[dghlsakjg]

I don't think that comparing a natural disaster/act of god to a foreign government forcibly relocating an entire culture is the right argument here.

If you stand by it, what is the correct number of people to have their rights systematically and intentionally violated before we should care?

[philwelch]

Saigon fell in 1975. Millions of people fled the country in fear for their lives or gave up their children, with hundreds of thousands dying in the process. The fall of South Vietnam was a humanitarian catastrophe on a monumental scale, and basically no one cares about it anymore. And you’re expecting me to care about 1500 people being peacefully resettled from one island to another? All of this handwringing is a disingenuous excuse to vilify Britain and the West in general from the very same people who sympathize and make excuses for the Vietnamese communists even to this day.

Edit:

If we were holding a consistent standard here, we would have to say that the Vietnamese government should withdraw from illegally occupied South Vietnam and return it to the people who were violently displaced in 1975. Nobody advocates for this. Vietnam has somewhat liberalized into the kind of country that doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore and the refugees of 1975 and their descendants have built new lives in the countries they ended up in, including the United States. This sort of revanchism causes more problems than it solves, and there’s no obvious limit to it. Should Turkey return Constantinople to the Greeks? If we want to learn anything from history, it shouldn’t be a catalog of ancestral grudges to be settled; it should be that holding onto these grudges achieves nothing.