From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Apr 06 2002 - 23:54:41 MST
At 10:29 PM 4/6/02 -0800, Spike wrote:
[Dwayne:]
>>if I was old enough to have been involved in world war 2
>>I'd be slightly offended at the comparison, I'd think.
>Those who fought in Korea and Viet Nam would understand completely.
Spike, the point is the *restricted local* versus *global* nature of those
conflicts. It's true that those `police actions' conducted by the US and
several communist nations had the potential to unleash global nuclear
horrors on us all, and were proxies perhaps for the avoided WW3 conflict
between the US and the Soviet Union; still, I don't recall there being any
Italian, German, British, Latvian, Greek, Belgian or even French soldiers
fighting alongside the Yanks. That was left to the poor bloody duped
Aussies (which, you'll recall, is a fact that you'd never heard until I
chanced to mention it to you, which makes even more bitterly ironic the
supposed rationale for Australian involvement: that we were *helping our
friends across the Pacific*, who would *never forget our brotherly
sacrifice*. Sigh.)
Damien Broderick
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