A Wave Is Rising (Lando Lincoln Recommendation!)

David Broder, the noted columnist for The Washington Post, got right to the heart of the matter in a recent column when he wrote: ''Will we ever recover from the 60's? What's happening with the bitter dispute over John Kerry's role in Vietnam confirms my fears that my generation may never see the day when the baby boomers who came of age in that troubled decade are reconciled sufficiently with each other to lead a united country. The ferocity of the dispute over John Kerry's Vietnam wounds and decorations--and about his testimony when he decried American atrocities in that war--is explainable only as the latest outburst of a battle that has been going on now for three decades. Neither Kerry nor his critics in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will yield an inch. On both sides the ongoing culture wars is as searing as it was when it first burst into flames. Kerry once told me he thought it would be doubly advantageous that,'I fought in Vietnam and I also fought against the Vietnam War,' apparently not recognizing that some would see far too much political calculation in such a bifurcated record.''

It's worse than that: Kerry forgot that the majority of the American people had no use for the war protesters. In fact, we need to remember just how treasonous the campus ''peace'' movement really was.

Commentary magazine of Feb. 1980, reported that 28% of all college students in the 60's supported the Viet Cong, having been told by faculty that the war was only a civil war, neglecting the aspect of communist aggression from the North, while 51% of those in the ''peace'' movement favored a Viet Cong victory. A poll by the Univ. of Michigan showed that reactions to ''Vietnam war protestors'' by the public was by a wide margin the most negative shown to any group. The Harris poll showed, at the height of the war that 69% of the public believed that anti-war demonstrations were ''acts of disloyalty against the boys fighting in Vietnam,'' and 65% agreed ''the protesters were giving aid and comfort to the Communists.'' ''The anti-war movement,'' said the S.D.S. out of Antioch College, ''rests on three main elements, the Trotskyites, the Communist Party, and the radical pacifists." Said Jane Fonda to students at Michigan State on Nov. 22, 1969, ''If you understood communism you would pray on your knees that we would some day become commuists.''

A study commissioned by SANE showed that the more informed one was on the issue of Vietnam, the more one supported American involvement. (documentation for these statements is found in ''America in Our Time,'' the highly acclaimed study by the noted British historian Godfrey Hodgson.)

The ''peace'' movement was never really concerned for peace. Although it cloaked itself in an aura of great moral purpose, it in fact gave aid and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of the Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate its agenda, and turned its back on the American soldier. It tried to stereotype them with the help of the media, as ''dupes,'' or drug-crazed ''baby-killers.''

What is really eating away at America is that everyone knows that our educators still teach students that the protesters were the ''moral heroes,'' when the real heroes came back to slander and ostracism by their peers who did not serve. That is a contradiction that none of us, Vietnam vets and those of us who support them, have been able to live with for 30 years, and it absolutely must end now, as Broder suggests, to present a unified country in the face of a terrible new threat. The ideologues on campus are going to have to surrender. The veterans can't. They were there and they know the truth.

We see the continuing complaints about this contradiction in a booklet produced not long ago by the The Vietnam Veteran Leadership Program of Houston. ''The misinformation currently disseminated about Vietnam ultimately reflects on the motives, convictions, values, and integrity of those who participated in the war at the behest of their country. If is imperative that the record be set straight.''

Meanwhile, I was here at home. I was either an instructor or a professor at three universities during the Vietnam Era and I know how the faculty lied, and how the students lied. (for a documented analysis of exactly how they lied, see ''Kerry Is Too Naive--Part 1'' at www.v-v-a-r.org.) And too many of these lies remain institutionalized and passed on by media and university even today. And when you catch them lying, they just ignore you. (See ''Students Challenge Professor on Vietnam'' at v-v-a-r.org.) I was probably one of the first in the 60's to step out on campus squares and tell the protesters they were lying. And I have been involved in this fight ever since because I recognized from the very beginning that this was the greatest moral fraud ever perpetrated on the American people, one that was doing emormous damage to the war, and to those who fought in the war. And as Broder said, it is still as searing as it was when it first burst into flames. You will see many of the people involved in this fraud in New York this week. Once you have betrayed freedom in one crisis, because of the guilt, you have to repeat it again in the next.

We have an excellent expose of the recycled Vietnam lies in a new book which we highly recommend: ''Can America Survive,'' by Stein and DeMuth. ''There has never before been a time, after foreign aggressors attacked the United States, when respected political figures turned their rage against America and not against the people who did the attacking. Why? Why is the left so angry at America and her rulers while the country is under attack?

America has shown the whole world the path to freedom and prosperity. It is the magnet for all the oppressed peoples of the world. A nation that wiped out institutionalized racism, progress unheard of and unmatched in world history, and opened the doors of achievement to everyone, man and woman, black and white, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor. The America that fought two world wars and has taken no more territory in the lands we freed than the space needed to bury our dead. The America that quite recently invested its time, money, and blood in saving the Muslims of the Balkan states, yet was attacked so cruelly and murderously by Musims on 9/11. Still, we have a large segment of the American population, especially on the left, who responded to the attack on America with sympathy for the attackers and contempt for the victims. Why? Your authors are gripped by the terror that the anger of today's American leftists will lead to something horrrifying. A likely sequel to today's anger from the left would be a failure to adequately wage the war on terror. Some in the left have poisoned the wellsprings of the patriotism that normally would sustain us over the lengthy and costly battle that is coming.''

The book then goes on to systematically demolish all the lies of the left, which is certainly easy enough to do. The emptyness of the arguments of the left, in contrast to the rage they produce, is one of the great mysteries of our time. The whole premise of this book is that there is something not quite rational about the level of anger directed against the United States and its leadership by the left. Nothing in the real world justifies such rage. But then, the whole anti-war movement of the 60's was nothing but endless rage, resting almost entirely on just one simple lie. (See our article. ''We Don't Want Your
Views on War--You Lied About Vietnam'' at v-v-a-r.org.)

William Bennett, former secretary of education and distinguished author, expressed a similar concern in his recent book, ''Why We Fight.'' He begins with examples of some of the stupid statements from the academic left right after 9/11: ''When you bully people long enough they are going to strike back.'' ''If what happened on 9/11 is terrorism than what America did during the Gulf War was also terrorism.'' ''We should apologize to the millions of widows and orpans, the tortured, and imporvished and all the other millions of victims of American imperialism.'' ''Whatever the proximate cause of Sept. 11, the ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy.''

These statements, says Bennett, show a ''want of clarity about the difference between good and evil...due to the well-entrenched judgment about our country and about the West in general that has come to dominate virtually every one of our major cultural and educational institutions. Leading intellectuals and educators have been saying and writing and teaching that the United States was no better and might even be worse than its enemies, that Western civilization was a mask under which one evil after another has been visited upon the poorest nations of the world. That way lies a generation prepared only for accomodation and appeasement.''

And Kerry, of course, has a long history of accomodation and appeasement. (Paris, Nicaragua, Granada, Libya) These would be sure roads to national suicide in dealing with terrorists. Bennett then goes on to say what we have repeatedly said: "The arguments of today's peace party are basically rooted in the period of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. It was then that the critique of the United States as an imperialist or ''colonialist'' power, wrecking its evil will on the hapless people of the third world, became a slogan of the left.''

And why? To get out of serving. The whole rage of the left always rests on trying to get out of something. Remember when you see the hysteria in the streets of New York this week that there are no valid arguments there, no rationality, it's all empty street drama. ''Full of sound and fury--signifying nothing.''

What I said in a press release I gave out at my protest at the University of Colorado in 1968 is still in play. (Associated Press, June 22) ''To combat the fact that the average citizen sees the present conflict in terms of morality, the university has conceived the ultimate hypocrisy, it has projected an absolute moral judgement. ''The Vietnam War is immoral'' (the Iraq War is immoral), from nihilistic philosophical foundations. The vehemence of both faculty and students, and their need to avoid debate at all costs, flows from the need to mask that hypocrisy, hoping the public will confuse the vehemence for unique moral insight and go along. But adult America, all of whom are for genuine peace in this world, has not fallen for it. It has conspicuously not joined the marches because it correctly senses the true underlying message, which is, we do not believe in truth or morals, we will not sacrifice for democracy, we do not care if millions are slaughtered or enslaved, we want only to be left alone, to pursue our sloth, our sex games, and our drugs.'' Same trick in New York. Don't worry, they will all go home and the boys will talk revolution stuff while trying to get the girls to share the shower to conserve water. Wartime, you know.

The whole thrust of Bennett's new book is that decades of teaching leftist multiculturalism and moral relativism may have left the nation morally and spiritually unprepared for the current crisis, as a result of which we could lose this war the way we did the Vietnam War. That doesn't mean that Muslim armies will invade us. It means that in our current state of miseducation and irrationality, we may pick the wrong man, one who doesn't have what it takes to protect the nation from the Islamist terrorists. We have never even heard Kerry mention the word Islam. Does he understand the nature of the crisis? Vietnam veterans in their general rejection of Kerry could point the nation in the right direction, but the media is covering this up. But they know what they are doing. The latest poll by the national organization Rasmussen Reports, taken after the Democratic Convention, shows that Bush holds a 23% lead among veterans, but those with no military service favor Kerry by 10 points. This has very frightening implications. Those with knowledge about war strongly prefer Bush over Kerry as Commander-in-Chief. An honest national media would investigate this finding and tell the American people why these veterans believe this. It also means that the much larger group of those with no military experience to judge the matter believe that Kerry would be better. In their ignorance of what makes a good Commander-in-Chief, because the media is covering up what veterans have to say, they could make Kerry, the less able of the two men, Commander-in-Chief. This would place the country in much greater danger that it would be in under Bush. The media, blindfolding America to further its campaign for Kerry, is leading America directly into harm's way.

Wintersoldier.com recently responded to a letter from a Vietnam vet as follows: "Thanks for the kind words... A wave is building out there. It's still in the gathering stage, but it seems to consist of two elements--the anger you and others express at having been unjustly maligned, and a dawning hope that these old wrongs can finally be set right. It is too early to say how the wave will look when it reaches the shore. But we have a pretty good view from here, and it makes the skin prickle just a bit.''

Commentary:
I can't believe the stupidity of the media. Talk show host Hugh Hewitt wrote recently ''The conventional wisdom floating downstream from Washington is that Senator Kerry's anti-war radicalism following his return from service in Vietnam shouldn't--and won't be--an issue in November.'' They wish. Translation: We better make sure that doesn't come up--we lied too. And ''National Review'' reported ''the media has brushed off the issue of Kerry's past as irrelevant or a pointless 'refighting' of the Vietnam War.'' I knew immediately when Kerry made his speech at the Convention that a major issue would, in fact, be Vietnam because it bears on who can best protect the country from the terrorists, which according to the latest poll, is now the top issue.

Stephen Young wrote recently: ''Our national recollection of the war matches that of the New Left.'' That is the problem. The media wants to keep it that way. The media declared long ago that the debate over Vietnam was closed, that the New Left had won, and that there would be no further discussion. And for three decades they have hidden the fact that America doesn't agree. And that is the basis for what Broder wrote: ''The latest outburst of a battle that has been going on now for three decades...as searing as it was when it first burst into flames.''

A wave is indeed rising. The nation cannot live with this any longer. It poses a catastrophic threat to the nation, not only because of the division, but because it keeps the public from seeing, as most veterans can see, that Kerry is ''Unfit for Command,'' the title of a new book about Kerry written by veterans. It keeps the public from seeing the misinterpretation of the Vietnam War in Kerry's 19'71 testimony to Congress. Millions of Vietnam vets, those who know most about war, in a huge underground controversy on the Internet are voting overwhelmingly that Kerry is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. As Hewitt reports of callers to his show, ''The vast majority hold Kerry in contempt because of his actions,'' and view his antwar activities as ''profoundly wrong and disqualifiying for the presidency.'' Of course. the media is covering this up, but taking enormous risk with the security of the nation. We have a most crucial of all elections coming up and the media is hiding half the facts.

Now is the time to clearly repudiate both the Kerry position, at the polls, and the leftist position on campus. The two are essentially the same. To legitimize the position of the New Left in the presidency would be inconceivable. You might as well vote for Jane Fonda. Either the Vietnam War was ''an imperialistic, immoral war of aggression'' against "freedom fighters" (the Viet Cong) in South Vietnam attempting to unify their country,'' the position of the campus ''peace'' movement, and clearly the position of Kerry and his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or it was ''a fight for the freedom of the South Vietnamese against communist aggression from North Vietnam,'' the position of the government, the majority of the American people, and certain to be the position of those who sacrificed their lives.

These positions are mutually incompatible. They cannot both be true at the same time. The nation cannot remain forever in this state of illogic and division. Through new books, films, and testimonies from even the enemy, we now have more than enough facts to show students how the campus lied about Vietnam. To save the nation the university is going to have to do some soul searching on the subject of Vietnam, and back down. Kerry too. Like Robert Dole says, he needs to apologize. If you go to Wintersoldier.com, go to Special Features and scroll down you will see a brilliant article by Vietnam vet John Moore on Kerry's 1971 testimony in which he makes it very clear that Kerry supported most of the lies.

You heal the nation, not by pretending that you can hold on to two absolutely incompatible versions of the war as both true, but by bringing out the truth. The other side then disappears and you again have unity. Without that unity we will fail against the Islamist terrorists. We know from our recent V.V.A.R. polls that 80% of all Vietnam vets are against Kerry, view him as ''unfit for command.'' The media is keeping the rest of the nation from hearing about this. Our immediate task, therefore, is to get this information into local and then national media, warning the American people away from Kerry. (See the V.V.A.R. Presidential Poll at v-v-a-r.org)

Unless we do this, our universites and the media will go on lying forever. Vietnam veterans, after 30 years, finally have a symbol, a focus, a target, for ending the division over Vietnam. They couldn't challenge the protests when they came home because they came home alone, exhausted, wounded, and were overwhelmed by the viciousness of the antiwar forces. As John Musgrave, a Vietnam combat veteran with three Purple Hearts said: ''It was disgraceful. There was no excuse for it. We came home unarmed, we didn't have the police behind us, we didn't have the community to defend us, we came home alone. We didn't have our buddies like we had in the bush to cover us--we walked right into the jaws of insensitive idiots.'' They had to retreat before an army of those who would not serve, an army frantic to justify a position which was ''low and dishonest'' (Auden) to the core.

Do everything you can to enlist others in this fight. We will send you a copy for TV or cassette for radio of our 40 minute interviews with vets telling how the war protesters, including Kerry, affected them. Use the other 20 minutes in an hour program for comments by a live panel of Vietnam vets. (You can see excerpts from what each of the vets said in our film, ''How the Campus Lied About Vietnam,'' in our recent article ''Media Cover-up Crumbling'' at v-v-a-r.org.

Organize, protest, march, write letters, or call talk show hosts. This is just as much a fight for your country as when you were in Vietnam, maybe even more so, as they are now over here. When you see the half-crazed fanatics turned out to protest Bush in New York this week you will know we cannot lose the country to these people. They are ignorant and dangerous. Put the poster up, ''A vote for Kerry is a vote for suicide--and suicide bombers.

About the Writer: Leonard Magruder is founder and president of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, whose website is at http://www.v-v-a-r.org. Leonard receives e-mail at Magruder44@aol.com

''The conventional wisdom floating downstream from Washington is that Senator Kerry's anti-war radicalism following his return from service in Vietnam shouldn't--and won't be--an issue in November.''...oh, I so hope they continue to believe this - meanwhile anger at Kerry builds through the Swiftvets ads, the internet, and word of mouth around the American Legion and VFW halls and in veterans families - let the leftists continue their sweet, smug dreams that they were right about Vietnam and that those few stupid people who disagree with them are too ineffectual to hurt Kerry - they will awake with shock on November 2........

I just now got off the phone with a fellow consultant and subcontractor for a project I'm running, a young lady in her late twenties. I explained that I was postponing by a day my week-long visit to the job-site in 10 days because I was going to D.C. to join with other Viet Nam veterans on Sunday the 12th in a demonstration to tell the truth about John Kerry.

She initially said that sounded exciting and I explained a little more about what had happened when men came back from Viet Nam, especially after Kerry started his VVAW activities. She was quiet, so I took that as a sign that she would be willing to listen to more. I explained that I went back to school in 1970 and that in the next couple of years, and that I and other fellow servicemen kept our recent history to ourselves. The campus was full of daily protests and the professors usually liberal (though engineering classes more likely had neutral instructs).

As I finished I apologies for taking her time. I said my past military service was something I did not talk about though my college work and experience is common knowledge to those I work with. I told her that all that changed when Kerry came on the scene and I felt I had to join others in making his views and past actions known. I asked her if she had seen the Swift Boat ads and she said yes. I told her I was there and that none of the things Kerry told the Senate about in 1971 had occurred in my yearlong stay in country.

She said it was good that I was taking this action and agreed that his becoming our President would not be a good thing. We finished by saying that we'd have lunch when I got back and tell her about the rally.

Thanks for posting this great article -- I'm emailing it to her. Your timing in posting it couldn't be better.

Thank you for this post. It bolsters, IMHO, the concept of the left as simply having such poor judgment as to fail at taking responsibility. Liberals refuse to accept responsibilty-their ability to do so successfully is poor-one reason I suspect as to why they wrap themselves in academia. Consequently, if they are fundamentally unable to successfully assume responsibility, they are angry when others do so and desire to prevent ANYBODY from doing so.

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