Essays in Idleness

One does not collect such souvenirs, but some time in 1970, I think, a copy of the Economist (in the old larger page size) tumbled into my lap. I was sitting in a (partly busted) rattan chair in Bangkok, during my youth. The cover of this magazine reproduced a panel from some lively old war comic, showing weaponized GI’s in action. The headline — “Oh no, not Korea again!” — struck me as quite funny. Those were the days when the Economist ran genuinely witty captions, and before it became a worthless magazine, for economic or political information.

Korea, remember, was the transition, from an America that won crucial wars, to an America that knew how to lose them.

Vietnam was the real issue, at the time, in 1970. I was in the course of learning, at first hand, how the Americans were indisputably winning the War in Vietnam, but with the help of Walter Cronkite, throwing victory away. More than a million Vietnamese, and more than two million Cambodians, would pay with their lives for this American betrayal (adding all relevant deaths, including drownings at sea). Since, a few million more have been sacrificed to the Yankee narcissism, so eloquently expressed by their Democratic party. President Biden’s absurd walkaway from Afghanistan was a theatrical example, but there were hundreds more. That “the media” will only mention thirteen fatalities, from that monstrously evil abandonment, suggests the amount of truth one may extract from such sources.

The United States had not only won the vexatious War in Vietnam, with a huge, incompetent bureaucracy and an incredible expenditure on mostly redundant technology, but President Nixon and his Kissinger had also got North Vietnam to acknowledge this at the Paris Peace Talks. South Vietnam would be, by agreement, free of satanic Communist infiltration. But then the Communists, as usual, entirely ignored their diplomatic commitments, and the U.S. Congress voted to cut off military supplies (including even bullets) to the dependent South Vietnamese regime, directly contradicting formal American guarantees. Fifty-one years have now passed since 30th April, 1975: the day of infamy on which I learnt that “progressive opinion leaders” were not only blackguard liars, but in multiple other ways, remorselessly evil.

I look at all the “diplomatic” efforts to end the War in Iran “peacefully,” and withdraw American arms, before the Twelver regime is utterly exterminated, as what will be the next example. Defeat will again be somehow pried from the jaws of certain victory. No?