Obama's Ho Chi MInh Trail
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in
Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for
having, “too much money in our politics, and rising
economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal
justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation
of the “American Declaration of Independence” and
claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the
murderous Communist dictator.
Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised,
his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the
opposition, political and religious. When Obama
references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps
mean Ho’s declaration, “All who do not follow the
line laid down by me will be broken.”
Perhaps he means the euphemistically named “land
reform” which may have killed up to a million
people. Like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh seized land
and executed property owners as “enemies of the
state”. The original plan had been to murder one in
a thousand. But the relatively modest plan for mass
murder was swiftly exceeded by the enthusiastic
Communist death squads.
Obama has consistently called for wealth
redistribution. This is what it really looks like.
It’s men being hung from trees or lying in dirt
dying of malaria. It’s death squads coming in the
night. It’s a declaration that you are to be
executed because you are the wrong class in a class
war. It’s a man condemned to hard labor in a New
Economic Zone and a family starving to death because
the regime has commanded that they must be made an
example of to other peasants.
What’s wrong with a little wealth redistribution
anyway?
As Obama said, on his visit to the brutal Communist
dictatorship in Cuba, “So often in the past there’s
been a sharp division between left and right,
between capitalist and communist or socialist... And
especially in the Americas, that’s been a big
debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist
Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy
communist that’s going to take away everybody’s
property... you should be practical and just choose
from what works. You don’t have to worry about
whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or
capitalist theory — you should just decide what
works.”
Does Vietnam’s Communist dictatorship work? Obama
seems to think that it does, talking up the,
“skyscrapers and high-rises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City, and new shopping malls and urban centers. We
see it in the satellites Vietnam puts into space”.
What’s a million dead when you’ve got satellites in
space? What does it matter if you don’t have freedom
of speech when there are skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh
City?
Unlike Pol Pot, whose genocidal crimes leftist
activists like Noam Chomsky tried and failed to
cover up, the Communist butchery in Vietnam that
took place even long before the Vietnam War has
largely been erased from common history. The victims
of Ho Chi Minh and his successors have become
non-persons not just in Vietnam, but in Washington
D.C. Instead Obama associates one of history’s
bloodiest Communist butchers with Thomas Jefferson.
What of the Declaration of Independence was there in
Ho’s concentration camps? The brutal Communist
regime whose ideals Obama praises, sent political
dissidents to camps. Are those the ideals he shares
with Uncle Ho?
Obama praises the “Vietnamese constitution, which
states that ‘citizens have the right to freedom of
speech and freedom of the press, and have the right
of access to information, the right to assembly, the
right to association, and the right to demonstrate.’
That’s in the Vietnamese constitution.”
The Soviet constitution had the same empty
guarantees. The Nhan Van-Giai Pham intellectuals who
were purged can testify that these words were as
meaningless as those of the Vietnamese Declaration
of Independence which Obama had quoted earlier. More
relevantly the fourth article of the Vietnamese
Constitution states that the “The Communist Party of
Vietnam... the faithful representative of the
interests of the working class, laborers and the
whole nation, acting upon the Marxist-Leninist
doctrine and Ho Chi Minh's thought, is the leading
force of the State and society.” That means there’s
no freedom of speech, press, assembly or anything
else except within the confines of Marxist-Leninist
doctrine and Uncle Ho’s cunning distortions that
fooled almost as many American leftists as Uncle
Joe’s plans for Eastern Europe fooled Western
European leftists.
Obama equates a Communist dictatorship to America in
an ugly display of moral equivalence. “This is an
issue about all of us, each country, trying to
consistently apply these principles.” Vietnam locked
up political bloggers for “abusing their freedom”
just this March. According to Obama, America has
“too much money in politics”. Vietnam doesn’t have
that problem. It only has one party. The Communist
Party.
Vietnam only has one party because its Communist
leaders banned, purged and criminalized the
opposition. But Obama doesn’t think that Communism
is a particularly bad thing.
In his speech, he dismissed the Vietnam War as being
caused by “fears of Communism” that overcame our
“shared ideals”. Why were we afraid of Communism? It
might have had to do something with the mass murder
of 94 million people by Communist regimes. It might
have a few things to do with concentration camps,
bans of political parties and the imprisonment and
execution of those practicing freedom of speech,
assembly and the press.
Our “fears of Communism” were as real and valid as
our “fears of Nazism”. It is only the fellow
travelers of the left who deny this undeniable fact.
After one bout of mass murder, Ho Chi Minh dismissed
his crimes with the words, “One cannot waken the
dead.” Obama clearly agrees. The dead, American and
Vietnamese, must be written off as part of an
unfortunate conflict. We must forget why they died
and embrace their killers.
Obama marked the lives lost on “both sides” as if
the Communist terror squads butchering Vietnamese
farmers or massacring Catholics were somehow morally
the equal of American soldiers dying to stop them.
Lives were also lost on both sides when America
fought the Nazis. Reagan was rightly criticized for
that sort of moral equivalence when he equated Nazi
soldiers at Bitburg and concentration camp victims.
And yet the liberals who protested that equivalence
have nothing but applause when Obama equates
murdered American soldiers and butchered Vietnamese
families with their Communist killers.
When Viet Cong terrorists threw grenades into
markets, are we supposed to mourn the children who
were torn apart by shrapnel and the grenade throwers
as morally equivalent? If we equate “the names of
58,315 Americans who gave their lives in the
conflict” with the evil they were fighting, then we
render their sacrifice worthless.
Their deaths become a meaningless mistake in an
unnecessary war caused by our failure to understand
our “shared ideals” with Ho Chi Minh and our
irrational fear of Communist concentration camps.
That is Obama’s real message. We should have adapted
some aspects of Communism and learned from our
shared values. We should have closed our eyes to Ho
Chi Minh’s atrocities as a matter of having to break
human eggs to make Socialist omelets while
celebrating him as another Thomas Jefferson.
That is the way the left saw it. That is still the
way it sees it.
Obama’s trip to Vietnam is not a mere strategic
journey, but yet another opportunity for him to
remind us that the left has not repented or recanted
of its solidarity and support for Communist terror
whether in Cuba, in Vietnam or anywhere else. It
still sees every Communist dictator as a role model
worth emulating and every Communist mass grave as
the price that must be paid for a better world.