Oh, Come On, Were The Commies Really
That Bad?
by Phillip
Jennings - July/13/2010
That,
in a phrase, was the underlying assumption of much of the anti-war Left.
It’s a pretty awful assumption. The short answer is yes, they were that
bad if you were a member of the clergy, or a landowner, or a capitalist, or
wealthy, or valued freedom, or were opposed to inescapable state control and
indoctrination, or if you wore glasses (a sign of deviationist intellectualism
at various times in Cambodia or China), or became in any way an enemy of the
Communist Party. Globally, Communism was the largest and most deadly social
experiment known to mankind. When it collapsed in the 1990s, it had killed,
according to the best estimates, 100,000,000 men, women, and children. More
than 30,000,000 more were killed in its wars against other countries.
This was the ideology of the North Vietnamese regime that was supported by the
movie stars, college students, professional agitators, academics, and leftist
journalists who prided themselves on being anti-war. And they weren’t the
only ones. Most people assume that it was the young in the 1960s and 1970s who
were most opposed to the war. That’s because most media coverage was of
student protests. But actually, statistically speaking, if you were opposed to
the war, you were an “old woman.” Polls taken throughout the war
were consistent—older people were more opposed to the war than younger
people, and women more than men. In a series of twenty-two polls taken from May
1965 through May 1971, support for the war was greater among those under thirty
than those over forty-nine. In fact, the support for the war was greater from
those under thirty than those between the ages of thirty and forty-nine in all
of the polls except September 1966 and September 1969. As late as February
1968, the majority of Americans were definite hawks. Twenty-five percent wanted
to “gradually broaden and intensify our military operations,” and
another 28 percent wanted to “start an all-out crash effort in the hope
of winning the war quickly even at the risk of
So who were the visible and angry protesters? Surely the most visible would be
actress and political activist Jane Fonda. Her actions during the Vietnam War
defined her for most Americans. For those few who don’t know—she
supported the enemy. There really is no other way to put it. She traveled to
Hanoi, called American soldiers “war criminals,” thanked the
Russians for supporting the North Vietnamese, posed for photos sitting in a
North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, and dismissed American POWs as liars
when they said they had been tortured. Jane Fonda bought the whole anti-war
program down to accepting Communism as not such a bad thing after all. Or, as
she put it in a speech to
Fonda’s
understanding of the war always seemed a bit sketchy, though this did not
inhibit her in the slightest in leading protests against it. During her tour of
North Vietnam she said, “Every man, woman and child in this country has a
determination like a bright flame, buoying them, strengthening their
determination to go forward, to fight for freedom and independence.”
Fonda was perhaps unaware that
Only in
Editor's Note:
Phillip Jennings is the author of the "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War."
You really should buy one - you will like reading the truth!
Phillip
