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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 03/30/01 -- Vol. 19, No. 39
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. Our vacation this year was to see Vietnam. I wanted to get down
my impressions of the country and why we are going before we go.
This will be a short editorial this week, but I think it is a
little more dense in thought. It will probably be the opening
paragraphs of my trip log.
It is interesting that that going to Vietnam gets the reaction from
people that it does. Americans have a sort of odd feeling toward
the Vietnamese people that we have toward nobody else. Not all of
us do, but some of us. After all we were embroiled in a long and
painful war in Vietnam and militarily we lost, even if politically
we won. And there is a sort of a grudge. If I said we were going
to visit Germany and Austria there would not be the same reaction.
Even among fellow Jews. Jews really lost a one-sided war in
Germany and Austria. But there no longer is the feeling that you
are dealing with a former enemy in those countries. Not among most
people. But then we get a lot of news from those countries. And
we can see that they have changed. We don't get much news from
Vietnam so our images of Vietnam come from the 60s. They come from
that horrible war. And we think of the whole country as just a
1960s North Vietnam that is now twice as big. And there are
certainly forces in Vietnam that want that to be what the country
was. But if I read my World Press Review, that is not what is
happening in Vietnam these days. Politically the war goes on and
still they lost the war back in the 1980s. They pay lip service to
socialism these days, but they have to survive in a Free Enterprise
world. When it was just the French or the Americans they were
fighting, they could use guerrilla warfare, much the same warfare
Americans used to defeat the British. And they successfully
defeated the enemy that way. But killing Free Enterprise is a
different matter. Today there is a Vietnamese stock exchange. It
has only four stocks for now, but its mere existence indicates who
won the war politically.
There are nearly 80,000,000 people in Vietnam and about half were
born after the war. The young people want prosperity, money,
careers. The Communist Party finds itself outnumbered and in
trouble. The symbols that inspired people during the war do not
convince the young that Socialism is noble. That is the great
tragedy of the Vietnam War. It is not that we lost so many lives.
Americans lost roughly the same number of lives in three days of
fighting at Gettysburg. But we just could not see that militarily
we could not possibly win and politically we could not possibly
lose. If we had walked away in the first days Vietnam would in all
probability have gone the same way. There is supposed to be in
July a trade agreement with the United States and things will
change quickly in Vietnam after that. That is one reason we want
to go now. In 1982 we saw a China that was not there ten years
later. The Vietnam we see in 2001 probably will not be there in
2011. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.
The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan