6/ Hundreds of thousands of 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation children were born with serious birth defects, long after the war. Vietnam was set back decades economically.
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7/ So why did this cruel & inhumane war happen in the first place? For no good reasons. To quote the Australian journalist
@johnpilger: “There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous.”1 reply 2 retweets 16 likesShow this thread -
8/ The origin of the Vietnam war went back to WW2. The rise of the superpowers & Cold War mentality were what spawned a series of proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East, South & Central America and other places around the world in the 20th century.
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9/ Vietnam war was fought in the name of Democracy, but in reality was created out of fundamental misunderstandings (Domino Theory), kept going thru a combination of continued miscalculations, arrogance & the selfish desire of a few Presidents & their parties to hold on to power.
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10/ Spreading Democracy has always been a lie: small nations are nothing but pawns pushed around to serve big nations’ interests. As apparent in this Department of Defense memo from John McNaughton to McNamara- the architect of the war.pic.twitter.com/uc65v6jPeo
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11/ All in all, the US spent 168 billion of dollars in Vietnam (roughly 1 trillion dollars in today’s terms), which stressed the already fragile US economy to the limits. To give some context, “billion” of debt was outrageous & “trillion” was unthinkable in those days.
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12/ When the US was “forced off” the Gold Standard, where did all that freely printed fiat money go? To fill the massive hole of debt & repay obligations incurred during the war.
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13/ In some sense, you can say that the Vietnam war & Nixon’s decision to leave the Gold Standard set up the monetarily irresponsible environment that led to the global financial crisis we saw decades later. Which led to the rise of Bitcoin, an antidote to that irresponsibility.pic.twitter.com/EK01GaeLMw
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*Credit for above passage:
@EdConwaySkyhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/edmundconway/8699815/Abandoning-the-gold-standard-was-a-seminal-moment-and-one-were-now-all-paying-for.html …1 reply 0 retweets 2 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @hugohanoi @EdConwaySky
Thanks Hugo - this is great stuff. I remember when I was at The Bank of England (2011), some guy came in and essentially said that coming off the gold standard is why we are in the mess we are in - everyone booed him out of the room. Groupthink. I saw it though!
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Like Ed wrote, it's one of those "seminal moments" in human history that we don't pay enough attention to- and IMO it's important to understand the root causes of them as well.
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