Yup, it’s a tricky one. The Vietnam war was such a cause for controversy, people still feel angry… My father was over here during the war flying supplies and people around, I would have been an anti-war protester. We both agree now that the only solid lesson you can learn from a war like that is that everyone loses. And they continue to lose for decades after.

The complexities of the situation – trade sanctions, non-professional soldiers, propaganda, a country that has been through a thousand years of war… Makes it difficult to know WHAT would have happened if war never happened. I would like to think nothing much could be worse than the end result. But who am I to say?

I don’t really agree personally with giving money into the hand. I just feel that since I can’t help everyone who needs it, giving to the few that come up to me or that I pass by is not going to affect things as much as giving to a charity that can make lasting changes.

All said and done though, you are going to get more utility out of giving than say, buying another 3 beers, so go for it. I don’t really buy the argument that doing so causes any harm, though I guess that will vary from situation to situation.

I myself am guilty of giving chocolate to starving waifs I find on Manners st from time to time so I cannot talk :)

My wife and I (she’s Sri Lankan) ‘adopted’ a couple of families in a village near where she was raised. They are both ‘single parent’ where the man has abandoned the family; in one case selling the family home out from under his wife and seven children and having them pushed into the gutter while he went off to live in Malaysia with a new woman.

It costs us about $200 a month to look after the families, which includes everything they need for the kids to attend school. One has just passed A Level Exams with an A+ average and started attending University this month.

While it doesn’t solve the problems of poverty and war that the country face; and doesn’t create a welfare/unemployment system in a country that has no safety net at all. It does put two families on a path upward from total penury. If every working family in NZ did the same for one destitute family in the third world, there probably wouldn’t be a third world in two generations!

Go well

Socialism is not evil, fascism is evil. Fascism can take extreme communist AND capitalist forms, but to label the structural causes of global inequality as a simple black and white political issue is fairly ridiculous and inflammatory. The Vietnam war was complete nonsense on multiple levels, and achieved no clear outcome on either side, though it did raze large parts of SE Asia to the ground.

It is purely and completely the fault of their socialist/communist government which cares not at all for the welfare of their people as long as the leaders are comfortable.

The closest you can bring the fault to home is to put blame on those who protested against US and NZ involvement in the war in Vietnam in the early 70′s. They may have been sincere and well-meaning, but they were dead wrong.

Do we have a duty to fight and overthrow evil governments around the world. and free their people? I really don’t know. But if we want to bring them out of poverty that is the proven way to do it. Just look at Japan and Germany today.