We Don't Want Your Views On War - You Lied About Vietnam

[thedrifter]

Subject: Fwd: vets to campus - you lied then, you're lying now

Part 1 of 2, in from Leonard Magruder

VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
the student auxiliary at the University of Kansas

VETS TO CAMPUS - WE DON'T WANT YOUR VIEWS ON WAR - YOU LIED ABOUT VIETNAM

VIETNAM VET ACADEMIC REFORM GROUP SAYS 60'S LIES ABOUT VIETNAM WAR MUST BE
EXPOSED NOW TO DISCREDIT ACADEMIC VIEWS ON FOREIGN POLICY AND THREAT OF
POLARIZATION. - a V.V.A.R. newsnote from Leonard Magruder- President (Part
1 of 2 parts)

( the following is quoted by permission from Dr. Jamie Glazov- noted
historian with a specialty in Soviet Studies. From FrontpageMag. - CSPC)

"The suffering of the Indochinese people under Communism is one of the
most tragic sagas of the 20th century. The terror that Communists perpetrated
in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos after their victory in l975 defies simple
characterization. The leftists among us, meanwhile, continue to spout their
lies about Southeast Asia and about the horror that Communism brought to that
region. They love erasing the historical memory of the millions of people who
were liquidated on the altar of socialist ideals . And engaging in historical
amnesia is precisely where socialists and neo-nazis share one of their most
sacred common bonds.
And now we have H. Bruce Franklin, a professor of English and American
Studies at Rutgers University, who has stepped forward to tell us that
Communism only brought peace and fraternity to Indochina.
In the March-April edition of “International Socialist Review” Franklin
writes an article glorifying the memory of the anti-war movement in America
during the Vietnam War. He emphasizes that remembering the anti-war movement
is crucial, “since it triumphed in bringing about an American defeat and a
Communist victory in Southeast Asia,” which he means in a positive sense.
Franklin writes that the anti-war movement should be:
“one legitimate source of great national pride about American culture and
behavior during the war. In most wars a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the
people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam
War. Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against
U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated.”
It is precisely an interpretation like this that reflects one of the most
putrid lies of the Left … the assumption that the U.S. was somehow fighting
the people of Vietnam, when it in fact it was actually fighting the
Communists who were seeking to imprison them. The fact of the matter is that
it was the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, as well as the anti-war
demonstrations in America, who were the enemies of the Vietnamese people -
not the American government which sacrificed 58,000 of its young men in an
effort to save them.
Franklin is very proud in remembering the “outrage” which he says served
as a key emotion behind anti-war demonstrations. When the Communists started
liqidating people en masse and setting up concentration camps, where was the
“outrage” of the Left then ? Franklin isn’t interested in such questions.
Sorry Franklin, you got it twisted. It was the American effort to save
Indochina from Communism that was admirable. And it was the anti-war
movement, of which you are so proud , that was the shameful - and shameless
- abomination.
While Franklin boasts about what he thinks are the anti-war movement’s
great accomplishments, history reminds us that this movement helped spawn a
blood bath in Indochina. David Horowitz, who helped to organize the first
campus demonstration against the war at the University of California,
Berkeley in l962, has reflected on this tragedy .
“Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has
affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the
battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to
win the war for them. This is what happened. The blood of hundreds of
thousands of Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, is on the hands
of the anti-war activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the
Communists...and we wanted them to win."
After Saigon fell to North Vietnam in l975, the summary executions of
tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese began. There were to be two
million refugees and more than a million people thrown into the new Communist
gulags and “re-education camps.” Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese boat
people perished in the Gulf of Thailand and in the South China Sea in their
attempt to escape what the likes of H. Bruce Franklin had helped to create.
The anti-war movement in America also facilitated the Communist takeovers of
Laos and Cambodia … the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia led to a killing
field in which some 3 million Cambodians were exterminated .
Franklin wants us to remember the anti-war movement in America during the
Vietnam War. We do remember it. And we remember it for what it was: a
shameful and shameless abomination, which saw tens of thousands of spoiled
moral degenerates betray the lives and freedoms of the Indochinese people -
as they offered themselves for an association with tyranny and a complicity
with evil."
End of the Glazov article


Right. As I have often written, “There is no question but what the
campus war protestors were on the side of genocide and tyranny in Southeast
Asia”.
Or, as I said in a speech to 600 Vietnam vets at the Vietnam Symposium at
New York State University (Stony Brook) in 1985, for which I served as
National Co-ordinator, “The campus “peace” movement, which said that the war
was “immoral”, that the motive was “imperialistic”, that the war was only a
“civil war”, that Ho Chi Minh was only a"nationalist," and that America had
engaged in “aggression” and “genocide”, lied to the nation. Although it
cloaked itself in an aura of great moral purpose , the “peace” movement in
fact gave supplies and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of the
Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate its agenda, and turned its back on the
American soldier when he returned.” David Horowitz had made a speech right
before mine. By that time I was a great admirer of Horowitz. He had had
“second thoughts” and now looks back on the anti-war movement as “treason.”
In material I handed out in protest during the years of the Vietnam War I
said of the movement’s “outrage” that so impressed Dr. Franklin, “Nothing
more enrages the academic proponents of a naturalistic and therefore
“value-free” world view that the incurable moralism of the American people.
To combat the fact that the average citizen sees the Vietnam war in terms of
morality, (that is, to save the people of South Vietnam from Communist
tyranny), the university has conceived the ultimate hypocrisy , it has
projected absolute judgements (the war is immoral) from nihilistic or
relativistic foundations. Faculties and students are engaged in a vast
hypocrisy, pretending to a moral critique of the war after decades of
debunking morality, values, and religion. The “outrage” of the anti-war
movement flows from the need to mask that hypocrisy, hoping the public will
confuse the outrage for certainty and go along. But adult America, all of
whom are for genuine peace in this world, has not fallen for it. It has
conspicuously not joined the marches because it correctly senses the true
underlying message of the anti-war movement, which is, we don’t believe in
truth or morals, we will not sacrifice for freedom, we do not care if
millions are slaughtered or enslaved, we only want to be left in peace, to
pursue our sloth, our sex games, and our drugs. Certainly if South Vietnam
falls to Communist aggression and slavery , the guilt will lie forever with
the cowardly conspiracy between faculty and student hypocrisy that blunted
U.S. efforts to stop that aggression."

True, it is unfair to indict the entire peace movement. Many of the
youngsters within it had nothing more in mind than halting a war they never
understood, singing songs that evoked a hunger for a tranquil world where
they need not shiver with the fear of fire storms and radiation. But as
someone wrote at the time ,"They were the sensitive and the kind, Christian
and Jews, and all mixed up with an unholy alliance of leftist radicals,
diabolists, drug cultists, and polemicists. But even these innocents were
soon spattered with the Amerika-hatred of the others as the movement spread
like the dark of a moonless night and by the end of the war the night was
black, and the movement began a goblin dance on the grave of America. Sincere
pacifists changed into werewolves whose true goal was to see the republic
suffer boundless humiliations. "
During the years when Horowitz was organizing anti-war demonstrations at
Berkeley, I was engaging in one-man protests following every demostration I
could find, showing where the protestors were lying. And the biggest and most
incredible lie was exactly the one Glazov focuses on, they said that America
was fighting the Vietnamese, they never mentioned that North Vietnam and an
auxiliary, the Viet Cong, were fighting against South Vietnam which did not
want Communism. I own a unique book that contains copies of all the material
distributed by the anti-war movement at 115 demonstrations. Not a single one
mentions that America was helping South Vietnam to fight Communist aggression.

continued.........

[thedrifter]

The main focus of lying by the anti-war movement was two White Papers
issued by the State Department in December l961 and March l965. The claims of
these two papers, based on a great deal of evidence, were that Hanoi was
directing a campaign of overt and covert subversion and aggression against
an independent South Vietnam. In a sustained attack over the years, the
anti-war movement claimed that the war was a civil war between "U.S. puppets"
and "indigenous resistance" in South Vietnam . This denial of a North
Vietnamese presence in the South was the major contention, and the biggest
lie, of opponents of the war. They portrayed the two White Papers as a
calculated campaign of disinformation by the U.S. Government. Destroying the
credibility of these two White Papers was the chief objective of the anti-war
movment and the first step in its ultimate victory over U.S. policy. But it
was done by lying, and if they do it again with regards to current U.S.
policy on war they will destroy the homeland.
The l961 White Paper said outright and, as it turns out, correctly,"The
Viet Cong are not indigenous freedom fighters; Hanoi is behind the guerrilla
war in South Vietnam. The Lao Doan party, that is, the Communist Party, is
the vangard of the "liberation" movement." This first White Paper was the one
that presented John F. Kennedy's case for assistance to South Vietnam as
legal, moral, and proper.
The Second White Paper, released in Februrary of l965, after Lydon Johnson
took over, again made the point that the conflict was caused by Hanoi's
policy of conquest. It stated, "South Vietnam is fighting for its life
against a brutal campaign of terror and armed attacks inspired , directed ,
and controlled by the Communist regime in Hanoi. It is established beyond
question that North Vietnam is carrying out a carefully conceived plan of
aggression against the South... a violation of the United Nations Charter and
directly contrary to the Geneva Accords to which North Vietnam is a party."
The entire anti-war movement rested on the lie that North Vietnam was
never involved in aggression. This was done to take the issue out of the
arena of Cold War containment policy. This is what was taught to students in
the notorious teach-ins at major universities. as well as spread by leading
anti-war figures such as I.F.Stone, Stanton Lynd, Tom Hayden, David
Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Francis Fitzgerald, and Hans Morganthau. Later
George Kahin and John Lewis in a text that was widely used in the teach-ins
,"The United States in Vietnam", wrote, "There is no evidence to assert, as
does the U.S. White Paper of 1965, that the Liberation Front for South
Vietnam was formed at Hanoi's order." They completely ignored all of the
evidence that went into the two White Papers.
Since then, of course, we have had numerous testimonies from disenchanted
leaders of the North confirming the accuracy of the White Papers, men such as
Van Toai Doan, author of "The Vietnamese Gulag" and Truong Nhu Tang, author
of "A Vietcong Memoir." As to the lie by the anti-war movement that the Viet
Cong was an independent South Vietnamese political movement, Bui Ten, the
North Vietnamese colonel who accepted the surrender of South Vietnam said in
"The Wall Street Journal " recently, "It was set up by our Communist Party to
implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960."
But the most important confession of involvment by Hanoi is found in the
report "Summary of Fact", issued in l987 by Hanoi's Military History
Institute describing key decisions made by Hanoi regarding South Vietnam from
the Geneva Convention in l954 until the final conquest by the Communists in
l975. Stephen B. Young in an article to which I am indebted for some material
in this article, summarized the impact of this material when he wrote, "The
Summary confirms the two American White Papers and utterly refutes the
position of the anti-war movement. Hanoi's document reveals how, step by
step, the Vietnamese Communist leadership in Hanoi made the decisions to
forment a war in South Vietnam and then, again and again, to escalate that
conflict." From the start of South Vietnam's existence following the Geneva
Conference, Hanoi was resolved to crush its autonomy and bring its people
under Communist rule. Those who supported the war were never confused about
this, but the lies of the anti-war movment came to be embraced by so many
that the U.S. was threatened with serious internal conflict, and the flawed
solution of Vietnamization offered by Nixon was accepted.
The "Summary of Fact" contains this statement, "Following the road set out
by the Party Congress, on December 20, l960, the People's Front for the
Liberation of South Vietnam was established." That is, the NFL, or Viet Cong
is thus revealed by the Summary as having been the creation of Hanoi's
Communist Party. That one sentence destroys the arguments of the anti-war
movement.
The White Papers of 1961 and 1965 had assessed the intentions of Hanoi
with complete accuracy. The credibility gap, or cynicism, of the 60's was
not created by any fabrication on the part of the Kennedy or Johnson
Administrations. It was created by deliberate lying by the leaders of the
anti-war movement.
Said Stephen B. Young in his article commenting on celebrations of the
thirtieth anniversary of the Vietnam War, "A generation congratulates itself
once again for doing what the North Vietnamese never could have done -defeat
the United States. History, as they say, is written by the victors, and the
victor in this conflict was the American anti -war movement. It is no wonder,
then , that our national recollection of the war matches that of the New
Left. It is no wonder too that certain questions are no longer asked, chief
among them the question, a central one thirty years ago, of whether the U.S.
involvement resulted from a tissue of lies Washington was spinning out even
before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or whether its factual assessment of
conditions in South Vietnam , Laos, and Cambodia and its consequent policy
response to the plight of the South Vietnamese people was rational and
justifiable."
We now know, with much of the evidence coming from the enemy itself, that
the response was rational and justifiable. Therefore, what is taught on
campus about the Vietnam War can no longer be tolerated as it is largely
based on lies. By far the most widely used textbook on the Vietnam War in our
universities is Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History." So biased is the book
that when translated into a PBS series it caused protests and riots by
Vietnamese refugees and Americans in New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles,
Washington, Paris, and London. A documentary , narrated by Charlton Heston
was produced exposing the errors, and also a book, "Pirates are Losers."
The time has unquestionably come for Vietnam veterans, who were the
primary victims of this massive academic conspiracy against truth to speak
out strongly in demanding that this change, and that this matter of the two
White Papers and the evidence that the anti-war movement was a moral fraud,
be a central part of presenting to students a new and more honest view of the
Vietnam War.
The only way that the American campus is going to be able to present the
absolutely necessary unity with the rest of the nation that is required in
the face of the current crisis is to admit that it was wrong on Vietnam,
admit they fell for and propagated enemy propaganda, as there are already
signs that this may be happening again.
As the Chief of Military History, U.S. Government wrote in his "Final
Report", "If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should
be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country,
and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the
best educated segments of our population have given credence to the most
incredible allegations."

Magruder44@aol.com 785-843-3737


Sempers,

Roger