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Originally Posted by Imperator
that’s not quite how it went and a fantastic statement, can you link to said research etc.?....
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From a previous post:
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To give you an idea of how these civilians were viewed by the policy gurus, here's a quote by Professor Samuel Huntington, who in 1968 was the chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Writing in Foreign Affairs, "The Vietcong is a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from it's constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist."
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He's referring to the South and to political power. The very reason we had to resort to such raw, naked power was because we had no support outside the urban areas, and that support was only on account of our dumping money on the population.
In essence, I think you could draw a parallel to what we were doing in our bombing campaign to what Stalin did with respect to collectivization/industrialization, in that they were both brought about by monstrous brutality. Which is not to say that our depredations match Stalin's in scale, but that we certainly didn't shrink away from the means necessary to bringing about forced urbanization.