The Vietnam War/Quotes: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|Once upon a time, our traditional goal in war and can anyone doubt we are at war? - was victory. Once upon a time, we were proud of our strength,our military power. Now we seem ashamed of it. Once upon a time the rest of the world looked to us for leadership. Now they look to us for a quick handout and a fence-straddling international posture.|'''Barry M. Goldwater''', 1962 }}
{{quote|Why should we draft our sons to fight an American war?|'''An Anonymous South Vietnamese citizen''' }}
{{quote|You got us in this mess. and now you can't get us out, because you don't know where the hell you're going? ''Do you?!''|'''Chief Phillips''', ''[[Apocalypse Now]]'' }}
{{quote|In compliance with modern politics, the war was originally intended to save South Vietnam from communism, but the proclaimed purpose of the war was not to protect freedom and individual rights, it was not to establish capitalism or any particular social system-it was to uphold the South Vietnamese right to self-determination i.e the right to vote themselves into any sort of system (including communism, as American propagandists kept proclaiming)
The right to vote is a ''consequence, not a primary cause'' of a free social system and the value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voter's power, unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet ''that'' is what the American soldiers were asked to die for-not even their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no knowledge of rights or freedom.
Picking up the liberals' discarded old slogan of [[World War I]] days "the self-determination of nations"-the American conservatives were trying to hide the American system ''capitalism'' under some sort of collective cover. And it is not ''capitalism'' that most of them were (and are) advocating, it was a mixed economy. Who would want to die for a mixed economy?|'''[[Ayn Rand]]''', ''The Lessons of Vietnam'', 1975 }}
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[[Category:Vietnam War]]
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