Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Chomsky-A comparison of the treatment of dissidents (Damien Penny)

Solzhenitsyn: spent years being tortured in slave labour camps. Sakharov: spent years under house arrest in obscure provincial cities. Chomsky: spent years as a highly-paid, tenured professor of linguistics at MIT and drives a snazzy red Audi A4.

Solzhenitsyn: had his writings banned by the state. Sakharov: had his writings banned by the state. Chomsky: has his writings available on Amazon.com. (Buy before May 27 and save!)

Solzhenitsyn: was barred from leaving the country. Sakharov: was barred from leaving the country. Chomsky: jets around the world to tell the masses about the Great Satan.

Solzhenitsyn: ignored and/or demonized by the Western "peace movement". Sakharov: ignored and/or demonized by the Western "peace movement". Chomsky: worshipped by the Western "peace movement".

What a liar you are. He was a supporter of the Khmer Rouge, he just plans ahead in case there are some tough positions he has to weasel out of. He selectively quotes himself, just as his cult does. You seem to think he didn't support the Khmer Rouge, but unfortunately for you he did, but his sleight of hand as to rather the atrocity stories were true or not, clearly hasn't been picked up by you. Despite your resounding lofty approach to thsi psychopath, you know like the Khmer Rouge, and he was a member of the group that went to Hanoi to take the guided tour and denounced the Americans as war criminals. You are under half delusions from this crackpot. His devastating dishonesty is more like it, none of the books he has ever written is basedon any factual evidence, just insane ramblings from a delusional Communist, plain and simple. ZMAG is a leftist propaganda archive, Chomsky's many lies are documented there, thank God, so those in the future can see how really insane he was. Manufacturing Consent is not a good book, it is poorly researched, and bloated with marxist themse. Yet Chomsky was all get out over that Hanoi and Khmer Rouge propaganda wasn't he? Too bad that right-wing AIM report cooked his goose ehh? His material on Clinton is more malarky, Clinton was horrible yes, but Chomsky pathetic paranoid BS which as always poorly researched, and carefully distorted to sway the reader to believe what Chomsky leads them too believe. He is the crazy shephard leading his flock of mindless sheep(looks like you are one of themLOL)off the cliff. Here is someone who uses logic and reason. The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness By David Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | October 10, 2001 ONE OF THE TYPICAL ILLUSIONS of the Chomsky cult is the belief that its imam and sensei is not the unbalanced dervish of anti-American loathing he appears to everyone else, but an analytic giant whose dicta flow from a painstaking and scientific inquiry into the facts. "The only reason Noam Chomsky is an international political force unto himself," writes a typically fervid acolyte, "is that he actually spends considerable time researching, analyzing, corroborating, deconstructing, and impassionately [sic] explaining world affairs." This conviction is almost as delusional as Chomsky’s view of the world itself. It would be more accurate to say of the Chomsky oeuvre -- lifting a famous line from the late Mary McCarthy -- that everything he has written is a lie, including the "ands" and "the’s." Chomskyites who read "The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky (Part I)" have complained that "there is not one single comment …that contradicts Chomsky’s research." Consequently, my refutation of Chomsky was not achieved "by reasoned argument or detailing the errors of fact or logic in his writings and statements, but by character assassination and the trivializing of Chomsky’s strongly held beliefs through accusations that they were unpatriotic." I confess to being a little puzzled by this objection. Having described Chomsky’s equation of post-World War II America with Nazi Germany, it did not actually occur to me that additional refutation was required. Not, at any rate, among the sound of mind. It is true, on the other hand -- as will become apparent in this sequel -- that the adulators of Chomsky share a group psychosis with millions of others who formerly worshipped pre-Chomskyites, like Lenin, Stalin, and other Marxist worthies, as geniuses of the progressive faith. Now to the facts. Chomsky’s little masterpiece, What Uncle Sam Wants, draws on America’s actions in the Cold War as a database for its portrayal as the Evil One in global affairs. As Chomsky groupies are quick to point out, a lot of facts do appear in the text or - more precisely - appear to appear in the text. On closer examination, every one of them has been ripped out of any meaningful historical context and then distorted so cynically that the result has about as much in common with the truth as Harry Potter’s Muggles Guide to Magic. In Chomsky’s telling, the bi-polar world of the Cold War is viewed as though there were only one pole. In the real world, the Cold War was about America’s effort to organize a democratic coalition against an expansionist empire that conquered and enslaved more than a billion people. It ended, when the empire gave up and the walls that kept its subjects locked in, came tumbling down. In Chomsky’s world, the Soviet empire hardly exists, not a single American action is seen as a response to a Soviet initiative, and the Cold War is "analyzed" as though it had only one side. This is like writing a history of the Second World War without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers influenced its events. But in Chomsky’s malevolent hands, matters get even worse. If one were to follow the Chomsky method, for example, one would list every problematic act committed by any part or element in the vast coalition attempting to stop Hitler, and would attribute them all to a calculating policy of the United States. One would then provide a report card of these "crimes" as the historical record itself. The list of crimes - the worst acts of which the allies could be accused and the most dishonorable motives they may be said to have acted upon -- would then become the database from which America’s portrait would be drawn. The result inevitably would be the Great Satan of Chomsky’s deranged fantasy life. In What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Chomsky begins with the fact of America’s emergence from the Second World War. He describes this fact characteristically as the United States having "benefited enormously" from the conflict in contrast to its "industrial rivals" -- omitting in the process any mention of the 250,000 lives America lost, its generous Marshall Plan aid to those same rivals or, for that matter, its victory over Nazi Germany and the Axis powers. In Chomsky’s portrait, America in 1945 is, instead, a wealthy power that profited from others’ misery and is now seeking world domination. "The people who determine American policy were carefully planning how to shape the postwar world," he asserts without evidence. "American planners - from those in the State Department to those on the Council on Foreign Relations (one major channel by which business leaders influence foreign policy) - agreed that the dominance of the United States had to be maintained." Chomsky never names the actual people who agreed that American policy should be world dominance, nor how they achieved unanimity in deciding to transform a famously isolationist country into a global power. America, in short, has no internal politics that matter. Chomsky does not bother to acknowledge or attempt to explain the powerful strain of isolationism not only in American policy, but in the Republican Party - the party of Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations businessmen whom he claims exert such influence on policy. Above all, he does not explain why -- if world domination was really America’s goal in 1945 - Washington disbanded its wartime armies overnight and brought them home. Between 1945 and 1946, in fact, America demobilized 1.6 million troops. By contrast, the Soviet Union (which Chomsky doesn’t mention) maintained its 2 million-man army in place in the countries of Eastern Europe whose governments it had already begun to undermine and destroy. It was, in fact, the Soviet absorption of the formerly independent states of Eastern Europe in the years between 1945 and 1948 that triggered America’s subsequent rearmament, the creation of NATO, and the overseas spread of American power, which was designed to contain an expansionist Soviet empire and prevent a repetition of the appeasement process that had led to World War II. These little facts never appear in Chomsky’s text, yet they determine everything that followed, especially America’s global presence. There is no excuse for this omission other than that Chomsky wants this history to be something other than it was. History has shown that the Cold War, the formation of the postwar western alliances and the mobilizing of western forces -- was principally brought about by the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe. That is why the Cold War ended as soon as the Berlin Wall fell, and the states of Eastern Europe were freed to pursue their independent paths. It was to accomplish this great liberation of several hundred million people -- and not any American quest for world domination -- that explains American Cold War policy. But these facts never appear on Chomsky’s pages. Having begun the story with an utterly false picture of the historical forces at work, Chomsky is ready to carry out his scorched earth campaign of malicious slander against the democracy in which he has led a privileged existence for more than seventy years. "In 1949," Chomsky writes -- reaching for his favorite smear - "US espionage in Eastern Europe had been turned over to a network run by Reinhard Gehlen, who had headed Nazi military intelligence on the Eastern Front. This network was one part of the US-Nazi alliance…." Let’s pause for a moment so that we can take a good look at this exemplary display of the Chomsky method. We have jumped - or rather Chomsky has jumped us - from 1945 to 1949, skipping over the little matter of the Red Army’s refusal to withdraw from Eastern Europe, and the Kremlin’s swallowing of its independent regimes. Instead of these matters, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a shocking fact about Reinhard Gehlen, which is quickly inflated it into a big lie - an alleged "US-Nazi alliance." The factoid about Gehlen, it must be said, has been already distorted in the process of presenting it. The United States used Gehlen -- not the other way around, as Chomsky’s devious phrase ("US espionage … had been turned over") implies. More blatant is the big lie itself. There was no "US-Nazi alliance." The United States defeated Nazi Germany four years earlier, and by 1949 - unlike the Soviet Union -- had imposed a democracy on West Germany’s political structure as a condition of a German peace. In 1949, West Germany, which was controlled by the United States and its allies, was a democratic state and continued to be so until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union (whose policies Chomsky fails to examine) was a police state, and continued to be a police state until the end of the Cold War, forty years later. In 1949, with Stalin’s Red Army occupying all the countries of Eastern Europe, the Communists had established police states in each one of them and were arresting and executing thousands of innocent people. These benighted satellite regimes of the Soviet empire remained police states, under Soviet rule, until the end of the Cold War forty years later. The 2 million-man Red Army continued to occupy Eastern Europe until the end of the Cold War forty years later, and for every one of those years it was positioned in an aggressive posture threatening the democratic states of Western Europe with invasion and occupation. In these circumstances - which Chomsky does not mention -- the use of a German military intelligence network with experience and assets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was an entirely reasonable measure to defend the democratic states of the West and the innocent lives of the subjects of Soviet rule. Spy work is dirty work as everyone recognizes. This episode was no "Nazi" taint on America, but a necessary part of America’s Cold War effort in the cause of human freedom. With the help of the Gehlen network, the United States kept the Soviet expansion in check, and eventually liberated hundreds of millions of oppressed people in Eastern Europe from the horrors of the Communist gulag. Chomsky describes these events as though the United States had not defeated Hitler, but had made a pact with the devil himself to attack the innocent: "These operations included a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s." This typical Chomsky distortion of what actually took place is as bold a lie as the Communist propaganda the Kremlin distributed in those years, from which it is cynically cribbed. Having equated America with Nazi Germany, in strict imitation of Stalinist propaganda themes, Chomsky extends the analogy through the whole of his fictional account of the episodes that made up the Cold War. According to Chomsky, establishing a Nazi world order - with business interests at the top and the "working classes and the poor" at the bottom -- was America’s real postwar agenda. Therefore, "the major thing that stood in the way of this was the anti-fascist resistance, so we suppressed it all over the world, often installing fascists and Nazi collaborators in its place." Claims like these give conspiracy theories a bad name. It would be tedious (and would add nothing to our understanding) to run through all of Chomsky’s perversely distorted cases, which follow the unscrupulous model of his account of the Gehlen network. One more should suffice. In 1947 a civil war in Greece became the first Cold War test of America’s resolve to prevent the Soviet empire from spreading beyond Eastern Europe. Naturally, Chomsky presents the conflict as a struggle between the "anti-Nazi resistance," and US backed (and "Nazi") interests. In Chomsky’s words, these interests were "US investors and local businessmen," and -- of course -- "the beneficiaries included Nazi collaborators, while the primary victims were the workers and the peasants…." The leaders of the anti-Communist forces in Greece were not Nazis. On the other hand, what Chomsky calls the "anti-Nazi resistance" was in fact the Communist Party and its fellow-traveling pawns. What Chomsky leaves out of his account, as a matter of course and necessity, are the proximity of the Soviet Red Army to Greece, the intention of the Greek Communists to establish a Soviet police state if they won the civil war, and the fact that their defeat paved the way for an unprecedented economic development benefiting all classes and the eventual establishment of a political democracy which soon brought democratic socialists to power. Needless to say, no country in which Chomsky’s "anti-fascists" won, ever established a democracy or produced any significant betterment in the economic conditions of the great mass of its inhabitants. This puts a somewhat different color on every detail of what happened in Greece and what the United States did there. The only point of view from which Chomsky’s version of this history makes sense is the point of view of the Kremlin, whose propaganda has merely been updated by the MIT professor. A key chapter of Chomsky’s booklet of lies is called "The Threat of A Good Example." In it, Chomsky offers his explanation for America’s diabolical behavior in Third World countries. In Chomsky’s fictional accounting, "what the US-run contra forces did in Nicaragua, or what our terrorist proxies do in El Salvador or Guatemala, isn’t only ordinary killing. A major element is brutal, sadistic torture - beating infants against rocks, hanging women by their feet with their breasts cut off and the skin of their face peeled back so that they’ll bleed to death, chopping people’s heads off and putting them on stakes." There are no citations in Chomsky’s text to support the claim either that these atrocities took place, or that the United States directed them, or that the United States is in any meaningful way responsible. But, according to Chomsky, "US-run" forces and "our terrorist proxies" do this sort of thing routinely and everywhere: "No country is exempt from this treatment, no matter how unimportant." According to Chomsky, U.S. business is the evil hand behind all these policies. On the other hand, "as far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the U.S., at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars." If these countries are so insignificant, why would the United States bother to treat them so monstrously, particularly since lesser atrocities committed by Americans - like the My Lai massacre - managed to attract the attention of the whole world, and not just Noam Chomsky? "There is a reason for that," Chomsky explains. "The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example (italics in original). If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, ‘why not us?’" It’s an interesting idea. The logic goes like this: What Uncle Sam really wants is to control the world; U.S. control means absolute misery for all the peoples that come under its sway; this means the U.S. must prevent all the little, poor people in the world from realizing that there are better ways to develop than with U.S. investments or influence. Take Grenada. "Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat." This is Chomsky’s entire commentary on the U.S. intervention in Grenada. Actually, something quite different took place. In 1979, there was a coup in Grenada that established a Marxist dictatorship complete with a Soviet-style "politburo" to rule it. This was a tense period in the Cold War. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Communist insurgencies armed by Cuba were spreading in Central America. Before long, Cuban military personnel began to appear in Grenada and were building a new airport capable of accommodating Soviet bombers. Tensions over the uncompleted airport developed between Washington and the Grenadian dictatorship. In the midst of all this, there was another coup in 1983. This coup was led by the Marxist Minister of Defense who assassinated the Marxist dictator and half his politburo, including his pregnant Minister of Education. The new dictator put the entire island - including U.S. citizens resident there -- under house arrest. It was at this point that the Reagan Administration sent the marines in to protect U.S. citizens, stop the construction of the military airport and restore democracy to the little island. The U.S. did this at the request of four governments of Caribbean countries who feared a Communist military presence in their neighborhood. A public opinion poll taken after the U.S. operation showed that 85% of the citizens of Grenada welcomed the U.S. intervention and America’s help in restoring their freedom. There was no "threat of a good example" in Grenada and there are none anywhere in the world of progressive social experiments. There is not a single Marxist country that has ever provided a good example in the sense of making its economy better or its people freer. Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic fact of 20th century history: Socialism doesn’t work. Korea would seem an obvious model case. Fifty years ago, in one of the early battles of the Cold War, the United States military prevented Communist North Korea from conquering the anti-Communist South of the country. Today Communist North Korea is independent of the United States and one of the poorest countries in the world. A million of its citizens have starved in the last couple of years, while its Marxist dictator has feverishly invested his country’s scarce capital in an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program. So much for the good example. In South Korea, by contrast, there are 50,000 U.S. troops stationed along the border to defend it from a Communist attack. For fifty years, nefarious U.S. businesses and investors have operated freely in South Korea. The results are interesting. In 1950, South Korea - with a per capita income of $250 was as poor as Cuba and Vietnam. Today it is an industrial power and its per capita income is more than twenty times greater than it was before it became an ally and investment region of the United States. South Korea is not a full-fledged democracy but it does have elections and more than one party and a press that provides it with information from the outside world. This is quite different from North Korea whose citizens have no access to information their dictator does not approve. Who do you think is afraid of the threat of a good example? Communism was an expansive system that ruined nations and enslaved their citizens. But Chomsky dismisses America’s fear of Communism as a mere "cover" for America’s own diabolical designs. He explains the Vietnam War this way: "The real fear was that if the people of Indochina achieved independence and justice, the people of Thailand would emulate it, and if that worked, they’d try it in Malaya, and pretty soon Indonesia would pursue an independent path, and by then a significant area [of America’s empire] would have been lost." This is a Marxist version of the domino theory. But of course, America did leave Indo-China - Cambodia and Thailand included -- in 1975. Vietnam has pursued an independent path for 25 years and it is as poor as it ever was - one of the poorest nations in the world. Its people still live in a primitive Marxist police state. After its defeat in Vietnam, the United States withdrew its military forces from the entire Indo-Chinese peninsula. The result was that Cambodia was over-run by the Khmer Rouge (the "reds"). In other words, by the Communist forces that Noam Chomsky, the Vietnamese Communists and the entire American left had supported until then. The Khmer Rouge proceeded to kill two million Cambodians who, in their view, stood in the way of the progressive "good example" they intended to create. Chomsky earned himself a bad reputation by first denying and then minimizing the Cambodian genocide until the facts overwhelmed his case. Now, of course, he blames the genocide on the United States. Chomsky also blames the United States and the Vietnam war for the fact that "Vietnam is a basket case" and not a good example. "Our basic goal - the crucial one, the one that really counted - was to destroy the virus [of independent development], and we did achieve that. Vietnam is a basket case, and the U.S. is doing what it can to keep it that way." This is just a typical Chomsky libel and all-purpose ruse. (The devil made them do it.) As Chomsky knew then and knows now, the victorious Vietnamese Communists are Marxists. Marxism is a crackpot theory that doesn’t work. Every Marxist state has been an economic basket case. Take a current example like Cuba, which has not been bombed and has not suffered a war, but is poorer today than it was more than forty years ago when Castro took power. In 1959, Cuba was the second richest country in Latin America. Now it is the second poorest just before Haiti. Naturally, Chomskyites will claim that the U.S. economic boycott is responsible. (The devil made them do it.) But the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba. Cuba not only trades with all of Latin America and Europe, but receives aid from the latter. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union gave Cuba the equivalent of three Marshall Plans in economic subsidies and assistance -- tens of billions of dollars. Cuba is a fertile island with a tropical climate. It is poor because it has followed Chomsky’s examples, and not America’s. It is poor because it is socialist, Marxist and Communist. It is poor because it is run by a lunatic and sadist. It is poor because in Cuba, America lost the Cold War. The poverty of Cuba is what Chomsky’s vision and political commitments would create for the entire world. It is the Communist-Chomsky illusion that there is a way to prosperity other than the way of the capitalist market that causes the poverty of states like Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam, and would have caused the poverty of Grenada and Greece and South Korea if America had not intervened. The illusion that socialism promises a better future is also the cause of the Chomsky cult. It is the illusion at the heart of the messianic hope that creates the progressive left. This hope is a chimera, but insofar as it is believed, history presents itself in terms that are Manichaean -- as a battle between good and evil. Those who oppose socialism, Marxism, Communism embody worldly evil. They are the party of Satan, and their leader America is the Great Satan himself. Chomsky is, in fact, the imam of this religious worldview on today’s college campuses. His great service to the progressive faith is to deny the history of the last hundred years, which is the history of progressive atrocity and failure. In the 20th century, progressives in power killed one hundred million people in the attempt to realize their impossible dream. As far as Noam Chomsky is concerned, these catastrophes of the left never happened. "I don’t much like the terms left and right," Chomsky writes in yet another ludicrous screed called The Common Good. "What’s called the left includes Leninism [i.e., Communism], which I consider ultra-right in many respects…. Leninism has nothing to do with the values of the left - in fact, it’s radically opposed to them." You have to pinch yourself when reading sentences like that. The purpose of such Humpty-Dumpty mutilations of the language is perfectly intelligible, however. It is to preserve the faith for those who cannot live without some form of the Communist creed. Lenin is dead. Long live Leninism. The Communist catastrophes can have "nothing to do with the values of the left" because if they did the left would have to answer for its deeds and confront the fact that it is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Progressives would have to face the fact that they killed 100 million people for nothing -- for an idea that didn’t work. The real threat of a good example is the threat of America, which has lifted more people out of poverty -- within its borders and all over the world -- than all the socialists and progressives put together since the beginning of time. To neutralize the threat, it is necessary to kill the American idea. This is, in fact, Noam Chomsky’s mission in life, and his everlasting disgrace. David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation,” and which chronicles his odyssey from radical activism to the current positions he holds. Among his other books are The Politics of Bad Faith and The Art of Political War. The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “the perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Horowitz’s latest book, Uncivil Wars, was published in January this year, and chronicles his crusade against intolerance and racial McCarthyism on college campuses last spring. Click here to read more about David Another article by logical human beings who don't fall for Chomsky's crap, but they once did. Noam Chomsky’s Jihad Against America By David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh FrontPageMagazine.com | December 19, 2001 Note: A reader has pointed out an error in our article "Noam Chomsky’s Jihad Against America", which is important enough to warrant a correction. In his MIT speech, Chomsky referred to a September 16 NY Times article about food supplies in Afghanistan. Through a researcher’s error, we cited an article from the October 16 NY Times in our rebuttal. This led us to accuse Chomsky of making up his quote. In fact, Chomsky was quoting the article accurately. We regret the error. The error, on the other hand, has no bearing on the charge Chomsky was making -- which we rebutted -- that the United States was deliberately planning to starve 3-4 million Afghan civilians. As we point out in this corrected version, the October 16 NY Times article we cited, which described the efforts of the American government to provide food supplies to Afghans, was available to Chomsky at the time he maliciously and falsely described U.S. policy as one of promoting a "silent genocide." --David Horowitz and Ron RadoshTreason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. U.S. Constitution, Article III, Section 3 ON OCTOBER 18, eleven days after U.S. military forces began America’s response to the monstrous September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Noam Chomsky explained the unfolding events to an audience of 2,000 people who were gathered for a prestigious MIT lecture series. His speech was called "The New War Against Terror" and has been posted on the Internet , broadcast on C-Span and published as a new Chomsky broadside. Weeks later, as the fighting in Afghanistan reached its highest pitch, Chomsky appeared in Islamabad to share his views with the Muslim population of Pakistan, that nuclear and none-too-stable state. Coming a month after the original attacks, and a week after the United States had begun its response, the speech provided a clear picture of Chomsky’s analytic process, his use of evidence, and the way in which the war has crystallized the agendas of Chomsky’s lifelong crusade against his country. Chomsky proposes to deal with five questions in addressing his subject, the first of which, he observes, far outweighs all the others: "One question, and by far the most important one is what is happening right now? Implicit in that is what can we do about it?" The numbered headings of the answers to these questions in the text that follows correspond to the headings in Chomsky’s transcript as it appears on the website at zmag.org. 1. What’s Happening Right Now? Starvation of 3 to 4 million people. Well, let’s start with right now. I’ll talk about the situation in Afghanistan. I’ll just keep to uncontroversial sources like the New York Times [crowd laughter]. According to the New York Times there are 7-8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population. As far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States or for that matter in Europe. In short, in Chomsky’s view the United States had already begun - in a calculated way -- to starve millions of defenseless civilians in Afghanistan. Moreover, no one in the West cared. This is what is "happening now." This provides us with the accurate moral equation for these misrepresented events. In order that nobody should fail to appreciate the gravity of the point, Chomsky spells it out again in the very next paragraph -- which the website underscores with the sub-heading, Silent Genocide Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don’t know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that’s just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe. The style is classic Chomsky. Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. The casual tone and the faux professorial caution in formulating the claim are meant to disarm his listeners as they absorb the charge, which is actually quite lurid, and also quite lunatic - at odds with everything we know about the way Americans and Europeans generally behave, and the way they were behaving as of October 18 in response to the unprovoked Al Qaeda attacks: No Muslim round-ups; no firing squads; no missile sprays at civilian populations in South Asia. But the professor knows better: The calculated starving of millions of innocents is actually "just kind of normal" for us folks. Chomsky’s answer to the question "what is happening now?" provides his audience with a bottom-line view of America and its Western allies: We are moral monsters; we are coolly planning the murder of not merely thousands of innocents like the desperate crew who brought down the World Trade Center - and whom we are about to punish -- but millions. Moreover, even if the starvation doesn’t actually take place, the intention to make it happen is unarguable. The American government has laid plans "on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it ... The country was on a life-line and we just cut the line." Of course, these were cold and calculated lies. In fact, it is this kind of malicious libel, characteristic of Chomsky’s political writings that has put them on the shelf alongside the Turner Diaries and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the genre of paranoid conspiracy tracts. Readers unused to such blunt mendacity, might still want to give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they think Chomsky could not possibly have meant what he wrote. Surely he does not mean to place American democracy on a par with Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other apostles of the mass annihilation of innocent populations. If so, however, they would be wrong, and Chomsky is the first to let them know it. "All right," he continues, "let’s turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban, of course, their victims." No wonder they want to bomb us! No wonder Al Qaeda resorts to "terror" - a word, which as Chomsky will explain, is really a cynical verbal construction imposed on our language by the monsters themselves - since, in fact, "terror" is more properly understood as the real victims’ revenge. Chomsky weaves these fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann’s Mario the Magician - a famous fascist prototype whose audience, spellbound by his illusions, could no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, evil from good. Chomsky’s own hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources like the New York Times, and as though the reality he is inventing were instead visible beneath its surface to eyes ingenious enough to detect it. Recall how Chomsky sets up the scenario of a Washington plot to deliberately starve 3-4 million innocent Afghan civilians: "On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population." That was September 16th. A month later, on October 16th -- two days before Chomsky’s speech another article appeared written by Elisabeth Busmiller and Elizabeth Becker, which began: "President Bush promoted his relief fund for Afghan children at the headquarters of the American Red Cross today…" In other words, the Bush Administration was working to prevent the starvation of Afghan civilians. "The Pentagon and the British Defense Ministry," the same article reported, "have agreed to coordinate the air strikes so they will not hit relief convoys…" Evidently, the truck convoys continued. To get to Chomsky’s conclusion, therefore, one has to deny first the reality of American governmental relief efforts and then convert every concern expressed by private relief agencies - some of which like Oxfam have a history of hostility to United States foreign policy -- into irrefutable statements of fact. One would also have to ignore the role played by the Taliban itself in the food crisis. As the Times story itself notes (and Chomsky ignores), the Taliban was stealing food from the very convoys Chomsky refers to, in order to supply their own forces: The Taliban have also begun levying a tax of $8 to $37 a ton on wheat coming into the country. "One convey of 1,000 tons of wheat was held up for five days trying to negotiate the tax," Mark Bartolini of the International Rescue Committee said. Since airstrikes began, several warehouses have been looted and local staff members have been beaten. Of course the war conditions in Afghanistan that militate against the delivery of food are the result of the terrorist aggression supported by the Taliban regime. No one would think of blaming Churchill and FDR, rather than Hitler, for the harsh conditions in Germany during the war. On November 16 -- almost a month after Chomsky’s MIT talk -- another article appeared on the front page of the New York Times with the title, "Now, the Battle to Feed the Afghan Nation." Written by Tim Weiner, the article reported that the American military was using its full resources to "deliver relief for millions of hungry, cold, sick, war-weary Afghans." Moreover, "NATO allies" -- acting as a "full partner" to relief agencies - "will ship food, clothing, shelter and medicine to the nations surrounding Afghanistan for United Nations relief organizations, private aid groups and intrepid Afghan truckers to deliver to people in ruined cities and shattered villages." In other words, the facts tell a story the exact opposite of Chomsky’s malicious claims. US led military action saved Afghan lives, led to the restoration of food relief, and lessened the danger of the mass starvation that might have been in store had Taliban rule continued. Because of the US action, some five million Afghans, who could have starved, now have hope. While the aid effort is international, the US alone is "paying for much of the good that the coalition is moving into Afghanistan." As Mark Bartolini, vice president of the International Rescue Committee told the Times, "had this war not occurred, we wouldn’t have had the access we have now -- the best access in the past decade." At the time, the Bush administration had in fact provided $320 million in food aid, which has "resolved for the moment" the question of actual food supplies getting to the people. The Times story was reinforced by an article by Laura Rozen in the on-line magazine Salon.com, which appeared the next day: "Aid experts say that the agencies’ repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before-a lot more." Rozen quotes John Fawcett, a humanitarian relief worker, who stated unequivocally, "more aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year. The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees -- one-tenth of what they expected, and there’s been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in." A possible reason for the exaggerated concerns of the aid groups was suggested by Rozen: "It’s hard not to think that some aid groups’ opposition to the bombing stemmed more from a fundamental reluctance among humanitarian groups to endorse a campaign of violence." It is certainly true that the violence of war affected the flow of aid - in the last weeks of November, when the war was at its height there was a temporary falling off in aid shipments (which were still twice the levels pre-September 11th). But given the conditions of war, the Bush regime, as one would expect, was doing what was humanly possible to provide aid to the Afghan people. So much for Chomsky’s "silent genocide." America’s defeat of the Taliban, in fact, has greatly enhanced the future prospects for the Afghan people. As John Norris, a senior advisor to the International Crisis Group put it to Rozen, "the retreat of the Taliban from key positions could make way to…a significant increase in aid deliveries and distribution" of food and other materials. "The spigots for aid," Norris said, "are going to be open in Afghanistan now like never before…. This military action is humanitarian action. Do you want to deliver food packets to the concentration camp, or do you want to get rid of the concentration camp?" On November 30th, the New York Times had reported that the absence of a bridge between northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan cut off "the most promising avenue for shipping in supplies." Once again, however, the US acted to address the situation. A week later, on December 8, Agence France Presse reported that Colin Powell had flown to Uzbekistan "with a diplomatic triumph under his belt after persuading the reluctant authorities to open a key bridge linking the central Asian country to Afghanistan." The bridge, which opened a few days later, was described as "a vital gateway for getting badly-needed humanitarian aid supplies into northern Afghanistan." In other words, U.S. policy had once again resulted in a situation that increased the availability of food supplies. The bridge had been closed "for four years since the Taliban took control of north-east Afghanistan," and the Uzbekistan government feared Taliban fighters coming into its country if it was reopened. America’s military defeat of the Taliban changed the equation. It was estimated that opening the bridge would supply "40 percent of the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people." Chomsky’s indictment had two counts - the alleged genocide and the silence that supposedly accompanied it: "Plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it." The first count -- as we have easily established -- is obviously false. The second originates in a thesis familiar to readers of Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent, a vulgar Marxist tract arguing that the American media functions as a propaganda agency for the government and its ruling class bosses. In his MIT address, Chomsky asserted, "the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I’m aware that was unreported. [Chomsky did not reveal how he knew this if it was "unreported."] That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can’t find a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir." In fact, the story in the Boston Globe was headlined "Fighting Terror Tensions in South Asia" - a region that includes Afghanistan - and there were three full paragraphs on the pleadings of the aid groups to stop the bombing. Moreover, as the citations above show, the story received attention in other sources, including the Times story of October 16. It was also reported on the nightly television network newscasts. It is reasonable to presume that the reason the story failed to receive even wider coverage was that it had no basis in fact, but only in the exaggerated fears of the aid groups, which responsible reporters would check. Put another way, the reason the genocide of Afghans was not a big news feature was that it was not news at all; it was just a figment of Noam Chomsky’s malignant imagination. Since there was no such planned genocide there was also no silence concerning one. Chomsky built his case, as his practice, on a tissue of distortions. It is in the cumulative effect of these distortions that his cultic power derives. 2. Why Was It A Historic Event? The second question Chomsky discusses in connection with the September 11 attack is, "Why Was It A Historic Event?" His answer is that America, which for centuries has been attacking the world - and especially the Third World - is now itself under attack, which is something for progressives to celebrate. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That’s new. Radically new. So take U.S. history…. During these 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that’s many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, the Caribbean and Central America,… But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory. Leaving aside the malicious distortions of the American past, the Chomsky thesis comes to this: The attack on America is long overdue and is historically just. Chomsky seems to believe that America and Europe are still living in the age of colonial expansion -- a rhetorical assumption that allows him to ignore the fact that America and its allies do not want to acquire Afghanistan or another Third World country, and are even reluctant to be involved to the extent that they should be. (Their benign neglect of Afghanistan after the collapse of the Soviet invasion is often pointed to as a factor in the creation of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network). Chomsky also ignores the mass slaughter and savage tribal wars conducted by indigenous peoples in today’s post-colonial world. In Chomsky’s calculus America and Europe will always come up negative values. Thus, Chomsky even denounced the recent efforts of the NATO allies to rescue impoverished Muslims facing systematic extermination and expulsion by Serbian ethnic cleansers as an example of "NATO imperialism." So much for Chomsky’s concern for the oppressed. 3. What Is Terrorism? We now come to Chomsky’s Third Question, which is "What is the war against terrorism?" This, as Chomsky tells us, has a side question, viz., "What is terrorism?" Actually it is not a side question but a rhetorical trick. It is Chomsky’s answer to the first question. The war against terrorism, according to Chomsky, is the real terrorism. In Chomsky’s view, America’s war against the Taliban is not only a terrorist war itself, but also the only terrorism one can accurately speak of. America’s war in Afghanistan is "a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by ‘depraved opponents of civilization.’" This is how Chomsky perceives his own country and the democracies of the West. The definition of terrorism as "a cancer spread by depraved opponents of civilization" originates - we’ll have to take Chomsky’s word for this -with Ronald Reagan. According to Chomsky the phrase comes from a presidential declaration at the beginning of the Reagan Administration to the effect that (in Chomsky’s paraphrase) "the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy." As Chomsky interprets this policy, "The Reagan administration responded [to the perceived terrorist threat] by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world,…" These are bizarre claims, but Chomsky is content to rest them on a single substantiating case: I’ll just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial, so we might as well not argue about it, by no means the most extreme but uncontroversial … at least among people who have some minimal concern for international law, human rights, justice and other things like that. The case referred to is what Chomsky calls "the Reagan-US war against Nicaragua which left tens of thousands of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery." In Chomsky’s view, the United States launched an unprovoked war of terror against Nicaragua in the 1980s, using a "mercenary army" (viz., the contras). When the Nicaraguan government lodged a complaint with the World Court about its support for the contras, the American government rejected the jurisdiction of the Court and thus - in Chomsky’s telling - the rule of international law itself. Chomsky provides no sources for these claims because there are none. There is no truly international court, nor is there an international rule of law - there is only the rule of a law that sovereign states consent to when it is convenient to them. Moreover, there was no U.S. war against Nicaragua, let alone a terrorist war. The U.S. provided assistance to a peasant army resisting a Nicaraguan dictatorship that was supported politically, economically and militarily by the Soviet empire. The Sandinista dictators had usurped their power from a democratic coalition, stripped Nicaragua’s citizens of their political rights and - at the time of the conflict - were ruling by force. It was the Sandinistas who destroyed the Nicaraguan economy and provoked the contra peasant revolt by pursuing Soviet-style collectivization -- confiscation of small peasant holdings and their conversion into socialist collective farms. When the pressure of this peasant revolt and U.S. efforts forced the dictatorship to hold a free election on February 25, 1990, the Nicaraguan people voted the Sandinistas out of power by an overwhelming margin. The anti-Sandinista popular vote was 55%-41%. The democracy that was created - along with free elections - and the rejection of the Sandinista party continue to this day. Meanwhile, the exit of the Sandinista leadership revealed that they were the ones who truly deserved the term "mercenaries," i.e., political thugs whose self-interest came before all others. Before surrendering power, in what their countrymen called the "piñata," the Sandinista ex-rulers fleeced their country of its remaining wealth, transferred government funds to hidden Swiss bank accounts, and appropriated hotels, industries and restaurants - to go along with the mansions they were already living in -- as their personal private properties. Chomsky knows these facts but ignores them. On the other hand, several former members of the Sandinista dictatorship have themselves conceded the lies they propagated in power, which Chomsky repeats. In 1999, Sergio Ramirez, a Sandinista leader who was Vice President of the Sandinista regime wrote: "Let the record show that many landless peasants joined the contras or -- resolved not to be corralled into [agricultural cooperatives] -- became the contras’ social base of support…the ranks of the contra kept on growing, and by then its field commanders tended to be small farmers, many of them without any ties to Somoczismo, indeed, in many cases they supplanted the former National Guard officers who had been the movement’s original leaders." Ramirez’ belated honesty was endorsed by former Sandinista comandante and Minister of Agriculture, Jaime Wheelock and by Alejandro Bendana, the Sandinista’s top diplomatic spokesman, who wrote his own memoir (A Peasant Tragedy: Testimonies of the Resistance). Bendana admitted that the "contra army grew beyond … expectations not as a result of sophisticated recruitment campaigns in the countryside but mainly because of the impact on the small-holding peasant of the policies, limits and mistakes of the Sandinistas." This reality is ignored in Chomsky’s misrepresentation of the conflict as between Nicaragua and the United States, in which the United States is the terrorist and the Sandinistas helpless victims. To establish his deception, Chomsky makes a tendentious mountain out of the molehill of Nicaragua’s complaint to the World Court and the Court’s adverse ruling against the United States. "The World Court accepted [Nicaragua’s] case, ruled in their favor, … condemned what they called the ‘unlawful use of force,’ which is another word for international terrorism by the United States." Well, outside the Chomsky cult, of course, unlawful use of force is not another word for terrorism. In describing the World Court case, Chomsky ignores the Cold War context of the events -- the projection of Soviet power into the Western hemisphere, and into Nicaragua in particular. Long before they seized power, the Sandinista dictators were trained as revolutionaries in Moscow and Havana. The Soviet goal in supporting them, according to political scientist Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Moscow’s Third World Strategy, Princeton Univ. Press, 1988) was to create a Communist nation with the single largest military in the region. The fact that the Sandinistas were supporting and supplying Communist guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Guatemala at the time of these events was a key factor in determining U.S. policies. Chomsky closes his eyes to the fact that the World Court is a creature of national governments, and consequently lacks any authority unless both parties to a dispute agree to give it authority. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time Nicaragua submitted its case, dismissed the court as a "semi-legal, semi-juridical, semi-political body which nations sometimes accept and sometimes don’t." Even the Court itself recognizes this reality, and its own statutes expressly permit states to withdraw from its jurisdiction. At the time of the Sandinista suit, the Court in particular had no jurisdiction over any of the Soviet bloc police states, although these same regimes - in which the rule of law was entirely absent -- provided judges for the Court itself. Soviet foreign policy was then operating under the Brezhnev doctrine, which asserted a right to use force to keep a nation in the Communist orbit. Yet the Soviet bloc states regularly condemned America’s defensive responses to Soviet expansion as "aggression." If the United States acquiesced in World Court decisions, it would be bound by them and hence incapable of responding to hostile Soviet bloc actions. In the Nicaragua case, as one of the dissenting judges on the Court (from Japan) remarked, "Nicaragua has not come to court with clean hands. On the contrary, as an aggressor, indirectly responsible - but ultimately responsible - for large numbers of deaths and widespread destruction in El Salvador, apparently much exceeding that which Nicaragua has sustained, Nicaragua’s hands are odiously unclean. Nicaragua has compounded its sins by misrepresenting them in court." The practical issue was whether the United States would surrender its own national interest to a Court composed of members who were not only hostile to American interests, but to the rule of law itself (among the latter China, Poland and Nigeria). The United States simply refused to accept the jurisdiction of a court composed of rival national interests. By ignoring these details, Chomsky is able to present the decision of a politicized and largely irrelevant institution as representing "the judgments of the highest international authorities" - and thus America as an outlaw state (therefore, in Chomsky’s loopy intellectual framework, a "terrorist" one as well). Thus, the American-supported contra rebellion, which actually restored democracy to Nicaragua becomes, in Chomsky’s analysis, the "first terrorist war." On the other hand, actual terrorists like the Al Qaeda network are really freedom fighters, resisting a Nazi-like oppression. Terror is misunderstood, Chomsky informs, us as a "weapon of the weak;" in fact, those who are called "terrorists" are really freedom fighters resisting the aggressions of the strong. As the case of Nicaragua shows, "terror is a weapon of the strong" and, in particular, the weapon imperialists use to suppress people who resist them. To expand upon this "analysis," Chomsky invokes his favorite image when discussing American evil. In customary fashion, Chomsky also attempts to disguise the central role this image plays in his world view, making it seem like a casual afterthought rather than what it is, an expression of his central belief: It is [regarded] as a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn’t count as terror. Now, that’s close to universal. I can’t think of a historical exception. Even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So pick the Nazis. They weren’t carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local populations from the terrorism of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter-terror. Furthermore, the United States essentially agreed with that. So pick the Nazis. As if Noam Chomsky would pick anyone else: After the war, the U.S. army did extensive studies of Nazi counter-terror operations in Europe. First I should say the U.S. picked them up and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former resistance. But the military also studied the Nazi methods, published interesting studies… Those methods, with the advice of Wehrmacht officers who were brought over here became the manuals of counter-insurgency, of counter-terror, of low intensity conflict … and are the procedures that are being used. So it’s not just that the Nazis did it. It’s that it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of Western civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves. In other words, in America’s war against Nicaragua - but more importantly against the Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan who have attacked us, according to Chomsky we are really Nazis: we employ Nazi methods and refer to Nazi manuals. No evidence is adduced to support these claims, but no matter; in the compassion cells of the Chomsky cult, the libel itself will do. The Wehrmaht, whose officers Chomsky refers to, was not a Nazi Party organization -- its officers even tried to overthrow Hitler. But the reference to Nazi methods, manuals and advice effectively conjures images of the master race, the Gestapo, the concentration camps and the Holocaust. Through slippery allusions, inverted logic, rambling eviscerations of fact from their context and malicious distortions of the historical record, Chomsky pounds his message relentlessly home. There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It was called the African National Congress. They were a terrorist force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we certainly couldn’t support actions by a terrorist group struggling against a racist regime. That would be impossible. In fact, the United States opposed racial apartheid, imposed economic sanctions against the South African regime, and helped force its surrender of power to the ANC and a peaceful and democratic transition of South Africa into a multi-racial, democratic state. Every Chomsky example, in fact, falls into the category of gross distortion of the historical facts. Not content with distortion of events, Chomsky also offers distortions of abstractions from events as in his attempt to formulate a Chomsky law of historical development: Nicaragua has now become the 2nd poorest country in the hemisphere. What’s the poorest country? Well that’s of course Haiti, which also happens to be the victim of most U.S. intervention in the 20th Century by a long shot…. Nicaragua is second ranked in degree of U.S. intervention in the 20th century. It is the 2nd poorest. Actually, it is vying with Guatemala. They interchange every year or two as to who’s the second poorest. And they also vie as to who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention. We’re supposed to think that all of this is some sort of accident. That it has nothing to do with anything that happened in history. Maybe. Chomsky’s anti-American fever is so high that he sometimes doesn’t even bother to make sense. In this passage, he describes Haiti as the country subject to the most U.S. interventions and (therefore) also the poorest. Then he describes Nicaragua and Guatemala as vying with each other as to who is the poorest and therefore "who is the leading target of U.S. military intervention." But he has already said that this distinction belongs to Haiti "by a long shot." Obviously it cannot be both. Who knows what Chomsky himself thinks. Or if he thinks. In fact, the last U.S. intervention in Haiti, during the Clinton Administration, was at the request of the Haitians to help them restore their infant democracy, instituted after the long reign of actual terror under the regime of the dictator known as "Papa Doc." In September 1994, Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter, along with General Colin Powell and Senator Sam Nunn to Haiti to talk with Haiti’s military leadership, which had overthrown the elected Aristide government years earlier. Facing the threat of a US invasion, the regime agreed to turn over power to the former President, Aristide -- a Marxist priest. (Here’s an interesting question for Chomskyites: Why would the imperialists want to replace military rule in their colony with a government headed by a Marxist?) A force of 20,000 US troops were sent in mid-September 1994 to oversee the transition from military rule to democracy. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in mid-October. Today, Haiti continues to vote, but without much democracy. The facts show that both the poverty and the lack of democracy in Haiti are indigenous products; the U.S. can be held guilty only of good intentions. One extremely poor country Chomsky inevitably omits from his list is Cuba, where a U.S. intervention in 1961 failed to overthrow the socialist dictatorship that Fidel Castro had installed. This turned out to be bad for the Cuban people. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba ranked fifth in per capita income in Latin America -- ahead of Mexico - and fourth in literacy. Forty years later, thanks to Castro’s rule, Cuba is one of the four poorest countries in the hemisphere. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Cuba actually ranks last -- along with Haiti -- in per capita daily caloric consumption. The average annual consumption of rice -- a staple of the Cuban diet, especially for poor Cubans -- was 53.5 kilograms per capita in 1956 but dropped to only 36.8 kilograms in 1997. In other words, as a result of Castro’s socialist economic policies enforced by a ruthless police state, Cuba is an island prison and worse off economically than it was under the previous Batista regime. By way of contrast, thirty years ago the United States helped to overthrow a pro-Castro Marxist government, headed by Salvador Allende, in Chile. Allende wanted to install a regime modeled on Castro’s Communist gulag. Fortunately the United States supported his opponents. After a successful coup, the new dictator, Augustin Pinochet, introduced free market policies and eventually (if reluctantly) transformed Chile into a multi-party democracy. Since 1975, Chile has shown the most sustained and highest rate of economic growth of any Latin American country and is a free country run by "democratic socialists." The Chomsky law of U.S. intervention evidently cuts both ways. 4. "What Are The Origins of the September 11 Crime?" In formulating his fourth question, Chomsky rejects the description of Al Qaeda terrorism -- the blowing up of two embassies, the attack on the war ship Cole, the bombing of two 100-story office buildings and the attack on headquarters of the U.S. military in Washington -- as acts of war. In Chomsky’s view they are merely the crimes of individual protesters at the end of their tethers. This allows him to treat the acts themselves as aberrations and, of course, as expressions of the cry for social justice -- desperate resistances to American oppression. He accomplishes this illusion with typical casuistry: "We have to make a distinction between two categories which shouldn’t be run together. One is the actual agents of the crime; the other is a reservoir of at least sympathy, sometimes support that they appeal to even among people who very much oppose the criminals and the actions. And those are two different things." Are they? This distinction represents a kind of refurbished Trotskyism: Stalin was a criminal but Communism was just fine. So-called terrorists - the Palestinians for example -- commit horrible crimes against women and children but since they are struggling "against a military occupation" they are to be excused. They are "resistance" fighters a term Chomsky casually applies to Hezbollah, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups in the Middle East. In fact the so-called "occupation" is a result of Arab aggression against Israel and the refusal of Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence (and thus any feasible conditions for peace). Chomsky even makes a tortuous effort to get Osama Bin Laden off the hook. Ignoring the mountain of facts linking Bin Laden to the attacks, Chomsky asserts that there is "no evidence" for his role or that of his Al Qaeda network. Of course in Chomskyland, even if the terrorists are guilty, the true terrorist entity - the United States - is ultimately to blame. According to Chomsky, America is responsible for the attack itself because its government supported the Afghan resistance to the 1979 Soviet invasion, and it was from these circumstances - with assistance from the CIA - that Al Qaeda grew. It is true that the United States opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus supported many mujaheddin groups, among them individuals who later joined Al Qaeda. But the United States merely armed them for one battle; it did not shape their intentions for others. American assistance made possible the defeat of a brutal invader who had killed a million Afghan civilians by deliberately bombing their cities. Support for the mujaheddin was a "price worth paying,…" in the words of foreign policy expert Robert Kaplan, "because it led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. To say that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was not worth it is like saying fighting World War II was not worth it because it led to a forty-four year Cold War." To pre-empt even this objection, Chomsky insinuates that America is to blame not only for providing weapons to the mujaheddin resistance, but for the Soviet invasion itself. He does this by alluding, without actually citing a specific text, to a comment he attributes to Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. According to Chomsky, Brzezinski once remarked that the United States armed the Afghan resistance in order to draw the Soviets into a trap. In other words, there is no evil connected with September 11 for which the United States is not responsible. Chomsky then asks a question that is for him and his acolytes actually superfluous: "Why did [the terrorists] turn against the United States?" Observe the answer: "Well that had to do with what they call the U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, the U.S. established permanent military bases in Saudia Arabia, which from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of Afghanistan, except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That’s the home of the holiest sites of Islam." Does Chomsky himself endorse this nonsense? He purposely does not provide a clue. In reality there is no comparison between the "U.S. invasion of Saudi Arabia" and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, because there was no U.S. invasion of Saudia Arabia. The Saudis themselves invited the United States onto their territory to protect them from Iraqi armies that had just swallowed the defenseless state of Kuwait. The U.S. bases there are only as permanent as the anti-Saudi threat. But not a word in Chomsky’s text indicates any acknowledgment of the absurdity of terrorists’ distortion of the facts. In short, while Chomsky doesn’t in so many words endorse Bin the terrorists’ libels against the United States, he doesn’t disavow them either, but leaves the ignorant and the innocent in his audiences to draw their own conclusions. Quite a display of intellectual responsibility. What about category two - the "reservoir of support" for Al Qaeda and its terrorist attacks on the United States? The answer: "They are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein." In addition to the brazen libels in this catalogue (which are Chomsky’s own inventions) - that the United States intervenes in Arab countries to stop economic development and to block any move towards democracy (instances? dates?), and that its war against Saddam Hussein is actually designed to strengthen his rule -- the main point is incomprehensible. If the anti-American anger of Islamic radicals is inspired by the authoritarian and brutal regimes of the Muslim world, why is the terror not directed against them? Why are they supporters of the Taliban -- the most brutal, authoritarian and economically backward regime of all? 5. "What are the Policy Options?" We now come to Chomsky’s final question - what is to be done? His answer: Since we are the terrorists, the obvious solution is for us to stop being terrorists. Then we will not be bombed. "We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely to stop participating in it." Noam Chomsky, of course, realizes that America will not cease being America in the foreseeable future. So, shortly after delivering his MIT remarks, and as the war in Afghanistan approached its climactic battles, Noam Chomsky went off on a two-week tour of the Indian subcontinent, adjacent to the war zone, and in particular to Islamabad - the capital city of Pakistan, a nuclear power which is also the most dangerously volatile state in America’s coalition to defeat the Taliban, and one that could tip the other way. The purpose of Chomsky’s tour was to pursue what he thinks is the real solution: giving aid and comfort to America’s terrorist enemies in the hope that they will win the war against us. On his tour, Chomsky repeated his lies about America’s intentions to starve Afghan civilians and perpetrate a "silent genocide." (This was reported in the Indian press and also to Iranian Muslims in the Teheran Times of November 6.) To tens of thousands and perhaps eventually millions of Muslims and Hindus, Chomsky denounced America as the "world’s biggest terrorist state" and the war in Afghanistan as a "worse kind of terrorism" than that perpetrated recently against the United States. This was obviously intended as an incitement to Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians and whoever else was listening to hate America even more. To turn the guns around. Which is clearly the solution about which Noam Chomsky dreams. Concerning manufacturing concent... CNN'S nerve gas story proves to be a lie by Gerard Jackson No. 80, 29 June-5 July 1998 About 10 days ago The Australian published a brief article on the alleged use of nerve gas by American forces in Viet Nam. Though this report was not written by a staff member, it nevertheless carried the paper's imprimatur. Time magazine and Cable News Network's Newsstand recently reported that in September 1970 special forces used nerve gas to wipe out a Laotian village thought to be hiding US defectors. It was also alleged that women and children were also killed in the gas attack. The report, however, was completely false. It has now been confirmed that the so-called village was actually Binh Tram, one of Hanoi's logistical sub-headquarters on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and entirely occupied by North Vietnamese troops and that the Studies and Observation Group that carried out the attack did not use any kind of gas. This was confirmed by Professor Richard Shultz, School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, an acknowledged expert on SOG operations in South East Asia. Moreover, it has been clearly established that nerve gas has never been used by US forces. What immediately alerted the sceptical among us was that April Oliver's and Peter Arnett's finger prints were all over the report. Oliver is a left-wing producer with a reputation for bullying combined with a burning ambition to get on, not a very healthy combination, while Arnett is a noted extreme left-winger with pro-communist sympathies. It seems that their source, or should I say inspiration, for the story was former Lieut. Van Buskirk who commanded B Platoon during Operation Tailwind. While doing prison time in Germany for selling weapons to terrorists -- a fact that Oliver and Arnett withheld from their readers -- he decided to write Tailwind: A True Story, revealing all about the operation. This is another fact that they withheld. Why? Because Buskirk's tell-all memoir completely contradicts Oliver's and Arnett's allegations. Buskirk, now a prison chaplain in North Carolina, was visited by Oliver who badgered him into apparently supporting her baseless claim that the SOG mission was to kill defectors, that it used nerve gas accomplish its mission and that it killed innocent civilians. I say apparently because Buskirk repudiates the report, claiming that he is not Oliver's source and that he never supported any of her accusations that the SOG used nerve gas, killing civilians and defectors. Sickened by this travesty of journalism, Gen. Perry Smith, CNN's military expert, resigned in disgust, further darkening the clouds now gathering over Oliver, Arnett and their bosses, none of whom can claim ignorance or error as a defence because when other members of the Tailwind operation denied the allegations, Oliver and Arnett either ignored them or quoted them out of context. When Dr Frederick Sidell, an expert on these matters, pointed out that the symptoms of nerve gas that Oliver and Arnett described were not those of nerve gas at all, CNN and Time immediately dropped him. Eric Felten is a leading expert on chemical agents. In a telephone conversation with Oliver, he supported Dr Sidell's expert opinion, which only succeeded in angering Oliver. It seems that this was not what she wanted to hear. To support their fantasy Peter Arnett, the report's co-author, alleged that Adm. Moorer who was then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had confirmed the use of nerve gas. This is a complete fiction. What Mr Moorer actually said is that "I would be willing to use any weapon and any tactic to save the lives of American soldiers." Moorer has made it absolutely clear that he never confirmed the use of nerve gas to CNN and that to his knowledge it had never been used in Viet Nam. Mr Moorer is 87 and lives in a nursing home and is obviously not senile, regardless of what Oliver and Arnett may have thought. As a reporter, Arnett leaves a lot to be desired. During the Gulf War he sided with the murderous Sadam, supporting his claim that American planes bombed a "baby food factory." In 1965 he submitted a story to Associated press in which he falsely claimed that US forces had used poison gas against the North Vietnamese. (American forces did use CS, a tear gas produced by the British and authorised for use in Viet Nam by Harold Wilson, Britain's Labour prime minister.) No wonder things are bad at CNN. This report has caused Turner considerable embarrassment. Tom Johnson, CNN Chairman, was forced by the strength of the protests (not the evidence unfortunately) into hiring Floyd Adams, a respected expert on the media, to investigate Oliver and Arnett's allegations. If found false, of which there is no doubt, CNN will have to publicly apologise and give the Special Forces' Association air time to tell the truth. And boy, will that make 'Hanoi Jane' choke. The question that is being asked is how did this incredible piece of shoddy reporting ever get past the editors? Jane Fonda is the commonly accepted answer. True or not, it is now believed that Fonda sponsored the report and forced it through, despite very strong reservations in certain quarters. Unlike the left-wing Oliver Stone, journalists cannot claim artistic license. They must always claim to be writing the truth, even when they know they are lying. This disgraceful episode has at least had the healthy side effect of alerting large numbers of the public to the extent to which left-wing reporters will go in promoting anti-Americanism. However, one can only wonder what the next libelous attack on America's armed forces will be. Note: This story has been faxed to The Australian with a request that it should publish a true account of the Tailwind operation. The fact is ideology is more powerful than money, but leftist lies about our War against Democidal Communists not only makes those in the fifth column who helped the Communists to power but it gets people watching, and digesting leftist propaganda. The NY Times, WashPost, Murdoch's many leftist papers, CNN/TIME owned by a leftist named Ted Turner, who married a marxist named Jane Fonda, whomarried a marxist terrorist Tom Hayden. Your resect for this moral and intellectual dengenerate sends up some serious falres as to you mental stability. Your reference to the MIT "treausre trove" is hilarious. He might use sources from many places, but after he distorts them with his malicious and leftist lies, you sheep just inhale it. Keep walking toward the cliff. >"It's the source materials and references and quotes and treaty references, the portions of declassified documents, etc which are pretty difficult to find in the standard literature."< Examples there Chomskyite? None. For instance almost every document on Vietnam has been released. In 93'-94' we realesed all but a few, they put together paint a different picture of the war. Chomsky denied the fact that the VC was Hanoi's terrorist insurgency(which General Giap admitted it was after the war). Chomsky presents to his sheep cynically distorted BS, in the trough it goes, and you lick it up. Pathetic. Hedoes not care for the 3,000 murdered on 9/11,in fact he was probably overcome with joy that in his words"the guns had turned the other way". Despite the fact America has never had a policy of intentionally targeting innocent civilians, unlike Chomsky's beloved regimes. If you bring up Hiroshima and Dresden you can go to HistoryChannel.com and search for many posts on the subject. We tired to minimalize civilian casualties in South-East Asia. That is according to all the de-classified documents. Not to mention Mcnmara and some others might have been engaged in treasonist activity... But that is for antoher time. Here is another article for you. Here is the text from a documentary of Vietnam and the Media. Put together by Leonard Magruder a psychology proffesor at Kentucky. PART 1 - Dan Rather Refuses to Debate the Issues By Leonard Magruder In light of the scandal a few months ago involving Dan Rather and Democratic Party fundraising, we decided to share an incident involving him in 1986. Mr. Magruder, President of V.V.A.R. , because of his long involvement with Vietnam veterans, was invited by Dr. Theodore Kennedy, Professor of Anthropology at the New York State University at Stony Brook, to help him put together the largest symposium on Vietnam ever assembled. "As National Coordinator Mr. Magruder has responsibilities for helping design the program and contacting and inviting some of the leading figures of the Vietnam period to speak." (Lawrence Journal World, Oct. l0, l986) "The first of its kind in the country and a model for other universities." (Newsday, Sept. 6, 1986.) It was the most comprehensive , in-depth examination of both the war in Vietnam and the "war on the home front" ever put together, unique because of the participation of some 800 Vietnam veterans. There were 60 speakers from all over the country, representing the military, the media, the protestors, the government, and academia. Among those invited and who spoke were Bruce Hare- Prof. of Philosophy, Stony Brook Univ., Kenneth Steadman - Director, VFW, General William C. Westmoreland, Jan Scruggs -Vietnan Veterans Memorial, Leroi Jones (Baraka)- activist and poet, Florynce Kennedy - Co-founder, N.O.W, Allen Ginsburg - poet and activist, Senator Eugene McCarthy , David Horowitz- co-editor, Ramparts, Hung Van Ho- Army of South Vietnam, and William Gibbons, National Defense Division. The media was singularly under-represented. In the beginning Dr. Kennedy spent hours on the phone with representatives of the New York national media emphasizing the national significance of the Symposium and the need for them to cover it. When this failed Mr. Magruder wrote the following open letter to Dan Rather, reviewing the performance of CBS during the war and challenging him to a debate at the Symposium. Copies of the letter were hand-delivered by students throughout the New York media community. Dear Mr. Rather: As you are probably aware , numerous sociological studies have documented the fact that during the 60's the television networks were strongly biased on the subject of Vietnam in the same left/liberal direction as the universities that educated their reporters. One of the best of these studies is The News Twisters , by Edith Efron, a book that CBS desperately tried to suppress. The quantitative data in this and other studies show that the networks consistently misinformed and even lied to the American people. Reporting by CBS, ABC, and NBC over an extended period in 1968 show a steady drumbeat of anti-government voices, unified in an assault on the war. Little or no opinion in support of the war was allowed on any of the three networks even though as late as Oct. 1969 the majority of Americans, according to pollster Lou Harris, still supported a military victory in Vietnam. The data also shows that the networks never allowed the true neo-fascist views and tactics of the New Left and the S.D.S. to be known, protecting them as part of a larger body of "harmless" or "idealistic" youth and using them to project an image of "youth in revolt against the war" and in general actively helping to promote their Marxist version of the war. The data shows how , through biased editorial selection, the views of the left had a virtual stranglehold on opinion on the war. If fact, reporter and enemy opinion constituted a majority of opinion advocating a unilateral bombing halt. Out of 37 such statements , one third came from enemy sources. Said Senator Margaret Chase Smith, "The press has become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest." (Congressional Record, June 16, 1971). Said Theodore White, the highly respected author of The Making of the President series, "There is a new avante garde which dominates the heights of national communication and has come to despise its own countrymen and its traditions." On occasion, as in the case of the Vietnam War, the university and the media act as an unelected counter-government, certain that they only know what is best for the nation. But if the world view that they share is in fact closer in its basic philosophical assumptions to those of totalitarianism than to those of the Judeo-Christian majority, the danger is obvious, they can misinform and mislead the country. There is, therefore, great fear abroad in the land that in another time of crisis, the university and the media, unless reformed, may again allow themselves to be manipulated by enemy propaganda or exploit the crisis to further ideological interests hostile to the national interest. One of the most significant consequences of the Vietnam conflict was its exposure of the breakdown that has occurred in intellectual and journalistic circles with regard to objectivity and truth. The truth is that the left-liberal media, informed in its analysis of world events by the impoverished moral sensibility of secularism and hostile to traditional American values, and wanting to see Hanoi win the war to prove those values wrong withheld information from the American people throughout the war. In particular, it created a "disaster" image of the Tet Offensive (perpetrated 15 years later in The Uncounted Enemy - CBS) because it served its ideological purposes, even in the face of incoming victorious reports from the battlefield. Said Ronald Reagan, "CBS under World War II circumstances would have been charged with treason." The philosophy of life that allows for such blatant disregard for truth is rampant throughout the New York media and Eastern academic circles. Said Theodore White in Newsweek, "I regard the growing gap between the cult that dominates New York intellectual thought today, and the reality perceived by thoughtful people elsewhere , as a political fact of enormous importance and danger." Part of the problem was no doubt touched upon by Carolyn Lewis, former Associate Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism when she wrote in The Washington Monthly recently, "So lacking in intellectual substance is the Columbia curriculum in journalism that students can go through the entire program without having to read a book." Another part of the problem is revealed in two well-know studies done by Columbia University and George Washington University that show that media persons, almost all college educated and liberal, "not only differ sharply on moral issues from attitudes of the general public, but shun religion and actively seek to reform society towards their views." Search Institute, in its landmark study of the importance of religion on Capitol Hill said, "An important factor in our national ignorance of religion on Capitol Hill is the national press. A predominant characteristic of the media elite is its secular outlook. Perhaps the reporters and commentators are unable to recognize religious influence when they see it." It follows that they would also not be able to recognize the true danger of an ideology such as atheistic Communism. It is no accident that Howard K. Smith, the noted television newscaster, warned during the 60's that "the media is not giving a true picture of Vietnam," and that the reporters are "especially naive about Communist intentions and Ho Chi Minh." Bias in the media, he said, was "massive" and "anti-American." The facts seem to be clear. Television networks are dominated by a world-view contemptuous of majority traditional values and they actively seek to impose their views on the rest of America. In this they serve as the propaganda arms of the academic establishment. In summary, it seems that "liberal" today means uneducated, uninformed, and naive. For the media, with the power it yields, to have no understanding of the significance of contemporary events makes it a very dangerous force in American society and clearly in need of a thorough airing of the problem. I hope you will accept my invitation to join me in airing the problem at the Symposium - Courage." Leonard Magruder Mr. Rather did not respond to the letter. And when the Symposium ended, the press release prepared by Mr. Magruder summarizing the findings of the Symposium was uniformly boycotted by the New York media. More on that in Part 2. Stay tuned. Mr. Magruder is not a Vietnam veteran. As a college professor (psychology) he was outspoken over many years in support of the troops in Vietnam and the cause, and became deeply involved with them when they returned. Until he moved to Kansas he was an Associate Member of the Suffolk , N.Y. Chapter of VVA.With the support of a number of these Vietnam vets who joined his Board of Advisors, including the VVA chapter President, he founded Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, a national organization with a student auxiliary at the Univ. of Kansas. He is sending out this series to regional and state Vietnam vet leaders, plus other vet leaders, vets in Congress, and the national media, to let people know what was accomplished, but was suppressed by the media. Part 2 of a 10 part series, "Vietnam and the Media" Part 1 - Dan Rather Refuses to Debate the Issues By Leonard Magruder In part l of this series on how the media suppressed stories related to Vietnam Mr. Magruder recounted how Dan Rather refused an invitation to debate the many issues with regard the performamce of the media during the Vietnam War at the Stony Brook University Vietnam Symposium of l986. "The media pretty well snubbed the entire event," said Mr. Magruder, who served as National Coordinator, "and when I sent out a final press release summarizing the findings of the Symposium, the largest ever held, it was completely ignored by the New York national media." Following are extracts from that press release: The key to the success of the Symposium was that for the first time hundreds of Vietnam veterans and students had been brought together in a direct learning situation, stimulated by an outstanding panel of speakers, 60 in all, from all over the country representing the military, the media, the government, veterans organizations, academia, and the war protestors. Funding for the project came from private individuals. Over $35,000 was raised for honorariums and speaker fees. Each session of the Symposium, most with a number of speakers, covered a different topic related to the Vietnam War. These included: l) The History of Vietnam and American Involvement 2) How America's Youth Responded to the Call 3) The Views of Veteran Organizations (VVA,VFW,American Legion ,etc.) 4) The War as Seen by General Westmoreland 5) Protests and Counter-Protests at Home 6) The Performance of the Media 7) The Turning Points of the War 8) The Return of the Vietnam Veteran 9) The Story of the Wall by its Founders 10) The Adjustment and Reassimilation of the Veteran 11) The POW/MIA Issue 12) The Views of the South Vietnamese 13) The Lessons of the War 14) The Vietnam Veteran as Emerging Leader In general, said Mr. Magruder in an interview, representatives of the military and government were not only highly responsive to invitations to participate, but all had given of their time at no cost. Most former war protestors who were invited, he said, either declined the invitations or had asked for fees which were in many cases prohibitive. The representatives of the national media who were invited, such as Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, and Ted Koppel, did not respond, making the media singularly underrepresented. Aspects of the war that had been neglected over the years but had been brought out by the speakers at the Symposium included; the humanitarian and idealistic dimensions of American involvement, the subversive aspects of the campus "peace" movement, the true intentions of Communist North Vietnam to conquer all of Indochina, the ruthlessness and barbaric tactics of the Viet Cong, the use of the American media to influence public opinion against the war, the succumbing of American journalists and intellectuals to Hanoi propaganda, the bravery and victorious record of the American soldier, the genuine thrust for freedom of the South Vietnamese, the abandonment by liberals in Congress of South Vietnam, the views of the Vietnam veteran towards the war protestors and the media, and the true status of the POW/MIA issue. Asked what he thought were the main themes emerging from the Symposium, Magruder said that while he could not speak for either Dr. Kennedy or the Vietnam veterans, that as a psychologist and sociologist the themes that he saw emerging from the Symposium seemed to include at least the following five points: l) The majority of veterans fully understood their mission in Vietnam to be to stop Communist aggression from the North, do not view their mission in Vietnam as having been "immoral", take a certain amount of pride in their accomplishments on the battlefield, and are proud to have served their country. This is quite at odds with the image perpetrated on campus and in the media of the veteran as a "dupe" of American "imperialism", waiting for the war protestors to save them. 2) The majority of veterans do not view the war protestors as having been either "idealistic" or as "moral heroes", and view their interpretation of the war as naïve, false, and damaging to their efforts. Most of them recognize that the war protests were engineered by Marxist and other ideologues on campus who were partisan to Hanoi and manipulated gullible students to further the self-interests of both groups. 3) Most veterans expressed concern over the fact that many former draft evaders and war protestors now occupy prominent positions on campus and continue in their writings and lectures to perpetuate a false understanding of the war and its veterans offering themselves to students as a "moral elite," while in general striving to avoid debate on the issues with the veterans. 4) A majority of veterans appear to be deeply dissatisfied with the media, particularly national television, for having portrayed a view of the war more sympathetic to that of the war protestors than to the majority of Americans including themselves. They are particularly unhappy that their considerable military achievements such as at Hue, Khe Sahn and other battlefields during the Tet and other large offensives were portrayed by the media to the American people either negatively , or as defeats, and that these impressions have never been corrected. 5) A majority of veterans appear to hold the campus and the media largely responsible for the tragic outcome of the war, and blame those two institutions for having created a false image of them and the war that made their return home very difficult. Asked what he thought was the most significant contribution of the Symposium, Mr. Magruder said that it was undoubtedly the changing perception by students of the Vietnam veterans from the false stereotypes of the anti-war movement and the media, to one of citizens who had acted responsibly in answering the call to duty, who successfully fought an especially difficult war to a peace treaty, and who had returned home to totally unfair treatment as a result of misinformation spread by the campus and the media. Equally important, he said, was the change that is coming about in student perception of the war protestors and the draftdogers as considerably less than the moral heroes they portray themselves to be, as a result of becoming aware, at the Symposium, of the ideological and often self-interested motives behind their behavior. Asked about the problems the symposium had faced Magruder said that the biggest problem was that media coverage had been scanty and biased. What little there had been focused primarily on General Westmoreland's visit, and the three articles on this in the campus newspaper had been unduly critical and harsh, causing some veterans to observe that many on campus, and in the media, seemed to be trying to avoid the issues. Also, he said, there had been some harassment by the leftists and Marxists on campus. One professor, a well known leftist, gave a lengthy speech on the "vested economic interests" behind the war, (an idea universally hooted down by the veterans), had coached his students into giving him a standing ovation, had encouraged his students to heckle others on stage, and had lodged a complaint with the Dean about the presence on campus of the American flag in a color guard to honor General Westmoreland. Mr. Magruder is President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, the national organization and the student auxiliary at the Univ.of Kansas. Speaking in Lawrence today he said, "Looking back, it borders on a national tragedy that an event of this scope, made possible by the contributions, in terms of time, effort, and money, of so many, and designed to help the American people arrive at some correct historical conclusions with regards the war, was so neglected by the media, as well as by many on the University faculty, who largely shunned the event. Significant new insights on the Vietnam Era by General Westmoreland, David Horowitz, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Seale and Al Santoli and so many others went totally unreported by the media, nor would they send representatives to engage in the dialogue. Nor has much changed . I noted yesterday a recent article by Richard Kolb, Editor-in-Chief of VFW Magazine in which he quotes Vietnam vet Milt Copulos as saying "There's a wall 10 miles high and 50 miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn't, and that wall is never going to come down." And vet David Carrad, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal," Until my generation passes from the scene, I doubt there will ever be any reconciliation of views on the war between those who went and those who did not." It is the guilt of those who didn't go that will always cause any effort to heal in a Symposium to be less than successful. For thirty years, the tissue of lies that had to be told by those who would not serve has been rotting the heart out of this society. Look at the experience of David Horowitz at Brown and Arizona State. The spirit of the leftist thugs of the 60's is still with us. For 30 years the university has been unable to tolerate a dissenting opinion, or discuss an issue rationally, continuing to serve as the Depositer of the Lies or as Paul Hollander, noted sociologist at U. Mass. writes, "the major reservoirs of the adversary culture." Why don't our universities finally face the truth about Vietnam, rejoin and help our failing society ?" Part 3 of this series on media suppression will be on how the media lied about the Tet Offensive. Stay tuned. Part I - Dan Rather Refuses to Debate the Issues Part II - "Vietnam and the Media" The Tet Offensive, which was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S. was in fact, as Westmoreland and all historians agree, an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese. Not only did they lose half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, the Viet Cong was virtually destroyed. Contrary to the expectations of the North, the people of the South took not one step to assist the invaders. Instead, they rose up in revulsion and resistance, with the government and the people galvanized into unity for the first time and volunteers for the South Vietnamese army almost doubling. In the U.S., the facts made clear by the Tet Offensive, that the war was not just a "civil war", that the South clearly did not wish to live under Communist rule and welcomed American aid, and that it was the North Vietnamese who were engaged in "genocide" and "aggression" with the mass murders at Hue and the rocket attacks on helpless civilian populations, should have ended the arguments of the "peace" movement. It was the moment of truth for those in the universities and the media. They failed the test. The lying continued with renewed fury. The New York media, recognizing an opportunity to manipulate the news to effectively impose its view of the war on the American people now created, and deliberately sustained, an image of "disaster", even in the face of incoming battlefield reports that contradicted that image. This image was taken seriously by advisors to President Johnson, totally altering the outcome of the war at the very moment when victory might have been possible. The liberal media robbed the United States government and the American people of the ability to make critical judgments about their most vital security interests in a time of war. The true reason for the tragic change in policy after the Tet offensive is seen in what Johnson now told Westmoreland, that to pursue the war more aggressively was politically unfeasible, that he had "no choice but to try to calm the protesters lest they precipitate an abject American pull-out." (America in Vietnam, Levy, 1978) In one of the most incredible phenomenon in the history of warfare, there was during this period, thanks to the media, no logical connection between what was actually happening in Vietnam and response on the home front. The response to victory was despair. This is what the media calls the "psychological victory," which they themselves created. And to their everlasting shame, the "peace" movement responded to any hint of success by American forces at Tet with panic, fearing that their own country might win the war. As presidential candidate George McGovern said to Vietnam vet and former Sec. of the Navy James Webb, "What you don't understand is that I didn't want us to win that war." (American Enterprise Mag. May/June 1997) The April-June 1986 edition of The National Vietnam Veteran's Review had a front-page article (with photo) titled "Professor Calls for Congressional Investigation of Media's Treatment of the Vietnam War." During that period Mr. Magruder had distributed a "Request to Congress" to most members of Congress calling for a Congressional investigation into how it came about that a major American victory had been reported to the American people as a defeat .The request was supported by twelve large Vietnam veteran organizations, and General Westmoreland. As stated in the N.V.V.R. article, "General Westmoreland, who has already made one call to the Steering Committee, stated publicly this week, "Professor Magruder's project is an extremely important issue and I support his efforts l00%." Copies of the material Mr. Magruder sent to Congress were distributed to news organizations throughout the National Press Building in Washington, but no mention of it ever appeared in print. The media has always tried to dismiss the charge of having lied about the Tet Offensive as a right-wing fantasy, but in his material distributed to Congress Mr. Magruder quoted from 21 standard histories and commentaries on the Vietnam War, as follows: "The enemy has been hurt badly; he committed a total of about 84,000 men. He lost 40,000 killed." (Report of General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Tet Offensive. Feb. 27, 1968) (Note: the allies lost 927. This is the disaster for the North Vietnamese that CBS called a "stalemate.") "The Allied counter-offensive following Tet destroyed the Viet Cong based in the South and was a major defeat for the North. Yet despite this victory the press in the United States turned Tet into an American defeat." (Great Battles of the 20th Century - Sir Basil Liddell Hart) "The Viet Cong was suffering severe casualties. .. but this situation was not being reflected in news reports or on television in the United States." (The Unmaking of a President - Herbert Schandler) "Following Tet, the enemy was completely vulnerable (but) the most powerful country in the world did not have the will power to meet the situation. (Strategy for Defeat - Admiral Sharpe) "The North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong guerrillas were defeated utterly on the battlefield. Granted the American superiority at that time, there is at least the probability that North Vietnam forces could have been destroyed." (Crossroads of Modern Warfare - Drew Middleton) "The impression created by the press and television coverage of the offensive was of a great defeat for the Americans and the South Vietnamese. (Why We Were in Vietnam - Norman Podhoretz) "The war still could have been brought to a favorable end following the defeat of the enemy's Tet Offensive. But this was not to be. Press and television had created an aura, not of victory, but defeat. (A Soldier Reports- General William Westmoreland) "Newsmen countered official claims of a Communist defeat by saying that even if it were true (which they refused to accept as they did the official account of enemy losses) the communists had achieved a psychological victory. (The Vietnam War - an international panel of historians) "This is the only war lost in the columns of The New York Times. They created an image of South Vietnam that was as distant from the truth as not even to be a good caricature. There were those who invented, distorted, and lied. (Certain Victory - Dennis Warner) "Visitors to the Lyndon Johnson Library are told, "While the President was reading reports from the war that made it clear that the enemy had suffered a severe military loss (Tet), newspaper and TV gave the impression that the loss was ours and that defeat was imminent." (New York Times News Service) "COSVN, Viet Cong Headquarters, in its internal report #6, March 1968, admitted the Tet Offensive had been a failure. "We failed to seize a number of primary objectives. We also failed to hold the occupied areas. In the political field we failed to motivate the people to stage uprisings." (The Magruder Expose - Leonard Magruder) "For the first time in modern history the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side." (Encounter-British journalist Robert Elegant) "It was the massive military defeat of the Viet Cong and NVA that proved the main turning point in the United States resolve. In military terms it was a massive defeat for Giap. However, on the television screens of the United States Tet turned into a victory for the Communists." (Vietnam - Ian Beckett) "Jack Fern of NBC suggested to producer Robert Northfield that NBC do a documentary showing that Tet was indeed a decisive military victory for the United States. "We can't," said Northfield, "Tet is already established in the public mind as a defeat." (Between Fact and Fiction - Edward J. Epstein) "When General Westmoreland publicly announced that the Tet Offensive had been a major defeat for the Communists and a major victory for the Allied forces, a fact obvious to anyone who viewed the events dispassionately, he was treated like a self-deluding fool by the news media." (Battles and Campaigns - Tom Carhart) "The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits." (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government -The New York Review Oct. 21, l982) "The military's conflict with the Saigon press corp was the crucible of the debate over the Order of Battle. But CBS chose not to explore that conflict and to have done so the network would have had to bare its own archives of the period, including Walter Cronkites's milestone commentary which declared, following Tet, that an American victory was unlikely and that a truce must be negotiated." (A Matter Of Honor - Don Kowit) "Though it was an overwhelming victory for South Vietnam and the United States, the almost universal theme of media coverage was that we had suffered a disastrous defeat. The steady drumbeat of inaccurate stories convinced millions of Americans that we had lost a major battle." (No More Vietnams -Richard Nixon) "The myth was created (by the media) that the war was unwinnable, and that had a decisive effect on American resolution. (War in Peace- Sir Robert Thompson) "Rarely has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. Essentially the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam added up to a portrait of defeat for the Allies, Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet Offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South. To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other - in major crisis abroad - cannot be counted upon as a triumph for American journalism and it could happen again." (Big Story - 2 vols. - Peter Braestrup) "If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population have given credence to the most incredible allegations." (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S.Government) When does this inquiry begin ? The last four years of the war, the lives lost, and the final abandonment by the U.S. of the peoples of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, were prices paid to indulge the tantrums of the campus 'peace' movement and the New York liberal media. America, through the lack of moral and intellectual sophistication of its liberal academics and journalists had succumbed to the most successful propaganda effort the world has ever seen. How the campus and the media lied about Vietnam is the one great trauma in the tissue of American history that has never been dealt with. Part 4 of a 10 part series, "Vietnam and the Media", by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform On Jan. 23, l982, eight months after Professor Magruder resigned his position at Suffolk College, N.Y. to protest that media and campus had lied about Vietnam, CBS ran a 90 minute documentary on prime time television titled The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, produced by George Crile and narrated by Mike Wallace. The program charged that U.S. military intelligence in Vietnam under orders from General Westmoreland had conspired to deceive President Johnson , the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Congress and the American people by systematically underreporting enemy strength to make it appear that Westmoreland was winning the war. This was done, CBS claimed, through the reduction of estimates of infiltration in the five months prior to the Tet Offensive, and by deleting from the Order-of-Battle village civilians who supported the Viet Cong; the SS and the SSD. The purpose of the deception, according to CBS was to lead people into believing that the U.S. was winning a war which in fact, according to CBS, it was losing. This "conspiracy", said Mike Wallace, led to complete unpreparedness for the Tet Offensive, unnecessary loss of American soldiers, and in the final analysis, to the loss of the war. The program was believed without reservation by almost the entire American press. "From The Nation to The Wall Street Journal" said Renata Adler in Reckless Disregard, "No serious journalist or publication called any element of the ninety-minute program into question. Editorials simply treated the broadcast as true." This was massive testimony to the nation's depth of ignorance on the Vietnam War, as a result of years of distortion by the media. They had lied so often on the subject they were in a fog. Professor Magruder immediately recognized the large number of serious discrepancies and outright lies in the film. Stunned, he realized that CBS had just given him a classic example of the kind of lying he had just given his job to protest and immediately began research to expose the film. On March 28, l982, 150 copies of a 21- page single spaced article documenting that the CBS film had been one long series of lies from beginning to end, were hand delivered by Mr. Magruder and his students throughout the upper echelons of the New York media, as well as sent through the mail. Among those receiving copies at CBS, in addition to CBS executives, were Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and George Crile. Executives and newscasters such as Frank Reynolds, Sam Donaldson, Roger Mudd, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and John Chancellor of ABC and NBC also received copies, along with executives, editors, and columnists of The New York Times, Newsweek, Newsday and The Washington Post. Approximately thirty copies were delivered to leading columnists such as Tom Wicker, Harriet Van Horne, and Anthony Lewis. The fully documented article proving that CBS had lied to the American people on a massive scale, just as they had often done during the Vietnam War, and particularly during the Tet Offensive, was immediately covered up by the entire New York liberal media establishment. On May 29, l982, two months after the cover-up of the Magruder expose the story broke with a cover article in TV Guide, Anatomy of A Smear: How CBS Broke the Rules and 'Got' General Westmoreland , by Don Kowit and Salley Bedell, based on copies of CBS interviews for the film. The article, while not as lengthy or detailed as the Magruder expose, was nevertheless more than enough to show that the CBS documentary was in serious trouble. The article showed that CBS had paid and then coached persons in what to say, had deliberately angered Westmoreland to make him appear guilty on film, had refused to include in the film corrections that he has requested, refused to include evidence by Walt Rostow that Johnson had been fully informed as to the increased infiltration , the upcoming Tet Offensive , and the Order-of-Battle controversy, had lied about its efforts to contact General Phillips Davidson, head of intelligence in Vietnam, and had rejected testimony by George Carver , head of CIA intelligence that would have totally invalidated the thesis of the CBS film. It also proved that the statement in the film by Col. Gaines Hawkins that he had been given an enemy troop estimate ceiling by Westmoreland was contradicted four times by statements from Hawkins to George Crile as found in the interview transcripts and that CBS had deliberately inserted a response by Westmoreland where it did not belong in an effort to discredit him. When General Westmoreland received his copy of the Magruder expose he wrote Professor Magruder a personal letter in which he stated, "You have done an exhaustive bit of research and I congratulate you. I am sending your letter and its enclosures to my lawyer." (letter, Sept. l3, 1982) In his expose Magruder wrote that in the film Mike Wallace failed to tell his viewers that the entire thesis of the CBS film, based on a charge made by Sam Adams, a CIA analyst, had been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975 and fully aired at the time in the press. Adams, a Harvard graduate sympathetic to the leftist views of antiwar leaders, and who testified on behalf of Daniel Ellsberg at his trial, had hoped by his estimate of 600,000 Viet Cong to force Johnson to pull out of the war. He strongly believed in the Marxist concept of the 'people's revolution', and consistently tried to prove through his figures that it was the 'people' who were fighting, unaided by the North, the same naive myth propagated by the campus 'peace' movement and the New York media cult. Wallace also failed to inform his viewers that Adams, in an article in Harper's Magazine in May l975 and again at the House investigation, was primarily concerned that the CIA, not General Westmoreland, had suppressed his estimate of Viet Cong strength. The subtitle of his article was A CIA Conspiracy Against its Own Intelligence. Said Rufus Taylor, Deputy Director of the CIA from 1966 to 1969, in a letter of response to the Adams article in the July, l975 issue of Harper's, " We could perceive no merit in presenting Sam or his conclusions to the President." Wrote James Graham, of the Board of National Intelligence in the same issue of Harper's, "and his assumption that these findings were generally accepted within the CIA is a distortion of the facts." He charged Adams with conveying a "misleading impression of a single-handed and lonely struggle to get the truth out about the war to the White House against the massive opposition of countless knaves and cowards." The truth, said Graham, was that , "In my twenty five years in the CIA I never saw an analyst given more individual attention, more opportunity to present his evidence and state his case ." But his case was so bizarre that no one would buy it, except for Mike Wallace, and CBS. Wallace failed to tell his viewers that at no time had the CIA ever taken Adam's estimate of 600,000 Viet Cong seriously. This estimate upon which the CBS film rested was dismissed by President Johnson's own Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and both branches of the CIA; the Directorate of Intelligence and the Office of National Estimates. The key statement in the film by Wallace that the CIA was "at war with Washington to accept Adams estimate," was not true. George Crile, the producer of the CBS film, had to have know these facts. He had been editor for the Adams article in Harper's in 1975, from which all of the above statements were taken. Furthermore, all of this had to have been know by most of the liberal columnists, such as Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, who had received copies of the Magruder expose, as much of that expose was based on their own articles published at the time of the House investigation of the Adams charge. They knew that the CBS film was a smear against Westmoreland based on lies, yet they said nothing as it served their ideological purposes. Quoting from President Johnson's memoirs, The Vantage Point, Magruder showed not only that Westmoreland had kept Johnson and the American people informed as to the conditions in Vietnam at all times, but that Johnson was fully informed of the Order-of-Battle controversy, the increased infiltration of Northern regulars, and the general timing and purpose of the approaching Tet offensive. Both Johnson and Westmoreland in their books had criticized the U.S. media for not passing on to the American people their warnings about the coming Tet Offensive. The press would later use the public dismay over Tet (which they themselves created) as an excuse to try to discredit earlier optimistic statements by Johnson and Westmoreland. The press deliberately neglected their warnings about Tet in order to set them up for criticism. A number of sources were cited by Magruder where CBS could easily have found official military record of the increased infiltration which Mike Wallace charged Westmoreland with suppressing. He also showed that Maj. Gen. McChristian, who was portrayed in the film as having his intelligence warnings suppressed by Westmoreland, leaving the military unprepared for the Tet Offensive, was quoted by Jack Anderson in a column on Oct 31, 1975 as saying, "There was sufficient data to predict the offensive in the spring of 1968," and that Westmoreland took his information,"very seriously." The CBS film was a final desperate attempt by the media to nail down the 'peace' movement's view of the war. It backfired miserably, resulting in complete exposure of exactly how the media, (and the university), as Mr. Magruder stated at the time of his resignation in protest, had lied about Vietnam. The falsification in the film of the Tet Offensive as a defeat was a repeat of how CBS had portrayed the offensive at the time. So incompetent was Adams that in his article he estimated American lives lost in the Tet Offensive at 10,000. The accepted figure is 927. Magruder pointed out that a final CIA evaluation of Adams as an analyst, shortly before his resignation under pressure, described him as "marginal" at conducting research, and as having lost "balance and objectivity." The entire thesis of the CBS-Wallace film, that it was a conspiracy by the military to conceal enemy strength to support Johnson's claim of progress that led to a devastating surprise victory by the Communists at Tet, and that the Adams estimate was then accepted, leading to Johnson's resignation and ending the war, is one long, sustained lie, as Westmoreland said, "a cruel hoax reprehensible and irresponsible." The film was an insult to the intelligence of the American people and a slander against those who served in South Vietnam, by the very ones who did the most to betray both national interests and the American people." On Sept. 13, 1982, General Westmoreland sued CBS for 120 million dollars for libel, labeling the film "vicious, false, and contemptible." Mr. Magruder now knew that his resignation to protest that the media had lied about Vietnam was about to be vindicated in one of the largest suits ever filed against the media. Westmoreland had stated in his letter that he had sent the expose Magruder had sent him to his lawyer, Dan Burt. On Feb. 4, 1984, Mr. Burt wrote to Mr. Magruder thanking him for his analysis. It is possible that Burt may have used the expose as a guide in planning his attack on CBS, as up until the time of the trial the Magruder expose remained prehaps the best detailed account of the lies in the film. Therefore it is understandable that it was with great satisfaction that Mr. Magruder sat back on Oct. 10, 1984 and watched (on ABC) the first of a parade of generals and colonels who would testify that CBS had lied. The trial, which ended with an apology to Westmoreland by CBS, destroyed the credibility of CBS-News for decades to come. Part 5 of a 10 part series, "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform This is an account of a national campaign that was waged by Mr. Magruder that forced PBS stations to show a documentary on Vietnam, narrated by Charlton Heston, that it had tried to suppress. The film detailed how CBS had misled the nation about the Tet Offensive. Martha Bayle, in The Wall Street Journal said, "Television's Vietnam: The Impact of Media", attacks the liberal bias of contemporary news coverage of the 1968 Tet Offensive. It suggests that reporters (especially TV reporters ) turned a U.S. military victory into a political and psychological defeat. PBS has refused to give air time to the film." By spending $6000 of his own money to show the film on various television stations around the country Mr. Magruder exposed the issue creating a landslide defection on the part of station managers who had been told by PBS executives not to show the film. In addition, he wrote a letter to all 314 PBS station managers appealing to them to defy PBS Headquarters and show the film. That summer, Mr. Magruder, along with Col. Chuck Allen, publisher/editor of the National Vietnam Veterans Review, discussed the issue in an hour long interview on CBS affiliate WFNC, Fayetteville, N.C. At the Vietnam Veterans parade in Chicago Magruder paid for a continuous showing of the film on in-house television throughout his four day stay at the Americana Congress Hotel, reaching the thousands of Vietnam veterans who were staying there. The afternoon of the parade about 50 vets showed up with posters that read "Media and Campus Lied About Vietnam" on one side and "PBS Show the Film" on the other and a protest was held in Grant Park. In addition, with every showing in Chicago and elsewhere viewers were urged to use a number that Mr. Magruder had arranged for with Mr. Joseph Redota of the White House to call President Reagan and tell him what they thought about the film. 280 out of 314 stations finally showed the film. William Criswell, Station Manger of WUSI/TV, Olny, Illinois, wrote on Aug. 26, 1986, "You should be pleased to know that this station has been at sword's point with PBS powers-that-be for more than a year on the issue of bias. I have written to PBS President Bruce Christiansen and others protesting the one-sided presentation of America's role in world politics. We aired Television's Vietnam: The Impact of Media, on Monday , August l8. It will be repeated Sat., Sept. 14." A number of station managers wrote Mr. Magruder saying they were defying the ban and would show the film. Wrote Ruth Ann Barnes, Director of WNET/13 in New York, "This is to let you know we have decided to air the AIM program." Pat Buchanan, in a handwritten note from the White House said, "All the best with your new endeavor." Anne Higgins, writing for President Reagan, said, "The President's views on this subject are well know, and he will continue to express his concern that a flawed sense of our own history can lead to mistaken judgements about present policies as well as our future course." Reagan had written to Charlton Heston about the film, "Great, .. something every American should see - but then we know TV will never help them to see it." (AIM Report, March 1986). Mr. Magruder was happy to be able to write Reagan and tell him that the American people had now seen the film, that the cover-up had been defeated. General Westmoreland wrote, "I congratulate you on your success in the showing of the AIM film on PBS stations around the country." (letter, Sept. 24, 1986) The Washington Inquirer of Sept. 25, 1986 said, the most dedicated in this endeavor (fighting the boycott) was Leonard Magruder, who had been campaigning on behalf of Vietnam veterans causes for the last six years. He quit his professional post to protest against the treatment of Vietnam vets . Magruder recently held a Washington press conference in which he accused the media of basing its analysis of events in Vietnam on a liberalism hostile to the American values of freedom and democracy and which created and sustained a disaster image of the Tet Offensive." The United Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times all sent reporters and photographers to this conference but did not report on the story when they heard that it was critical of the media performance in Vietnam. Mr. Magruder said that while his successful national campaign to break the PBS boycott had been treated fairly in over two dozen local newspaper articles, radio, television newscasts and talk shows, the story had been suppressed at the national level. Word had gone out from PBS to contain the story. Local editors were appalled by this development. Obviously, a story about a private citizen spending thousands of dollars to successfully reverse a decision by PBS not to show a film about Vietnam was a national story. Some editors, such as Mr. Donald Gillem of The York Times-News, York, Nebraska, considered this highly unethical and made special appeals to representatives of the wire services to see that the story was carried nationally, but they were rejected. In Topeka and Kansas City the Associated Press refused to place mention of press conferences by Mr. Magruder on the day calendar, which simply informs reporters of upcoming events. In other places, such as Lincoln, Nebraska, the wire services boycotted the news conferences that were held by Mr. Magruder. "The national media," said Mr. Magruder, "went on an orgy of suppression over this issue." "The PBS campaign," he said, "was our response to the betrayal by CBS of the Suffolk College Rally for returned Vietnam veterans. Millions of people now know how CBS lied about Vietnam . For millions of Vietnam vets Dan Rather now became the symbol of a liberal media that had lied about their efforts in Vietnam, and The CBS Evening News program slipped into third place apparently as vets turned it off." Wrote Victor Goodpasture, a columnist for The Daily Kansan, the daily newspaper of the University of Kansas, "Mr. Magruder showed the documentary on campus last semester and also on Lawrence Cable Television. It ought to be shown to all journalism students and then discussed. It was this type of reporting that changed attitudes towards the war and eventually led to a Communist victory in South Vietnam. The media did a disservice to the American soldiers and the American people." In a lecture at the University of Kansas following the PBS campaign Mr. Magruder said, "Thuong Nhu Tang, Minister of Justice of the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government said in an article in The New York Times of Oct. 21, 1982 that the Communist losses in the Tet Offensive were "so immense that they were unable to replace them with new recruits." They lost half their troops, some 40,000 dead. (the U.S. lost 926) But the media portrayed this as a U.S. defeat and CBS said that the United States couldn't hope to win the war." The Daily Kansan, April 2, 1986. Part 6 of a 10 part series, "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform. The following is from material handed out by Mr. Magruder in a one-man protest in the late 60's at the University of Colorado the day after a massive and violent anti-war protest. During the 60's he did this at a number of universities. Covered by all Denver and Boulder newspapers and television stations, the national media refused to report the protest, refusing to let Mr. Magruder join the debate on the issues of the hour. Only liberals could play. At the time Mr. Magruder, a psychologist, was Special Consultant to the State of Colorado in the field of mental retardation. But the material that he handed out that day to the students was incompatible with the media's "advocacy journalism" at a time when the most inane statements on Vietnam of obscure liberals were being given national attention. It was this suppression of opinion contrary to views on the war by left/liberals in the university and the media, and the use of these institutions as instruments of indoctrination and propaganda, that created the polarization and breakdown in national debate in the 60's leading to the tragedies in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The campus 'peace' movement ended up on the side of tyranny and genocide. He wrote: "Nothing more enrages the academic proponents of a naturalistic, and therefore "value-free", world view than the incurable moralism of the American people. To combat the fact that the average citizen sees the present conflict in terms of morality, tyranny versus freedom, the university has conceived the ultimate hypocrisy, it has projected an absolute moral judgment, "the Vietnam War is immoral," from nihilistic philosophical foundations. The vehemence of both faculty and students , and their need to avoid dialogue at all costs, flow from the need to mask that hypocrisy, hoping the public will confuse the vehemence for certainty and go along. But adult America, all of whom are for genuine peace in the 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 in peace, to pursue our sloth, our sex games, and our drugs. Certainly if South Vietnam, and with it all of Southeast Asia, falls to Communist aggression and slavery, the guilt will lie forever with the cowardly conspiracy between faculty and student hypocrisy that blunted U.S. efforts to stop that aggression." The main issues, he said, were "The failure of the social sciences with regard to contemporary social ills, the ignorance of students on Communism and basic philosophical and theological alternatives, the indoctrination of students and their manipulation by left/liberal faculty to influence national policy, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the student anti-war movement, and the regressive movement on campus back to witchcraft, astrology, and drugs as sources of truth and self-fulfillment." The Boulder Daily Camera. Two months later Mr. Magruder led in a protest at the American Psychological Association Convention in Washington, D.C.. A major issue had to do with the misuse of psychology in the service of the anti-war movement: "With regard to the role of psychologists in relation to the Vietnam War, the lies about the war spread by the campus 'peace' movement and the media have had a devastating impact on the returned veteran, leaving many shocked and creating unnecessary feelings of guilt." For many, the resulting suffering was worse than the war, and was borne in silence for years. What little help was available was found in the "rap group" where again the veteran was betrayed. Anti-war oriented psychologists encouraged veterans into becoming active in the anti-war movement and encouraged them to convert their acts of killing in the line of duty into atrocities, so as to resonate better with the lies that by now permeated American society. Other psychologists charged the war with having created a "killer instinct" for which there was not the slightest shred of evidence. Said the noted sociologist Charles Moskos, "psychologists tried to portray the soldiers as variously, wanton perpetrators of atrocities or proto-fascist automatons." There was nothing in contemporary psychological or psychiatric theory, with its moral relativism, that could come to grips with the code of the soldier, "Honor, Duty, Country". The mental health community prostituted itself to forward its politics, using the suffering of the veterans to do so. The social scientists, who through their naïve secular and humanistic theories of man had played a major role on campus in betraying the war effort, now had to lie about the veterans of the war. The lying was compounding itself." The protest, which created considerable stir at the Convention, was totally ignored by the Washington media. Part 7 of our 10 part series "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform. From one of two 15-minute special news broadcasts with Mr. Magruder on KYFC-TV in Kansas City, Missouri. "One myth propagated by the 'peace' movement is that the American soldier, because of his involvement in an "immoral " war, would, and later did, lose the war. The truth about the progress made following the Tet Offensive, from 1968 on, was never told to the American people. The world's foremost authority on People's Revolutionary War, the Communist developed strategy that was used in South Vietnam, is Sir Robert Thompson, who as Secretary of Defense of the Malaysian Federation defeated the Communist insurgency in that country. As observer of the Vietnam situation throughout its history, and himself critical of earlier American strategy, he nevertheless was able to report as follows to President Nixon in 1969. "I was very impressed by the improvement in the military and political situation in Vietnam as compared to all previous visits, and especially in the security situation, both in Saigon and the rural areas. A winning position in the sense of obtaining a just peace, whether negotiated or not, and of maintaining an independent non-Communist South Vietnam has been achieved. We were most impressed by the remarkable success of the pacification program, we were able to visit areas and to walk through villages that had been under Viet Cong control for years. With increased security and improved communication, the economy is expanding rapidly. The seeds of democracy are also being planted at the village level. At the higher political level these is no question but what the government of President Thieu is not only more stable that any other government of the past few years, but that its performance is steadily improving. On the military side there has been a steady improvement in both performance and morale." Where had all this progress come from, if not from the efforts and sacrifices of the American soldier? (For the full scope of the true tragedy of Vietnam, that it was a war that had been won and then thrown away to placate those at home who would not serve, we now have new histories that fill in what happened after 1968. None of this progress was made known to the American people by the media. Two of the most important of these books are "Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army", by Mark Woodruff, and "A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam" by Lewis Sorley From a speech Mr. Magruder gave on the occasion, with 50 Vietnam veterans, of the symbolic retaking of Grant Park during the Chicago Parade weekend, from those who protested at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and did not serve. Mr. Magruder later presented the flag used in the event to General Westmoreland in a ceremony during the Houston Parade weekend. Although reporters from Chicago papers were present at the event, they refused to report on it, arguing that there were still too many in Chicago who were against the war. That is absurd. Former war protesters wept openly in regret in the streets, and had to be comforted by the veterans as the hugh parade, with its countless wounded, passed by. This was never mentioned by the media. "We need to remember just how treasonous the campus 'peace' movement actually was. Commentary of Feb. 1980, reported that 28% of all college students at the time supported the Viet Cong while 51% of those in the campus 'peace' movement favored a Viet Cong victory. 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 be Communists."(she obviously knew nothing about atheistic Communism) "The anti-war movement", said the S.D.S. in literature out of Antioch College, "rests on three main elements, the Trotskyites, the Communist Party, and the radical pacifists. A number of its leaders, such as Dave Dellinger, were self-confessed Communists and Marxists. 'Peace' movement leadership let North Vietnam provide tactical advice and help coordinate demonstrations. 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 American withdrawal from Vietnam." For this reason, the general public had nothing but contempt for the campus 'peace' movement. A poll by the University of Michigan showed that reactions to "Vietnam war protestors" 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 anti-war demonstrations were "acts of disloyalty against the boys fighting in Vietnam." 65% agreed that "protesters were giving aid and comfort to the Communists", and 64% felt that they were "not serious, thoughtful critics of the war, just peachiness and hippies having a ball." (Reported in "America in Our Time," by Godfrey Hodgson.) Later, in a letter published in The Lawrence Journal World, Mr. Magruder wrote, "Robert McNamara , in his recent memoirs, said that U.S. policy in Vietnam was "gravely flawed" and the war was unwinnable. According to the enemy, it was McNamara's policies that were "flawed", and the U.S. could have won the war. Bui Tin, a colonel on the general staff of North Vietnam, and the man who accepted the surrender of South Vietnam on April l0, 1975, was recently interviewed in The Wall Street Journal. "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Mihn trail, Hanoi could not have won the war." It was McNamara who advised Johnson on this. On McNamara's bizarre policy of "graduated response" bombing, Bui Tin said, "It didn't worry us, we had plenty of time to prepare alternative routes and facilities." On the effectiveness of Westmoreland's strategy he said, "We were losing base areas, control of the rural population. And our main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam." Of the crucial Tet Offensive he said, "Our losses were staggering. If American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon they would have punished us severely; we suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was." The American people never had any idea of just how seriously the enemy was mauled. Here are the figures for just the five main offensives, from "Vietnam in Military Statistics", a major history of the Vietnam War by Micheal Clodfelter. 1968 - The Tet Offensive, U.S. -1,829 KIA (Killed In Action), South Vietnam - 2,788 KIA, Communist forces - 45,000 KIA 1969 - U.S. - 9,414 KIA, South Vietnam -21,833 KIA, Communist forces -156,954 KIA 1970 (includes Cambodian Incursion) U.S.-4,221 KIA, South Vietnam - 23,346 KIA, Communist forces - 103,638 KIA Laos Invasion (Lam Son 719 ) (with U.S. air support) South Vietnam - 3,800 KIA, Communist forces -13,668 KIA 1972 -Easter Offensive (with U.S.air support)- South Vietnam - 15,000, Communist forces - 83,000 From "Unheralded Victory", by Mark Woodruff: "During 1966 the North Vietnamese Army suffered approximately 93,000 killed. In 1967 the casualty figure climbed to over 145,000. By the early 1970's General Giap was publicly admitting that his forces had suffered at least 500,000 killed during the war. The actual number of Communist soldiers killed during the war: 1,100,000." Compare this to approximately 58,000 American forces killed. That is a 19 to 1 ratio. How was this war lost? Certainly not on the battlefield. The media never made any of this clear to the American people. Nor did they ever make clear the enormous sacrifices of the South Vietnamese, who lost approximately 250,000 in the war. It was McNamara's flawed policies, the impact of the campus 'peace' movement, and the media that cost America the war. Of the 'peace' movement Bui Tin said, "It gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield losses through dissent and protest America lost the ability to mobilize a will to win." As to the argument of the 'peace' movement that the Viet Cong was an independent South Vietnamese political movement, Bui Tin said, "It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960." The 'peace' movement lied to America. Carrying the flag of the enemy it succumbed to Hanoi propaganda and ended up on the side of genocide and tyranny. As for McNamara's views, they are nothing but a cover-up for his own incompetence. It is absolutely time to demand that the media, and the university, stop hiding out on the subject of Vietnam and re-enter into dialogue with the rest of America, especially its Vietnam veterans, as to what really happened. We cannot go into a world-wide war on terrorism with this hugh a hole in our history. Holding on to, and perpetuating myths has too great a potential for creating a lethal, paralyzing polarization. The media , and the campus, must find the courage to consider 'second thoughts', as have David Horowitz and so many others, now describing what they did in the 60's as "treason." They fell for enemy propaganda and it is time they admitted it. As the Chief of Military History- U.S Government wrote in his Final Report, "If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population gave credence to the most incredible allegations." And to tell the truth about Vietnam is by definition to bring about the long hoped for reformation of American education. The lies told in the 60's metastasized through the years to create intellectual trends on campus that are betraying the American student. These must be challenged. We can't fight a war with dummies either. Part 8 of our 10 part series "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform From "To the Vietnam Veteran" a speech delivered by Professor Magruder at the first rally on any American campus to honor the Vietnam veteran with over 400 persons attending. (It was at this rally that Magruder resigned his position to "protest the damage done to the veterans by the erroneous views of the left/liberals in the media and the university in the 60's and their perpetuation of these views. Although a reporter from "Newsday" was present the newspaper did not publish the event." ("The Compass", college newspaper, (May 11, 1981) "Clearly newsworthy, but because of their bias no news organization in New York would touch such a story." (Noted newscaster Bill Jorgenson - NBC-TV) From the speech: As Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran and principle author of the study by the Center of Policy Research on the problems of the Vietnam veteran said, "For the first time in our history homecoming was as difficult as, if not more difficult than, the battle itself." A whole new psychiatric category, "delayed stress syndrome" has become necessary to describe what was largely the impact on the returned American soldier of attitudes at home based on lies that had been told about the war by the media and academia. The Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program of Houston, in a booklet it produced to challenge these lies said, "The misinformation currently disseminated about Vietnam ultimately reflects upon the motives, convictions, values, and integrity of those who participated in the war; it is imperative that the record be set straight." (The impact of these lies is the subject of a documentary made by Mr. Magruder, How the Campus Lied About Vietnam, based on interviews with Vietnam vets and available at no cost by e-mailing Magruder44@aol.com) "Following a semester of study of the Vietnam War last year, 240 of my students, after they had received their grades so the voting would be objective, voted overwhelmingly (85%) that in their opinion the war had been justified, that there was nothing wrong in trying to save South Vietnam from Communist tyranny. It was not, they agreed, the U.S. government that had misled the nation. 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 Minh was only a "nationalist", and that America was engaging in "aggression" and "genocide", misled the nation. Puzzled as to why the students of this generation could see the truth so clearly, while those of the 60's could not, the students concluded that faculties, to serve their own largely leftist and Marxist ideologies, had misinformed their students, who, in turn, used the misinformation to serve their own purposes, primarily to avoid the draft. The 'peace' movement, the students decided, 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. When the soldiers returned it tried to stereotype them, with the help of the media, as dupes or drug-crazed "baby killers". That those who did all the suffering in Vietnam should on their return be asked to bear additional suffering at the hands of the very ones who had betrayed them, was, the students concluded, absolutely unconscionable." Said Mr. Magruder, who is now President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform at the Univ. of Kansas in Lawrence today, "I am certain that if this experiment was done again, with students free from the pressures that existed in the 60's, the results would be the same." On the failure of the media to report on the rally and this experiment he said, "The suppression of this event and experiment by the media was predictable in view of the stand taken by the students. The media (reporters from "Newsday" and "The New York Times" who were present) refused to report on the events of that day largely because of the posters the students carried which read "Abbie Hoffman Was Wrong", "War Protestors Were Wrong", "The New Left and the S.D.S. were wrong." Other posters said that Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, William Sloan Coffin and others were "Wrong." As I said in my speech that day, even though there is now nothing that opponents of the war can point to today that vindicates their position, it is imperative for them that they continue to urge the nation to ignore the correct historical conclusions. To admit to having been wrong would be to face, not only guilt, but disproof of their ideological assumptions and loss of prestige and power. They must of psychological necessity take the position that they were right, the matter is over, and there is nothing to discuss, thereby leaving the Vietnam veteran to suffer for the perpetuation of their lies. The fact that the matter is not over, and there is still plenty to discuss is seen in recent commentary on the Kerrey incident. Writes Ellen Goodman "As time goes on, "our war" recycles with less frequency, but with equal ferocity. Every time we think we have achieved that mystical/medical word "healing" something happens to remind us that the scar is a zipper, ready to reveal wounds that still lie close to the surface." Writes columnist Mark Shields, " How conflicted about their own actions are all the middle-aged males on the press bus or in positions of public and private leadership who, through the testimony of friendly physician or graduate school deferment artfully evaded the nation's military call?" The problem is academics and media persons won't let the issues be raised. For example, my current 10 part series on Vietnam goes out by e-mail to 40 professors at the University of Kansas. Already l4 of these professors have e-mailed me back to remove them from my list. They say things like "I don't want to hear what you have to say." There is the problem. Those who opposed the war have never had the courage to try to defend their position with the veterans . Until they find that courage what Vietnam vet Milt Copulos said recently in "VFW Magazine" will no doubt continue to be true, "There's a wall 10 miles high and 50 miles thick between those of us who went and those who didn't, and that wall is never going to come down." There is then, a fault line, between those who served and those who didn't, many of the latter now entrenched in our universities, which could lead to another, even more dangerous, polarization as the current war on terrorism continues. As was stated in the Manifesto of V.V.A.R., placed on record with the White House in the late 80's, " A major lesson of Vietnam is that American foreign policy should henceforth take into consideration that the liberal university and media, largely apologists for secularism and therefore hostile to the traditional values of the American majority, 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 book written by former Congressman John LeBoutiellier, "Harvard Hates America." Or as the noted sociologist Paul Hollander of U. Mass recently wrote, "The university is the reservoir of an adversary culture." The entire psychology by which persons in the media and academia must continue to lie about Vietnam rests obviously on their guilt over having turned their backs on a struggle for freedom. The only solution is a massive aknowledgement of bankruptcy, betrayal and guilt by our intellectuals, especially in the humanities and the social sciences, and immediate exposure of their basic assumptions about life and human nature to re-examination in debate with philosophers and especially theologians, because in the final analysis the conflict in the U.S. over Vietnam was ideological. To tell the truth about Vietnam at this time is by definition, to demand a reformation of our universities as the metastasizing of the lies they told in the 60's is corrupting our entire culture. Part 9 of our 10 part series "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform We are almost at the end of this series on Vietnam and the media. The final part will be a selection on the media from a just finished book on the Vietnam War by one of its veterans. And there will be one part after that on the issues that cannot be discussed in today's campus newspapers, as the result of the "advocacy journalism" of the 60's continuing into our times. But before we share that we would like to say a word about the primary mission of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, and that is education reform. The first part of this report is from a one-hour talk Mr. Magruder gave on radio station KAW recently in Lawrence, Kansas. This is followed, however, by material that was not reported by the media. Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform has held four protests on the Univ. of Kansas campus in recent years. The university newspaper, The Daily Kansan would not report on the substance of any of them, showing that not much has changed. From the radio talk: "Those who fought for freedom for South Vietnam will continue to speak out against the growing totalitarianism on the American campus, as seen in multiculturalism, dormitory re-education, gender feminism, sensitivity training, speech codes, political correctness, historical revisionism (particularly on the Vietnam War), leftist attacks on America and democracy, postmodernism, and deconstructionism." We also concerned about why American students rank so poorly in international competition, (19th) as well as the seriously flawed approaches to education being fostered by the social sciences, such as "approximate" spelling and math, massive grade inflation to assure "self-esteem", "look-say" over the proven superiority of phonics in reading, dropping of the multiplication table, serious historical revisionism by gender feminists, literature chosen on the accidental basis of gender, class, and race, and the attack on excellence, standards, and honors. The perpetuation of these failed approaches by the education establishment strikes us as perversity and utter folly, a total betray of its charge and something this nation should not put up with any longer. Our social scientists and educators now stand speechless before the specter of a collapse they themselves engineered. The nation is under no further obligation to indulge them with the whole future of the nation now at stake. We are also concerned about the psycho noxious impact of humanistic psychology on students. There is significant research showing that the "psychological conditioning" courses in high schools, (sex education, values clarification, affective education, death education, drug and alcohol courses etc.) are resulting in significant rises in violence, abortion, teen-age pregnancy, AIDS , racism , drug and alcohol abuse. The impact of the social sciences on secondary education is a growing national disaster, as the flawed theories of humanistic psychologists (Rogers, Maslow, Kohlberg, etc.) produce students who are intellectually incompetent, morally confused, sexually absorbed, and socially maladjusted. The emphasis in these theories on feelings ("trust the organism" -Rogers) to the neglect of reason is the most profound failing of 20th century psychology. This, combined with the teaching that "there is no right or wrong", is the direct cause of the rise of the sociopathic personality in our time. The first warning that these "psychological conditioning" courses in high schools would produce sociopaths, or "killer kids", antedated the first student killing at Pearl, Mississippi by four months, and appeared in material V.V.A.R. distributed at the Univ. of Kansas in its second protest , ignored by the university newspaper. The protest also dealt with certain developments in higher educations, as follows: "Multiculturalism"- enforced cultural relativism, rooted in a seething hostility towards the predominance of democratic and Judeo-Christian values in Western civilization, and riddled with the simplistic buzzwords of humanistic psychology. "The result can only be the fragmentation , re-segregation, and tribalization of America." - the noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. "Self-esteem"- quintessential humanistic psychobabble, source of dumbed down textbooks, the deception of parents in grade inflation, and the "new racism" on campus. Creates make-believe uniqueness, an absolute barrier to personal growth. "Sensitivity training" - the dormitory as re-education camp, teaching students "proper" beliefs about race, gender, and sexual preferences, sources of rising rates on campus of pregnancy, abortion, AIDS, and date rape. Social scientists teach students to view sex as a non-moral, non-romantic recreational activity, something like football. "Speech Codes" - hunting licenses to track down and punish those who are not in step ideologically with the social sciences, denying students the right to disapprove of something, such as homosexuality. "Political correctness"- forcing conformity to the moral relativism of the social scientists through administrative harassment, with immunity for left/liberal academic thugs who beat up dissident guest speakers . "Gender feminism" - "The most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the 60's. It certainly deserves its place in the halls of intellectual barbarism. Women's studies are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred." Robert Bork "Deconstructionism" - tendentious mumbo-jumbo, using the classroom to propagandize for self-congratulatory nihilism. A massive attack on conscience and the values of Western civilization. "Postmodernism"- the New Left of the 60's come to power, with all the distinguishing characteristics of fascism; social contructionism, cultural relativism, rejection of individual identity, rejection of transcendence, science and reason. Fueled by the anti-humanism of Heidegger, who along with Paul de Man (deconstructionism) were both Nazi apologists. We call on all the universities of America to begin reform by adopting something like the following Charter of Purpose of Bellarmine College in Lousiville, Kentucky: "This college calls upon all member of the academic community to address themselves to ultimate questions about reality and human life: the meaning of God, freedom, society, suffering and death, care and hope. It is when men and women have come to grips with questions such as these, and have achieved some measure of careful considered response, that they begin to advance towards educational maturity." It is the position of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform that by neglecting these questions the university is in the vanguard of moving society in an increasingly sociopathic direction. There is now no alternative but to acknowledge a massive moral, intellectual, and scientific bankruptcy on the part of the social sciences and the humanities and to call for immediate exposure of their basic assumptions to re-examination in debate with philosophers and especially theologians. We also call for an immediate moratorium on all psychological conditioning courses in our high schools and universities and a march by l,000,000 Vietnam veterans and 3,000,000 parents on the National Education Association in Washington in demand of reform. The critics scoffed when the majority argued that the loss of South Vietnam to Communism would threaten America. That it has, but in a manner unforeseen. It isn't that foreign armies threaten us, it is that when Southeast Asia fell, the New Left, the S.D.S. and other radicals on campus were encouraged, strengthening the leftist attack on American values. They cowered so long in the classroom to avoid the battlefield they became tenured professors, now dominating our universities and brainwashing students with their alien and totalitarian philosophy. We call on all veterans to join us in this struggle for freedom from tyranny on a new battlefield - the university. We urge all veteran groups to be ready to march in protest when blatant oppression of student rights appear on any nearby campus, and to call in the local newspapers and complain. It is time to reclaim our educational systems from those who want only to impose on them their own alien agendas, hostile to democracy and traditional American values. Part 10 of our 10 part series "Vietnam and the Media," by Leonard Magruder, President - Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform A Vietnam veteran who has just finished a new history on the Vietnam War has just given me permission to quote from his chapter on the media, but wishes however, to remain anonymous. I can think of no better way to end this series, "Vietnam and the Media" than to look at the conclusions of someone who was there, and is an accomplished historian. Conclusions: There were some worthy, honest, and intelligent reporters in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, Dickey Chapelle, Robert Shaplen, Liz Trotta, Peter Braestrup, Hugh Mulligan, Keyes Beech, Neil Davis, Denis Warner, were among those who objectively, and without resort to sensationalism, conveyed elements of truth, parts of the puzzle, to the American public. Their efforts notwithstanding, the fog of nonsense spewed out by others obscured and effectively censored honest, logical, comprehensive reporting, denying the American public information needed to develop accurately informed opinions. News media malfeasance was complemented by brilliant manipulative Hanoi propaganda, and a corresponding U.S. government inability or unwillingness to make a case for its own efforts. The American public could not hope to understand what was taking place, and does not today. No one, least of all South Vietnamese, American or other allied forces, was oblivious of or happy with the endemic corruption and incompetence, yet, because of flawed and narrowly focused "reporting" the story of South Vietnam's progress and improvement remains untold. American reporters never wrote or televised stories about CDR, Phan Quang Dan, Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, Gen. Nguyen Khoa Nam, the 81st Biet Kich, the Hau Nghia RF, Col. Mach Van Truong, Gen. Le Minh Dao, Tran Ngoc Chau, Col. Ha Mai Viet, writer Nguyen Manh Con, or RVN Marine Sergeant Van Luom, who stood alone on the Dong Ha Bridge and knocked out the lead tank in an NVA armor column with a shoulder-fired antitank missile, an act, in the words of an American witness, of inspiring "defiance and bravery." Knowing little of this, the American public was understandably disenchanted. The news media seldom, if ever, accompanied American or Australian troops on MEDCAPS or DENTCAPs (Dental Civic Action Projects extremely welcome to rural people with painful tooth conditions) In the first six months of 1969 more than 200,000 villagers received medical care and 15,000 received dental care from the 3rd U.S.Marine division alone. Instead the American public was subjected to repeated coverage of the My Lai atrocity , which, like the photo of Gen. Loan, was considered symbolic and representative of the entire war. Wolfgang Leonhard, a Soviet commuist agent before defecting to the West, was tasked with analyzing western news media stories. He and his colleagues were puzzled over superficial news coverage predominating in the newspapers they read. "Generally, we could only shake our heads over them, and often we were exceedingly disappointed. There was usually not even mention of the really significant events that were causing endless discussions amongst ourselves and on which we were passionately eager to read a serious Western commentary. "They don't seem to know what is going on " was the main theme of our conversations when we talked to each other on the subject." One of the more tragic ironies of Vietnam and the news media failure is that there were many fascinating and positive stories to be told. The American people would have appreciated seeing hour-long specials on, for example, U.S. Marine Corps CAP units, a squad of 14 Marines living in one hamlet for their entire tour, working with and defending "their " hamlet alongside local PF. USMC CAPs had a higher voluntary extension rate than among their line unit counterparts. Why? It would have made for a good story. It would have been equally enlightening to see programs showing U.S. troops helping an orphanage, or volunteering to teach English. The American public deserved to know about a VNAF Skyraider pilot who had been shot down five times, and continued flying, despite his several fused vertebrae. They deserved to know that American forces could take on the NVA, in their own backyard, and prevail. Something might have been learned from Americans who volunteered for three, four, five, six, or even seven tours as advisors, choosing to serve in Vietnam again and again, not as bloodthirsty and uncaring killers, but as very normal, decent human beings who could eloquently and convincingly explain their motivations, which was ultimately to see Vietnamese people have a life of peace and decent government. Geopolitics and the Cold War, all relatively abstract concepts, were not a primary concern, taking a back seat to basic human concerns for that which is fair. Americans would have benefited by hearing of Captain Nguyen Quy An, Lt.Vu Tung and Warrant Officer Nguyen Quang Hien of the famed 219 Kingbees. Were it not for the action of these men, John Litter, Bob Stratliff and Wiley L . Craney, by their own testimony, would have been killed or captured after their helicopter had been shot down in Laos. They were rescued by Captain An and his crew while under fire and surrounded by NVA. Captain An would later lose both his hands by keeping control of a burning helicopter, saving the lives of others on board who would have died had the flame-engulfed chopper fallen from the sky. Americans were mesmerized by the NVA 25-day hold on Hue City in 1968, and presumably would be similarly impressed by the 92nd Ranger Battalion 400-day stand at the remote base of Tong Le Chan. Completely cut off, resupplied only by air, the 92nd held, with ambulatory wounded refusing evacuation. Had a VA unit held out for over 400 days, surrounded and cut off, it would have made headline news. The 92nd Rangers did it and nothing was said. Had a handful of VC high school boys held off an allied attack it would also would have made headlines. A handful of high school boys did resist VC/NVA forces at the "Troung Thieu Sinh Quan", a junior high school military academy for sons of RVNAF (South Vietnamese) military fatalities. They resisted to the end in 1975, with twelve and thirteen year old boys sending younger kids home, staying in their barricaded school and fighting on. Many of them were killed and when the Communists came in they fought them. The Communists could not get into that academy. NVA forces eventually surrounded the school, threatened to level it with rockets, kill everyone inside, and negotiated a surrender. This last stand would presumably have had all the drama and "human interest" for a "big story" and had VC adolescents been involved opposing RVNAF , the story would undoubtedly have been trumpeted to the American public. To this day next to nothing has been said or printed, and the cadets at Troung Thieu Sinh Quan are not even a footnote to history. Coverage of these stories could have gone on and should have gone side-by-side with negative reporting on corruption, civilian casualties, drug use, and other presumed universal evils of American involvement in Southeast Asia. It is neither suggested nor desired that blemishes or morally repugnant aspects be ignored or covered up. It is asserted, however, that it would have been far more honest to have contrasted examples of deplorable behavior with other aspects, not in the least rare, of which many Vietnam veterans are familiar with and participated in. Fairness and objectivity also demand that equal coverage be applied to the VC/NVA shortcomings and ruthless excesses shown in proportion to their existence and occurrence. Had all this been done the American public would have been able to understand something, and certainly much more than the psuedo-understanding derived from the "shoot-em-up-bang-bang" reporting they were continually exposed to. For any number of reasons, "positive" news did little for a reporter's career or ego, a career based on finding or inventing "stories" accentuating the negative while heightening public discontent. Ignorance of military and Southeast Asia matters, of communist revolutionary warfare, fueled by potential for lucrative career advancement, unwilling or unable to report on South Vietnamese or Laotian troops except in cases of failure, apparently enthused by the visual impact of war and the destruction it causes, sometimes disdainful of South Vietnamese if not American troops while ignoring Australian, Korean, Thai, and New Zeland forces, the news media proved incapable of depicting Vietnam, and Hanoi's War, in its entirety . The American public saw the same "bang-bang" every year, and were misled into assuming nothing had changed, nothing was accomplished. Allied temporary defeats were portrayed as permanent setbacks, while victories and accomplishments went unreported, or were, with smug theatrics, cast aside as government propaganda. News media misrepresentation not only misled and uninformed the American public, but also prohibited its ability to think and make logical inferences on its own. In the final analysis, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Hanoi's war, and American involvement could not be, and cannot be, understood, in good part because of media failings, moral, intellectual, and otherwise. Without recognizing this, and knowing that what was reported was not the all-comprehensive truth of the matter, the subject itself cannot be understood. Overall, and efforts of responsible reporters notwithstanding, the nature and extent of news media failure in Vietnam exceeds that of allied military forces who were attempting to and succeeding, despite documented lies and bumbling, to stop Hanoi's War. Many people died and millions more have greatly suffered simply because the whole story was never told. And because what was portrayed in media reporting was demonstrably not, to use the famous Cronkite phrase, "the way it is." This bitter judgement is itself based on beliefs articulated by Robert Elegant, himself a journalist : "Illusionary events reported by the press as well as real events within the press corps were more decisive that the clash of arms or the contention of idologies. For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page , and above all, on the television screen." "Looking back, I believe it can be said that South Vietnam and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi, and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance". (Editor's note: Elegant, a highly acclaimed British reporter on Vietnam, later added these terrible words: "never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side." Could this possibly be the truth about the performance of the U.S. media in Vietnam? In ending this series, from my extended observation and study of the media while on the home front during the war, this is certainly the way it looked to me. And many others. Said Senator Margaret Chase Smith, "The press has become more sympathetic to the enemy than to our own national interest."(Congressional Record, June 16, 1971) www.vvar.homestead.com Before I go, I see you are clearly indoctrinated. Chomsky is really a worthless marxist jackass. PS. By the way 5% of the American people know who he is? Sounds like an imaginary pole, with imaginary figures, keyword-IMAGINARY. That is what all of Chomksy's claims are based upon. He own wild dereanged fantasy life, yet privileged life at MIT, were the moron created his linguistical theory. Which probably die before he does. I can't wait for Noam to die, considering he doesn't deserve to live because of his many treasonist acts, including his vacation, guided tour, and radio adress in Hanoi, in where he reinterated Communist lies and propaganda. May he die painfully, really painfully.

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