Top 5 Books On JFK & Vietnam

[Michael Griffith]

On 8/16/2023 at 9:14 AM, Tom Gram said:

Really? Now you are uncritically defending cluster munitions?  

I used to work for DoD, and was involved in the demilitarization of the entire US stockpile of 155mm DPICM rounds, M483/483A1s, after they were banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008. For those who don’t know, these were big artillery shells designed to explode in the air and release 88 miniature shaped charged grenades. The grenades have a wound-up cloth ribbon on top that is designed to unwind and spin as they fall through the air and detonate just off the ground with the shaped charge pointing down, killing anyone unlucky enough to be underneath. 

The problem is the ribbon fuze mechanism is total crap - it doesn’t always unwind - so for each round you get x amount of these innocuous looking mini death grenades scattered all over the ground with the ribbon held on by a glorified paper clip, or nothing at all. A kid comes by, thinks it’s a toy, unwinds the ribbon and gets blown in half, hence the CCM in 2008. 

DPICM rounds were first used in combat in Vietnam. Criticizing Fonda and Vietnam vets for being sharp enough to realize how f-ed up these things were over 30 years before the CCM is the only thing here that’s bordering on the obscene. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions

If you're unhappy that we used cluster munitions in Vietnam, then I'm sure you'll join me in roundly condemning the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army (NVA) for the following actions during the war:

-- Assassinating school teachers, nurses, doctors, mail carriers, clergy, and local/low-level government officials by the thousands.

-- Shelling tens of thousands of civilians who were fleeing on crowded roads and highways. The NVA did this more than once. The Communists viewed fleeing civilians as traitors who were refusing to be "liberated."

-- Sending children on suicide missions by giving them time bombs or other explosives and sending them to nearby American or South Vietnamese troops. When the bombs would fail to denotate, interviews with the children revealed that most of them had not been told they were carrying explosives. 

-- Drafting teens as young as 14 and forcing them to serve in the NVA. 

-- Chaining soldiers to their weapons or in their firing position so they could not flee.

-- Booby-trapping corpses.

-- Using claymore mines (an anti-personnel cluster munition) to blow up restaurants and hotels. The Viet Cong would repeatedly detonate claymore mines inside a restaurant or hotel, and would then wait until the survivors began to flee the building and then would detonate more claymores that they had positioned on the escape routes from the building.

Criticizing Fonda and Vietnam vets for being sharp enough to realize [how wrong the war was]. . . . 

One, only a small minority of Vietnam vets criticized the war effort. The overwhelmingly majority did not.

Two, Jane Fonda and the small minority of anti-war vets oddly said nothing about the above-listed actions. Nor did they have anything to say when the North Vietnamese imposed a "reign of terror" on the South Vietnamese, as one former Viet Cong leader described it, executing tens of thousands of people and sending nearly one million others to concentration camps, where the death rate was, as even Max Hastings admits, at least 5%. 

Fonda and the anti-war vets suddenly fell silent about their professed concern for "human rights" when news of the butchery and concentration camps in Vietnam began to reach the U.S. Nor did Fonda and the anti-war vets complain about the fact that Hanoi's tyrants broke their repeated promise to allow South Vietnam to govern itself under a neutral or friendly government. The breaking of this oft-stated promise was part of the reason that a number of Viet Cong officials defected and left the country.

A few people in the anti-war movement did speak out about the brutality and oppression that the Communists imposed on the South Vietnamese after the war, but Fonda, Hayden, Sutherland, Abzug, etc., were not among them. 

Edited September 11, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Michael Griffith]

To show how truly embarrassing and inexcusable it is for anyone to still deny that the North Vietnamese imposed a reign of terror after they won, let us consider the open letter that numerous former anti-war activists sent to the Hanoi regime in 1979.

To their credit, a number of liberals who played leading roles in the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War condemned the Hanoi regime in 1979 when they finally--some would say belatedly--became convinced that the Communists were brutalizing and oppressing the people.

In an “Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” published in five major newspapers on May 30, 1979, Joan Baez and other former anti-war activists called out Vietnam's Communist leaders for serious human rights violations. The letter was written by Joan Baez and Ginetta Sagan and was signed by numerous other prominent liberal anti-war activists, including Norman Cousins, I. F. Stone, Norman Lear, Cesar Chavez, Edward Asner, and Daniel Berrigan.

Guess which anti-war activists condemned the letter or declined to comment on it? Shamefully, the list is very long. A small sampling: Jane Fonda, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, William Kuntsler, and Tom Hayden condemned the letter--they actually blamed the U.S. for the oppression in Vietnam (some anti-war activists even argued that the CIA was behind the refugee accounts). Musician John Lennon and his wife Yoki Ono and actors Donald Sutherland, Michael Alaimo, and Peter Boyle declined to comment on the letter. Vietnam Veterans Against the War leaders John Kerry, Ron Kovic, Jan Barry, and Al Hubbard also declined to comment on the letter.

On a separate occasion, Joan Baez even complained that she had been "used" by the Left during the Vietnam War. 

To her further great credit, Joan Baez led the effort to persuade President Jimmy Carter to help the Vietnamese boat people and other Vietnamese who were fleeing from the Hanoi regime's tyranny. She eventually even persuaded President Carter to send the Seventh Fleet to rescue the boat people who were still at sea. 

Baez became convinced that the growing mountain of accounts of Communist brutality in Vietnam were true when her good friend and Amnesty International official Ginetta Sagan personally interviewed numerous Vietnamese refugees (see https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=dissertation). Baez and Sagan teamed up to form Humanitas, which sponsored the open letter. Here is a portion of the open letter:

          Thousands of innocent Vietnamese, many whose only «crimes» are those of conscience, are being arrested, detained and tortured in prisons and re-education camps. Instead of bringing hope and reconciliation to war-torn Vietnam, your government has created a painful nightmare that overshadows significant progress achieved in many areas of Vietnamese society. . . .

          We have heard the horror stories from the people of Vietnam from workers and peasants, Catholic nuns and Buddhist priests, from the boat people, the artists and professionals and those who fought alongside the NLF. The jails are overflowing with thousands upon thousands of detainees. People disappear and never return. People are shipped to re-education centers, fed a starvation diet of stale rice, forced to squat bound wrist to ankle, suffocated in connex boxes. People are used as human mine detectors, clearing live mine fields with their hands and feet. For many, life is hell and death is prayed for. . . .

          Many victims are men, women and children who supported and fought for the causes of reunification and self-determination; those who as pacifists, members of religious groups, or on moral and philosophic grounds opposed the authoritarian policies of Thieu and Ky; artists and intellectuals whose commitment to creative expression is anathema to the totalitarian policies of your government.

          Requests by Amnesty International and others for impartial investigations of prison conditions remain unanswered. Families who inquire about husbands, wives, daughters or sons are ignored. (https://vietnamkrigen.wordpress.com/dokumentsamling/open-letter-to-the-socialist-republic-of-vietnam/)

Edited February 6 by Michael Griffith