>>>>We tried to warn the nation in '92 but would they listen? No we were vilafied.
In '92, I was in college.
Thankfully, I will hide behind Leonard Magruder here.
HE explains about the infiltration of higher education.
See, REMOVE history at the public school level. DON'T tell students what really happened...
No publically accessable internet....
Spin your own story...
Don't forget, media was already infiltrated, see Leonard Magruder again for that.
http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/051603_HigherEducation.html
Leonard Magruder, President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, today sent a letter of congratulations to Sara Russo, president of the latest student organization calling for academic reform, Students for Academic Freedom. The following is from “About Us” at their website:
“Students for Academic Freedom is a clearing house and communications center whose goal is to end the political abuse of the university and to restore integrity to the academic mission as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge.”
They now have fifty students at major universities building chapters.
There are now a dozen or more major new organization dedicated to university reform. Said Mr. Magruder, “As founder of the first organization of this kind, I find it very gratifying to find that so many others now recognize the same problems that we did in 1982, and are also speaking out. However, it is important to remember that all these totalitarian trends on campus today have their roots far earlier in the rise of the Left in the campus war protests of the early 60’s.”
The second such organization, Accuracy in Academia, began about 1984. Reed Irvine, the founder, invited Mr. Magruder to become President of the organization in 1985 but because of prior committments he could not accept. Mr. Michael Capel, however, Editor of th AIA’s magazine Campus Report, later served on the Board of Advisors of V.V.A.R.
Another major organization to appear around this time was the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, founded by the former 60’s radical David Horowitz, with probably the nation’s most brilliant and most read group of writers. Mr. Magruder met Mr. Horowitz when both spoke at the Vietnam Symposium in 1986, following former Senator Eugene McCarthy on the platform. Mr. Horowitz also served for a while on the V.V.A.R. Board of Advisors.
Mr. Horowitz, having been there at the time, often writes about the connection between the new totalitarianism on campus and the 60’s. Recently he wrote:
... you quickly realize that something is terribly wrong at our institutions of higher learning. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the left made a concerted effort to take over our colleges and universities. The turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War made our schools ripe for leftist pickings, and they did—they methodically took over our campuses. Now, four decades later, they have a stranglehold on hiring, teaching and administrating most of our schools in all 50 states. As they’ve taken control, they’ve trampled free speech, virtually banished all conservative professors, and turned our schools into little more than huge megaphones for anti-American rhetoric from coast to coast.
And then he goes on to tell about his new National Campaign to Take Back our Campuses.
[Note: the full article is archived at this link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Content/read.asp?ID=10]
More recently this type of organization is being started by the students themselves, rather than older activists such as Magruder or Horowitz, and the writing is being done by students. For example, Campus Watch, which presents criticism of academics written by young people. Noindoctrination is another new website that presents reports by students about the indoctrination going on at their school. Professor Watch will present profiles of professors reported to be using their classrooms for propaganda purposes rather than education.
And there are other new groups. It is very clear that a revolution has started on campus, but one of the first things that will have to happen is to demonstrate once and for all how the Left lied about Vietnam in the 60’s.That is why in September [2003], V.V.A.R. will present a five-night series of new, far more objective and truthful films on the Vietnam War to help students see the connection.
That many could see the connection between the campus war protests of the 60’s and a growing corruption in academia as early as 20 years ago should be very clear from the following presentation of selections from the Manifesto of our organization, delivered by appointment to the White House by Professor Magruder in Jan. of 1982. Although copies were distributed throughout the National Press Building, the Washington press never mentioned the students’ protest.
MANIFESTO President Ronald Reagan The White House Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President,
Over the past year 300 of my students in 10 sections of Psychology and Sociology were assigned the task of studying the Vietnam War to answer two questions that had been asked of President Carter by Vietnam Veterans of America: Why had they been sent to war, and what lessons had the nation learned from the experience ?
In every section the students concluded that the answer as to why we were there was now even more clear than when President Kennedy first explained the matter. We were there because of our relationship to the South Vietnamese through SEATO, they had asked for our help in defending their freedom against Communist aggression originating from North Vietnam and supported by Russia and China. He warned that should South Vietnam fall, it would have a domino effect and threaten the balance of power in Southeast Asia in favor of Communist totalitarianism.
Kennedy, and every president who followewd him, the students agreed, had told the nation the truth. The campus “peace” movement, which said that the war was “immoral,” that the motive was “imperialism,” that the domino theory was “absurd,” that the war was only a “civil war,” that Ho Chi Mihn was only a “nationalist,” and that America was engaged in “aggression,” and “genocide,” was wrong.
[note: At the end of this exercise, Professor Magruder, after giving the students their grades to insure objectivity, asked them to vote on whether the war was justified. 85% said that it was justified, a legitimate struggle for freedom for others. We challenge all universites to repeat this experiment, using the more objective, up-to-date materials now available on the war.]
Puzzled as to why the students of this generation could see the truth so clearly, whereas those of the 60’s could not, the students concluded that faculties, to serve their own ideological purposes, had misinformed their students, who in turn used the misinformation to serve their own purposes. Some of the students admitted that had they been in college at the time and were subject to the draft, they would have viewed this issue differently.
The najor lesson of Vietnam, the students concluded, was that American foreign policy would henceforth have to take into consideration that left-liberals in our universities and media, hostile towards traditional American values, have created within our society a large and dangerous bloc lacking in the intellectual and moral foundations necessary to defend freedom. The lesson of Vietnam is epitomized in the title of a recent book by Congressman John Leboutieller, “Harvard Hates America.”
The role of the campus “peace” movement is seen in President Johnson’s telling General Westmoreland shortly after the Tet Offensive that to pursue the war more aggressively was politically unfeasible, that he had “no choice but to calm the protestors lest they precipitate an abject American pull-out.” (Lewy, 1978) The role of the media is seen in the conclusion of Peter Braestrup, the noted journalist who researched in detail the reporting of the war by the news media. “Rarely has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality.” As Senator Margaret Chase Smith said at the time, the press “had become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest.” (Congressional Record, June 16, 19721)
The “peace” movement, my students concluded, 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. Rejecting the democratic principle of majority rule, it set out to intimidate the nation through violence. So dangerous did it become that it paralyzed national will and drove a President from office. By ascribing the basest possible motives to the government and the American people it in fact played out the role of a Hanoi lobby in enemy territory.
Said Guenter Lewy, in “America in Vietnam,” the most comprehensive and best balanced study to date of the war “... it was obvious that many of these men and the organizations and committees they spawned were not so much for peace and against the war as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory they sought to hasten through achieving an American withdrawal from Vietnam.”
It was this support for Hanoi and the desire to humiliate America that caused my students to decide that the anti-war movement was not an authentic domestic peace force. They agreed with General Westmoreland who said, “I can make no accommodation for those who burned draft cards and their country’s flag, besieged the Pentagon, paraded the enemy’s flag in the streets, encouraged others to break the law, fled their responsibility, and in general went beyond the bounds of reasonable debate and fair discussion. None should escape the reality that his or her actions helped to prolong the war.”
Particularly disturbing to my students was the fact that the university had spawned, in the very heart of academia, two totalitarian movements, the New Left and the S.D.S., behind which tens of thousands of students rallied to defeat the sacrifices for freedom of their own countrymen. Based largely on Marxism, these two groups advocated authoritarian repression of opposing opinion, political violence, and ultimately class murder and dictatorship, all with the encouragement of liberals in the university. This tendency to encourage totalitarianism, the students concurred, still lies latent within the profound contradictions of contemporary liberal thought. Unless immediate university reform begins, the university and the media, they fear, could prove instrumental in the destruction of America, by again polarizing, and then paralyzing the nation in a time of crisis.
The American soldier, with few exceptions, fought bravely and honorably. He did what the nation asked of him and in no sense was the war lost on the bttlefield. Even though American resolve fell short in the end, few nations in history have ever engaged in such sacrifices for others, and no gain, or attempted gain for human freedom can be discounted. Those who fought for freedom for South Vietnam not only deserve to be honored, they deserve that the nation start facing the truth.
The aspects of the war that most need clarifying, in TV documentries, film, movies, books, debates, courses, etc., are: the idealistic motives for our involvement, the subversive nature of the “peace” movement, the true intentions of Communist North Vietnam to conquer all Indochina, the barbaric tactics of the Viet Cong, the use of the media to influence public opinion, the manipulation of American journalists and intellectuals by Hanoi propaganda, the true bravery and victorious record of our fighting men, the genuine thrust for freedom of South Vietham, and the truth about liberals in Congress in their final abandoment of South Vietnam.
But to tell the truth about Vietnam, the students realized, would necessarily involve challenging the reigning philosophies on campus. Out of this could come, however, not only freedom for the Vietnam veteran from a false image, but a profound intellectual and moral revolution on campus. They decided they wanted to do something to start this reform.
Mr. President, the problem and the cure are both touched upon in this petition my students have asked me to bring to you. It begins, “We, the undersigned, students in Professor Magruder’s classes in psychology, wish to protest the news blackout by the liberal press, particularly “Newsday,” of our rally to honor the Vietnam veteran on Thursday, April 10, 1981. We also wish to protest the tyranny of naturalistic and deterministic views on the nature of man in contemporary education, particularly in the social sciences. We would like to see a reformation of the American university through renewed dialogue between psychology, theology, and philosophy.”
There is unquestionably a growing resentment against the suppression of their right to be exposed to the full spectrum of intellectual debate. Minor secular philophies have become institutionalized on campus as ultimate truth. These positions are protected by the simple expedience of refusing debate and running major challengers, such as theism, off campus. The insights of centuries of Western experience and thought have simply disappeared, from curricuum, bookstores, and textbooks. The impact of this on students who raise such basic existential questions as “Why do I exist,” “What should I do,” and “Is there a God,” is to make them feel that it is wrong to raise such questions, that there is even something strange about themselves.
Amongst the symptoms of the suppression of open dialogue are: a deterioration in the intellectual quality of textbooks, a profusion of covert philosophical assumptions in the social sciences masking as scientific fact, a steady nation-wide deterioration in academic standards, the inability of the social sciences to understand or cope with rising social pathology, the capitulation of philosophy to scientism, and a breakdown in moral standards by faculty and students alike in the name of “life style.”
That those most priviledged in terms of education are not ony those most likely to abandon America in times of crisis, but also those most likely to be in the forefront of moral decline, is a contradiction this nation can no longer afford.
The time has unquestionably come for the American people to demand the liberation of their educational systems from the defensive, hypocritical, and potentially treasonous confines into which they have been betrayed.
End of Manifesto
So it was that my students came to realize that something terrible had happend to our universities in the 60’s, something that not only helped to destroy our efforts for freedom in South Vietnam, but would compound itself in the years ahead in terrible conflict with everything American, leading to further totalitarian movements as we see now in multiculturalism, political correctness, speech codes, gender feminism, postmodernism, etc. And so began the first student organization to call for university reform, Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform.
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