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.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
WRUF radio interview - MAGRUDER TELLS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA STUDENTS SOME VERSION OF MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION (MAD) NECESSARY TO PREVENT LOSS OF AMERICAN CITIES.
ALSO TELLS OF WEEK-LONG PROGRAM AT UNIV. OF KANSAS EXPOSING CAMPUS LYING IN THE 60'S, WHICH MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN.
by Leonard Magruder
October 22, 2003
Leonard Magruder, President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, the student auxiliary at the University of Kansas, in a radio interview on WRUF, Gainsville, told students at the University of Florida today that the man raising the most crucial questions of the hour was Daniel Pipes, Bush appointee and the nation's top expert on Islam and the Middle East.
(Other interviews recently include WDEV, Vermont, United Press International out of Washington, D.C., WFNC, North Carolina, and a number of radio and TV stations in the local area, Topeka, Lawrence, and Kansas City.)
Said Dr. Pipes: “Why do American academics so often despise their own country while finding excuses for repressive and dangerous regimes? Why have university specialists proven so inept at understanding the great contemporary issues of war and peace, starting with Vietnam, then the Cold War, the Kuwait war, and now the War on Terror? What is the long-term effect of an extremist, intolerant and anti-American environment on university students?”
That these questions are relevant is shown in other developments mentioned in the Gainsville interview:
In a week-long program of films and lectures on Vietnam at the University of Kansas last week Mr. Magruder, to illustrate what Dr. Pipes said, opened the program by quoting the Final Report of the Chief of Military History - U.S. Government:
“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 (university people) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.”
In the first evening Mr. Magruder talked about his activism in the 60's in support of the troops, and showed his 16-minute introduction to “Television's Vietnam : The Impact of Media” on which he spent $6000 in a national campaign to break a PBS boycott of the film. (“I congratulate you on getting the film shown on PBS.”- General William C. Westmoreland - letter, Sept. 13, 1986). In the film he explains how the media and the campus continued to lie even in the face of documented facts.
“In the U.S., the facts made clear by the Tet Offensive, that the war was not just a “civil war,” that the Viet Cong was indeed, as all U.S. presidents had argued, linked to the North, that the South clearly did not wish to live under Communist rule and welcomed American aid, and that it was the North Vietnamese who were “immoral,” engaged in genocide and aggression in the mass murders at Hue and the rocket attacks on helpless civilian populations, should have ended the arguments of the campus war protestors. All of their arguments rested on lies given to them by faculty in the infamous university “teach-ins” to help them avoid serving. It was the moment of truth for those in the universities and the media. But they failed the test. The lying continued with renewed fury.
The university and the media effectively robbed the United States government and the American people of the ability to make critical judgements about their most vital security interests in a time of war.”
The reason Mr. Magruder offered his program last week is to help insure this does not happen again in the current crisis.
In films that followed in the next two evenings, from the award-winning new 4-part series “The Long Way Home Project,” introduced by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, students learned how Nixon faced the same dilemma, and tried to solve it in the very flawed plan of Vietnamization. This involved withdrawing troops at a dizzying pace to placate the growing danger of the “peace” movement at the same time that South Vietnam had been 95% pacified, and American soldiers had repeatedly mauled the enemy at a horrifying 15 to 1 or better KIA (Killed in Action ) ratio. The films told how, for two years, South Vietnam held its own alone against the North, until vengeful anti-war elements in Congress cut off their ammunition, leaving them helpless before the Communist onslaught of 1975. “We lost the war right here at home,” says General Donn A. Starry in the film.
But the biggest lie by the campus protestors involved two White Papers issued by the State Department in December 1961 and March 1965. The 1961 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 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 1965, after Lyndon Johnson took over, made the same point. In a sustained attack over the years, the campus war protests 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. 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
Since then, of course, we have had numerous testimonies from leaders of North Vitnam confirming the accuracy of the White Papers. The most important confession of involvment by Hanoi is found in the report “Summary of Fact,” issued in 1987 by Hanoi's own Military History Institute. The Summary confirms the two American White Papers and utterly refutes the position of the anti-war movement. The majority in America that 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 fatal solution of Vietnamization offered by Nixon was accepted.
Hanoi's “Summary of Fact” contains this statement, “Following the road set out by the Party Congress, on December 20, 1960, 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.
Said Stephen B. Young in a recent article, “It is no wonder 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 the government's 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.
In 1979 Professor Magruder had 300 students study the Vietnam War. In a poll at the end of the study 85% voted (after they received their grades) that the war had been justified, a war to save South Vietnam from Communist aggression from the North. They could not believe how gullible the students of the 60's had been. It was clear to them that while American soldiers were dying to save South Vietnam from aggression from the North, a huge protest had grown on the home front based on the lie that no such aggression existed. How could this not help but be the greatest moral fraud of American history?
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. And at the same time, caution students about the ideological bias in statements being made by many academics regarding the current crisis. This is offten just a recycling of the lies of the 60's, “imperialism,” “racism,” “genocide,” those toothless old hags still haunting the faculty lounge. (We recognize, however, that in recent years, at some universities, and often because taught by Vietnam vets, objectivity is returning.)
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.
In the fourth evening Mr. Magruder showed students his own documentary “How the Campus Lied About Vietnam,” based on 68 interviews with Vietnam vets in the late ’80s at the Chicago and Houston Parades. There was only time for 11 vets in the 1-hour film, but across the board the veterans agreed that the campus war protests were “naive, misinformed, and demoralizing.” (“The Stalwart”-K.U.) 80 copies of this film recently went out to universities all over the nation that had asked for them, and where it is currently being shown to students.
Mr. Magruder then showed the PBS documentary, “Jihad in America,” to inform students as to the dangers they face from terrorists right in their own country. This was followed by a talk on the all-important subject of a need for a policy of deterrence:
“This is unquestionably the most important crisis the nation has ever faced. We need to set up something along the lines we had during the Cold War with Russia of mutually assured destruction, but based on invasions, not nuclear destruction. We need to be able to threaten something the terrorists care deeply about and tell them, for example, if you strike an American city, from our base in Iraq we will invade and then democratize, say, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and/or Saudi Arabia.This will mean, of course, our troops staying in Iraq indefinitely.
From the very beginning after 9/11 President Bush warned that those nations that harbor terrorists are potentially at risk.”
The terrorists think they are safe because they have no country. But we know that they do come from countries, ones that often harbor and support them. And we know their goal is the expansion of Islam and Muslim territory and that they would not like to see that territory diminished, much less at the hands of Americans. The terrorists need to be told that if they attack us, if we lose an American city, there will be massive retaliation, one reason being to deter them from striking again. Our current situation is unacceptable.We are totally vulnerable. A terrorist -by-terrorist approach cannot work. We must get the nation and the government working on a plan for deterrence. Once it is understood that the American people will not accept the loss of a single city, or any other form of mass destructon, such a national policy must inevitably follow.
Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, said in a recent article, “Most Americans understand that had Al Qaeda possessed an atomic device last September, the city of New York would not exist today. They realize that last week we could have grieved not for thousands of dead, but for millions. It appears that people will have to once again see the unimaginable materialize in front of their eyes before they are willing to do what must be done.”
We must do what must be done, before that materializes. The fate of Islam, its Koran containing the words, “Kill the unbelievers where you find
him,”(Sura 2:256) is not our problem.
This article may be reproduced in any form.
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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