No Peace without Victory

by Simple Simon Friday, Feb. 28, 2003 at 1:00 AM

The Appeasement Mongers, and why we have to deal with them.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the victorious allies, having uncovered the atrocities of the Nazis, began a program of De-Nazification. The cornerstone of this effort were the Nuremburg trials of the most senior Nazis.

The idea was that in order for the country to move forward, the bad seeds had to be exposed and punished. As a result of this program, Germany has become a very stable Democracy despite not previously having a Democratic tradition.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a similar program to weed out and prosecute the criminals of Communism was not pursued. The result is a very shaky political system which is constantly under threat by a minority of old Communists who have resurfaced after a decade of lying low and licking their wounds.

In the United States we had a movement of our own. Starting in the mid-1960's and lasting until the termination of our involvement in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest their government and to oppose its policies. These protesters ideas and ideals varied greatly, but they were united in their opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War.

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Americans supported the government's involvement in Vietnam because they believed that the Communists were attempting to unify the country by force, and were seeking to subvert the governments of neighboring countries. This group also contained tens of thousands of Americans who served in uniform.

The former group has passed into legend, and become a popular myth. The latter group was derided in their time, abused and only recently rehabilitated in such films as Forrest Gump.

The desire of the protesters is to say that they were right, that the war was wrong.

They are wrong. The war was right. The Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian people have been bled white thanks to cowardly appeasement. Villagers that stayed in their ancestral homes despite french bombs and shells, Viet Minh and later Viet Cong 'recruiters', American bombs, shells, and napalm, nothing could make these people move.

Communism came and they dove into the South China Seas in the tens of thousands on anything that could float.

So how does this tie into our problem with the Appeasement Mongers today? Well, we've never had a reckoning, a de-hippification. We've never established that the protesters of the 60's, while they may have been idealistic, were also misguided and ultimately wrong. The Appeasement Mongers emulate an icon of popular culture: the protesting hippie. It is time we dispelled the myth. It is time we stack up the bodies at the feet of traitors like Jane Fonda. We will have no peace until we have victory.

Original: No Peace without Victory