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
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.
(Parts 1 and 2)
by Leonard Magruder
October 29, 2002
(the following is quoted by permission from Dr. Jamie Glazov- noted historian with a specialty in Soviet Studies. From FrontpageMag. - CSPC):
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 1962, 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 in1975, 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.”
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.
Part 2
The main focus of lying by the anti-war movement was two White Papers issued by the State Department in December 1961 and March 1965. 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.
The1961 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 1965, after Lyndon 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 Tin, 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 1987 by Hanoi’s Military History Institute describing key decisions made by Hanoi regarding South Vietnam from the Geneva Convention in 1954 until the final conquest by the Communists in 1975. 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, 1961, 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.”
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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