I was replying to a post and one thing led to another and I wrote this. It happens sometimes. Maybe someday I'll clean this up, reorganize it, make it more coherent, and do some actually good writing.

Korea

We went to Korea and trained their guys. Within a couple years in 1953 they had infantry as good as ours (Ridgway himself said this) and they were learning to use artillery. By then the Americans were doing most of the technical stuff (communications, artillery, armor, certain engineering tasks) but with our help the Koreans had built up the 4th most powerful army in the world and taken responsibility for most of the front.

Vietnam

We go to Vietnam. We're there for 15 years. We give them all kinds of training and equipment. Many ARVN units are brought up to US standards. They're flying jet fighters in combat ffs. Somehow they lose. This is some political problem in Saigon, not what's happening at the front. They had the same problem as Ukraine with draft dodgers who they wouldn't crack down on for political reasons. You can't win a war when the people who are supposed to be doing most of the fighting are playing a bunch of inscrutable oriental Fu Manchu games with each other. Apparently Ukraine has the same basic problem, except the Vietnamese fought for 15 years and they're already throwing in the towel.

Somehow we don't have a Fu Manchu marsey yet.

The Vietnamese were treacherously stabbed in the back like Trump is going to do Ukraine. Kissinger made a deal with the Chinese where we'd make sure South Vietnam was destroyed in exchange for them turning against the Soviets. The media presented this like it was a genius move that only he could make. Frick. Frick this b-word. The Chinese already hated them and were in extreme fear of a Soviet invasion. We didn't need to give them anything. I could have gone over and accepted them begging us for help. Mao was a total fricking psycho but he was willing to do business.

The US mostly pulled out in 1971 (Old Man Redactor was one of the last) and completely in 1973. But to the consternation of imbecilic wingcucks on both sides, South Vietnam didn't immediately collapse.

I hate hippies

Leftoids were shocked as they imagined that the with the Americans gone, the Vietnamese didn't all rise up and beg for the communism they always wanted? They were supposed to be cute communist teddy bears (George Lucas has proudly and openly said the Ewoks are based on what he imagines Vietnamese people are like) and follow Jane Fonda's lead. In my entire experience with leftoid boomers (keep in mind this about 75% of my teachers, lots of family members, etc.) I have never once heard them mention ARVN once. I think most of them honestly don't even know it existed. So there's this extreme cognitive dissonance between their idea that America was fighting all the Vietnamese and it turning out that most Vietnamese were on our side.

B-word, you are not going down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a major highway, in the rubber sandals they imagine on college campuses. You know why? Because it would be dangerous with so many trucks going by.

You ever notice that the "Anti-War Movement" never gave a shit about ending the war? After 1971 they had zero interest. Curious. Their hearts bled for all the brown people being killed by US imperialism and all of the sudden they don't give a shit what happens. I've had conversations with people who were adults in the 1970s and I have to explain to them what happened because at the time that's how little they cared about all those brown people. (I know Vietnamese aren't brown, I'm talking in terms of how these people saw them.) I'm not saying we should have gone to Vietnam. I'm not saying we should have stayed in Vietnam. Throughout this post I am not giving any military or government policy advice. But the "Anti-War Movement" was entirely self-serving, trying to keep upper middle class people out of the war. This is the real moment when the Democratic Party began shifting upward. Republicans dodged the draft too, but the Democrats became identified with the social class that could and did to that. A generation later it should be no surprise what peoples' party affiliations are.

This is one of the best episodes. When the hippie dies because he's walking around barefoot I always curl up in laughter. I guess this planet has a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy.

Chuds are no better

The rightoids were equally embarrassed. They were supposed to be so badass and they lost a war against a weaker opponent. How does that work? Some blamed the Vietnamese "we cared more about fighting for their country than them!" and a lot them made it a racial thing. A couple moments in time from Old Man Redactor's memory: Standing there in the base and realizing that everyone in his unit was either drunk or high. Everyone. Every single one. Other memory: Old Man Redactor turns on the TV. Now you've been told over and over again that "Vietnam was the first war on television, where people at home could see what was really happening". He's flipping the channels and he gets on South Vietnamese station. They're showing their journos' footage of the fighting. And right away he can tell that this is actually not staged, these people really are in combat, because they're fighting but at the same time they're scared out of their minds. You notice Walter Cronkite never aired any of that footage on American TV. The audience might find out his Vietnam War entertainment product wasn't really authentic.

You ever notice that our "racist grandpas" watched our Chinese allies fight but you never see our allies today (except white Europeans). It's probably because of internalized whiteness or something.

The stab in the back (unlike Hitler's, this one actually happened)

So the ARVNs kept on fighting. In America both leftoids and rightoids had massive cognitive dissonance. A South Vietnamese army that could hold it's own in battle? This can't exist in either of their world views. (You had to try really hard to not notice the ARVNs existed. (Old Man Redactor paraphrase: "The Tet Offensive is when they found out that in a real war the South Vietnamese would beat them.")) The leftoids especially were absolutely fuming that South Vietnam didn't roll over and die immediately like their professors at Dartmouth promised. Should they learn and adapt their thinking to the real world? Of course not. We're talking about rich white women. So the US Congress got together and cut off artillery ammunition for South Vietnam.

Is that the narrow gauge railroad he told me about that went along Route 1, the Street Without Joy? Notice the relationship between the ARVN commander and the advisors. At this point in the war they're throwing out suggestions but this guy may have been fighting 12 years. He'll consider that but he's the one in charge.

Old Man Redactor says they used 130mm guns to blow shit out of Quang Tri province, the one on the border just north of where he was. The ARVNs had no shells. They couldn't shoot back. Things disintegrated pretty fast after that. The US had trained and equipped a really strong powerful army to fight like Americans. Americans (especially then) rely a lot on artillery. So they're overrun.

Impossible. The Viet Cong (who totally still exist 7 years after the Tet Offensive) only fight with goofy wooden traps and carry everything on their backs. American soldiers can wander around unarmed alone because... the teddy bears are waiting to spring their traps. They would never use an 8 ton gun that is among the heaviest artillery in the world. It's just not sporting. Only imperialists do that.

The war is over!

Meanwhile the "Anti-War Movement" doesn't notice. They're too busy smoking dope and giving each other gonorrhea to care. There war is over. The North Vietnamese send I dunno how many people to "reeducation camps". (I guess it's better than Tet where they murdered all the teachers in Hue on the grounds that they're paid by the government.) They help their Cambodian puppet army take over Cambodia. Their puppet does their own thing, which is genocide. Now genocide isn't a problem for the Vietnamese commies. They aren't Anne-Marie Slaughter weeping about the "responsibility to protect". But a power struggle between the pro-Russian and pro-Chinese factions is fought out and the pro-Russians win. Pol Pot sides with China. So Vietnam invades Cambodia. Pol Pot's guys run into the jungle and do guerilla warfare. You thought the Vietnamese commies were good at guerilla warfare? Well they're sure not good at being on the receiving end of it. They quickly realize that they can't accomplish anything by fighting, so they just cut off food to areas controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Now huge numbers of people are dying of starvation. This only ends when the Cold War does. Like so many wars across the world it was fueled by the Russians and Chinese fighting over who is the better commie. As soon as that ends, all these wars do too.

*Border skirmish between China and Vietnam in 1984. Did the Anti-War Movement care about this? A bunch of asian people got killed. That's they're raison d'etre, right?"

You ever ask an "Anti-War" boomer how they felt about the genocide in Cambodia? I'm not saying they're responsible for it (they had virtually no impact on any decision making in the war) but like... did you ever wonder what happened in the end? Ever? All those people you cared about so much before. And then they stammer and piss their pants and say "It was... It was Immoral! It was an immoral war! I know because I saw that napalm girl! That's when I knew I had to fight against the war!" And then I say "b-word please, that photo is from 1972 when virtually all Americans were home. For you the war was over. There were no Americans involved. A South Vietnamese plane dropped napalm in support of a South Vietnamese unit on the ground. The more I think about it, the more I notice that the "anti-war" boomers would systematically ignore the whole existence of South Vietnam through the whole war. I wonder who coordinated this.

This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.

The breadth of the Republican victory, extending from the presidency to the Senate and probably to the House of Representatives as well, will be interpreted as a strong political mandate confirming these ideas and allowing Trump to act as he pleases. We can only hope that some of the remaining institutional guardrails will remain in place as he takes office. But it may be that things will have to get a lot worse before they get better.

https://www.ft.com/content/f4dbc0df-ab0d-431e-9886-44acd4236922

!historychads

https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation

You'd do less damage giving the kid a nintendo switch and pretending

A reminder that if Robespierre, Stalin or even Hitler had killed communists and redditards instead of human beings they would be remembered as great heroes.

I think today, November 5th, there's only one thing people want to know about; how Harry Truman was a crook that stole a bunch of money. That's the relevant Presidential stuff, right?

In February 1975, the band Chicago released a song called "Harry Truman". Posthumously dedicated to President Truman and written in reaction to the Nixon resignation, the song laments the state of American politics and opines for President Truman's brutal honesty.

We'd love to hear you speak your mind, in plain and simple ways. Call a spade a spade, just like you did back in the days.

A slight issue emerges when you understand this is bullshit, hilarious and blatant bullshit. Harry Truman ran one of the most audacious scams on the American people in history, creating a public image of a humble man trying to get by when he was in truth very wealthy - through rather dishonest means.

If, like me, you enjoy popular history, this may surprise you. It is a popular fact that Truman left the oval office a poor man. Like U.S Grant before him, Truman sacrificed so much for his country yet was walked away from the White House with nothing but a $112 pension per month (roughly $1300 for inflation) for his military service. He would not give talks or degrade the office of the Presidency, and was happy to rely on the charity of friends to just barely scrape by.

It's a sad, somewhat pathetic, story - the most powerful man in the most powerful nation in the world reduced to all but begging to survive. A slight issue emerges when you find out that not a single word of this story is true.

The Grain of Truth

Truman's haberdashery business in 1919.

In all great scams, there's an element of truth in them. Truman did struggle with finances for a long time in his life - he became a haberdasher in 1919, but his business went bankrupt in the 1921 recession and trapped him with debts for nearly 15 years.

Truman would become a Judge in 1922 and a salesman 1926 after losing re-election, but his time as a judge had allowed him to establish connections with the Missouri Democratic machine boss Tom Pendergast. Pendergast would get Truman some more jobs, and eventually he backed Truman for the U.S Senate after Pendergast's preferred options all declined.

Truman was blessed to be running against a Republican that opposed the New Deal, and while he ran for his office and a banker named William Kemper, a longtime friend of the Truman family and enthusiastic Democrat, would pay for Truman's debt (likely to avoid Truman being shamed as the broke butt Senator from a broke butt state).

This really wasn't much of an upgrade for Truman. Sure, being a Senator paid a lot and he managed to get out of some of his debts thanks to it, but the Senate didn't pay that much. Adjusting for inflation, it was the low end of triple figures, and he also had to buy a new house to live in both D.C and Missouri. While not broke anymore, he was still pretty far from a rich man.

Harry Truman's good luck

"Is there anything I can do for you?" - Truman

"Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." - Elanor Roosevelt, informing Truman of Roosevelt's passing.

Franklin Roosevelt was going to die soon in 1944. Everyone knew it. Roosevelt knew, Dewey and his comments about "tired old men" knew it, and the Democratic party bosses knew it. While Franklin Roosevelt liked Henry Wallace, the powerbrokers didn't, and they pressured Roosevelt to swap Wallace for Truman - someone who had been making a name for himself by cutting government graft during the second world war. Roosevelt didn't particularly like Truman, and as a Senator Truman was frequently ignored by the President, but with Roosevelt's death looking imminent, the future was bright for Truman.

Becoming Vice-President didn't alter Truman's fortune notably. The Vice-President is President of the Senate, so he got less of a new salary and more of a nice pay raise, and he had some rotten luck when Congress passed the Congressional Pension in 1946 - after he had joined the White House. So while he was likely grateful, this really didn't change much about his life.

Things changed on April 12th, when Franklin Roosevelt suddenly passed away following a massive and sudden hemorrhage. Truman's fortunes changed dramatically, to say the least. He immediately started earning a salary of $75,000 - which when adjusted for inflation, becomes an eye watering 1.3 million dollars a year, and he got an additional $50,000 in expenses (roughly $800,000). According to Bess Truman's personal papers, made public in 2009, he walked out of the White House in 1953 with around $650,000 or $7.6 million when adjusted for inflation. While the expenses would later become taxable, which means that the President would also need to prove that he had actually used to the expenses money to pay for expenses, for most of Truman's Presidency they weren't so Truman sort of just… took the money. He even wrote to his wife to confirm that they had nearly $200,000 ($2 million today) in the bank from the expenses.

And that's before we get onto his post-presidential ventures - he released a really shitty biography in a publishing deal for a good $600,000 ($7 million), and would go on TV to give an interview where he claimed that former Presidents are "just allowed to starve", for $25,000 (nearly $275,000) in 1958…

Truman's begging

Harry Truman and Edward Murrow. While being interviewed by Murrow, Truman claimed "The United States government turns its chief executives out to grass. They're just allowed to starve (...) If I hadn't inherited some property that finally paid things through, I'd be on relief right now."

Truman's begging was a sad and pathetic sight. The Commander-In-Chief was on TV telling people how poor he was - but that pails in comparison to the begging he was doing in Congress. He was sending letters to the Democratic leaders of Congress, explaining he was barely keeping his head above the water by selling a farm he inherited from his mother (she had lost her land in 1940), and while he totally wasn't begging for a presidential pension, he was going to have to try and cash in on the Presidency more then he already had by going on TV and writing books.

Truman explained in his letters to Rayburn and McCormack that while his book deal was worth $600,000, thanks to darn taxes he actually only got $37,000 ($400,000) from it while he incurred $153,000 in living expenses sitting on his butt and doing nothing but "writing" a shitty book. This is a lie - he actually got $300,000 (3 million) from the book deal, and when adjusted for inflation Truman is claiming that he was spending more then $1.7 million dollars. In these same letters, he says while feeding Congressional leaders this sob story "I don't want any pension and never wanted any because I'll manage to get along."

His obvious begging would pay off - the Former Presidents Act would pass Congress and be signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1958, earning the inflation-adjusted millionaire Truman an extra $20,000 pension ($220,000). The only other living President was Herbert Hoover, who didn't need, claim to need or want a pension but accepted it anyway to avoid humiliating Truman any further then Truman's begging had humiliated himself.

Moral of the Story

Defrauding the government for no reason is awesome

Truman with the Japanese Surrender.

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