October 24, 2004
THE COMPANY YOU KEEP:
Never Apologize, Never Explain: John Kerry's real record as an antiwar activist. (Joshua Muravchik, 11/01/2004, Weekly Standard)
JOHN KERRY SAYS HE IS "PROUD" of his activities in opposition to the Vietnam War. Why, then, have he and his spokesmen consistently misrepresented them? Indeed the Kerry camp has been so effective in obscuring this history that both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to run corrections on the subject recently because their reporters relied on misinformation that the Kerry camp had succeeded in putting into wide circulation.When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unveiled the fourth in their series of television ads--this one accusing Kerry of having "secretly met with the enemy" in Paris--both papers went into full debunking mode. The Post ran 600 words under the headline: "Ad Says Kerry 'Secretly' Met With Enemy; But He Told Congress of It." The story explained that the Swifties were "referring to a meeting Kerry had in early 1971 with leaders of the communist delegation that was negotiating with U.S. representatives at the Paris peace talks. The meeting, however, was not a secret. Kerry . . . mentioned it in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of that year."
The next morning the Post ran a correction. The previous day's story, it noted, "incorrectly said that John F. Kerry met with a Vietnamese communist delegation in Paris in 1971. The meeting was in 1970." The correction did not acknowledge, however, that this apparently minor error invalidated the entire point of the Post's impeachment of the Swifties' ad. Kerry's visit to Paris took place in or around May 1970, eleven months before his Foreign Relations Committee testimony. In other words, his meeting with the Communists (while he was still a reserve officer in the U.S. Navy) appears to have been kept secret for nearly a year. [...]
Why all the obfuscation from the Kerry camp? Because his activities were not as innocent as he would like them to be remembered. The antiwar movement, broadly speaking, had two wings. To one, the war was a tragedy: America's actions were well-intentioned but misguided. To the other, the war was a crime: America's motives were less worthy of sympathy than those of its enemies. Kerry sometimes sounded as if he were in the former camp, as when he warned against being "the last man to die for a mistake." More often, he was in the latter camp, as when he accused American forces of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," a kind of language he never used about the behavior of Communist forces.
America had gotten so far off track that we needed a "revolution" to recapture our founding principles, Kerry said, while also suggesting that our enemies were more in tune with those principles. Ho Chi Minh, he declared, was "the George Washington of Vietnam" who was trying "to install the same provisions into the government of Vietnam" that appeared in the U.S. Constitution.
Which would make Zarqawi the George Washington of Iraq. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 24, 2004 6:59 PM
At the conference at Versailles following WWI, two nationalist leaders from Asia came to visit Wilson to ask for his support in recognizing their claims as he did those of Masaryk, Weitzmann and Pilsudski. Those two leaders were Syngman Rhee of Korea and Ho Chi Minh of Indochina. Wilson, racist that he was, turned them down flat.
Ho went to the Soviets because they were the only ones smart enough to see that he was the future, and that the languid French colonial exploiters were the past.
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 7:00 AMBart:
You're aware it's racist also to believe that you made Ho Communist and Pol Pot commit genocide, as if you controlled them?
Posted by: oj at October 25, 2004 7:32 AMOJ,
We chased Ho into the hands of the Soviets. He wanted someone to back his efforts to rule in Indochina and came to Wilson first. We wouldn't, the Soviets would. Maybe, he was a committed Communist, maybe not. My guess is he was just another Third World leader looking for a sponsor like Bandaranike or Nyerere.
As for Pol Pot, it was the French. What became the horror that was Kampuchea is all in his Sorbonne thesis.
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 7:44 AMBart:
Yes, that's the Left's version of events. It's false.
Posted by: oj at October 25, 2004 8:35 AMHo helped found three Communist parties: the French, the Chinese, and the Indochinese (you could say that the Laotian and Vietnamese parties were separate). Why aren't you sure that he was a Communist?
Posted by: Brian (MN) at October 25, 2004 8:58 AMBrian,
Because I think that for a bowl of noodle soup we could have had him on our side fronting for democracy.
When did he found those parties? Before or after 11/11/18?
OJ,
The ease with which Third World leaders like Mobutu or Sadat or Siad Barre or Torrejos or Manley or even my hero, Harry Lee, switched sides during the Cold War should indicate how little importance they placed on Western ideological labels like 'Communist.'
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 9:08 AMBart:
Yes, it's their acts that define them, not the labels they choose. Ho was a Communist in Paris and died one.
Posted by: oj at October 25, 2004 9:14 AMBart--
He apparently read Marx by 1917, and was active in radical circles and attending meetings of the French Socialist Party that summer (or perhaps winter). The French Communist Party itself did not exist until 1920, true, but there was always a more radical faction before then (and that was Ho's faction, though he wasn't called Ho then). Where was the intellectual break for him?
Posted by: Brian (MN) at October 25, 2004 9:46 AMI read the Communist Manifesto in 1978, does that make me a Communist? The question to ask about any of these Third World 'Communists' is whether they actually believe it or whether it was just a means to get some bunch of white people with access to money and guns to help you. I frankly don't know enough about Ho to make a judgment, but my tendency is to say he was no more a Communist than Sadat was a Nazi. The French Socialist Party has been a middle class party since Jaures ran it.
By contrast, Castro and especially Little Danny Ortega are Communists. They still act as if they believe all that claptrap long after it makes any geopolitical sense for them to.
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 10:46 AMThe French Socialist Party has been a middle class party since Jaures ran it.
Yeah, that's why the Poldes faction left it.
Of course reading Marx doesn't make you a Communist. Writing propaganda pieces for Soviet newpapers while living in Moscow in the 1920s does.
Posted by: Brian (MN) at October 25, 2004 10:54 AMand Vietnam makes Ho one.
Posted by: oj at October 25, 2004 11:27 AMBrian
Didn't Chiang Kai-Shek study military strategy and tactics in the Soviet Union for a few years in the 20s?
OJ,
In a fit of staggering stupidity that only the Dullest Brothers could pull off, we ended up replacing the French colonials in Vietnam, as the target of choice. My basic question is whether it would have been possible to have invited Ho in for a little chat after Dien Bien Phu and persuade him or pay him to switch sides. It worked in so many other cases.
Look who ended up being our SOBs in Vietnam. The arch-Catholic Diem, who generated huge hostility to his government from the mostly Buddhist population; Ky, who went from service in the French military against the independence movement and is today a leading figure in the Vietnamese mob; Thieu, who was a cipher who stole everything that wasn't nailed down.
Posted by: Bart at October 25, 2004 2:21 PMBart--
Didn't Chiang Kai-Shek study military strategy and tactics in the Soviet Union for a few years in the 20s?
Maybe he did. Was he a confidant of Lenin's too? Did he found the Chinese Communist Party? This isn't guilt by association, Bart. At best, he could have been Tito.
Posted by: Brian (MN) at October 25, 2004 3:42 PM