It turns out that the anti-war protesters of the Vietnam era hadtheir facts wrong, and were fooled into … well,acting like fools. It also turns out that they could have bothered touncover certain facts about their movement and about “freedom loving”North Vietnam — but they didn’t. But instead, they “ended” the war,creating the circumstances for Leninists to come to power. TheseLeninists, by the way, were then able to kill or enslave tens ofmillions in Southeast Asia.
One of the protesters’ favorite arguments was that the UnitedStates was conspiring with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diemin order to prohibit free elections in 1956; it was thought thatthese elections, which would decide the future of Vietnam, would fallto Ho Chi Minh’s Communists, to the United States’ ire. In otherwords, the protesters thought that the U.S. opposed the electionsbecause the wrong people would win.
Actually, the U.S. opposed the elections because the NorthVietnamese didn’t want the elections supervised by the UnitedNations, and because Ho Chi Minh routinely won 99 percent of the votein North Vietnamese elections. We therefore gathered that theelection would have been bogus, as Hanoi had a majority of the peopleand was already skilled at turning out these types of elections.
As Robert F. Turner argues in the Weekly Standard, the result ofour refusal to sign on to these elections was the creation, by theNorth Vietnam Communist Party, of the National Liberation Front forSouth Vietnam. Three months before the NLF was created, the CommunistParty Congress in Hanoi willed the creation of a front aimed atliberating the “people in the South.” But our protesters didn’t evenbother to find this out. Indeed, Hanoi’s Defense Minister GeneralGiap bragged in a 1983 French documentary about the decision toestablish the NLF; this also included opening the Ho Chi Minh Trailto ship soldiers and supplies southward, for war.
Protesters also claimed that South Vietnam was holding 202,000″political prisoners.” Actually, South Vietnam’s prison populationwas only 36,000 with 6,000 prisoners “Communist criminals.” Accordingto Turner, these people were being held in tiny cages for terrorism,extortion, threats of murder and other violent acts. Communistcriminals are usually up for these types of acts, anyway. It was saidthat these criminals were held in subterranean “tiger cages,” yetTurner himself visited these “cages” on a 1974 congressional staffvisit and found them to be “nearly 10 feet tall, above ground andcompletely protected from the elements.”
It even turns out that protesters working for the NLF providedHanoi with the names and serial numbers of U.S. soldiers serving inVietnam; the Viet Cong would then phone the men’s parents or wivesand report their “deaths while serving in Vietnam.”
But by 1973, however, the date at which Congress made it illegalfor the president to spend money for operations in Vietnam, we hadwon the war. Turner writes, “[T]he Viet Cong had ceased toexist as a meaningful fighting force by 1970, the Easter offensive of1972 had been decisively blunted and South Vietnam controlled everypopulation center and most of the territory that had been inCommunist hands five years earlier. When the United States finallydecided to fight the air war seriously in 1972, our POWs in Hanoiobserved firsthand that Hanoi’s will was broken.”
But instead, these “peace activists” used faulty facts and NorthVietnamese propaganda to advance their cause, which amounted to thewithdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. But unbeknownst to theseprotesters, the ensuing Stalinist tyrannies that were able toflourish without U.S. opposition ended up killing more people in thefirst two years of “peace” than in the past 14 years of war. And, asI mentioned, the murder or enslavement of tens of millions ofinnocent people. Now that’s something to protest about.
–Benjamin Abel is a social science senior and the senior opinionwriter for The Daily Aztec.
–This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of TheDaily Aztec. Send e-mail to letters@thedailyaztec.com.Anonymous letters will not be printed — include your full name,major and year in school.
