From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 01:12:55 MST
*Bzzt* Damien, mate, the juxtaposition you have made is erroneous. Spike's
comment was addressed specifically to the issue of whether the Cold War was a
"war", not whether it was a "world war". Check your target, please:
Begin quote:
But either way, it certainly wasn't a war, and 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
End guote.
As for the issue of "was 'it' a war", I have a fresh "paranoiac-critical"
(Salvador's name for his style) insight.
It comes down to this: some guy sees an elephant, and some others see a stand
of trees, a snake, a rope and big leaves.
The first guy might have Don Quixote disease or worse; the others might be the
blind guys in the fable; or the tableau might be a Dali painting where both
are true.
M
PS: _I_ know about the Ozzies, and I am not going to bother to look up all the
nationalities that died in Korea.
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> 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
--
butler a t comp - lib . o r g
I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization.
Sometimes I forget.
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