ce, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because
of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we
are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. - See more
at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf
We
could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our
silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because
of what threatens this country, not the reds, but the crimes which we
are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. (John Kerry)
n
Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23,
1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf
Remarks before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971
John
Kerry made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23,
1971. - See more at: http://hnn.us/article/3631#sthash.folFV67x.dpuf
Joseph
Stalin died on March 5th, 1953, most likely from a stroke, stricken late during
the night in his sleep. In his dotage and pathologically suspicious of doctors,
Stalin’s cowering associates hesitated to call for medical assistance fearing
his wrath. So he lay helpless for some time, unable to speak or otherwise
communicate, soaking in his own urine before his final exodus. When his closest
henchmen, Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and Bulganin, confirmed that “the Boss” was finely
and safely dead, they scurried off to the Kremlin offices to clean out the files
and papers that might document their extensive complicity in Stalin’s long reign
of terror and criminality.
The
Georgian Bolshevik was seventy three years old. As the undisputed God of the Communist world
his passing unleashed paroxysms of grief in the Socialist Workers Paradise of
his making and regions elsewhere under the banner of the hammer and sickle. The
CPSU bosses set his embalmed corpse next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum.
Eight years later he would be quietly evicted by the ‘kinder, gentler’ Nikita
Khrushchev after he began to ponder with his colleagues at the 20th
Party Congress the “imperfections” of the reign of the General Secretary, his
long-time mentor and father of the world’s first modern terror-command state,
and what they might signal for his own political fortunes.
Stalin’s
legacy was not just two and a half decades of repression and mass murder. He
also left posterity the gift of Stalinism,
a unique form of tyranny that combined systematic terror with an ideology at
once rigid yet flexible and adaptable, held together with a mindless cult of
personality. The ‘mold’ of J.V. Stalin stamped out a number of working copies –
ambitious, overachieving Stalinists wielding vast power in many places. An assortment
of vicious, self-infatuated monsters such as Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot, Fidel
Castro and Communist chiefs of the Eastern block countries, like the Master, devoted
their waking energies to the celebration of their self-perceived genius and the
wreckage of the millions of lives of those under their domination. The authors
of the Black Book of Communism
estimate that Communist rule snuffed out the lives of some 100 million people
during the 20th century.
Stalinism
survived Stalin – survived and flourished in fact. In the 21st
century its practitioners have cleverly adapted themselves to the changing
world but, like the Bolsheviks from the early days, continue to embrace
Stalinism’s core conviction – that they, the Stalinists, alone possess a
cognitive and moral superiority that entitles them to wield whatever power they
need to smash the old, corrupt order and micromanage the lives of others. The
old guard Stalinists were open, confident and ardent about what they intended
to do to their real, and imagined, opposition; the 21st- century
ones tend to hide behind the customs, institutions and traditions they loath
and surreptitiously work to destroy. Twentieth-century Stalinists were
about Revolution: twenty-first-century Stalinists promise “transformation.”
After
WWII the Stalinists of note in the U.S. could be found undercover high up in
FDR’s government—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Henry Wallace and Harry
Hopkins being some of the better known, as we now know from the Venona decrypts.
The America’s mainstream, however, for a season disdained every feature of
Communism. During the Cold War, particularly in the early years, most Americans
were appalled by the grim spectacle of Soviet imposed helotry in central and
eastern Europe and the murderous fanaticism unfolding in Mao’s China, Stalinism
with an Asian accent. Americans were also threatened by the Communist
self-confident assertions of their superiority and inevitability. “We will bury you!" ("Мы вас похороним!")
predicted Nikita Khrushchev while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception
at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.
Reflecting
the sentiments and convictions of the American people post WWII, both the
Republicans and the Democrats at least appeared resolutely anti-Communist. Joseph
Kennedy Sr. was close to Joe McCarthy, and early in his career Bobby Kennedy
worked for the Wisconsin senator before the American Left accomplished it’s
most successful and enduring smear. Nixon of course launched his political
career combating Communism in America, defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 Senate race. Nixon dubbed her as “the pink lady … red down
to her underwear.” President Kennedy warned the country of domino threat of
Communism to Southeast Asia and following General Maxwell Taylor’s counsel,
sent 8,000 troops to Vietnam to support the Catholic, anti-Communist, South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm.
Vietnam, as we now know, was a
disaster for the Americans, fifty-seven thousand soldiers who perished fighting there,
and, of course, for the Vietnamese all of whom ended up living under a repressive
Communist regime. The Vietnam War marked a major turning point for Americans in
their engagement with Communism. Rife with political assassinations, race riots
and radicalized universities during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. hard-turned
to the Left. Vietnam became for the Left a propaganda fulcrum used to
de-moralize America, its traditions, history and promises, all exposed as a various
elements of false consciousness that disguised its essential character – a viciously,
hopelessly racist, rigged system propped up with a phony, exploitative
Christianity and Horatio Alger mythology.
America,
John Kennedy in his 1961 inauguration speech promised would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the
success of liberty”. Liberty-Schmiberty, throw away lines for the naive and the dummies. Such
sentimental schlock was quickly turned upside down by our adversarial
intellectual class who were busy polishing their favorite Marxist leitmotifs and
disseminating a view of American history (Charles Beard comes to mind) that that
read exploitation and oppression into the country’s foundational fabric.
Southeast
Asia refracted through the hermeneutical Marxist lens became a theater of
imperial aggression fought with conscripts extracted from America’s underclass –
poor and minorities dragooned and dropped into rice paddies half way around the
world to bomb, napalm, and devastate a colonialized third world people. The American
presence in Vietnam stripped of anti-Communist rhetoric was shown to be in
essence about its true core, aggression and racism: the white imperialist
descendants of American slave owners were conscripting young, black Americans,
discriminated against and marginalized from the slums at home, to wage war on
Asian people whom they (the leaders) viewed as racially inferior, culturally
insignificant and physically expendable. American foreign policy particularly
in all of its ugly Vietnamese contortions became an external (international)
reflection of its fundamentally racist internal (domestic) character and its
chauvinist history.
One especially
notable indictment of American racism in Vietnam came from none other than the
future Massachusetts U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry, who had returned
home from active duty to throw away his service medals and help organize the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Among
other symbolic gestures of condemnation of the U.S. government prosecution of
the war, Kerry carried a North Vietnamese flag in a protest march. His book, The New Soldier denounced the architects
of the war as racists hiding behind a phony vale of anti-Communism.
“We are
probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical
war against communism… [W]e watched while America placed a cheapness
on the lives of Orientals.”
It would not be quite correct to say that Kerry was opposed
to the war. It was far more than that.
The war itself was a manifestation of something much worse for him. “The country doesn't realize it yet but it
has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to
deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the
biggest nothing in history.” It is difficult to know what to make of this sweeping, slanderous verbiage,
a poisoned cocktail of vituperation and nihilism that one might expect to hear
from a raging anarchist on a street corner, not from a decorated veteran
testifying before Congress. This “monster”
was made up of his comrades in arms some of whom had died believing, perhaps, that they
were about more than dealing and trading in violence. Kerry’s personal history
and ascendance to high office—from a 1960’s anti-war radical, communist
sympathizer to high establishmentarian is a splendid prototype of the political
trajectory of many of our current elites and helps to explain why American
political and social institutions now bear scant resemblance to what they were a
generation ago.
Thus: many years later when he appeared before a national
audience to accept the Democrat Party’s nomination to run for the Presidency, Kerry
opened his speech with a snappy salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty”, apparently having calculated
for purposes of garnering votes that the “biggest
nothing in history” he had fought in and subsequently with great fanfare denounced
as an enterprise concocted and conducted by war criminals was now an illustrious
entry in his autobiography. And so, from
John Kerry, “How
do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
as he put it in his testimony before Congress … to John Kerry, the proud war hero! This was the sort of amoral reversal that reminds one of an
earlier volte-face from a cynical power monger, Joseph Stalin: Stalin was for
Hitler (Mototov-Ribbontrop pact 1939) until he was against him (1941-1945). Kerry’s
opportunistic affinity for Stalin-like switcheroos was captured in his risible, "I
actually did vote for the $87 billion [for the Iraq war] before I voted against it." Needless to say, Kerry did not during his Presidential
campaign bring up the authorship of The
New Soldier and his characterization of the U.S. effort in Vietnam as he so
delicately put it, “a filthy obscene
memory.”
Kerry's ambition to be President in 2004 was foiled in part by emergence of his former naval Swift Boat comrades from the Vietnam days who had served with Kerry and told the voters the truth about his self-exaggerated war heroics and reminded the voters of his sweeping condemnations of the American military in which he served. For their efforts they were smeared by the Left for doing what Stalinists most resent from those who oppose them, telling the truth.
