Afghanistans and Samaritans

 Surprisingly I find myself much in accord with what Beagles has to say.  I had to look up that guy Diem, which I only vaguely remembered being a bloody corpse in the back of a tank.  Well it turned out to be an armored personnel carrier, but he was dead as a doornail.  I get the impression that the ARVN really didn't like him, and they asked the CIA if it was okay, and the CIA said Sure.

Folks don't generally cater to a total overhaul of their culture, particularly from an invading power.  We made the Japanese give up their colonies and their army and say nice things about America, but otherwise their culture was untouched.  There is a continual kerfuffle about them teaching their kids that Japan was a good guy in WW II.

The Taliban was and is a religious theocracy, but the only other one I can think of is Iran under the ayatollah.  Saudi Arabia professes to be one, but it's just the royal family dressing themselves up in the Koran like some American pols like to wrap themselves in the flag.

Maybe the biggest thing in common with Vietnam and Afghanistan is that in both cases we were fighting a home grown army of people who believed in something, while on our side, we had great guns for sure. but mainly we had the moolah.  Our guys, the ARVN and that highly-trained, well-armed, Afghan army were only it because we were paying them a lot of money.  As Americans we hold no higher belief than the American dollar, but other folks don't feel that way.

Freedom of religion is an interesting concept.  Most of the colonies were not tolerant of any religion other than the founders, but when they united they had to all get along, and I think the thrust of the first amendment (had to look that up, wasn't sure if it was in the constitution or an amendment) was to keep any of the varying Christian religions of the colonies from trying to impose their religion over the others.  There has been a lot of prejudice against the Jews and the Catholics, but nobody has tried to outlaw them.  The eastern religions are tolerated well because compared to the Abrahamic religions they are more like philosophy, they don't have a lot of hidebound rules that it is acceptable to kill for.  And the Muslims do all right except when they try to build a mosque in the burbs and their neighbors complain ostensibly about the parking situation.

Well this is a much more complex issue than I thought it would be when I first started writing it, so I am going to stop here.

As I have been writing it I have been using the google and the wiki to try to keep my ducks in a row.  I googled Abrahamic religions expecting something like Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Muslim, and what I got was Jewish, Samaritan, Christian, and Muslim.  Well I can see lumping all the Christians together, but Samaritan?  All I knew of them was the guy who helped that other guy on the road.  But it turns out they were kind of a big thing, but not anymore.  Anyway I invite the dawgs to look it up.