Don's Tuesday Column

                THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/26/2017

                      Christmas in the Vietnam War

The last column of 2017 provides a space to reflect and project on some current issues and stories, usually given short shrift by what President Trump has often rightfully described as the “Fake News” media. There are decades old narratives to consider.

The Vietnam War is one of the historical subjects given mention in my daily summaries from history.com, historynet.com and infoplease.com. Christmas has its own place in that war as President Nixon conducted “Operation Linebacker” bombing of North Vietnamese targets at this time in 1972. Predictably, the international pro-communist and anti-American left came quite unglued over the bold destruction of military targets, without which North Vietnam hadn’t a fighting chance to implement and maintain its subjugation of the South.

Though not without civilian casualties, the bombing was a very effective means to achieve the rather reasonable goal of forcing North Vietnamese negotiators back to Paris to continue talks they had committed themselves to participate in. As with any negotiations involving Communist entities, the “Paris Peace Talks” were, from the side of the North, nothing more than a strategy to make irreversible gains on the ground by duplicitous means. They had what to them were fanciful goals to establish the predicates for ultimate subjugation of the Republic of (South) Vietnam. They were fanciful due to the improbability that American politicians would abandon the South militarily (by renewed bombing of NVA military positions if they were to violate their commitments) and financially (through promises to replace military assets, made explicitly by presidents and Congress).

It’s not possible to provide an accurate and truthful reflection on the Vietnam War without giving fair attention to the march of militant Communist and socialist movements throughout the 20^th century. Tens of millions of Russian, Eastern European, Ukrainian and other populations were slaughtered or sacrificed in pursuit of the Marxist/Leninist obsession with reordering all of society along collectivist principles. Up to 100 million deaths, including in Communist China, became simply statistics for the cause of violent redistribution of wealth. Hence, the only relevant power—the kind that came out of a gun barrel—sought to destroy free market capitalism and binding, free elections in favor of twisted Communist goals.

Liberal revisionists (like Ken Burns and Lynn Novick) whitewash the true nature of Marxist/Leninist subjugation of ever more nations—South East Asian nations like Vietnam, for example—by giving minimal attention to the atrocities of the North and the Viet Cong. Likewise, they brush over the successes that I highlighted over last summer’s series on “A Better War—The unexamined victories and final tragedy of America’s last years in Vietnam” by Lewis Sorley.

Also, no mention was given to the tens of thousands of Viet Cong that abandoned their cause and switched sides. When I perused my columns from July through September, what stood out after watching the Burns/Novick series were titles like “A winnable war lost by media, Democrats” and “Elusive victory; elite failure.” The loss of South Vietnam to the hordes from the North, as American military and political leaders shamelessly abandoned the commitments they made to simply back up our ally, was a stain beyond description on America’s reputation (Osama bin Laden said we were a paper tiger because we left Vietnam in disgrace).

Presidents like Johnson and Nixon were culpable for making, and reneging on, promises to defend our ally; the news media abandoned all pretexts of neutral reporting, like they had practiced during WWII and the Korean War. Reporting sided with Communists in the North and South and plied a defeatist narrative at home. The greatest shame and stain, however, accrues to Democrats in Congress that, having binding commitments to replace used equipment and bomb the North if they aggressed against the South, simply deprived then-President Ford of money and authority to stand by the free people of South Vietnam. Hence, slaughter, re-education camps, “boat people” and ongoing economic weakness, compared to a thriving, free South Korea.

It can be literally head-turning to review the twisted regard the American progressive left has held for the international, revolutionary Marxist/Leninist movement. I see it as the kind of bright-eyed, rose-colored-glasses perspective that has accompanied many utopian views and aspirations for fashioning a “just” society. If only someone could marshal the populace to agree with the utopian, communist left and its necessary reordering of people’s lives, decisions and private-property-owning habits. If only power could be sufficiently held and exercised such that the worthy, laudatory goals and visions (they always imbue themselves with good intentions) could be forced into the lives and systems of otherwise free people. Like sustainability, maybe.

So it was that “progressivism” came to America a century ago, with mixed results. Direct democracy, through propositions and initiatives, was to be an improvement on our previous system of representative democracy. Public ownership of utilities never panned out. However, for every improvement in our lives, like what occurred after Prop 13 limited the voraciousness of tax-and-spenders, there have been numerous measures that literally kill people by mandating the release of criminals, the emptying of our jails.

I think the most hypocritical, shameless example of communist-leaning toadyism would be how the movement depended, not on principles or values in America’s entry in WWII against Hitler’s Germany, but on the latest cable from the Soviet Politburo to Communist Party of America leader, Gus Hall. Such near-daily instructions on whether to support or oppose the fight against Germany depended on the USSR’s interests, not America’s. Hence, the left aligned with the Russia- and Communist China-backed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong rather than America.