>>18008620
The communists historically and today are completely dishonest and untrustworthy. Unfortunately they aren't the only problem.
>>18008068
With hindsight their decision looks very different than it must have looked at the time. They might have expected a more decisive conflict like the Korean War had been, and could not have foreseen the fact that it would drag on and on, and that pretty blatant subversion efforts by fellow travelers at home who were paid to take part in active measures – which, in the early years, would have been seen as treasonous and self-defeating and thus seemingly unthinkable – would start to pick up cultural steam with disaffected boomer youth. When I say "treasonous and self-defeating," I mean in the sense that wanting to help the other side would be directly or indirectly causing other Americans to be killed, by giving aid and comfort to the 'other side' while willfully turning a blind eye to the evils of those movements.
To make a WW2 comparison, it would be as if the pro-German underground movement (or pro-Axis movement post-1941) in America had been extremely more successful than it actually was. It would be unthinkable that journalists would just wholesale ignore what the enemy on the other side of a war that we were currently fighting was doing, as if someone like Noam Chomsky just chose to ignore Unit 731 and the atrocities Japan was committing, while condemning Americans for fighting back.
Unfortunately, that kind of thing stopped being unthinkable at some point as subversion entered full swing. This can be blamed at least in part because of how long the war dragged on due to the conditions in Vietnam, but I also think technology and cultural factors, which continued to unfold and change into the later 20th century, are extremely relevant.
