Apart from the
Soviet Union,
Asia was the major killing field of communism.
Perhaps 75 million innocent men, women and children
were killed for communism
in Asia - mainly in China,
North Korea,
Vietnam and Cambodia.
The western effort to stop this evil in Korea and Vietnam
was a great and noble cause,
and partially successful.
The brave Americans who died in Korea and Vietnam
did not die for nothing.
They did not die for "a lie".
They
died for the freedom of South Korea and South Vietnam.
In Korea, they were partially successful.
North Korea fell to the darkness, in which it still lives today.
But South Korea was saved from communist democide.
Tragically, in Vietnam, the brave American effort was betrayed at home.
South Vietnam could have been defended indefinitely,
but the "anti-war" protesters won the day,
and the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress
abandoned South Vietnam
and Cambodia to communist tyranny and democide
after 1973.
This abandonment - celebrated by the left to this day
- is one of the great crimes of the west
of the modern age.
The
anti-Vietnam War protesters
should be ashamed of what they did.
Jim Warner,
a POW for 5 years,
on how the "anti-war" protesters encouraged the North Vietnamese
(whether they meant to or not).
"Anti-Communists predicted a blood bath if the Communists took over Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The left,
including Jane Fonda and John Kerry, told us that this was a myth. Which one proved to be true?"
Joe Crecca, who spent 6 years as a POW in North Vietnam:
"These demonstrations for peace
had the exact opposite effect of what they purported to accomplish.
Instead of shortening the war the "peace movement" served only to protract the conflict,
resulting in a vastly greater number of Americans killed and wounded
...
The war would have been over much sooner and with a much more favorable result
if those in the "peace movement" would have rallied behind the commander in chief
...
Many fewer names would be engraved into the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial if these people had supported
our efforts instead of trying to derail them."
"After the war ended, some of the war protesters hung on to their anti-war postures for a while.
Some of them realized the errors of their ways almost immediately, but it took others 20 to 25 years.
Some, like Kerry,
have not realized there was anything wrong with what he did."
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, 2004
- The first great victory, after all these years,
of the ordinary decent Vietnam veteran
over the appalling "anti-war" protesters like John Kerry.
The L'Innovation Department Store fire,
Brussels, Belgium, 1967.
320 people - men, women and children - died in this fire
at a store picketed by anti-Vietnam War, pro-communist protesters.
It may have been arson by the anti-Vietnam War protesters.
Or it may have been an electrical fault.
It has never been proven.
From here.
See more photos.
Letter from a brave American POW
who was held for nearly 7 years
and tortured while Jane Fonda cheered the regime
only a few blocks away:
".. a woman who fulfilled the dictionary definition, as well as centuries of
legal precedent, of treason, by giving aid and comfort to the enemy,
during active hostilities, while I and several hundred other American and Allied POW's were being abused just a few blocks away in the "Hanoi Hilton," the infamous
Hoa Lo Prison! She conducted press conferences condemning U.S. and Allied policy and actions; POWs were abused and forced to attend a press conference with
her, and were punished badly for not following the communist script."
Shame on Jane
by Michael Benge
- An American POW tortured for disrespect to Fonda
during her visit.
Some stories of POWs executed because of Fonda
are not true
(also here).
"All we are saying .. is give peace a chance",
by John Lennon, 1969.
They did. America abandoned Vietnam and Cambodia in 1973.
It gave peace a chance.
The result was the communists killed millions of people.
John Lennon
supporting the violent terror group the IRA
in 1971.
Like many other "anti-war" and "pacifist" lefties,
Lennon was only really opposed to war by democracies.
People using violence against democracies
were to be judged differently.
Image from here.
Pol Pot's Cheerleader
by Jeff Jacoby
- on western idiots' support for the fall of Cambodia to the communists in 1975.
"Was this willful blindness or mere stupidity? To believe that the Khmer Rouge would be good for Cambodia, one had to ignore everything the world had learned about communist brutality since 1917."
Schanberg is glorified in the deeply flawed film
The Killing Fields (1984)
which, idiotically, argues that the Khmer Rouge killed
because they were "angered" by US bombing -
rather than, for example,
because they were totalitarian communists,
and that's what totalitarian communists do.
Chomsky quote in 1979:
"the evacuation of Phnom Penh,
widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives."
Many of the leaders of the Cambodian genocide
developed their
appalling philosophy
at leftist universities in France
and the US.
The genocide included an emphasis on back-to-nature, anti-property,
organic food produced with no technology,
and alternative, non-western medicine.
If you want to know what society the anti-globalisation protesters
would lead to, just look at the Khmer Rouge.
Gates of Vienna
makes this point very well.
The radical environmentalists and
the hate-filled, anti-consumerist "black bloc" rioters
call for a utopian, pre-technological, pre-consumerist world.
But such a world would, of course,
require genocide on the scale of the 20th century.
"How many people could the earth support under such a neo-Neolithic model?
Ten million? A hundred million? Let's be generous and say a billion.
That means that four-fifths of the world's population would have to disappear.
...
To achieve their ideal society, to create their heaven on earth, four billion people will have to die.
Who do you think those people will be? And who do you think will get to choose who goes,
and who gets to stay?
...
When the time comes .. it will be the Central Committee of the Anarcho-Green People's Coalition that makes the decisions.
The workers and bureaucrats and truck drivers and school children won't just lie down in the streets to die.
No, it will be Pol Pot all over again ...
We know the drill; we've seen it so many times before. The Enemies of the People will be marched out of the cities
and herded into camps to work for the common good. Those who can't handle it, who can't reconcile themselves
to the new order will .. Well, they'll just have to be sacrificed.
They'll go in single file across the organic soybean fields to the
mass graves that have been so thoughtfully prepared for them.
And you can bet that the bulldozer and the pistol will be the last technological artifacts
to be given up after the Green Millenium arrives."
John Lennon's Imagine
plays at the end of the deeply flawed film
The Killing Fields
(1984). Sophal Ear,
whose family were victims of the Khmer Rouge,
thinks this is rather ironic:
"You know the John Lennon song 'Imagine'? 'Imagine no possessions, no religion'? That's what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily porridge. And that porridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields."
It does seem in bad taste to play Imagine
in a film about the Cambodian genocide.
The appeal of a "cleansing" genocide is a constant with some humans.
Here, Irish Republican
"celticliam88", 19 Oct 2013, calls for the killing of the 6 million Jews of Israel in order to bring "peace".
In the West, the Vietnam War is associated with killings and bombings by America.
And indeed, it is the site of the worst American war crimes
after 1945.
And yet America is largely irrelevant to the story of war crimes
of this period.
The statistics show that over 95 percent
of all the killing of civilians
outside combat in this period was done by communists.
He gives the following estimates for democide in this period:
The communist Khmer Rouge of Cambodia - killed 2,400,000
innocent human beings -
men, women and children - by mass executions,
urban evacuation,
death camps,
and state-caused famine.
The communist regime of North Vietnam - killed 1,700,000
innocent human beings -
men, women and children - by mass executions, death camps,
and the deaths of refugees (boat people) trying to escape.
South Vietnam - 90,000.
America (in Cambodia) - 60,000, mainly by bombing.
This could account for as much as 2 percent of the democide there.
America (in Vietnam) - 6,000, mainly by bombing.
This could account for as much as 0.3 percent of the democide there.
For comparison, WW2 is remembered as a just war
and yet American war crimes were far worse in WW2.
Rudolph J. Rummel
has estimated democide in the WW2 period
(see summary table)
as:
In Korea, there was no serious anti-war movement,
and South Korea was saved from the jackboot of the communists by the US.
North Korea fell into Orwellian darkness and famine,
which continues today.
But South Korea was saved.
In Vietnam, there was a powerful anti-war movement,
the US military were prevented from winning,
the US pulled out,
and
South Vietnam and Cambodia were abandoned to the communist darkness.
No one was saved.
The genocide began.
The US went home.
For decades afterwards, and still today, the whole region,
Vietnam (North and South),
Cambodia
and
Laos,
is
miserably
poor and unfree.
South Vietnam could have been like
South Korea.
But it
was abandoned, not saved.
The anti-war movement
see no shame in what they did.
Why Vietnam was lost:
A different picture
by Jack Kelly:
[People]
"tend to forget that the U.S. military did not lose the Vietnam war. The U.S.
military did not lose a single battle in the Vietnam war. It was American
politicians who lost the war, by failing to come to the aid of the South
Vietnamese in the face of a North Vietnamese invasion three years after
almost all U.S. troops had come home."
Winning the Peace, Quietly
by Max Boot,
on how the home front lost Vietnam,
not the military.
"As in Vietnam, so in Iraq: Only defeatism on the home front can stop our soldiers."
"Vietnam was a quagmire only because we fought it that way.
If we had closed North Vietnam's ports and carried the war to the enemy,
victory could have been relatively quick."
"We lost the war when the Democrat-controlled Congress specifically banned all military aid to South Vietnam, and a beleaguered
Republican president signed it into law.
...
The South Vietnamese people were subjected to a murderous totalitarian government
.. because the U.S. Congress deliberately cut off military aid
- even after almost all our soldiers
were home and the Vietnamese were doing the fighting themselves.
That wasn't about "peace," that was about political posturing and an indecent lack of honor. Is that where we're headed again?"
Victor Davis Hanson on the tragedy of Vietnam
- South Vietnam could have been like South Korea,
had America not abandoned it.
The anti-Vietnam war protesters have a lot of blood on their hands.
On comparing Iraq to Vietnam:
"Well, there's only one modicum of comparison that works and that is whether the U.S.
will continue to have the willpower and the tenacity to support a democratic government.
We almost did in Vietnam and then right before the finish line we stopped"
North Korea today
is probably the most genocidal regime on the planet.
Interview
(and more copies)
with Col. Bui Tin of North Vietnam,
who received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam in 1975.
Wall Street Journal, 3 Aug 1995.
Q: "Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?"
Bui Tin:
"It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.
...
Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."
Q: "What of Nixon?"
Bui Tin:
"Well, when Nixon stepped down because of Watergate
we knew we would win. Pham Van Dong [prime minister of North Vietnam] said of Gerald Ford, the new president, 'he's the weakest president in U.S. history; the people didn't elect him; even if you gave him candy, he doesn't dare to intervene in Vietnam again.' We tested Ford's resolve by attacking Phuoc Long in January 1975. When Ford kept American B-52's in their hangers, our leadership decided on a big offensive against South Vietnam."