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
Part 8 of a 10-part series, Vietnam and the Media, from the archives of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform - Leonard Magruder, President
Part 8 - Subject: Poll showing today’s students disagree with 60’s protestors suppressed by “Newsday”
From “To the Vietnam Veteran,”a speech delivered by Professor Magruder at the first rally on any American campus to honor the Vietnam veteran with over 400 persons attending. (It was at this rally that Magruder resigned his position to “protest the damage done to the veterans by the erroneous views of the left/liberals in the media and the university in the 60’s and their perpetuation of these views. Although a reporter from Newsday was present, the newspaper did not publish the event.”(The Compass, college newspaper, May 11, 1981) “Clearly newsworthy, but because of their bias, no news organization in New York would touch such a story.”(Noted newscaster Bill Jorgenson - NBC-TV)
From the speech:
“As Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran and principle author of the study by the Center of Policy Research on the problems of the Vietnam veteran said, “For the first time in our history, homecoming was as difficult as, if not more difficult than, the battle itself.”A whole new psychiatric category, “delayed stress syndrome,”has become necessary to describe what was largely the impact on the returned American soldier of attitudes at home based on lies that had been told about the war by the media and academia. The Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program of Houston, in a booklet it produced to challenge these lies, said, “The misinformation currently disseminated about Vietnam ultimately reflects upon the motives, convictions, values, and integrity of those who participated in the war … it is imperative that the record be set straight.”
“Following a semester of study of the Vietnam War last year, 240 of my students, after they had received their grades so the voting would be objective, voted overwhelmingly (85%) that in their opinion the war had been justified, that there was nothing wrong in trying to save South Vietnam from Communist tyranny. It was not, they agreed, the U.S. government that had misled the nation. The campus ‘peace’ movement, which said that the war was “immoral,” that the motive was “imperialism,” that the domino theory was “absurd,” that the war was only a “civil war,” that Ho Chi Minh was only a “nationalist,” and that America was engaging in “aggression” and “genocide,” misled the nation.
Puzzled as to why the students of this generation could see the truth so clearly, while those 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 students decided, was never really concerned for 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.” That those who did all the suffering in Vietnam should on their return be asked to bear additional suffering at the hands of the very ones who had betrayed them, was, the students concluded, absolutely unconscionable.”
Said Mr. Magruder, who is now President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform at the Univ. of Kansas in Lawrence today, “I am certain that if this experiment was done again, with students free from the pressures that existed in the 60’s, the results would be the same.” On the failure of the media to report on the rally and this experiment he said, “The suppression of this event and experiment by the media was predictable in view of the stand taken by the students. The media (reporters from Newsday and The New York Times who were present) refused to report on the events of that day, largely because of the posters the students carried which read “Abbie Hoffman Was Wrong,” “War Protestors Were Wrong,” “The New Left and the S.D.S. Were Wrong.” Other posters said that Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, William Sloan Coffin and others were “Wrong.”
As I said in my speech that day, even though there is now nothing that opponents of the war can point to today that vindicates their position, it is imperative for them that they continue to urge the nation to ignore the correct historical conclusions. To admit to having been wrong would be to face, not only guilt, but disproof of their ideological assumptions and loss of prestige and power. They must of psychological necessity take the position that they were right, the matter is over, and there is nothing to discuss, thereby leaving the Vietnam veteran to suffer for the perpetuation of their lies.
The fact that the matter is not over, and there is still plenty to discuss is seen in recent commentary on the Kerrey incident. Writes Ellen Goodman, “As time goes on, ‘our war’ recycles with less frequency, but with equal ferocity. Every time we think we have achieved that mystical/medical word ‘healing,’ something happens to remind us that the scar is a zipper, ready to reveal wounds that still lie close to the surface.” Writes columnist Mark Shields, “How conflicted about their own actions are all the middle-aged males on the press bus or in positions of public and private leadership who, through the testimony of friendly physician or graduate school deferment, artfully evaded the nation’s military call?” The problem is, academics and media persons won’t let the issues be raised. For example, my current 10-part series on Vietnam goes out by e-mail to 40 professors at the University of Kansas. Already 14 of these professors have e-mailed me back to remove them from my list. They say things like “I don’t want to hear what you have to say.” There is the problem. Those who opposed the war have never had the courage to try to defend their position with the veterans. Until they find that courage, what Vietnam vet Milt Copulos said recently in VFW Magazine will no doubt continue to be true, “There’s a wall 10 miles high and 50 miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn’t, and that wall is never going to come down.” There is then, a fault line, between those who served and those who didn’t, many of the latter now entrenched in our universities, which could lead to another, even more dangerous, polarization as the current war on terrorism continues. As was stated in the Manifesto of V.V.A.R., placed on record with the White House in the late 80’s, “A major lesson of Vietnam is that American foreign policy should henceforth take into consideration that the liberal university and media, largely apologists for secularism and therefore hostile to the traditional values of the American 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 book written by former Congressman John LeBoutiellier, Harvard Hates America. Or as the noted sociologist Paul Hollander of U. Mass recently wrote, “The university is the reservoir of an adversary culture.”
The entire psychology by which persons in the media and academia must continue to lie about Vietnam rests obviously on their guilt over having turned their backs on a struggle for freedom. The only solution is a massive acknowledgement of bankruptcy, betrayal and guilt by our intellectuals, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, and immediate exposure of their basic assumptions about life and human nature to re-examination in debate with philosophers and especially theologians, because in the final analysis the conflict in the U.S. over Vietnam was ideological.
To tell the truth about Vietnam at this time is, by definition, to demand a reformation of our universities, as the metasticizing of the lies they told in the 60’s is corrupting our entire culture.
This article may be reproduced in any form.
Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
Part 10, Vietnam and The Media
Part 10a, Vietnam and The Media
RETURN TO MAGRUDER ARTICLE INDEX
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