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Comment by farting | Hacker News Reader

I'm not exactly a scholar on the Vietnam war, but I don't think it was about what Vietnam "represented". Communism had already been spreading with incredible ease, helped by the USSR's investments, and we were afraid of it spreading more, as it's a detriment to capitalism's global profit extraction scheme. There was a very real and very big risk to our bottom line with the whole communism fight. If Ukraine falls, Russia gets a whole bunch of agriculture exports, but other than that what do we lose? Sure it sets a bad precedent for global tensions and all, but the US isn't at risk of losing as much as we (thought) we would with the Vietnam fight.

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It wasn't just the bottom line, communism was also killing a lot of people and not very nice on the human rights front. It didn't spread with ease due to helpful investment, it spread at gun point due to their ease at killing people. Possibly coming to Taiwan soon. You can see how the capitalist profit extraction works by looking at the poverty in south Korea compared to the utopia up north.

>communism was also killing a lot of people and not very nice on the human rights front

So the US decided to up their killings?

"The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World is a 2020 political history book by American journalist and author Vincent Bevins. It concerns U.S. government support for and complicity in anti-communist mass killings around the world and their aggregate consequences from the Cold War until the present era. The title is a reference to Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, during which an estimated one million people were killed in an effort to destroy the political left and movements for government reform in the country.

The book goes on to describe subsequent replications of the strategy of mass murder, against government reform and economic reform movements in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. The killings in Indonesia by the American-backed Indonesian forces were so successful in culling the left and economic reform movements that the term "Jakarta" was later used to refer to the genocidal aspects of similar later plans implemented by other authoritarian capitalist regimes with the assistance of the United States."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

It does seem American anti communist folk killed a few people too. Though the scores seem to be about US 2 million, commies 90 million.

>American anti communist folk killed a few people too

There is something deeply wrong with talking like that about 2 million deaths.

Anyway, if you lump up all the 'communist' regimes, you should do the same with capitalist regimes too. Bengali famine gives you up to 4 million deaths for a start.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

too funny... 2 million maybe just in the last decade? :)

Weapons of war don't just appear before a revolution starts, somebody has to buy them. Of course the spread of communism was helped by the USSR's active investment in revolutionaries in other countries.

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