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Talk about old memories. Just a few tidbits about Aptheker, James, etc.

Aptheker’s commie daughter is Bettina Aptheker of the Berkeley “free speech movement”. A hardcore psychopathic red, her picture appeared in a news photos debating an eye-patched Romanian refugee, Dan Teodoru, back in about 1965. Dan’s father was the head of the Romanian Red Cross and had to flee from a death sentence to France.

Danny and I went to So. Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970 on a fact-finding mission, which got our group invited to the White House in 1971 to brief Pres. Nixon in the Oval Office.

Re Herb, the red papa, I challenged him at a public forum at Temple Un. in either late 1965 or early 1966 on what he was telling the audience about the Viet Cong being a “national liberation movement” so that the people of Vietnam could determine for themselves who they wanted to rule them.

I used his own words against him and asked him why, if he believed so strong in “self-determination of peoples”, why did he support the Soviet Union/Bloc’s invasion of Hungary during the 1956 “Revolution” there.

He denied the Hungarians their own right to “self-determination”, which literally made the audience laugh except for a handful of reds in the audience. However, he and the audience got the point.

I later used this same turn-about tactic against George Novack, the theoretician of the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” at his speech (1970 or so)at GWU in DC. when I asked him why he supported Ho Chi Minh when Ho and his Communist forces (the so-called Viet Minh), wiped out the better organized and widespread Trotskyite movement in Vietnam led by Thau Thu Tan (sp?).

His pathetic reply was that the Trots would settle their difference with the Stalinists when they got into power. Fat chance and this guy was once a Secretary of Trotsky in exile in Mexico. Nice guy but he should have gotten a job running a bookstore instead of trying to be the theoretician of a vibrant Trotskyite organization in the U.S. (Social Workers Party/Young Socialist Alliance; front - Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam - took it from the CP students faction in 1968).

CLR James. Sat next to and talked to him at a CP front meeting in DC at GWU. He was an interesting man, and actually a relatively knowledgeable person about Marxism in the Caribbean, which Aptheker was not.

Importantly, his refusal to let black Marxists, or blacks in general become the Communist Party USA’s footsoldiers (and WEB DuBois’ “Cannonfodder”) was a key tenant of DuBois’s 1930’s writing and warning to American black about just that (FBI On Line Electronic Library files of DuBois).

Damned. We had some interesting times back in the late 60’s/early 70’s and I was glad that I got to meet and even question these men (just as I did with KGB/CPUSA member I.F. Stone a few years later).

Reading a book by someone, or an article about them is still not the same as meeting and talking to them face-to-face, no matter what their views are. When you heard them speak (or “operate”), you got to see the “front persona” in operation and knew how to approach them intellectually and honestly.
NB: For my newspaper reporting in the 70’s, I did the same for getting first hand information from JDL leader Rabbi Meir Kahane (a big scoop in DC and Baltimore papers), Menachem Begun (he didn’t talk or answer a question I put on paper about a historical event in Israel. I was disappointed but knew why he didn’t answer it - lives could have been at stake); and Simon Weisenthal (Vienna Documentation Center and Concentration Camp survivor/Nazi Hunter).
Simon was great and gave me a lot of documents about ex-Nazis in the East German government including copies of SS membership cards. Used this information in a major story that literally knocked a CPUSA/KGB disinformation agent off of a major television network as a “Nazi hunter”. Revenge was sweet.

I’m getting old and sicker so I wanted to pass on some information to FR readers because you probably hadn’t seen these particular stories before from someone who was “there”.

Now to get back to writing a chapter for a book on communism’s cost in lives and destruction in Southeast Asia. Someone has got to speak for the dead.

It will eventually be available at the educational site “Vietnam Veterans for Factual History.org”. Check us out. I guarantee you’ll learn more about the truth of the Vietnam war there than you will in most popular histories by liberals and leftists. We are dedicated to the truth from our personal experiences and our contributors are among the best in the world, with an estimated 50-80 or more books amongst us (including prize winning history books), hundreds, if not thousands of articles, a couple of documentaries, and thousands of speeches from the National Archives to high schools, colleges, TV news shows, and conferences.

No rest for the weary but we’d never want it any other way.