can celebrate Grant for using his manpower advantage, why can we not celebrate Giap for doing the same?

There are armchair generals who hypocritically look at Grant/Sherman's scorched earth across a swath of the south as strategic brilliance while appalled at more recent/modern use of the same tactics.

Again, I'll make the statement: Maybe we should ask the Vietnamese people what they REALLY think of Giap.

Personally, if I could pick a few times/places in modern history to visit it would be observing Ho Chi Minh and Giap in that crucial end of war, post war period. It's quite possibly the biggest missed opportunity of the 20th century in terms of wasted lives/capital.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Che?
I read his motorcycle story (On a Norton).............
I feel deeply confussed by him........he could just never left Cuba, but he was a man on mission, a mission that was impossable. Yes you can throw the Western imprealist pigs of balance with sudden unexpected action.....but you unlikely be be a winner long time.

He should have, MUST have known that trying to get a bunch of dirt poor 3rd World types won't work..........they too busy being poor. You need nations with a middleclass that getting attacked..........

In the End he died a pointless death, perhaps he though it might spare others into action.............mind you the CIA F*cked up by shown his body.........he looked like Christ on the cross!

Mike

Che needed to leave Cuba.

He had become a major liability for Castro and contender for power.

Che was going "off message".

Here's a few of his quotes that make Che romantics feel a bit awkward:

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/10-che-...not-talk-about

Ultimately, I think Che's ego, hubris, and lack of former education/instruction/experience in economics and unconventional warfare led to his undoing(competition/threat to Castro's power base and helping implode the Cuban economy) and death(amateur hour in both Congo and Bolivia).

Had Che made some other choices when dictating the Cuban economy, things could have turned out differently.

Had Che made some other choices in Congo and Bolivia as an uninvited guest attempting to spark revolution in environments that were entirely unsuitable, things could have turned out differently.

From a iTulip perspective, Che was effectively anti iTulip as he believed "one can only win at the cost of others."

Whereas we know here that the only true wealth creation comes from entrepreneurship.

[flintlock]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Grant was no military genius either, just determined, like Giap. But then it's not like they were spilling their own blood.

[c1ue]

Re: Red Napoleon is dead at 102 !

Some of the other part of the grey pile did what they said they would do: gain independence and built a [pretend] socialist society. [where some are more equal than others]

Given that the same can be said for the US - I fail to see what is so unusual or hypocritical. Is a pretend democratic and human right loving society any better than a pretend egalitarian society?

The latter grey pile was fighting on its own land against foreigners.[and domestic competitors who were liquidated]

The victorious North booted the loser South. That describes the US Civil War just as well as it does the Vietnam war. For that matter, why did so many so called Americans move to Canada after the Revolutionary war?

Once again, real hard for me to see the difference.

As for Giap - ultimately all that matters is that he won. [unless you ask the millions of friends and family of the fallen in Vietnam whose opinions may differ regarding their loved ones]

So you've asked millions of friends and family about their fallen in Vietnam?

I suppose they also are possessed of your wisdom in military affairs - that the loss of life could only have been avoided if Giap were able to overcome the literally millions of tons of bombs dropped, the Agent Orange, the napalm, the tanks, the tremendous economic and material disparities, etc etc. with his bare hands.

Again, I'll make the statement: Maybe we should ask the Vietnamese people what they REALLY think of Giap.

I know and have worked with quite a number of Vietnamese - both immigrants and 'natives'.

The ones who got kicked out hate him. A number respect him, however, including an ex-Captain in the South Vietnamese army who almost literally swam to the US (boat sank 10 miles offshore).

The ones who still are there: adore him.

Seems like a straight winner/loser label issue.