• A quote from Robert Leckie - Why?

    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Mon Nov 1 14:40:34 2021
    I like Robert Leckie.
    He was a Marine who then wrote 40 books.
    As he wrote in 1998,

    Why, then, were five Presidents unable to contain
    Communism in Indo-China?
    Probably because of their naïve but mistaken belief that
    democracy can flourish in any soil. In truth, democracy
    -free speech society with truly representative government -
    is a rare bloom, which has seldom blossomed outside Europe
    or the English-speaking countries of the world. To have
    attempted to graft it onto South Vietnam's population of
    peasants, ignoring their psychology, their traditions, their
    rigidly structured society, their indifference to the Western gods
    of Ballot Box and Freedom and their attachment to a charismatic
    leader, be he emperor, king or commissar, was the original and
    major mistake of the war.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)