Time unravels Whitlam's liberation theology (The Left got it badly wrong about Vietnam)

Three decades ago - after the fall of Saigon and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia two weeks earlier - Gough Whitlam's Labor government welcomed what was then fashionably termed the "liberation" of Indochina.

Jim Cairns, Whitlam's deputy prime minister and the (then) guru of the Australian left, on April 8, 1975, had looked forward to communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, maintaining that this was "the only way to stop the carnage, the bloodshed and the suffering" in Indochina. On May 26, 1975 - two months after Saigon fell - Whitlam told the Parliament that "the changeover has been peaceful and effective".

Next Saturday, in Dandenong, Governor-General Michael Jeffery will unveil a memorial that is the initiative of Vietnamese Australians who settled here after 1975. It depicts an Australian and South Vietnamese soldier standing together, under a United States helicopter. This is a tribute by Vietnamese Australians to the Australians and Americans who fought, unsuccessfully, to stop South Vietnam from falling to the North Vietnamese communist regime.

Once it was fashionable to support the communist victories in Indochina. This was the position of most leading ALP figures (Whitlam, Cairns, Tom Uren) and also of the overwhelming majority of academics, journalists and other opinion leaders involved in the public debate on our Vietnam commitment.

On January 26, 1978, Uren and some fellow Labor comrades issued a statement addressed to Pol Pot in Cambodia (then Kampuchea) and Phan Van Dong in Vietnam. The leftist signatories declared their support for the "national liberation struggles of both Vietnam and Kampuchea" and urged both leaders to resolve their "current border conflict". No mention was made about the human rights violations then taking place in both countries.

In September 1978, Whitlam addressed a conference in Canberra where he declared that he did not accept the validity of any of the reports about human rights violations in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos. He was particularly emphatic about Cambodia, declaring: "I make bold to doubt all the stories that appear in the newspapers about the treatment of people in Cambodia."

In late 1978 and early 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and drove the Pol Pot regime out of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge was now deserted by all but a few of the left. However, Vietnam continued to be well regarded and its appalling human rights record was overlooked.

It is true that the regime that came to power in Saigon in 1975, assisted by the communist leadership in the Soviet Union and China, did not engage in wide-scale killings. But it did incarcerate about 1 million South Vietnamese in Hanoi's own gulag.

Some Australians who once supported the communists in Vietnam have regretted their past deeds. The Melbourne academic Douglas Kirsner, for example, recently acknowledged the continuing human rights abuses in Vietnam and queried whether "the radicals of the time were right". Yet he is very much a voice in the wilderness.

The change of view in Australia to the Vietnam War, which has occurred in recent times, has been primarily due to the influence of Vietnamese Australians now living in Australia.

Quang Luu was counsellor at the South Vietnamese embassy in the early 1970s. In August 1973 he was subjected to a violent demonstration by members of the radical left when invited to speak at La Trobe University. Luu returned to Saigon where he was head of the foreign ministry until the city fell to the communists. He subsequently fled Vietnam and later settled in Australia. His courageous story was told in The Bulletin in June 1975 and, more recently, on ABC radio.

Presumably, none of the one-time student radicals who denied Luu his right to free speech at La Trobe, would know that he returned to Australia, became an Australian citizen, is now head of SBS Radio in Sydney and has been made an officer of the Order of Australia.

Quynh Dao is one of an estimated 2 million Vietnamese who fled the communists. She eventually settled in Melbourne.

Writing in the spring 2004 edition of the National Observer magazine, she criticised the likes of Noam Chomsky and John Pilger who "saw it as their mission to support the Northern communists who persecuted Vietnamese intellectuals (and) who imprisoned poets and novelists".

Next Sunday, ABC TV will screen a documentary, All Points of the Compass, based on the story of one-time South Vietnamese foreign minister Tran Van Lam and his family. Judy Rymer, the film's producer, admits that she once supported the Vietnamese communists but now acknowledges that her position was "naive, simplistic and typical of Western myopia".

New Year's Day next year will see the release of the cabinet papers for 1975. They will document the Whitlam government's position during the communist victory in Vietnam and Whitlam's lack of compassion for the plight of Vietnamese asylum seekers. Yet, in spite of Whitlam, anti-communist Vietnamese refugees arrived in Australia, where they have been primarily responsible for changing attitudes in Australia to Asian communism and to Australia's military commitment in Vietnam.

I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.

I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.

When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.

There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.

Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.

He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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