VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Director of Counseling and Research – University of N.D.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
(Vietnam vet contact: General Carl Schneider (ret.) Korea, Vietnam
dukesch@aol.com, 480-595-7668)
THEY WERE WRONG THEN AND WRONG TODAY
by Leonard Magruder
March 15, 2007
On May 11, 1981, the headline of The Compass, the student newspaper of Suffolk County Community College, Long Island, read, “Professor Resigns for Vets.” In his sociology classes that semester, Mr. Magruder had his students study the Vietnam War. At the end of the semester, after giving them their grades to eliminate any possibility of professor bias, he asked them to vote as to whether the war had been a just war, or an “immoral” war as had been argued by the campus war protesters. 85% of the students voted that the war had been a just war. Puzzled as to why the students of the 80’s could see the truth so clearly, that there was nothing “immoral” about defending South Vietnam against Communist aggression, while the students of the 60’s could not, the students concluded that faculties, to serve their own largely leftist and Marxist ideologies, had misinformed their students, who in turn used the misinformation to serve their own purposes, primarily to avoid the draft.
The “peace” movement, the Suffolk students concluded, was never really concerned about peace. Although it cloaked itself in an aura of great moral purpose, it in fact gave aid 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 the soldiers returned, it tried to stereotype them, with the help of the media, as dupes, or drug–crazed “baby killers.”
On May 10, 1981, Mr. Magruder and his students held the nation’s first rally on any campus to honor the Vietnam veteran. It was during a speech at this rally, before more than 400 students, faculty, and Vietnam veterans, that Mr. Magruder announced that he was resigning his position as Professor of psychology at the college to “protest the damage done to the Vietnam veterans by the erroneous views of liberals in the university and the media of the 60’s and their perpetuation of these views.” (The Compass, May 11, 1981).
The mood of the times is seen in the title of a leading piece of literature put out by Vietnam Veterans of America, “Until now the only Vietnam veterans who got any respect were those who came home in a box.”
Although The New York Times, Newsday, and other media were present, none would report the event because of statements made by the students, who carried posters that included, “Abbie Hoffman was Wrong, “ “War Protestors Were Wrong, “ and “Jane Fonda was Wrong.” There are photos of all this in our archives. As reported by the school paper, “Newsday had been notified of the rally in advance, and, although a reporter was present, the newspaper did not publish the event.”
This was the beginning of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform. It was followed immediately at the college by a “Crisis Conference on Bias in the University and the Media, “ at which a dozen Vietnam combat veterans testified that the campus “peace” movement and the media had lied about the war and that this would happen again unless these institutions were reformed. “The peace movement pulled the trigger on my men, “ said one former Army Captain. Although the conference was boycotted by the New York media, it was covered by WSGN Radio and the Western Student Press.
These betrayals by the media led to protests by students all the way to the White House, where, in that year, Mr. Magruder by appointment placed on record the Manifesto of the new organization, in the form of a letter to President Reagan, which ended as follows:
“The major lesson of Vietnam, the students concluded, was that American foreign policy should henceforth take into consideration that the liberal university and media, largely apologists for secularism and therefore hostile to the values of the Judeo-Christian majority, have created within our society a large and dangerous bloc lacking in the intellectual and moral foundations necessary to defend freedom. The lesson of Vietnam is epitomized in the title of a recent book by Congressman John LeBoutiellier, “Harvard Hates America.”
Harvard still hates America.
A great many of those participating on March 17 will be representing the university, an acknowledged national failure. And still lacking in the intellectual and moral foundations necessary to defend freedom.
They will yell good, but really have nothing to say to America in this hour of mortal danger. They can’t even do what they’re supposed to do. Because of them, Johnny can’t read, write, tell right from wrong, or get through without massive grade inflation. They have put America in 19th place in international scholastic competition. Multiculturalism, speech codes, and political correctness have led to a totalitarian climate on campus of racism, anti-Semitism, and fake American history. Send them a serious article and all you ever get back is, “Don’t send me that crap.” Real classy people.
What do they know about truth or freedom?
Here are some slogans we suggest for posters on March 17:
· Most of you can’t find Iraq on a map
· Same hypocrisy as the 60’s: moral judgements from professors of relativism
· We fought to free South Vietnam - you’re fighting for tyranny.
· Listening to this “Hate America” crowd would be suicide
· You made students take down the American flag, Desert Storm and 9/11
· Why trust people who teach kids that America is a racist, immoral, imperialistic nation?
· “No blood for oil” - a sophomoric, meaningless pseudo-insight
· “Root cause” is academic nonsense. Osama says God told him to kill us.
· Tolerance? Diversity? What about the new anti-Semitism at Harvard?
· Multiculturalism and “diversity” led straight to the new racism on campus
· The military is not confused. “We’re good - they’re evil.” - Gen. Dick Hawley
· Academics lie (especially MESA) - jihad means holy war, not character building.
· “Higher education - uniformly left-wing and virulently anti-American” - Editor Daniel Flynn, Accuracy in Academia
· 9/11 - your Big Lie, “It was something we did to them.”
The betrayal by the media of the Suffolk student rally for Vietnam vets was the beginning of a war between Mr. Magruder and the media, particularly CBS, which included forcing PBS to show a film that documented how CBS had lied about the the Tet Offensive, an exposé of the lies in the CBS film, The Uncounted Enemy, (“You have done an exhaustive bit of research and I congratulate you, “ -General William C. Westmoreland, in a letter), an appeal to Congress backed by thousands of vets to investigate the media, a challenge to Dan Rather to a debate, which he refused, at the Stony Brook University Vietnam Symposium for which Mr. Magruder served as National Coordinator, and, when the media refused to tell the American people of the findings of this Symposium, a call to all Vietnam veterans to boycott CBS Evening News.
These, and many other battles V.V.A.R. has fought for the truth about the Vietnam War, can be found in the 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media, at v-v-a-r.org.
OTHERS SPEAK OUT
Not long after the rally, others began to complain about the lies. The Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program of Houston, under the leadership of Col. Stanley Horton, a member today of our Advisory Board, produced a booklet in which he said:
“The misinformation currently disseminated about Vietnam ultimately reflects upon the motives, convictions, values, and integrity of those who participated in the war at the behest of their country…it is imperative that the record be set straight.”
In later years the issue seemed to be dying out. But in 2004 it became dramatically clear that the issue had simply been underground. The candidacy of John Kerry for president seemed to most vets to represent the “New Left, “ or anti-war version of the Vietnam War, and 80% of them ended up voting against Kerry. We knew this before it happened, from a poll we took involving some 6,000 Vietnam vets in 32 organizations. The results were reported in an article by United Press International, but buried by all other wire services to protect Kerry, for whom the media openly campaigned as he seemed to them to represent their position on the Vietnam War. (The vet groups that helped, and the results, can be found at v-v-a-r.org, also see article 7 of “Vietnam and the Media” for the vet groups that supported our petition to Congress.)
Columnist Stephen Young on the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War wrote, “Our national recollection of the war still matches that of the New Left.” Vietnam vet dissatisfaction with this state of affairs exploded at the beginning of the 2004 Election. Even as Kerry was being nominated at the Democratic Convention in Boston, right next door at Simmons College some of the nation’s top historians and military experts on Vietnam were holding a symposium, “Examining the Myths of the Vietnam War.” Out of this came the new Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation. The President of the group, Col. George E. Day, said in a press release:
“A false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security. Leftists lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. Our goal is to counter more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda and set the record straight.”
The media at the Convention next door, demonstrating once again its perpetual cover-up of all efforts to tell the truth about the Vietnam War, knew all about this but did not report it to the American people. The response to this by academics was zero. Nothing changed. Not long after, the group published a booklet to be used on college campuses, Whitewash/Blackwash - Myths of the Vietnam War, by Bill Laurie, who is a member of our Board of Advisors, and R. J. Del Vecchio (available at TechConsultServ@Juno.com).
The presentation later of the film Stolen Honor by various television outlets was the next milestone in this struggle. The film accurately and powerfully showed the effect of the protesters on our prisoners of war. Our own documentary, Media and Campus Lied About Vietnam shows how the protests affected the return of other veterans. It is based on 62 interviews with veterans by Mr. Magruder at the Houston Vietnam Veteran parade in the late 80’s and has been given away to over 100 universities and veteran groups. (For information on these and other important films, such as Silent Victory, go to v-v-a-r.org.)
The latest development, and one of crucial importance, is the growing influence of the movement known as “revisionist history” concerning the Vietnam War. One example of this is the article by James Kurth in The Intercollegiate Review, of Fall 2006, “The U.S. Victory in Vietnam: Lost and Found.”
Wrote Kurth, “The U.S. war against the insurgents in Iraq has raised the specter of the war fought four decades ago. Critics of the Iraq War contend that the Iraqi insurgency now is like the Vietnamese insurgency then, and that the United States today faces a similar defeat. But many are coming out now and saying that while the two wars might seem similar, the United States had actually won its war in Vietnam by 1973 and can do it again in much the same manner. Of course, this is not the received opinion. But if we are to reckon by the ‘memory’ of Vietnam, we had best get the history right.”
Peter Spiegel of The Los Angeles Times recently wrote another article along these lines:
“In historical assessments and the American recollection Vietnam was the unwinnable war. But to many in the armed forces, Vietnam as a war was actually on its way to succeeding when Congress pulled the plug, blocking funding and supplies to the South Vietnamese Army. If they hadn’t the South Vietnamese Army, which had been bolstered by U.S. advisers and a more focused ‘hearts-and-minds’ campaign in the later stages of the war, could have fended off the communist North, military thinkers have argued.”
The American soldier won the war, but it was thrown away. Is this going to happen again?
A major scholar of the revisionist movment to “get it right” is Mark Moyar. In his new book Triumph Forsaken, which is receiving critical acclaim everywhere, he describes in the preface the emerging “revisionist” version as against the “orthodox” version:
“Like the earlier scholarship, the recent historical literature has been concentrated in a relatively small number of areas, and it has been dominated by one major school of thought. Most of it comes from what is known as the orthodox school, which generally sees America’s involvement in the war as wrongheaded and unjust. The revisionist school, which sees the war as a noble, but improperly executed enterprise, has published much less, primarily because it has few adherents in the academic world. The orthodox-revisionist split has yet to become a full-fledged debate, because many orthodox historians have insisted that the fundamental issues of the Vietnam War are not open to debate. Some prominent orthodox scholars have gone so far as to claim that revisionists are not historians at all but merely ideologues, a claim that is indicative of a larger, very harmful trend at American universities whereby haughty derision and ostracism are used against those whose work calls into question the reigning ideological scholarship orthodoxy, stifling debate and leading to defects and gaps in scholarship of the sort found in the historical literature on the Vietnam War.”
Moyar is refering here to the larger trend on campus that led David Horowitz, for example, to say that “Universities have become nothing more that a huge patronage machine for the Left,” and caused student groups to arise all over the nation protesting the growning totalitarianism on campus.
Moyar mentions among those who biased the earlier views of the war, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow. Karnow’s history is so biased that when it appeared as a PBS series it caused riots by American and Vietnamese soldiers in Los Angeles, New York, Houston, London and Paris, was exposed in a book Pirates are Losers, and a documentary The Real Story, by Accuracy in Media.
We have presented the above material to show that the struggle to bring out the truth about how the war protesters and their lies damaged both the war effort, and the soldiers when they returned, has been a long and bitter one. Through all of these developments the other side always managed to avoid a direct confrontation, the academics in particular hiding out, refusing to debate while brainwashng their captured audience of students.
There may be an unprecedented opportunity on March 17 to get the issues for the first time directly into the hands of, if not the original protesters of the 60’s, then those today using the same false arguments.
We are indebted to Ronald Winters for an article in which he points out how the March 17 march goes beyond simply a march and contains renewed attacks on Vietnam veterans, providing the justification for answering back.
Wrote Winter:
“Take a look at what the pro-terrorist march organizers are saying on their own website:
‘Tens of thousands of people will be gathering at Constitution Gardens at 12 noon near the Vietnam Mermorial prior to the march on the Pentagon on Saturday, March 17. The 58,000 U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam and the millions of Vietnamese who were killed, died in a criminal war. The connection between Vietnam and Iraq could not be more clear. Iraq is also a criminal war of aggression.’
There is no mistaking the pro-terrorists’ aims. Once again America is a criminal enterprise, once again its veterans are war criminals, and once again groups who have no real agenda save for the downfall of democracy are using the very freedoms that veterans fought for to attack and overthrow the country that guarantees those freedoms.”
There they are again! Those toothless old hags of the protests of the 60’s, “criminal”, “aggression.” You can hurl these charges back in their faces on March 17 by handing out copies of the articles I am sending you as well as take copies throughout the National Press Building and maybe select members of Congress. Documented facts that show how the war protestors of the 60’s lied, and by recycling the same arguments again on March 17, will be lying again.
While copies of all material is going by e-mail and fax to march organizers and national news services, we know they will bury it. And it may be the vets cannot reach the marchers. That’s all right. Hand it out to anyone you can. That will allow me to write another article about the issues being raised. The issues can especially be made a matter of record by some vet group or groups making copies and handing them out throughout the numerous floors of the National Press Building, and to selected members of Congress. Notify me if you did so, and if the media still tries to cover it up, we will call upon the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Foundation to come out and raise hell about it.
Back in the 60’s-70’s when I was engaged in my various campaigns, I started at least a dozen times on the top floor of the Press Building and went around in circles handing out press releases on each floor all the way to the bottom. But now I’m getting old and can’t do that. In any case, the press never paid any attention, but I’m hoping for a big win this time. Do it for the students at Suffolk they betrayed and for the Vietnam vets they betrayed.
It’s time the nation realize who the true “criminals” are. The ones who betrayed South East Asia to tyranny and genocide.
This is not the first time V.V.A.R. has been involved in a counterprotest in Washington. A few years ago we received this letter from Mr. Joel Charles Kernodle, President of the 1st Marine Division Association of Indiana.
Dear Mr. Magruder:
I have not only read all of the materials you were so kind to forward, I have posted them within a special forum created for a club, which has an
internet site, to which USMC combat veterans belong.
There has been a furor over a post originally made of your actions leading Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform just a few days ago within the club
website. Nearly all of the members believe in doing something about these radical protesters and the rebirth of this type of movement. There is
tremendous anger and a feeling among them of violation as a result of these leftist radicals “using” both physical monuments to veterans and their own
interpretations of what deceased veterans would protest.
The membership is aware there will be a march/rally/protest in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18. It is the desire of most of the membership to engage these
leftists.
This group was the only veteran group counterprotesting in Washington on that occassion.
On March 17 we would like to see Vietnam veterans not only defending the Wall, but speaking out in demand that it is absolutely time to get the media and the university to stop hiding out on the subject of Vietnam and re-enter into dialogue with the rest of America, especially its Vietnam veterans, as to what really happened. We cannot go into a world-wide war on terrorism with these huge lies in our history. Holding on to, and perpetuating myths, has too great a potential for creating another lethal, paralyzing polarization. The media, and the campus, must find the courage to consider “second thoughts, “ as have David Horowitz and so many others of the anti-war movement, Horowitz now describing what they did in the 60’s as “treason.” The campus and the media fell for enemy propaganda and it looks like it might 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 (media and academia) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.”
The time has come to raise the questions anew because the new films and the new histories are devastating to the leftist version on campus and could end this debate forever. This is the one great trauma in the tissue of American history that has never been honestly dealt with.
The psychology by which academics hide out on this issue is elementary. To admit to having been wrong would be to face, not only guilt, but disproof of their ideological assumptions. But it is these same assumptions that are causing the wave of anti-Semitism on campus, the dangerous “Islam is peaceful” mythology, and the anti-Americanism being pressed on students: “It is because of something we did to them.”
We cannot win the war against terror with the campus building towards a polarization that could again paralyze a national effort.
We are sending to Vietnam vets and news outlets only, three other articles that sum up the case against the anti-war movement of the 60’s. Others can see these articles at v-v-a-r.org.
1)
READ
THIS AND THROW UP; THE OUTRAGEOUS LIES OF THE 60’s (titled previously on v-v-a-r.org
as Kerry Too Naive).
We show you straight from literature handed out in the 60’s at major protests
how anti-war leaders lied to their followers, telling them that the war was a
civil war within the South between the government and Viet Cong “indigenous
freedom fighters.” The actual enemy, the Communist North Vietnam, of which the
Viet Cong was always a combat arm, was never mentioned
2) CAN THE ENEMY AGAIN COUNT ON IGNORANT AMERICANS AND FAKE MORALITY TO WIN THE WAR FOR THEM? (titled previously on v-v-a-r.org as We Don’t Want Your Views on War- You Lied About Vietnam).
The Vietnam Communists admit 60’s war protesters were wrong. We show how the entire anti-war movement rested on the lie that North Vietnam was never involved in aggression. The main foci of lying by the anti-war movement were two White Papers issued by the State Department in December 1961 and March 1965 which documented that the North was involved. Admission of this involvment by Hanoi is found in the report “Summary of Fact, “ issued in 1987 by Hanoi’s Military History Institute. Wrote analyst Stephen Young, “The Summary confirms the two American White Papers and utterly refutes the position of the anti-war movement.” Those who supported the war were never confused about this.
3)
HOW
THE MEDIA LIED ABOUT THE TET OFFENSIVE
Documentation from 21 standard histories and commentaries on the Vietnam War on
how the media transformed a strategic American victory into a defeat, betraying
the war effort (Part 3 in the series “Vietnam and the Media”at v-v-a-r.org).
(For more on how the campus lies about Vietnam see Students Challenge K.U. Professor on Vietnam at v-v-a-r.org. A new additional place to see Magruder articles is in the forum section on WMDterror.com, largely military strategists on the current crisis, by Major Frank C. Stolz, USMC (Ret.), author of the important book, WMD Attacks on America.
Mr. Magruder is not a Vietnam vet. He founded his organization, with the help of local Vietnam vets, following his resignation as professor at Suffolk College in 1981 to protest that media and campus had lied about Vietnam causing veterans additional suffering, which he had personally observed while working with vets as a volunteer psychologist.
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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