Posted on 07/19/2006 7:36:59 AM PDT by John Carey
July 17, 2006
The Honorable Condoleezza Rice Secretary of State of the United States of America U.S. Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington, DC 20520
Dear Madam:
We, the undersigned, are the citizens of Vietnam who, on April 8, 2006, have proclaimed the Manifesto 2006 which calls for democracy and freedom in Vietnam. We call ourselves Group 8406. According to the information that we received from Vietnam’s Ministry of External Affairs and the U.S. Department of States, we understand that you’ll be visiting Vietnam by the end of this month. We will be happy to welcome you here and we wish you a successful visit.
Madam Secretary:
Martin Luther King Jr., one of the finest Americans for whom Vietnamese have had deep respect over the last half-century, said in his famous speech of August 23, 1968 I have a dream: “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
Today, while Mr. King’s dream all men are created equal has become a reality in your country, to the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese, it remains only a dream. Our goals -- Independence, Freedom, and Happiness -- were supposed to have been opened to us on September 2, 1945, but they were cheatingly and blatantly changed to a “socialist revolution” by successive generations of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s leaders over the last 61 years.
It was this cheating – and nothing else -- which has, up to the present time, denied our people the opportunities to develop and build our country. Because of this cheating, all our fundamental rights have been trampled upon, and our right of self-determination has also been destroyed. As a consequence, Vietnam is now one of the most inequitable, corrupt, poor, dishonest, and backward countries in the world. Vietnam’s one-party, uncompetitive political system has been incapable of resolving the above fundamental problems of our country.
For the above reasons, we now also have a dream which is rooted in the soul of the Vietnamese people over so many centuries. It is a dream to be able to fight abuses of power, corruption, poverty, dishonesty, backwardness, and to build a new country that will integrate well into the world of the present time. The way to achieving this dream is through democracy, freedom, and a plural, multi-party political system. We have no other way.
With our spirit of self-reliance and self-strengthening, we are determined to make our dream a reality in the near future, with the enthusiastic and ever-more effective help of the progressive world, as well as that of the U.S. State Department, and your own support which, we earnestly hope, you will be kind enough to provide.
On this occasion, we would like to convey to you our appreciation for the U.S. State Department’s annual assessment of the human rights situation in Vietnam, and the inclusion of Vietnam – over many years – in the list of “Countries of Particular Concern”. These actions have been, and will continue to be, of great help to our struggle for democracy and freedom.
Yours sincerely,
Interim representatives of Group 8406, 1,735 democracy and freedom advocates, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens
Do Nam Hai, engineer, Saigon Tran Anh Kim, former army officer, Thai Binh Nguyen Van Ly, Catholic priest, Hue
Ping VN freedom
Are these the same folks that killed thousands of American solders 50 some years ago to protect their countries move to communism?
No, these are the folks that are sons and daughters of those betrayed by John Kerry and others of his ilk when he convinced the MSM and the Congress to abandon our effort to keep Vietnam free from communism.
I strongly doubt that all of them are.And of those who are,it would appear that they've seen the light.
Better late than never,I always say.
EXACTLY.
I hope this is a rumbling of something greater!! God bless your service! I am one of those kids that President Ford saved at the closing of the war. Freedom is a worthwhile goal...
Send John Kerry to help them.....
please?
How do you know the PRC would have intervene on Hanoi's behalf? They were convulsed with the Cultural Revolution from 1966 and beyond. There was a lot turmoil in China to begin with. That is one of those enduring myths of the war.
China and Vietnam have been fighting minor border skirmishes for years, actually China supported the Khmer Rouge and attacked Vietnam when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979.
ping
The US side was significantly outnumbered most of the war. Around the time Congress forced the US to draw down its troops, the communists were losing soldiers at a rate of ~100,000 beyond replacement rate per year and for the first time during that war the US side actually had more boots on the ground than the communists. The communists have generally agreed with this assessment and do not dispute that they were losing the war at that point in time.
The interesting thing is that historians from both sides of the conflict generally recognize that the US pulled out right around the time it finally had a decisive upper hand. The decision to draw down at the point the US did was basically a Dunkirk moment that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
The only other option we had was a full scale land invasion or use of a nuclear weapon. China had plans of their own ground invasion if the U.S. tried to do a land invasion and the use of nukes would have defeated the entire purpose of the Vietnam war.
That is a naive analysis. Not only did we not need a full-scale land invasion -- we were winning decisively at the end -- but we did not need nukes either. And China had very limited options with respect to involvement that mostly kept them in the background. China invaded Viet Nam (again) in 1979, and look where that got them even with a weakened Viet Nam
China and Viet Nam have been mortal enemies for millenia. The US was a transient nuisance but they hate the Chinese, which made the situation much more dangerous for them than it was on the Korean peninsula. The last thing China wanted was to be fighting the Vietnamese and the US at the same time.
To put the relationships in perspective, imagine a war between Hezbollah and Hamas, with the surrounding countries picking sides. The US in that conflict would be Jordan. The Chinese in that conflict would be Israel. No matter if Israel allies with Hezbollah or Hamas, it is an awkward situation.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to answer your question in depth. But essentially, after the peace agreements were signed in 1973 there were numerous violations by the north and VC. And while the US pulled its troops out in accordance with the agreement, fighting occurred and the SVN army was left to fight on its own.
In early 1975, North Vietnam launched an offensive and South Vietnam's requests for aid were denied by the U.S. Congress. The northern half of the country was abandoned to the advancing Communists, a panic ensued, South Vietnamese resistance collapsed, and North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon Apr. 30, 1975. In the subsequent months and years the Vietnamese people suffered the consequences of that defeat both those that escaped, or tried to, and those that remained. Many took to the sea in boats and travelled around SE Asia where they were denied refuge. Those left in country were subject to arrest, jailing or indefinite detention in "re-education" camps.
There are many stories about the fall of Vietnam, but I believe it was started by our inability to remain firm in our support of the SVN government, and John Kerry was a big part of that.
A quick Google will give you two links to explore to learn more about the peace accords and the VN suffering after our departure.
Uh, I'm not disputing that. There were 300,000 Chinese engineering and logistical troops to free up the NVA to go south. There were N.Korean pilots flying Migs over N.VN, so it was a hot war supported by the Communist bloc. Chinese Communists' intentions are harder to decipher. There are a lot of variables than just your citing of some historians of Chinese sources. Fact of the matter is the US was fighting a limited war where N.VN was fighting an all out theater wide war. They had troops in Laos and Cambodia. All we did was fight a defensive war. The objective of the war was to ensure the survival of RVN (S.VN). How do you do that? Doesn't it make sense to choke off the supply line coming from the HO Chi Minh trail in Laos? By Using US troops on the ground to block off the route and let the S. Vietnamese to pacify the countryside is a better alternative than the way we fought it under McNamara and Westmoreland. Read Sorley's book, "A Better War" and countless others. Anyway, subject is far too complicated to discuss here.
These are the sons and daughters.....EXACTLT right. Good for you.
Come visit us:
http://peace-and-freedom.blogspot.com/
John E. Carey
there's a really good book on this: the Myth of U.S. Defeat in Vietnam by C. Dale Walton. Check it out.
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