Enough of this Ridiculous Revisionism
I want to add one point entirely tangental to my post below about Andrew Busch's article. Busch condemns King for his opposition to the war in Vietnam, which supposedly "made him, like thousands of other misguided Americans, accessory to the Stalinization of Indochina."
I can only deduce that Busch has not been to Vietnam within the last ten years or so. I know we're supposed to have all kinds of national myth-making and psychological coping strategies bound up in how we remember that war, but let's be blunt about it. A million Vietnamese dead - maybe more - 58,000 American dead, never mind the genocide in Cambodia brought on as a direct result of the war and American bombing, and all for what? A futile effort to prevent the development of what would turn out to be a country just as capitalistic, and hardly more authoritarian, than any client state our Cold War masterminds could have dreamed up.
I doubt that more carnage was ever created, for less purpose, than in America's foolish war in Vietnam. And the fact that people like Busch refuse to acknowledge that just demonstrates why we must never let their crowd get their hands on power again.
Labels: Andrew Busch, Vietnam