Masada and Maccabeans in Honor of the Queen

kzt wrote:Following his Peace without Conquest speech, on the way back to the white house, LBJ said, confidently of his plan to create a new TVA along the Mekong, “Old Ho can’t turn me down”, convinced that the obvious economic advantages would compel Ho Chi Min to agree.

Narator: “LBJ, like most Democrats, had no idea how to handle a man or a people whose actions and motivations were based on faith or ideals, not on how it enriched him personally or his people. And Old Ho could and did turn him down, confident that he would eventually win thw war.”

And therein also lies another problem, even for a rational decision-maker: who is the decision supposed to most benefit? In the case of a dictator, that's usually the dictator himself plus a small clique of supporters who keep him in power (see CGP Grey's video on how to be a dictator on YouTube). Not the population as a whole, which I assume is what the LBJ statement was meant to convey.

Houseman completely misunderstood what value meant for the Faithful and probably that only that the Council of Elders' values mattered. He may have heard of "schadenfreude" but he'd probably assign a value of zero to it.

This also explains his view of the military, because war will always destroy some value somewhere.

kzt wrote:Following his Peace without Conquest speech, on the way back to the white house, LBJ said, confidently of his plan to create a new TVA along the Mekong, “Old Ho can’t turn me down”, convinced that the obvious economic advantages would compel Ho Chi Min to agree.

Narator: “LBJ, like most Democrats, had no idea how to handle a man or a people whose actions and motivations were based on faith or ideals, not on how it enriched him personally or his people. And Old Ho could and did turn him down, confident that he would eventually win the war.”

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And therein also lies another problem, even for a rational decision-maker: who is the decision supposed to most benefit? In the case of a dictator, that's usually the dictator himself plus a small clique of supporters who keep him in power (see CGP Grey's video on how to be a dictator on YouTube). Not the population as a whole, which I assume is what the LBJ statement was meant to convey.

It may be fair to call Ho Chi Min a dictator, but he was also a nationalist and a popular liberator. The government of North Vietnam was still filled with idealistic devotion to the "heroic" cause of anticolonialism and not the moral rot that set into many Iron Curtain countries after decades of misgovernment. Meanwhile if you were looking for corruption, the South Vietnam elites were still the ones that had done the best while collaborating with the French. Also it may not have helped that in 1963 a leader was deposed by a coup that the CIA knew about, with the resulting government much more dependent on the USA.