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I've been intending on a number of occasions to publish to the blog but facilities have been lacking, as has time, in the last few weeks.

Some Saigon history for you, depicting the scene in the mid 60's:

'A one time population of half a million had become three million by 1966, a city of desitute refugees and enriched elite servicing the US effort. In the night clubs the music was stateside, the mood gay and abandoned. Beyond the flower manicured central boulevards and the encircling pastel villas, the red-light districts had industrial dimensions, employing in 1966 an estimated 30,000 war orphaned prostitutes - who would multiply with troop levels. Elsewhere gangs of juvenile delinquents said to number 200,000 - as numerous and menacing as the old sects - held sway over dark inner citidals 'off limits' even to the police. In the general crowded squalor, the fear was not of war but of disease and hunger. At differant times there was every kind of epidemic, from typhoid to bubonic plauge'.

And, taken from the same book, something which goes towards explaining the current situtation in Viet Nam today:

'Vietnam was a poor country for a thousand years' reflects Premier Ky, but now the endemic poverty was harder amid so much unobtainable affluence (American aid). Asked if the sudden presence of so many Americans was as overwhelming as Communist fire-power, and therefore self-defeating, Ky says 'Yes, it's one reason'. The GI's were needed but not for their lifestyle.

'The American soldiers', Ky says, 'bought a living condition, compared to Vietnamese living conditions, so high, so comfortable, that in many ways it corrupted........instead of helping us it really created more problems for the Vietnamese government.

The book is called 'The Ten Thousand Day War' and is written by Michael Maclean, a non institutionalized and honest account of the history of the Viet Nam war.

Now for the quote of the day, written by Adam Smith in 1776:

The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which efffects are prehaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possilbe for a human creature to become.........His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in manner, to be aquired at the expense of his intellectual, social and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is to the state in which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people. must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.