The use of propaganda and psychological warfare by the Left by Russell L. Blaylock, M.D.

Introduction

This momentous essay was written by my friend, Dr. Russell L. Blaylock, who has studied political science, in general, and totalitarianism and communism, in particular, for nearly five decades. Dr. Blaylock wrote this paper in 1989 but the manuscript had been lost. Fortunately, he had sent me a copy, which I had read, kept and treasured. I recently rediscovered the copy rummaging through my papers, and with Russell’s permission, this magnificent essay has finally reached the light of day, now published online by HaciendaPublishing.com.

Those of you who read this essay carefully will find valuable historical knowledge as well as timeless sociological and psychological wisdom in its analyses of the flawed political philosophies of collectivist/communist revolutions. These deceptive socialist revolutions — aided by the use of psychological warfare and abetted by the organs of propaganda disseminated by the popular press and other media — frequently topple governments and reach bitter fruition. The heaven-on-earth workers’ paradise never materializes. Instead, the workers’ paradise turn out to be led by authoritarian tyrants imposing hells-on-earth — oppressive police states, peppered with concentration camps fenced in with barbwire. In the end, these left-wing dictatorships deceptively seeking people’s democracies and elusive equality (where members of the Party are always more equal than others) are always incompatible with personal security, liberty, happiness, and the aspirations of the human soul. Desolation, extermination of “enemies of the State” (euphemistically sometimes shouted as “enemies of the people”), cruelty, barbarity, and slavery become the order of the day. — Miguel A. Faria, MD

Now that the subject of the Vietnam War is no longer treated as if it were a social disease, a vast number of books analyzing this often confusing topic have emerged. Some are excellent analyses of the war from various standpoints: tactical, strategic, political and sociological. While they cover many aspects of the war, none have really focused on one of the most important features of the war and that is the role played by the so-called “anti-war activists,” communist front groups and fellow travelers in North Vietnam’s psychological war against the United States. As experts in this field, the communists realized that psychological warfare is equally if not more vital than military hardware, or the size of one’s army, and even more important than advanced technology when facing a larger, better equipped enemy, such as the United States.

Throughout the Vietnam War the leaders of the communist North emphasized the importance of gaining the favor of the Western liberals, especially those in the United States. Truong Mealy, a former Vietcong agent stated it best when he said:

From the very beginning we were taught the art of deception. Telling lies is part of winning the victory. You do anything to overthrow the government and defeat the enemy.

This, of course, is consistent with Lenin’s principle of communist morality, that is, anything that promotes the revolution is moral. But modern communist wars have developed psychological warfare not only into a science but also into an art form. Vietcong defector Truong Nhu Tang, who served as the Minister of Justice in the NFL (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam or Viet Cong) from 1960 until 1976, stated:

Psychological (warfare) is the principle decisive arm of the popular front. Another section of the NFL was responsible for working with groups in the West opposed to the war, and Western media to weaken the resolve of the American government.

And just how did they propose to destroy our will to defend our freedom?

Our aim was to present to the world as a large representation of the South’s population. And the American media are easily open to suggestion and false information given by communist agents. The [American] society is completely hypnotized by the media.

In other words, the Vietcong used sympathetic or unknowing Western journalists to ignore the North’s invasion of South Vietnam. They did this by using the time-honored tactic of painting themselves as the true representatives of the peasants, as land reformers, and as nationalists.  Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the communists in the North were able to convince American liberal leftists and influential media representatives that they were indeed the legitimate heirs of a unified Vietnam. The manipulation of the media was, according to Tang, quite easy. In his book, he cites the case of Phan Xuan An, who manipulated several important American reporters for years. Today, An is a high-ranking officer in the communist intelligence apparatus in Ho Chi Minh City.

But the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese government went much further than merely influencing the media. They also sought the aid of the American peace movement, which was an admixture of the old and new Left, drugged-out hippies, and anarchists. They were quick to see that the youth of America had great potential for use as a psychological weapon in the war against the United States. While the communists knew that the vast majority in the West would never openly support communist objectives, they recognized that the dedicated members of the old and new Left could easily manipulate the non-communist peace groups. They were the invisible organizers and the motivating force behind the protesting groups.

As a result, the Vietcong maintained agents in the U.S. who analyzed the effectiveness of the anti-war youth movements. Tang stated:

Our analysis that antiwar sentiment was having an increased impact on American staying power was thus confirmed at the source. It was evident that we has succeeded in opening … our fourth front … and we started monitoring domestic developments in the U.S. even more attentively… Our goal was to infiltrate public opinion … in the United States, where we would enhance our claim of representing the Southern [Vietnam] people, giving the peace movement additional ammunition … the idea that continued American intervention was immoral was gaining widespread credence in the U.S., according to our intelligence analysis…

The North Vietnamese communist and the Vietcong came to depend more and more on the American Left after their disastrous defeat during the Tet Offensive. Admiral James Stockdale and Jeremiah Denton both stated that during their long stays in the North Vietnamese POW camps they were told on numerous occasions by their captors, “We cannot beat the United States on the battlefield but we shall defeat you on the streets of America.”

By the time Nixon became president, the will of the United States had been broken. Communist Vietnam’s psychological war had been successful beyond their wildest expectations. But one final blow awaited the beleaguered giant — Congress must have its will crushed beyond repair. Once diplomatic negotiations had been completed and Vietnam was finally partitioned and American troops withdrawn, all that was required was assurances that the U.S. would not defend her new partner. Those assurances were soon to follow. The leftists in Congress held the day. It was decided by Congress that we would not live up to our agreement to supply replacement weapons and ammunition to the South Vietnamese military. Truong Nhu Tang summarizes the final victory in Southeast Asia for the communist forces:

The final campaign against Saigon was to be a classic battle of main forces. But such a climax had been made possible only by the thoroughness of our victories on the political and diplomatic fronts. It had been through gradual and cumulative erosion of our enemies’ internal cohesion that prepared the way for Saigon’s sudden collapse while her protector looked on helplessly.

So why should we open these old wounds? After all, the war has been over for twenty years; the nation has begun its healing process; Jimmy Carter had pardoned the draft dodgers (who flew to Canada during the war); Jane Fonda sort-of apologized for her traitorous collaboration with the enemy that hurt her acting career, and her former husband, Tom Hayden (known for standing trial in the Chicago Seven case), now wears a suit and attends the Democratic National Convention as a mainstream politician. Many of the same congressmen who betrayed Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the sacrifice of nearly sixty thousand American soldiers’ lives, now sit in judgment of our Central American policies. It is for all these reasons, but particularly the last, that we must re-examine our policies and those of our enemies both foreign and domestic.

The communists, as all conservatives know, are masters of deception, manipulation, disinformation, terror, and other forms of psychological warfare. Vietnam, in this regard, was not a one-time event. The pattern used there had been successful before — first by Lenin in attaining power in the Russia in 1917, and then by Stalin in collectivizing farming and collaborating with Hitler in a quest for world domination. Stalin deceived the West into believing that he was turning the Soviet Union into a utopia, which in truth he turned it into a hell on earth. He then convinced the United States that he had always been our ally against Hitler, a myth that still lives on.

In Korea, American POWs experienced first hand the use of communist psychological warfare. With each conquest, the communists have vastly improved their methodology and fine tuned their propaganda and disinformation techniques. We have seen that the war in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefield but in the minds of Americans back home, who were victims of a carefully planned and conducted psychological assault on our values and ideas that totally destroyed our will to resist the forces of totalitarianism. We should learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. We can do this only by a deep understanding of their methods and motivations.

The methodology of the communist movements worldwide has been reproduced so many times, and is so well documented that there is little excuse for falling victim to its deceptive techniques again. Yet, that is exactly what happened in South Africa, in the Philippines, in South America, and especially in Central America. In many instances it is the same front groups, the same institutions, and even the same personalities who were behind the Soviet conquest of new territories. The methods used by the communists to neutralize the opposition or those who sound the alarm, is a carbon copy of that used during the Vietnam War. The cries of McCarthyism arise against every individual or group that attempts to shed light on the true nature of this assault on freedom. The flood of disinformation from the front groups and Soviet and Cuban agents, since the Vietnam War, continues unabated. And as with the war in Vietnam, the national media has joined the chorus of the New Left in aiding the Soviet cause. What is different is the role being played by the high tech public relations companies acting on the behalf of the communist governments and the role being played by the American legal apparatus.

Let us look at the psychological methods being utilized by the communists in Central America and see how they compare to those developed and refined by the Vietnamese communists during the war. As stated above, the psychological war waged upon the United States by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese communist party was one of the most successful in the history of warfare. It gave the communists a tremendous weapon with which to fight a militarily superior opponent — the United States.

Encouraged by their victory in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union directed its attention to an even more vital area of the Western world, Central America. This area is particularly important to the Soviets for several reasons. First, it represents a tremendous cold war victory since it demonstrates to the world America’s inability, through a loss of will, to defend its own backyard. Consequently, Latin American countries are more prone to accept closer ties to the victor of this battle, the Soviet Union. After all, the United States has shown an unwillingness to defend its allies when the chips are down. This loss of will has been referred to as the post-Vietnam syndrome by the liberal Left.

Second, Central America offers many strategic advantages to the Soviet Union. For instance, airbases in Nicaragua can accommodate nuclear capable aircraft that can reach the United States in two hours. Also, radar networks and listening posts built in Nicaragua can easily spy on the U.S. eastern coast, and when combined with other listening facilities can completely blanket the United States. Once the communist government of Nicaragua is solidified, this strategically located country can act as a launching base for military attacks upon its neighbors as well as upon the United States. Our intelligence data clearly indicates that Nicaragua acts as a base of terrorist training camps, including those operated by the PLO and Muammar Khadafy. These camps are being used to train terrorists to attack not only Nicaragua’s neighbors, but the United States as well.  Finally, Nicaragua may well give the Soviets access to their own trans-oceanic canal. Few are aware that Nicaragua was the first site suggested for the building of the canal. The Soviets have shown renewed interest in this project. Their strategy, of course, hinges on whether or not they can capture Panama.

It is for these reasons that the Soviet Union has chosen to throw all of its effort into capturing this tiny country. Of course, as is more often the case, they operate through their surrogates, particularly Cuba, so as to prevent public alarm in the West. This method has been very successful. After all, who would be afraid of a tiny island country like Cuba? And, as we shall see, the Soviet Union’s main weapon in this battle is the same one it utilized to win in Southeast Asia, psychological warfare, deception and disinformation. Vietcong leader Truong Nhu Tang stated the tactic of the communists in Vietnam was to manipulate “American public opinion” and that it was “the hearts and minds of the American people that have to be motivated and exploited.” Today, when Minister of Internal Security, Tomas Borge declares that “the battle for Nicaragua is not being waged in Nicaragua. It is being fought in the United States” — he, as his predecessors in Vietnam, means that the victory of communism in the Americas shall be won by deceiving the West and destroying its will to resist. 

During the early stages of the Vietnam War the communists in the North first convinced the liberals and leftists in the United States that they were nationalists and not communists. This disinformation campaign was quite successful. Even high-ranking members of the State Department were making such idiotic assertions despite enormous evidence to the contrary. What is even more incredible is that such disinformation was allowed to take root even when it was well known by knowledgeable Asian scholars that Ho Chi Minh had lived and trained in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s and later traveled to France where he helped set up the French Communist Party. And that on returning to power in North Vietnam, he proceeded to murder all of the non-communist nationalist factions. He murdered not only the members of these parties, but also their families.

In Nicaragua, it was known that a small segment of the Sandinistas were in fact communist agents working closely with Cuba’s Fidel Castro. At least one year before the fall of Anastasio Somoza, Castro had secretly shipped in a huge cache of weapons to the FSLN. The details of this story are recounted in Shirley Christian’s book, Nicaragua: A Revolution in the Family. The Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, and their ruling directorate were communist revolutionaries long before the fall of Somoza. This is well documented just as was the case of Ho Chi Minh.  But through a well-coordinated and orchestrated disinformation campaign utilizing American leftist groups and liberal media, this fact was kept from the American public. As with Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega and his FSLN Sandinistas were portrayed as merely revolutionaries seeking democracy and freedom.

Ho Chi Minh and his American “useful fools” used the same tactic when they painted the North Vietnamese communists as simple peasants seeking self-determination, even at the expense of Soviet domination. Once the French had been disposed of, Ho sought land reform. The West was told that evil landlords, set up by the colonialists, controlled vast amounts of land. Uncle Ho was painted as a hero and defender of the peasants who has suffered under the system. Nquyen Tuong Lai, a security official for communist Vietnam from 1975-1978 has stated:

During the war, we used two magic words. The first word was “nationalism,” to get the monks, priests, students, and all social classes to join our front. The second word was ‘democracy,’ promising land reform and political equality for all South Vietnamese.

But this simple truth was never told to the American public before, during or after the war. Yet, the real aims of the Vietnamese communists were available to those who would listen. Take for example Hoaung Van Chi, a resistance operative for the Viet Minh, who stated that in reality Ho’s program was designed to eliminate all non-communist opposition, intimidate the remaining population into obedience and force collectivization of farms, as Stalin had done earlier in the Soviet Union.  The majority of the so-called “landlords” actually owned less than one-half acre. During Ho Chi Minh’s land reform movement, 850,000 peasants were executed or starved to death. Another 50,000 were killed during the peasant uprising against Ho’s reform movement.

Following the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 and its subsequent capture by the communist elements of the FSLN, the Sandinistas were painted in a similar light. We were told both by the Sandinista government and their American “useful fools,” that they were land reformers who sought to take large land holdings from the evil landlords and turn them over to the peasants. But, as with Ho’s Vietnam, the reality was quite different. The Sandinistas have attempted to confiscate all farms and ranches, not to turn them over to the peasants, but to turn them over to the State. Once the Sandinistas were in control, all crops and livestock in Nicaragua belonged to the State. Yet, by manipulating public opinion in the United States, the Sandinistas were still thought to be the friends of the peasants. Many peasants have had their crops burned, their cattle slaughtered, and their lives taken for resisting the communist rulers just as occurred in Vietnam. These facts are well documented, yet they are not available to the general public, unlike the communist propaganda and disinformation carried daily by our news media by pro-Sandinista front groups, by University professors, and by far too many in Congress.

The next step for Ho Chi Minh was to isolate his new enemy, the United States, from its allies. This was done by portraying the United States as the new colonial power in Vietnam, which legitimatized his claim that he was fighting for Vietnamese independence, or to use the Soviet’s favorite term: “self-determination.” This campaign was by the late 1960s enormously effective in that most of the Western world had accepted the notion that the government of South Vietnam was little more than a puppet of the United States, despite considerable evidence otherwise.

Today, the communist FSLN in Nicaragua were able to accomplish the same thing by utilizing its liberal-leftist contacts in the West, particularly in the United States. That is, they portrayed Anastasio Somoza as nothing more than a puppet of the United States and as a corrupt and greedy despot. Our Western newspapers and major networks carried this line, day after day, until the Somoza regime finally collapsed. This is not to say that Somoza was a knight in shining armor, because he wasn’t. He also wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist. He was a greedy authoritarian whose friendship was vital to U.S. strategic interests and whose economic policies were bringing about continued economic growth within Nicaragua. Prudent minds did not object to Somoza being replaced as long as our strategic interests weren’t endangered.

But all was not lost when Somoza was deposed because the largest segment of the Sandinista organization, at the time of the 1979 revolution, was non-communist. The FSLN was a small, but highly organized group, which received considerable support both logistically and militarily from Fidel Castro. At the time of the fall of Somoza in 1979, President Jimmy Carter was urged by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to send in American advisors to monitor the Sandinista’s transition to power so as to prevent the FSLN from stealing the revolution as has happened in so many other revolutions in the past. President Carter repeatedly ignored Brzezinski’s advice. As a result, the FSLN, being the most heavily armed group in the revolutionary factions thanks to Castro’s weapons and military advisors, literally shot their way to power.

Interestingly, these events were ignored by the media. As in the case of Vietnam, we were told that the revolutionaries were poor peasants seeking true democracy and freedom. That Latin America has been the Soviet’s next target was well known by insiders and particularly by those collaborating with the communists in North Vietnam. For instance, in Night Flight to Hanoi, Daniel Berrigan wrote:

For it is perhaps well known by now that the nations of Latin America and Africa are looking to North Vietnam as the most brilliant example of a revolution abroad in full progress.

Indeed, they were watching, listening and planning. As we shall see, they have copied the methods of the North Vietnamese and the communist international almost exactly. Many of the actors from the United States who played such a critical role in bringing the communists to power in Southeast Asia are hard at work today doing the same thing in Central, and eventually, South America. For example, we observe such organizations as the Institute for Policy Studies, the World Peace Council, the Communist Party USA, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and other Soviet fronts, operating in every area of our society concerned with Central and South America. Likewise, we hear the same names involved with Central America that we so frequently heard with the destruction of Southeast Asia, such names as — Peter and Cora Weiss, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Jeff Jones, William Sloane Coffin, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen and John Kerry.

But, it is not only conservatives who have made this connection. In September 1980 a mass demonstration was held by the Sandinista communists to show their solidarity with Hanoi. A portrait of Ho Chi Minh hung next to that of Che Guevara and General Sandino. And indeed they did owe the success of their revolution to Ho Chi Minh, for it was he who showed them how to defeat the United States without firing a shot. While many of the leftist groups working on behalf of the Sandinista communists were created at the time of the war in Vietnam, some were organized solely for the purpose of influencing public opinion on Central America in this country and hence manipulating public policy. Take for example the case of Miguel Bolanos, a high-ranking intelligence official in the Sandinista government who defected to the United States on May 7, 1983. In testimony before a congressional committee he stated that as a student at Louisiana State University (LSU) he set up a Sandinista solidarity group designed to create support for the FSLN. The group raised money, which it sent to the FSLN headquarters in Costa Rica, Bolanos stated:

…by 1978 the Sandinistas realized the value of the solidarity committee in the United States, so they placed a couple of key people in the Sandinista organization in charge of the solidarity network in their country. They were under orders from the Sandinista directorate.

In other words, these solidarity committees were set up with the sole purpose of influencing and manipulating public opinion in America as regards Central American policy. Bolanos testified that the solidarity groups utilized a multitude of means to bring this about, such as disinformation campaigns, the creation of front organizations, youth groups, and teacher organizations, all for the single purpose of spreading a barrage of Sandinista propaganda. They concentrated on discrediting every opposition group in Nicaragua, including all religious denominations, both Christian and Jewish, competing political parties, and the media, principally La Prensa. This extended to the groups working on behalf of the Sandinista communists within the United States.

One of the older groups is the Communist Party USA. It is well documented that it was Sandy Pollack of the CPUSA’s National Council who played such a critical role in laying the groundwork for the National Network in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People. This organization played a pivotal role in stopping aid to the Contras on numerous occasions, and through it congressional influence was able to have legislation passed that blocked similar aid from Third World countries and private groups. How they carried it out is detailed and documented in Francis Bouchey’s book, Real Secret War (1987).

The Nicaraguan Network also operated as a propaganda organization by providing carefully orchestrated tours to Nicaragua, similar to the Potemkin tours arranged for gullible Americans visiting Stalinist Russia in the thirties. In the case of the Soviet tour, we know that they were enormously effective in converting many influential writers, journalists, and intellectuals to the belief that the new Soviet empire was nothing less than utopia. Such tours have become a powerful weapon in the war for minds, and hence territories. To date over 60,000 Americans and West Europeans have traveled to Nicaragua to “experience the revolution.”

The careful orchestration of these tours by the communist intelligence operatives has been well documented by those knowledgeable in disinformation methods. For example, Paul Hollander has written a classic text on the subject, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928-78. A more recent analysis of how these disinformation and propaganda tours work in Nicaragua is contained in the testimony of Mrs. Linda Westrom and Jane Otten. Their important contribution to our knowledge appears in the Congressional Record, Vol. 131, No 44: April 16,1985. In the report they emphasize,

(The tours) are not objective educational experiences designed to acquaint women with the problems of Central America as they are purported to be. They are instead two weeks of intensive anti-United States pro-Sandinista indoctrination.

They also observed that their instructors and guides were Americans who articulated, “deep commitment to Liberation Theology and the Marxist revolutionary movement. During their orientation sessions in Cuernavaca, Mexico, they observed many anti-American posters, one of which especially caught their attention. It was a colorful poster which “depicted U.S. helicopters carrying bombs with the caption, ‘Herod searches for the baby Jesus to kill.’ ” Throughout their trip, they encountered this analogy between Herod and President Reagan. Shirley Christian reports seeing the same propaganda methods being used throughout Nicaragua. Former Sandinista Miguel Bolanos says this is a frequent tactic used by Daniel Ortega. He has a special office where he receives visiting American religious delegations (fully equipped with Bibles, crosses and other religious icons). His real office is plastered with more traditional Marxist-Leninist trappings. Bolanos says that Ortega even memorizes a few Biblical passages for his “useful American fools.”

But, the tours are more than mere propaganda tools. A case in point is the use of such tours in Cuba. According to former Cuban operative Gerardo Peraza, in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism in February 1982, Fidel Castro’s tour brigades are under control of Cuban Intelligence (DGI), which is in turn under the full control of the Soviet KGB. Peraza further stated that American tourists were used to collect intelligence concerning the United States and that the tours also provided the regime an opportunity to recruit American radicals. Some American radicals, he told the subcommittee, have received terrorist training in Cuba. This is also known to be the case in Nicaragua.

Again, none of this is new. Americans traveling to Hanoi during the Vietnam War were similarly treated to large doses of propaganda training and in some cases, recruitment. Jane Fonda was especially useful to their war effort against the United States. She made treasonous broadcasts from Hanoi to our troops; had her picture taken on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun (provided by the Soviet Union), grinning and clapping her hands like an idiot, and forced American POWs to meet with her. After her act of treason she returned to inform the American public that the POWs were being treated well by their captors, which she knew to be a lie. Several POWs have stated that they knew of at least one POW who was beaten to death for refusing to meet with her. Her dedication to the communist cause is legendary.

Others were equally guilty of treason and betrayal. History professor Howard Zinn, who traveled to Hanoi with Daniel Berrigan, heaped praise upon communist North Vietnam, as did U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and dozens of other academics, and journalists. Harrison Salisbury, while more subdued in his support of the regime, nevertheless gave much appreciated credence to their claims of legitimacy and sincerity.

While captives in squalid POW camps, our men were constantly tortured for intelligence information concerning troop strength, weapons systems, and the names of other flyers. In many instances, our POWs fabricated stories to protect secrets and hence the lives of their comrades. Despite the fact that these men endured incredible degrees of torture, these brave men’s sacrifices were nullified by American traitors, who checked what information has been tortured out of the POWs, and reported discrepancies to their communist friends, the guards in the camps. More than one POW died as a result of these disclosures by American traitors.

Certainly traitors are not peculiar to Vietnam. They have always existed in virtually every country ever engaged in war. But what is different in the case of Vietnam and Central America is the protection given to them by our media, liberal intellectuals, and political pundits — all of which you would expect, but they were also given cover by a government that refused to prosecute a single one of these traitors or even publicly condemn their behavior. Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, nor anyone of the numerous despicable traitors have ever been fully exposed by the media or our government. To this day, the media denies and refused to face the obvious fact that they played a critical role in our defeat in Vietnam.

Today, the situation is the same. Those who are acting to bring not only our enemies but enemies of all freedom-loving people to power are given full protection by the media — first, by keeping their communist connections quiet, and second, by giving credibility to their propaganda. Take for instance the solidarity group, Witness for Peace. Organized in 1983, the WFP organization maintains a full time office in Managua, Nicaragua, as a guest of the Sandinista communists with full support of President Daniel Ortega and his Chief of Internal Security, Tomas Borge.  It is from this office that propaganda concerning false Contra atrocities are generated. The WFP organization is so devoted to the communist Sandinistas that they offered to place their members between Sandinista troops and the Contras on the battlefield as a “shield of love.” In fact, it was expressed at one of the meetings that they hoped that some members would be killed so as to turn Americans against supporting the Freedom Fighters. None of this has been made public knowledge by the national media. Instead the Witness for Peace organization is treated as if it were a legitimate human rights group.

In February and March 1980, Salvadorian guerilla agent Rafid Handel and his brother Shafil, Chairman of the Communist Party of El Salvador, traveled to the United States to meet with other solidarity committees and leftist organizations with the help of Communist Party member Sandy Pollock and a Cuban intelligence officer, Alfredo Garcia Almeida, for the Committee on Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). According to captured documents from a safe house in El Salvador, it was discovered that the communist party in Washington, D.C., had introduced the founder of CISPES to Congressman Ron Dellums (D-CA), who in turn introduced Handel to members of the Black Caucus. In his journal Handel wrote, “the offices of Congressman Dellums were turned into our offices. Everything was done there. Again, this information was placed in the back of the drawer by the media. It is never mentioned by the national media when CISPES organizes a demonstration or publically accuses the Contras of brutality towards civilians.”

Realizing the tremendous potential offered by the liberal-left sympathies in the United States, the Nicaraguan communists, through their front groups, organized active constituencies in essentially every congressional district in the country. These fronts worked closely with churches and other religious groups so as to give the movement an air of unity with legitimate religious goals against poverty, hunger, and disease in the Third World. With these groups they always emphasized the humanitarian nature and aims of the Sandinista regime. They speak constantly of their strides to eliminate ignorance through the establishment of a network of schools. Of course they neglect to mention that the church teachers are expelled and replaced with Cuban instructors or loyal Sandinistas who will teach the children loyalty to the government and to the principles of Marxism-Leninism; and that special courses teach the children to hate the United States and to accept a Soviet presence in Nicaragua.

The Sandinistas also love to boast of the tremendous strides they have made in expanding medical care in Nicaragua. Clinics have been built in areas that previously never had access to medical care. Free care is available to all. One of their proudest accomplishments was their vaccination program, which provided, for the first time, thousands of polio vaccinations to the poor of Nicaragua. What they neglected to mention was that the vaccines, some 810,000, were supplied by the Kawanis Club, not by the Sandinistas. As for the clinics, the communists always provide such services during the stage of solidification of their power, especially when they must appeal to the U.S. to accept their regime as legitimate. Most of the clinics are run by Cuban doctors who, according to refuges, are often rude and non-caring.

Once again, we see that this is the same pattern we experienced in Vietnam. The government in Hanoi and the Vietcong emphasized to their visiting Western delegations the tremendous strides they were making in humanitarian measures. For example, Daniel Berringer tells us that his host told him that under the French there was but one doctor per 180,000 people and 48 inadequate provincial hospitals; but following the communist victory in 1945, there was an enormous building of medical facilities. In fact, according to his communist host, a law has been passed in North Vietnam forcing all schools and factories to provide medical care for their workers. Sounds a lot like the Dukakis health plan in Massachusetts.

In communist Vietnam today, visiting Western delegations are told of the tremendous advances being made in universal education and health care to the poor. Education in communist Vietnam consists of indoctrination of the young with Marxism-Leninism and propaganda that teaches them, just as in Nicaragua, to hate the United States. Every communist country, without exception, teaches its youth to spy on their parents for the State. As a result, parents come to fear their children.

Following the fall of Saigon, the communists informed all persons in any way connected to the Saigon government, to sign up for re-education classes. These classes were to last ten days. Tran Tri Vu, a press officer in Saigon, said that instead they were led to prisons in the forest where they remained for years under the harshest of conditions. 

Those undergoing re-education were fed the same food that was fed to the pigs, while their guards ate food sent to Vietnam through foreign aid. Many died during their period of re-education secondary to starvation, disease, or from torture. The wives of the inmates were frequently raped by the guards. Once again, the media remained strangely reticent. Westerners visiting Vietnam returned with stories of how well the prisoners were being treated. Tran Tri Vu tells us why:

The way the communists fooled international opinion is that when Western journalists visited re-education camps, they were tricked. On one occasion the communists had the prisoners from my camp build another camp, very, very beautiful. We could not figure out why we had to construct this beautiful camp in an artistic way: a meeting hall for the cinema or theater, tennis courts, a volleyball court.

The communists then had the prison filled with guards as pretend prisoners. These new “prisoners” not only appeared happy and well fed, but they enthusiastically told their Western visitors about the wonderful education they were receiving. The communists told the visitors this was a typical re-education camp. Such model prisons were also constructed in Nicaragua as well as in the old Soviet Union. We learn of one other piece of highly successful propaganda from Mr. Vu. He says that the communists organized the prisoners to cut down the forest and to burn it so that they could produce a quick crop. Thousands of acres of land were destroyed by this “slash and burn” policy. But when visiting delegations from Western nations arrived, they were told that the barren lands were the result of American military’s policy of defoliation during the war.

We should have learned enough about how communists capture countries and then solidify their control through propaganda, terror, mass murder, and disinformation directed at the West, that we would never fall victim to their tactic again. But we haven’t, and we do fall for these obvious ploys. To a large degree this failure falls at the doorstep of the national media whose job it is to keep the public informed. Yet, their fear of a return of “McCarthyism” fired by such knowledge and understanding of the true nature of communism overshadows their sense of responsibility to the free world. They are so afraid that an admission that the communist system is not only inherently evil, but that it seeks to infect the rest of the world with its malignant ideas and deadly actions, will give credence to the conservative’s warnings and hence will light the fires of anti-communism. This, the liberal-leftists cannot tolerate.

One area the national media has been particularly careful to blanket in silence is the connections between the communist revolutions in various parts of the world and the front groups, and the “anti-war” liberal-leftists and their fellow travelers in the West. This interaction was never more blatant than during the Vietnam War. The communist front groups and the “anti-war” liberal-leftist were more open and more active than ever before in our history. Many made no secret either of their affiliation with the communists in the North or of their desire that the communists should prevail. These traitorous acts were never more in evidence or carried out in such a tremendous scale. Peter Collier and David Horowitz have demonstrated this connection in their excellent article appearing in Commentary titled, Another Low and Dishonest Decade on the Left:

SDS delegations met with the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (Vietcong) in Cuba and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam and agreed to collaborate with their war effort by providing propaganda advice and orchestrating a campaign to demoralize American troops in the field and to create disorder and disruption back home.

Those of us who lived through this period know just how successful their program turned out to be. It not only destroyed our war effort and will to win, but it also ripped apart the very moral and philosophical foundation of our society. Even through the assault by the New Left failed in its revolutionary objective, that is, the collapse of our government and the victory of socialism, they were entirely successful in their efforts to set the agenda for America’s future. This is especially evident when you consider that most of their radical ideas concerning morals and values are now considered within the mainstream. The ideas of radical feminism, recreational drugs, the new morality and the alternative family are accepted as legitimate. Likewise, few question the wisdom of their contention that America should never enter a war to defend the Free World against communism. Peace at any price takes precedence over principle, survival, and the fact the Soviets are pledged to world revolution and the triumph of communism over the West.

One of the chief principles of communist front organizations is to maintain a low profile and always present themselves with an air of respectability and compassion for the lower classes. They will go to any extreme to make their movements appear as a spontaneous expression of moral outrage. To a large degree this is done by infiltrating a non-communist group, gaining control of its leadership, and thereby setting the agenda. Truong Nhu Tang, the former Minister of Justice for the Vietcong apparatus, refers to the tactic as “green on the outside and red on the inside.” We have seen this in both the Vietnam War and with Central America.

As stated, one of their most valuable partners, both unwittingly and consciously, has been the national media outlets. By refusing to openly disclose to the American public the true driving force fo the antiwar movement, and to expose their connections with the communist front groups working to undermine American foreign policy, the media in effect acted as agents of our enemies. Make no mistake about it; all of these facts presented in this paper are well documented, referenced, and are readily accessible to the media. They have voluntarily chosen to ignore these witnesses and sources for their own reasons.

During the Vietnam War the communists in North Vietnam knew that their tactic of manipulating the American front groups and the anti-war protest movement were bearing fruit. This is evident in the comment Premier Pham Van Dong made to Daniel Berrigan during his visit to Hanoi:

Because as you know, the longer the war continues, the worse your domestic problem becomes—so too, your movement to harvest fruit of the present struggle. And I have confidence in America.

This confidence in their American front was also sounded by Nguyen Tuong Lai, a former guerilla leader in the Vietcong who said, “Also we knew that there was a large anti-war movement in America who would not allow the American Army to cross over the border.”

It wasn’t that the communist North and the Vietcong were merely utilizing a spontaneously developing anti-war movement, rather they were actively participating in its creation, organization and direction. This involved direct contacts between Vietcong delegations and leaders of the American and European anti-war movement. For example, following a national moratorium on ending the war in Vietnam, held October 15, 1969, communist Premier Pham Van Dong cabled the following message to members of the American anti-war movement:

We are firmly confident that with the solidarity and courage of our two peoples, with the sympathy and support of the peace-loving peoples in the world, the struggle of the Vietnamese people and of progressive people in the United States against U.S. aggression will end in total victory. I wish your ‘fall offensive’ a brilliant success.

This was then followed by Hanoi’s Ambassador Xuan Thug’s call for “the progressive American people and all anti-war organizations in the United States to unite closely.”  And they did just that. On April 24, 1971, huge crowds paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. waving Vietcong flags and chanting loudly, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong are going to win.” According to Truong Nhu Tang, the Vietcong saw Nixon’s call to withdraw American troops from Vietnam as a sign that he wanted to placate the domestic anti-war groups. Which, in essence, meant that their American front campaigns had been successful. As a former head of the Vietcong organization, Tang gave credit for their eventual victory to the Western anti-war movements.

Many of these same front groups and a whole array of newer ones, having honed their skills during the Vietnam War, are now busy trying to bring victory to their comrades in Central and South America. Their methods are exactly those used to bring down the Saigon government. First, they portray the new communist government in Managua as the legitimate rulers of Nicaragua. Then they emphasize the corruptness and dictatorial aspects of the previous regime — all the while, they are receiving tons of military hardware and training from the Soviet Union’s chief surrogate, Cuba. As with Vietnam, they then expel the true democrats from the ranks of the new revolutionary government and declare themselves the only true representatives of the revolution.

As they go about solidifying their control they call on their comrades in the various front groups residing in the United States and in Western Europe, to support them with a campaign of solidarity. The front groups and other “useful fools” play an important part in discrediting those who attempt to point out the Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism of the New Nicaraguan regime; even those who have defected from the ranks of the Sandinistas, for example, Roger Migranda Bengochea and Miguel Bolanos. In both cases, Vietnam and Central America, this campaign of disinformation was quite successful. And, even after it became generally known that the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, and the Sandinistas were communists, the American and European Left were able to convince most Americans and Europeans that they were forced into communism by American belligerent behavior. This fairy tale still exists today.

The point to be made is that in both instances, Vietnam and Central America, the communist success can, to a large measure, be attributed to the Western front groups that support Marxist-Leninist objectives in this hemisphere, and to a liberal-leftist press that is either sympathetic to Liberation Theology and its “humanitarian” socialism or that has allowed itself to be manipulated through naivety or self-deception. Once the facts have been examined, the role of the press in allowing and even aiding communist revolutions is undeniable. As Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter point out in their important book, The Media Elite, the majority of journalists in this country are sympathetic to any Third World revolution even when undeniably Marxist-Leninist.

With the national media sympathetic to leftist causes, all opposing opinion and information will be filtered through liberal opinion makers. And, therefore, no matter how well documented the contravening information and no matter how impeccable the qualifications of the source, most such information will be either diluted out or suppressed completely. That this is true can easily be shown by the example given by Vietnam’s ex-Minister of Justice for the Vietcong, Truong Nhu Tang, who says in his book: “Our aim was to present ourselves to the world as a large representation of the South’s population. And the American media is easily open to suggestion and false information given by communist agents — the society is completely hypnotized by the media.”

Remember, it was the media that perpetrated the story that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and not a communist. They did this despite credible information proving otherwise. Once it became generally known that Ho was a communist, it was again the national media that sold us the myth that he was pushed into the Soviet camp because of the United States’ intransigence and hostility. In fact, throughout the war it was the Western media that portrayed the Vietcong as guerrilla soldiers fighting for Vietnam’s independence rather than the truth, they were fighting as part of the Soviet communist party’s international expansion. In fact, they were given kinder treatment by the media than the Contras are today.

It was also the national media that portrayed our soldiers as baby killers, dope heads, and incompetents. Vietcong and North Vietnamese atrocities were generally ignored by the media, while American transgressions were dwelled upon ad nauseam. According to Vietcong defectors, they influenced our media to portray the government of South Vietnam as a corrupt, incompetent puppet of the United States. The implication conveyed by our national media was exactly that decided on by Ho after the fall of the French at Dien Bien Phu — that is, that the United States was a neo-colonial power; this necessarily meant that the people in the South didn’t support the South Vietnamese government. Peter Baestrup, the Bureau Chief of the Washington Post in Saigon from January 1968 to February 1969 observed:

If anything, the South Vietnamese were generally portrayed as victims, incompetents, or crooks. No one, even today, mentions that more than 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers died during that war. None of the units went over to the other side. There were far more Vietcong defectors to our side. That never got across.

It never got across because the liberal-leftist media didn’t want to take the chance that the American public might view it as a sign of loyalty by the South Vietnamese to their government. That would have legitimized our role in Vietnam. Presenting the South Vietnamese government in such a bad light had a profound effect on how Americans back home viewed the war. The idea that we were fighting to defend a corrupt, incompetent, and unpopular government against what was portrayed as a popular guerilla uprising, was repugnant to most Americans, especially those who had sons either in Vietnam or eligible for the draft. Le Thi Anh, a writer and anti-war poet during the early stages of the war, observed that while the Thieu regime was corrupt, it was overall good for South Vietnam. She says that it was the American media that completely distorted the picture:

But the U.S. Congress said, ‘Stop the aid to the corrupt regime.’ and the democratic system fell as a result. The democratic institutions in the South were not perfect, but at least it was a beginning. A democratic institution was precious to us, but we didn’t have the time or security to build it.

Ex-Vietcong Truong Nhu Tang also points out in his book that all political cadres were required to learn the three currents of revolution by heart. First was an ever growing international socialist camp. Second, the armed liberation movement. And finally, the most important, was the influence of Western opinion. He says that the Vietcong learned early on that “the minds and heart of the American people have to be motivated and exploited,” and that the media, both directly and indirectly, played that role.

One of the most famous pictures of the entire Vietnam War era, and one that profoundly influenced its outcome, was the photograph of General Loan, the South Vietnamese Police Chief, shooting the young Vietcong prisoner in the head. The photo instantly appeared on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the world. It represented to the critics of the war the reason South Vietnam should lose, namely, that the South Vietnamese government was a brutal dictatorship.

It has been said that the problem with the national media is not what it says openly, but what it fails to say. This incident represents a case in point. The true facts of the case vary significantly from the impression given by the horrifying photograph. The executed Vietcong, in fact, had just killed General Loan’s best friend and afterwards proceeded to knife to death his friend’s wife and six children. AP photographer Eddie Adams stated that he soon regretted having taken the picture because he realized the photograph had ruined the life of a decent man, who in a time of war has acted out of anguish and frustration.

But the press was to repeat selective moralization and purposeful omission of stories detailing communist atrocities throughout the war. Despite the fact that the Vietcong were conducting a campaign of terror all over South Vietnam, the press continued to portray them as a popular guerilla movement. For example, they completely ignored the common practice of terror directed toward local village chiefs. A typical incident occurred in a small village in the delta region. After surrounding the village, the Vietcong tied the chief’s wife to a tree and proceeded to disembowel her. Then they forced him to watch while they dismembered each of his children. The show of terror ended by castrating him in front of his village. Such displays were designed to terrorize and stop the villagers from cooperating with the government.

Unlike isolated cases of American brutality, which made daily headlines, Vietcong atrocities were an integral part of their revolutionary policy. In 1967, after capturing the village of Cai Be, the Vietcong murdered 45 wives and children of members of the local militia. And in Dak Son, they massacred 252 civilians, two thirds of whom were women and children. These unfortunate civilians were burned to death with flamethrowers. The Vietcong campaign of terror included throwing grenades into crowded public squares, pagodas, and schools. The shelling of refugee camps by the Vietcong and the NVA was commonplace and, most importantly, was a matter of policy handed down from the leadership. Most of these refugee camps contained women and children, and the elderly. This reign of terror killed thousands each year. But most Americans were unaware of this stark reality because the national media choose not to cover it.

Another blatant example of the media’s moral selectivity was their coverage of the Mi Lai incident, in which American soldiers, fresh from a brutal Vietcong attack, struck at what they believed to be a Vietcong stronghold, killing over a hundred civilians. This “American massacre” was the subject of major media attention throughout the war. The incident was first reported by Seymour Hersh of the New York Times. According to Steven Powell, Hersh’s story was made possible through the Fund for Investigative Journalism, which in turn was backed by the far left Institute for Policy Studies. It was Hersh who later defended the Soviet explanation of the shoot down of the 007 airliner. And before the panel discussion on the role of the press in world affairs, Mr. Hersh told his audience that had he known the time and place of the D-Day invasion before the attack, he would have printed it on the front pages of the New York Times. From this background we get some idea as to why certain facts always manage to get left out of news stories.

But what has turned out to be the most glaring cover-up of the entire war was in fact perpetrated by the North Vietnamese communist — the Hue massacre. Most Americans are totally unaware that it ever occurred. For those unfamiliar with the incident, Hue was a peaceful city that was overrun by the NVA during the Tet Offensive. As the conquering troops entered the city they carried with them a death list containing all the names of those who worked in any capacity for the South Vietnamese government. These unfortunates were exterminated immediately. But this was not the end of the bloodbath. The communist death squads continued the killing until 2,800 civilians — men, women and children — had been massacred. Thousands were forced to dig their own graves before being shot. Many had their hands wired behind them and were buried alive.

These graves were discovered as our troops returned following a bloody retaking of the city. But as Nixon notes in his book, No More Vietnams, neither did reporters flock to the area, as more burial grounds sites were found in nearby mountains, jungle clearings, and coastal flats. All told, over 5,000 civilians had been executed. The silence from the media was deafening. But then this was in keeping with the silence concerning “Uncle Ho’s” murder of 850,000 peasants in the North.

One of the blackest moments in media history occurred with the coverage of American soldiers being forced to kill small children in self-defense. The idea that our soldiers would shoot small children was not only shocking to most Americans, it was something totally alien to their moral perceptions. This media attention led to our returning soldiers being called “baby killers” by the unwashed rabble that hid safely in the United States throughout the war. Revelations following the war clearly indicate that this “baby killers” media event was not by accident, but rather had been carefully orchestrated by the communists in the North, the Vietcong, and their fellow travelers in the United States. Truong Mealy, a Vietcong agent operating in the Mekong Delta describes this strategy in Al Santoli’s book, To Bear Any Burden. He says:

Children were trained by the communists to throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldier would have to shoot them. Then the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers ‘war criminals.’

One cannot escape the conclusion that the media played right into the hands of the enemy. Instead of explaining that the Vietcong were responsible for not only the deaths of these unfortunate children, but also for the deaths of American soldiers — the media simply left a void where there should have been clarification. We see this same policy of forcing soldiers to kill civilians being carried out today. For example, despite the fact it is well known that communist and terrorist groups in the Middle East always position themselves in densely populated areas so as to use the civilians as shields, the national media still portray the Israelis as “brutal killers of civilians,” when in the course of pursuing terrorists, or even in defending themselves, innocent civilians are harmed or killed.

This policy of using a civilian as a shield is also standard in Nicaragua. Virtually all military bases are placed directly in the center of villages or cities. This arrangement assures the Sandinistas that some innocent civilians will be killed when the Contras attack their bases.  And this is exactly what they want. After each such incident, the Sandinistas fly in Western reporters to show them that innocent children and women have been brutally murdered by the evil Contras. That this is a matter of Sandinista state policy has been documented by the testimony of ex-Sandinista defectors, such as Miguel Bolanos and Humberto Belli, as well as thousands of Nicaraguan refugees.

The Nicaraguan communists use many ploys to force the Contras to kill civilians. For example, they frequently transport civilian workers in military trucks with the bed covered with a canvas so as to, not only hide the Sandinista soldiers traveling with them, but to entice the Contras to attack what looks like a military convoy. The Sandinistas obtain a lot of propaganda mileage from such incidents. Another tactic never mentioned by the American media is the use of Sandinista armed bands dressed in Contra uniforms to commit atrocities against the population. According to reporter Wesley Smith, several of the refugees he interviewed on tape reported to have seen men they recognized as Sandinista State Security officers, dressed as Contras during terrorist raids on villages.  Such attacks are quite common. Alvaro Baldizon Aviles, a former human rights investigator for the Sandinista Ministry of Interior, calls these imposters “special operations forces.” These special operations, Baldizon says, began in 1981 using elite units trained in East Germany to kill civilians for propaganda purposes.  Again, none of this has been reported by the national or international media, even though it is well documented.

Bouchey and co-authors have noted that the FDN, Nicaraguan Democratic Forces or Contras, “is perhaps the only guerilla army in the world that has executed some of its own commanders for ordering attacks against civilians.” A case in point is that of Commander Suicida, a renegade Contra who ordered attacks on civilians. He was hunted down by the Contra forces and after a military trial, was executed along with three of his men. Again, this important information was never reported by the national media.

The campaign of terror in Central America, much like that in Vietnam, is directed at every aspect of the society that could potentially endanger the revolution, such as the press, religious institutions and persons, labor unions, businessmen, farmers, and the Indians living on the Atlantic coast. According to Bolanos, the policy to neutralize the church, the most powerful force opposing the Sandinistas, includes every tactic in the communist revolutionary’s repertoire.  It includes the use of government controlled mobs to harass and beat up priests and bishops; the replacement of all non-communist parochial teachers with communist ones; the destruction of churches and confiscation of religious artifacts; the imprisonment and torture of persons openly rejecting communism; and the closing of Radio Catolica. One well-known incident is the humiliation of Father Carballo, who was beaten and dragged through the streets naked, before reporters by one of the turbas divinas, “divine mobs.” Sandinista reporters informed the world that this man of God was having an adulterous affair with a parishioner’s wife. The entire affair, according to Miguel Balonos, had been carefully fabricated by Internal Security.

In Vietnam 50,000 Catholic priests and bishops fled to the South following Ho Chi Minh’s communist revolution. The media was quite familiar with the fate of Catholic priests at the hands of the communist guerillas: Priests were either required to renounce their faith or suffer death or imprisonment.  The same is true of Jews and Christian leaders in Nicaragua. As in all communist countries, belief in God cannot be tolerated. As a result, the Nicaraguan communist government directs much of its internal repression towards the church. But knowing that the people hunger for religious direction and comfort, the Sandinistas have instituted an official Marxist-Leninist church, called the people’s church. This is, of course, patterned after the official Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, which trains special priests and bishops who understand revolutionary principles. In fact, some of these men of the church are KGB agents.

Most “revolutionary” priests and nuns in Nicaragua come from other countries, either Europe or the United States, and are devotes to liberation theology. Liberation theology is a classic oxymoron — that is, a Christian atheism. It is more sociological than Christian — based solely on social engineering and not the word of God. In fact, one is safe to say that the religious trappings are nothing but window dressings. Take for example, the case of Sister Hartman, an Agnesian nun from Wisconsin who works closely with Tomas Borge, the overseer of the secret police, the political prison system, and much of the propaganda apparatus. She has admitted on television that she helped smuggle guns for the communist FSLN during the 1979 revolution. One of her chief functions for the Sandinista government was to brainwash visiting Western delegations and especially religious groups and to provide Western reporters with “Contra atrocity stories.” Sister Hartman’s role has never been exposed by any major newspaper in the United States, save The Washington Times.

As the North Vietnamese communist disinformation and propaganda policy began to take hold in the United Sates, the anti-war front groups and liberal fellow travelers moved to center stage. This move was orchestrated by the media as a result of their portrayal of the New Left as the major spokesman for concerns regarding the war. The New Left’s arguments and “facts” were accepted at face value by a sympathetic media and by certain congressional delegations. Answers to their charges concerning the immorality of the war and the true nature of the communist threat from the North were never given headlines if aired at all. Instead, the major media personalities merely added their own commentary as to the shortcomings of the administration’s policy in Vietnam, usually in a thinly disguised endorsement of the New Left’s position. We witness this same tactic as regards Central America. This constant media attention to the protest movements of the New Left was like pouring kerosene in smoldering embers. Soon, we had a roaring fire that was spreading out of control. You could hardly turn on the television without seeing a scruffy gaggle of war protestors screaming and proudly waving Vietcong flags. During the academic years 1969-1970, there were 1,800 anti-war demonstrations, and from January 1969 to February 1970 there were over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings or threats, resulting in $21 million in property damage, hundreds of injuries and 42 deaths. In August 1970, a van packed with explosives was detonated adjacent to the mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin, killing a graduate student in physics and causing $6 million in property damage.  One must wonder if these pro-communist radicals would have gone to such extremes had their ideas received the proper attention from the media.

The national media opinion makers had agreed, knowingly or unknowingly, with the pro-Vietcong radicals when they gave credibility to their anti-war propaganda. Namely, that: 1. The war was unwinnable, 2. That the cause was morally unjust, and 3. That the majority of Americans opposed the war. At least toward the end of the war, our soldiers were portrayed as drugged-out, guilt-ridden, racist killers of women and children. These points were hammered home to the reading and viewing public day after day, not directly by the enemy, but by our own media.  I remember extremely well watching an evening news broadcast of our first glimpse of American POW life in the prisons in Hanoi. The American Red Cross had been allowed to enter a model camp purposely set up for just such media events. The POWs were shown playing a game of basketball in their recreation area. The camera then panned to the POWs’ comfortable beds, reading material provided by their gracious host, and their spacious rooms. The commentary never emphasized that, from past experience, it was well known that communist governments prepare such model prisons purely for propaganda purposes. Instead, we were left to believe the POWs were being treated well.

Yet, the North Vietnamese communists went even further to deceive the West concerning the treatment of the POWs. By the end of the sixties they had dozens of leftist sympathizers from America making regular trips to Uncle Ho’s playground, such dignitaries as Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Harrison Salisbury, Professor Howard Zinn, Daniel Berrigan, and ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Ramsey Clark’s dedication to communist victory in Vietnam is legendary. In August 1972 he testified, after a trip to a Hanoi POW camp, that the POWs were well fed and cared for. One POW later testified that the communists tortured him by hanging him by his broken arm until he agreed to meet with Ramsey Clark. Some POWs were, in fact, killed for refusing to meet with exercise guru Jane Fonda. After the POWs returned home and told the grisly, horrifying details of their torture at the hands of North Vietnamese and special Cuban torturers, “Hanoi” Jane called them liars.

In each case, as in the case of American leftists defending the communists in Central America, these traitors were portrayed by the media as legitimate “anti-war protestors” or “pacifists.” This was true and has been well documented that many who were in fact acting as agents for the communist government in North Vietnam and has a long list of communist front affiliations. For example, according to Harrison Salisbury, it was Herbert Aptheker, chief theoretician for the Communist Pasty USA (CPUSA), who chose Tom Hayden to go with him to Hanoi. Peter Collier and David Horowitz confessed that during the Vietnam War they, along with their fellow intellectual leftists, “had a weekly ritual of sitting in front of the television set and cheering,” as Walter Cronkite announced the ever-rising American body count on CBS. Professor Eugene Genovese, before a 1965 rally, stated, “…unlike most of my distinguished colleagues… I do not fear or regret the impending victory of the Vietcong. I welcome it.” Even today, Professor Genovese is a highly regarded scholar teaching our children his Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

And then there is Cora Weiss, the patron saint of the Left. It was Mrs. Weiss who was chosen by the North Vietnamese communists to act as a liaison between the government in the North and the POW wives and families. After returning from one of her sojourns, she reported to a staged news conference that the POWs were being treated well and housed in “immaculate facilities.” But the point is that none of these facts regarding these traitorous activities were ever presented to the general public by the media. The events surrounding Cora Weiss are so disgusting and shocking that it is inconceivable that they have been hidden from the public so well and for so long. Take for example, the revelation by Sybil Stockdale, wife of ex-POW Admiral Jim Stockdale, that she was approached by Cora Weiss and told that if she wanted mail from her husband she would have to make public anti-war statements.  In other cases “Hanoi” Weiss went even further. On January 27, 1970, she held a news conference in the Cannon House Building during which she emphasized American committed atrocities in Vietnam and made light of the recent testimony revealing the harsh treatment two Navy pilots suffered as POWs. When told by a reporter that one of the men had his arm broken by his captors, she snapped back, “Since he was captured as a war criminal he was lucky to have an arm at all.” Why would it be important to drag up Cora Weiss’ crimes twenty years after the war ended? Because not only was she never punished for her original crimes as a traitor, she repeated her traitorous actions by trying to undermine our democratic policies in Central America by giving aid and comfort to the Salvadorian guerillas and the Sandinista communists.  But once again the media has chosen to be conveniently silent.

Despite all the media attention the Berrigan brothers received as Catholic “protestors,” little was ever mentioned about their true motives and beliefs. For the most part, they were portrayed as men of the cloth who were morally outraged by war in general and this war in particular. But, Daniel Berrigan’s beliefs concerning the communists in the North was certainly available to the media. You see, he wrote a book in 1969 called, Night Flight to Hanoi, in which describes his and history professor Howard Zinn’s trip to Hanoi as guest of Ho Chi Minh. Throughout his book, he not only accepts every propaganda line dispensed by his communist host, but he also literally grovels at their feet. In one passage he describes his feelings as he is viewing a propaganda film on American bombing raids on North Vietnam, which according to his guests, are directed at hospitals. He writes:

I am writing what follows from my notes, scrawled in the changing light of a film in progress, in a hand shaking with emotion and shame. As I write I felt like a Nazi watching films of Dachau…only conceivable purpose of the attacks is to maim and kill the patients, and to induce terror in the medical workers, in order that the entire society might be intimidated.

Berrigan’s view of the American bombing of North Vietnam was a reflection of the propaganda concocted by an enemy with whom we were at war. But interestingly, it was to be the same view expressed by virtually every major newspaper and network commentator in the United States and the free world. This is incredible. No journalist bothered to interview the pilots flying over Vietnam to get their story, or if they did, their story was spiked by their editors. If they had interviewed the pilots, and their stories had been reported, it would have been clear that, once again, the media had been hoodwinked by the communist propagandists in the North. These so-called hospitals were in fact disguised anti-aircraft emplacements, as were pagodas, churches and schools.  As a result of the attention given to our bombing these fake hospitals and schools, severe limitations were placed on our pilots, and as a result of these limitations, many lost their lives or ended their careers as POWs. The effect of our manipulated press went far beyond its role in destroying America’s will to win at home. It was also used to demoralize our soldiers in the field and our POWs who were rotting away in North Vietnamese prison camps. Dan Pitzer, who while a POW in the notorious U Minh Forest, experienced the powerful effect of the American media as a propaganda weapon. He says:

One way they conducted psychological warfare was to show us reports from the New York Times, Washington Post, news magazines and the Congressional Record, displaying the anti-war sentiments at home. It was hard to drive ourselves on day after day when the guards showed us newspaper stories of protestors flying the VC and North Vietnam flags around the Washington Monument, while students burned the American flag — what was being published in the U.S. was much better propaganda than anything the Vietcong could write.

What was especially frightening is that it is all happening again. This time in Central America, South Africa, and in Chile. The propaganda, disinformation and its language are almost identical. It’s as if we learned nothing from our experience in Vietnam. In the case of Nicaragua, our foreign policy is being portrayed by the media as, (1) immoral, (2) as supporting the dictatorial policies of the previous regime under Somoza, (3) As opposing the wish of not only the majority of Nicaraguans, but also of her neighbors, (4) as supporting incompetent, murderous, and corrupt counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, and (5) as a policy that will lead us back into an unwinnable American military involvement.

When I begin to tell my friends about the media’s role in the communist revolutionary movement, the first question they ask is — Why? Why would the American media support communists? This is not an easy question to answer. Basically, there are many reasons. Profit is a major one. The owners of major networks and newspapers know that the public likes a good scandal, and what better scandal than an administration that is using our troops to support an unpopular dictator? They were also aware that during the period of domestic unrest in the sixties and early seventies, the most colorful stories were on the side of the protestors — lots of screaming and yelling, colorful clothes, nudity, drugs and outlandish behavior. It all made good copy. Plus, and most importantly, many in the news industry sympathize with the “moral” position taken by the anti-war movement. This is mainly because they, like the protestors, grew up in an educational environment that taught that the United States was evil and an immoral nation and that the extreme Left (the communists) were the ones who truly cared about the “have nots” — the underclass and the poor. They took the revolutionaries’ view as their own.

In some instances, reporters and commentators support communist revolutions because they feel that once the growing pains have passed (that is the mass murder, the concentration camps bulging with political prisoners, and other police state tactics), the society will transform into a new acceptable one that will be beneficial to the masses of poor inhabiting Third World countries, as well as the pockets of poverty in more advanced countries. Daniel Berrigan perhaps best stated this in his book Night Flight to Hanoi, when he said, “Life under Big Brother’s shadow seems to awaken the submerged virtues — courtesy, compassion, cheerfulness of spirit.”  One has to wonder if such thinkers had used the same reasoning during World War II, would they have concluded that had we left Hitler alone his nasty habit of executing millions would have passed, and he would have become a humanitarian?

Finally, revolutions appeal, at least superficially, to many because it reminds us of our frustrations with authority in our own lives. We all harbor a desire to break free of the everyday restrictions and what we perceive as unfair oppression from above. This subliminal hostility to authority and institutions of authority begins at an early age when our parents forced us to conform to their rules and later when society forces us to conform to its rules. Therefore, we vicariously enjoy seeing such authority removed from power, especially when we perceive it as unjust. The problem seems to be that journalists are unable to make the critical distinctions between just revolutions, such as the American Revolution (actually a rebellion), and that which produces greater injustice and oppression, such as we see with communist revolutions.

Most readers and viewers of news reporting are unaware of these biases of the media. It is a rare thing indeed for a person to question a major news story to the point that they would be willing to do further research. As respecters of intellectual authority, most Americans assume that news professionals are reputable and honest. But this is a dangerous assumption. Steven Powell in his monumental book, Covert Cadre, outlines how the extreme Left operates to not only spike news stories that tell the truth, but also supply stories favorable to their positions even though these stories are pure fabrications and distortions of the truth. He found that one of the major sources of leftist disinformation in the United States come from the Institute for Policy Studies. He notes that during the Vietnam War:

IPS officials were involved in establishing a “message network” that linked them with the North Vietnamese and Vietcong delegation in Paris and with the Hanoi government, which eased the flow of propaganda from the communist to the radical underground press — soon to surface in the mainstream press, using the media to undermine the American people’s support for the war… part of the overall North Vietnamese/Vietcong strategy.

Powell says that two anti-war radicals, Raymond Mungo and Marshall Bloom, met with representatives from North Vietnam and the Vietcong to establish the Liberation News Service, which spread pro-Vietcong and pro-Castro news to many underground subscribers. Later, key people from the IPS established the Dispatch News Service, which fed a constant flow of anti-American stories to the mainstream media. It was this news service which fed the My Lai story to the New York Times. Interestingly, once Vietnam fell to the communists, the Dispatch News Service folded.

But, the IPS hasn’t disappeared. In fact, it is more powerful and influential than ever. Today, this far Left network is busy trying to bring about the same results in Central America that it helped engineer in Southeast Asia. It is doing this on many fronts — such as through its influence on Congress, the State Department, universities, the national media, and their old standby, the communist front groups. The parallels with the propaganda and disinformation campaigns conducted by the communist fronts during the Vietnam War are undeniable. Occasionally, we witness an open outburst of gratitude by these communist movements directed towards the American fronts, which have played such a valuable part in their revolution. Take for instance, Le Duc Tho’s message of thanks to his American supporters in Ted Koppel’s Nightline commemorating the 19th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Similarly, Rafael Solis expressed his gratitude to his American supporters for bringing the communist Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua. And President Daniel Ortega, not to be outdone, referred to Congressman Christopher Dodd, Michael Barnes, and George Miller as “friends of our revolution.” But the top “useful American fool award” goes to Congressman “Leaky” Jim Wright for his determination to uncover our nasty covert policies directed toward his Sandinista friends.

While most media personalities and reporters are victims of self-deception and artfully directed programs of disinformation, others are quite open in their support of the communist revolutionaries. John Lantigua’s, who writes for UPI, Newsweek, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News, support for the Sandinistas is so fervent that his friends and colleagues refer to him as “Johnny Sandinista.” Among the Sandinistas in Managua he is known as a “Internacionalista”, that is, a foreigner who sympathizes and collaborates with the communist regime.  Latin American journalist Daniel James states, “professional journalists in Central America estimate that as many as 90% of the United States media representatives in Nicaragua may be Sandinista sympathizers.”  This, of course, is not by accident. As we have seen, the communist government in Managua and its solidarity fronts in the United States go to great lengths to manipulate media personalities. They are wined and dined, taken on specially organized tours to model prisons and work farms, and in many cases are supplied with “female companions.”

One of the areas in which the American Sandinista solidarity fronts have been most successful is in their efforts to paint the Contras as blood thirsty killers and rapists. They have been successful because their concocted stories have been carried by the major networks and newspapers assumed authoritative and accurate. Of the fronts working on behalf of the Sandinistas, the most successful has been the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which was founded in 1974 by Joseph Eldridge as a human rights group with a leftist viewpoint. WOLA frequently “arranges for witness and speakers from Latin American leftist groups and revolutionary movements to testify at congressional hearings and to address the media.” The WOLA network includes many international communist fronts. WOLA’s influence extends not only to the media and the universities, but also to Congress. They have provided background briefings to congressional staff members on El Salvador, and during three congressional hearings WOLA submitted its own testimony on human rights in Guatemala. It is also known that Stanley Higginbotham, the Congressional Research division’s Chief of Foreign Affairs and National Defense, has turned to Joseph Eldridge for advice and information. Former Congressman Gerry Patterson and Senator Ted Kennedy attended WOLA’s tenth anniversary party in 1984. Another guest was Congressman Matt McHugh (D-NY), who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. And California Representative Mel Levine has used WOLA information on the floor of Congress and during the debate on Contra aid in 1985. He also had sections of WOLA’s Fox-Glennon Report inserted in the Congressional Record. This report contained sixteen atrocity witness reports, all provided by the Sandinistas, and contains no interviews from the refugees that fled the communist terror in Nicaragua.

To be effective, a front group must have reliable contact with major journalists. WOLA has been enormously successful in this regard. It has cultivated close contacts with what it terms “powerful actors in the formulation of policy”, examples of which include Alan Riding, the Chief correspondent for the New York Times on Central America; Stephen Rosenfield, Washington Post deputy editorial page editor; Steve Singer, ABC News reporter; Tom Bywater, ABC News producer; and Joseph Spear, and assistant to Jack Anderson.  These contacts gave valuable credibility and authority to covert and overt Sandinista propaganda and disinformation. When Contra aid was lost in Congress in 1984, a major factor influencing that vote was a report produced by WOLA entitled, “Human Rights Violations by the Contras”, also known as the Brody Report. This report had the appearance of a legitimate human rights analysis in which well-documented Contra atrocities were reported. But a closer analysis discloses a carefully crafted piece of Sandinista propaganda, Assistant Secretary Elliot Abrams described the report accurately when he said it was “bought and paid for by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.”

New York attorney, Reed Brody, the primary author of the report, has impeccable far-left credentials, including membership in the communist front group, The National Lawyer’s Guild. But, it is not just Brody’s far-left sympathies that invalidate the report as being objective, but rather the fact that most of the “atrocity incidents” have been shown by multiple witnesses to be false. The report contains massacres that never occurred, rapes that were fabricated by known FSLN operatives, mass kidnappings that were in fact mass exoduses by Nicaraguans fleeing Sandinista terror and oppression, and staged civilian murders by Sandinistas posing as Contras. Interviews with the witnesses of “Contra atrocities” were arranged by the Washington law firm of Reichler and Applebaum, which is registered as a foreign agent representing the communist government of Nicaragua. Brody admits that the government was very helpful in providing witnesses. According to former Sandinista Chief of Finance, Bayardo de Jesus Payan Hidalgo, much of Brody’s work was assisted by the Sandinista funded National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights. This group he says,

…was established to serve as an instrument of propaganda for the Sandinista government… They try to convince the people through their commission network that the only thing the Contras do [sic] is massacre people.

Further, Payan said of the report, “I consider it false.” He also pointed out that Brody has frequently voiced his “fondness” for the communists and has willingly “made propaganda for the FSLN”. He concludes:

I believe, and many believe in Nicaragua, that the report presented by Mr. Brody is nothing more than a propaganda job directed by the Sandinista government.

Other American front groups provided data for the Brody Report: For instance, the Witness for Piece, which as stated, maintains a full-time office in Managua as a guest of Tomas Borge, Minister of the Interior. It has also been pointed out that many of the so-called witnesses were in fact members of the FSLN controlled Sandinista Defense Committee. However, not all of the evidence against the Contra atrocity reports is based on negative analysis. Positive evidence has been provided by Peter Berthie, a journalist with the Toronto Sun, who traveled with the FDN (Freedom Fighters) for five and a half months. He found that the Contras were warmly welcomed, fed, and sheltered by the peasants and small farmers, and that more people wanted to join the Contras than they could accommodate.  Major Miranda states he defected when on visiting a Nicaraguan battlefield he noted that the resistance forces were not mercenaries, but campesinos (peasants). In an interview he further noted, “The Nicaraguan Resistance (forces) are the legitimate representatives of the interest and hopes of the Nicaraguan people. But, despite all the evidence belying the objectivity as well as the truthfulness of the Brody Report, it was released on March 5, 1985 at a press conference co-sponsored by Congressman Sam Gejdenson (D-CT). The New York Times and the Washington Post gave the report prominent coverage. As expected, this report and similar ones, were used to destroy Contra aid packages in Congress and to create a negative picture of the Freedom Fighters in the minds of the American people.

Once again, we see history repeating itself, not in a deterministic Marxian sense, but rather through America’s failure to learn from experience. The intelligence communities and other members of Congress also share the blame and have blood on their hands because of their inaction. As the aphorism goes, all that is necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for good men to do nothing. We have allowed the enemies of freedom deceitfully to take, in the mind of the public, the moral high ground. They have simply repeated a successful formula used in Southeast Asia. That is, not only discrediting our foreign policy objectives, but also subverting ideas of freedom into support for totalitarianism and all that it entails. During the Vietnam War, the communist North convinced the general public in America that we were involved in an immoral war and that we had no chance to win against a popular people’s army, the Vietcong. As we withdrew our forces, Congress demonstrated its cowardice by failing to live up to an agreement to support our ally in the South. We did the same thing in Cambodia and Laos.  And, when the conservatives warned of an impending bloodbath should the communists take over the South, they were treated as ignorant schoolboys. After all, the communists assured us that they had no intention of seeking retribution against their enemies in the South and the leftist media was stupid enough or sufficiently disingenuous to believe them.

Many liberal-leftists in Congress rejected the idea that the communist victors could not be trusted or that a bloodbath would follow their victory. The communist North pandered to this naiveté and self-deception by the American Congress before the fall of Saigon. For example, Pham Van Dong asked several foreign visitors, “How could we have the stupid, criminal idea of annexing the South?” And Le Duc Tho told the international media in Paris, “We have no wish to impose communism on the South.” Incredibly, many members of Congress and the majority of the national and international media bought this line or disingenuously claimed they did.

But then, how could the American public have known the true nature of communism? They had never heard of the Hue massacre, or of the 850,000 North Vietnamese killed by Ho Chi Minh, or the forced starvation of millions of Ukranians, or the mass execution of 60 million Russians, or the massacre of thousands of black Angolans by Cuban troops in Africa, or the extermination of as many as 70 to 100 million Chinese by Mao, or the grim fate of the peaceful Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese red hordes. Americans also knew nothing of the mass graves discovered in Nicaragua containing the bodies of hundreds of children killed by the FSLN or of the gruesome torture chambers used against the peasants and captured Contra soldiers. Yes, communist atrocities and mass murders are always kept in a dark place in the historical record of the world.[Photo right] To allow the public a clear view of the true nature of communism would conceive that evil idea — anti-communism.

To most Americans, there have been no bloodbaths in South Vietnam following its subjugation by the communists from the North. Despite a few stories about refugees on the high seas being raped and murdered by pirates, we have been told little about the new Vietnam by our leftist-dominated media. Nguyen Cong Hoan, a representative of the Communist International Assembly until his defection in 1977, stated:

Although no major bloodbath took place in the major cities after the communist victory, in the provinces, where there were no outside observers, eliminations and killing were widespread and took many forms. In Phu Yen, directly after the communist takeover, around five hundred people were killed en masse in a forested area near Hoa Quang village.

Interestingly, not even the Vietcong were spared this gruesome form of communist “justice.” According to Nguyen Tuong Lai, a Security official in communist Vietnam from 1975-1978, 200,000 Vietcong were executed after the fall. Why? Because they took Ho Chi Minh at his word when he promised them an equal share of power in the new government. They had been used and betrayed, just like the Nationalists in the North. The communists never had any intention of sharing power and therefore eliminated them. In 1978, Ginnetta Sagan, a human rights advocate, interviewed some six hundred Vietnamese refugees that had served time in communist Vietnam’s re-education camps.  She found that many of their friends and relatives had died of starvation, beatings, torture, disease and execution. The exact number that have died in these camps is unknown, but conservative estimates place the figure at over one hundred thousand killed; possibly as many as half a million. We do know that for the first time in the history of Vietnam, people have been leaving their country en masse, by any means possible, accounting for some of the tragedies of refugees at sea. Thus far, over 250,000 have died on the high seas in a effort to escape the communist holocaust. Yet, once again we see the American defenders of the communist system arrive on the stage. Mrs. Sagan notes:

Many former members of the peace movement have chosen to hide the ongoing tragedy in Vietnam, or to justify it in other ways. Some have made trips to Vietnam, often as guest of the Hanoi regime. One such invited guest (who testified before Congress) described her impression of the re-education camps in 1977. She said it was a place that ‘looked as though it could have been a tropical resort.’

One of those defending the new communist government of Vietnam was Shana Alexander, who said as Vietnam fell, “If we know anything about the government founded by Ho Chi Minh it is that its social services are excellent: good health care, day care, and educational programs abound, especially for the poor.” In Cambodia the situation was even worse. The hospitals were emptied into the streets, and those too sick to leave were slaughtered in their beds. Entire cities were herded into the countryside where they were forced to work, without food or shelter, until millions died. According to the new communist leaders, anyone who has worked in any capacity for the previous government was to be slaughtered. All teachers were killed, as were doctors, nurses, and all professionals. Incredibly, a death penalty was instituted for anyone owning a pair of glasses, as this indicated they were literate. The executions took place in the countryside, where bodies were piled deep — the so-called killing fields.

In the end, over two and a half million people had been executed. The congressman who had voted against our living up to our agreements to supply Southeast Asia with military aid (not our soldiers), were the very ones who assured us that no bloodbath would occur after the communists came to power. They were wrong then and they are wrong now in the case of Central America, Chile, South Africa, Angola and the Caribbean.

Berta Romero, a previous member of the anti-war movement, at least had the intellectual and moral honesty to go to the refugee camps in Thailand and see for herself the suffering caused by those who betrayed freedom in the world, she says:

I learned what happened in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia through the refugees. But there was no press coverage. None of the human rights groups even thought about getting involved.

But the media’s guilt went even further. Norman Podhoretz, in his book, Why We Were in Vietnam, observed that “not only were the critics of the war spared accusations of disloyalty; they were celebrated as prophets to whom the country should have listened and heroes who has shown courage to ‘tell the truth to power.’ ”

Despite the enormous evidence proving that pro-Vietcong front groups in the United States worked closely with the communist government of North Vietnam to bring about the defeat of the United States, nothing was ever done to bring these groups to justice, far less to bring their crimes to the attention of the public. The media must carry the burden of the blame. When lecturing I suggested to people that they should read the history of this betrayal, a listener attempted to chastise me by saying — “Why must you always brings this up? We should just put it behind us.” I responded that the dead, including over 70,000 of our soldiers and millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians will not come back to life; those who still suffer from the grisly memories and years of torture with ruined health, and from years of deprivations with ruined lives, will not return to normality, and the tens of millions who still live in these totalitarian systems will never see freedom and a decent life again — all thanks to these traitors. No — we should not forget. In fact, this holocaust happened because we forgot the previous outrages by the extreme revolutionary Left.

Unfortunately, there is a rising generation of young people in this country who are not only unaware of these horrific crimes against humanity, but are also being taught by the very ones who perpetrated these acts of cowardice and betrayal. The radical Left, who collaborated with these enemies, are now the tenured professors who are teaching our sons and daughters in colleges and universities. Podhoretz concludes:

Even opponents of the war which openly sided with the Vietcong — who had marched with Vietcong flags, who parroted the propaganda of the communist speeches and articles and books, who had visited Hanoi and had come back with reports of how well American POWs were being treated, who had denounced their own country as an aggressor and a perpetrator of crimes against humanity — were spared the wrath of public opinion, not to mention prosecution for acts that at any other time and in any other country would have been regarded as treason. More than spared: Tom Hayden, who has done most of these things, was received at the White House by President Jimmy Carter; ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had done most of these things, was sent on a diplomatic mission by the same President Carter; Jane Fonda, who had done most of these things was rewarded with greater and greater popularity, higher and higher fees, and more and better prizes.

I don’t think I will ever completely understand why people betray their country. I understand the psychopathology, the obsession with ideology that captures the young and impressionable mind, the camaraderie of the leftist society, the need to belong to a cause that pretends to have a superior moral standard, the greed that compels the hireling, the self-deception, the immense attraction of the idea that one is among the vanguard in the building of a perfect utopian society, and naiveté that can, at least temporarily, blind even those of intelligence; but I can never understand why an intelligent, honest, compassionate person would persist in the lie after it has been exposed. Since each of these events, numerous books and articles have been written by, not only the victims of the collectivist, fascist onslaughts, but also by the defecting high ranking members of the communist revolutionary movement. Yet, despite the easy availability of these materials, the revolutionary leftists have no difficulty in recruiting a new generation into their ranks, either as active members or as fellow travelers.

One of the great puzzles during all these events is the almost complete silence from the intelligence community and the military regarding the techniques and individuals involved in the capturing of these nations. They had full knowledge of how the Vietcong operated; yet they never informed the media or the public at large. Had they made a concerted effort to inform the media and the public the Left would never have been so successful. The military knew of the widespread incidence of atrocities by the NVA and Vietcong, yet they too remained silent. It is this silence that allowed the leftist revolutionaries to deceive the public in the West. For example, knowing that the Brody Report was a constructed piece of propaganda and pure disinformation by the Sandinista government, why did the intelligence community not speak up when this was presented to Congress and later to the public through the media. It would have neutralized Sandinista efforts to engineer defunding of the Contras. It is obvious that someone or some group of powerful individuals, very high in government or in the shadows, wanted events to turn out the way they did. This is the most glaring crime of the entire episode. And worse, these same people persist with the lies, the deception, and most unforgivable of all, they persist with the chilling silence about the truth. The advance of the collectivists thus continues unabated.

Perhaps it was Frederic Bastiat who understood the weakness of a free society best when he said, “The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”  We have failed because we have refused to defend our beliefs in Western traditions, in freedom, and in our faith in God. Our youth were ill prepared to face the onslaught of pernicious ideas that assault the mind in today’s world because they are so distracted with entertaining themselves. They are constantly distracted by cell phones, television, sporting events, and recreational drugs to study and observe the determined forces that are leading to the loss of Western civilization and the loss of human freedom, perhaps forever.

Epilogue

That same year, 1989, saw the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, and by 1991, the Soviet empire had collapsed under the weight of its own immoral record of injustice, economic inefficiencies, moral shortcomings, persecutions, and human suffering. A great push was given by such towering figures as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Saint John Paul II, the Great, and many courageous patriots who worked from inside the Iron Curtain to overthrow the corrupt and bankrupt communist system. Today Vietnam and China, nominally communist nations, are doing their best to leave the system while saving political face, but freedom in those countries remains illusory. The toll of totalitarianism: 100 million souls perished in the 20th century during peacetime, while purportedly the communists and socialists were cracking eggs to make the omelettes they never produced.

But as communist bloodbaths in the USSR, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, etc., demonstrate — left-wing revolutionaries are most sanguinary and vicious in victory, murdering their enemies by the millions. And they are most ungrateful and vindictive even in defeat — Dr. Jonas Savimbi was assassinated in Angola, just as communism was collapsing worldwide and peace was within reach even in Africa.

The communist FMLN terrorists were defeated in El Salvador by the courageous security forces of the people of El Salvador, and after the collapse of Soviet communism, the FMLN gave up terrorism and violence, and agreed to participate in the democratic process. Again and again, they were drubbed in the voting booths of El Salvador.

In Nicaragua after Anastasio Somoza’s overthrow in 1979, El Comandante Cero, (“Commander Zero”), Eden Pastora, a former Sandinista hero, quickly became disillusioned with the new Marxist government established by his previous friends in the FSLN and the ruthless Ortega brothers. Pastora went back to the hills of Nicaragua and became a Contra leader in the Southern front. In 1984 while negotiating an armistice with the Marxist Sandinistas, Pastora was the target of an assassination attempt at the La Penca bombing incident. He was severely wounded. The Contras attained numerous battlefield successes, but after they were defunded by a disingenuous U.S. Congress, the Marxist Sandinistas were able to remain in power, bringing continued privation and suffering to the Nicaraguan people, right up to the time of the Soviet collapse in 1989-1991. The Sandinistas then sought money and rapprochement with the U.S., and boosted by opinion polls, and in their own minds believed themselves the darlings of the people — they agreed to use the democratic process to remain in power and gain legitimacy. Like the FMLN in El Salvador, the FSLN Sandinistas were drubbed at the voting booths, and in 1990 Violeta Chamorro, the head of the opposition parties, was elected President of Nicaragua by a landslide.

Today crime is the order of the day in several Central American countries, particularly in Honduras and El Salvador. Central America, like most of Latin America, has learned much about freedom following the collapse of Soviet communism, leftist guerrillas, and corrupt dictatorships of the right and left varieties — but they have not learned enough about civic responsibilities. Generalissimo Francisco Franco would have called this state of affairs libertinaje (i.e., from excessive liberty without duty, “debauchery”).

Likewise, Central America, like the rest of Latin America, has learned about democratic elections, empty slogans and popularity contests, and even mastered the handling of the levers at the voting booths; but without the salutary methods and traditions of Republican institutions, it does not understand separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, and other accoutrements of constitutional governance — most importantly, the duties and responsibilities of citizenship that come with self-rule. So of late, sadly there has been too much crime and corruption in Latin America. And yet we Americans can learn much from Latin America as far as the integrity of the family, faith, and race relations.

Nevertheless, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the Central American nations in which the largest battles were fought, both for and against communist dictatorships, have achieved some measure of peace, order, and prosperity. — Miguel A. Faria, M.D.

Footnotes and References

Al Santoli. To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and South Asians. E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1985, p. 59.

Troung Nhu Tang. “Psychological Warfare,” ibid.

Ibid.

Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden, op. cit., p. 166.

Truong Nhu Tang. A Vietcong Memoir. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985, p. 145.

Jim and Sybil Stockdale. In Love and War. Harper and Row, 1984.

Truong Nhu Tang, op cit., p. 253.

This was one of the main points made by Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings. For a more in-depth analysis of the strategic importance of the region, I suggest the study published by the Council for InterAmerican Security, Central America and its Strategic Importance to NATO by Daniel Fitz-Simons, 1986; also “The Sandinista Military Build-up: An Update”, Department of State and Department of Defense, October 1987.

Ex-member of the Sandinista State Security Apparatus Miguel Bolanos has testified that Nicaragua is being used as a base for a multitude of communist-bloc terrorist groups. This includes not only Soviet and Cuban operatives, but also Bulgarians, East Germans, Libyans, and the PLO. (The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 294, Sept 30, 1983). Americans are also being trained in Nicaragua for the purpose of exporting terrorism back to the United States. For documentation see, Mercenaries in Nicaragua: The Documentary Evidence, Ed. J Michael Waller, Council for InterAmerican Security Special Report, 1986.

Shirley Christian. Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family. Random House, 1985, p.129, 303. This tactic by Daniel Ortega is also explained in some detail in L Francis Bouchey, J. Michael Waller and Steve Baldwin, The Real Secret War. Council for InterAmerican Security, 1987, p. 21.

For a historical discussion of the background of Ho Chi Minh’s communist development, see Nguyen Van Canh. Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982. Hoover Institutional Press, 1983.

One excellent source is R.S. Leinken, B. Rubin. The Central American Crisis Reader. Summit Books, 1987, which contains many of the official documents of the FSLN and letters written between several of the organizers of the revolution. See also James R. Whelan and Franklin A. Jaeckle. The Soviet Assault on America’s Southern Flank. Regnery Gateway, 1988.

Nguyen Toung Lai. New Socialist Man. In: Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden, op. cit., p. 292.

Ibid, p. 41-47. According to Nguyen Van Canh, the communists in the North classified as “landlords” anyone owning more than 1.0 mau or 0.68 ha (equal to less than ½ acre) of land. The majority owned less than one mau. In truth, the tactic was used to intimidate the population and as a ploy to remove all non-communist resistance, and to enforce collectivization. Van Canh confirms the people and the world were told a lie that land was to be taken from rich landlords and given to the people, but in truth it was taken from the small farmer and given to the State. Nguyen Van Canh. Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982. op. cit., p. 30-31.

Shirley Christian, op. cit., p. 249.

Richard Nixon. No More Vietnams. Arbor House, 1985, p. 21.

In fact, the largest segment consisted of moderate political parties, church leadership, and private enterprise groups, and not the radical communist revolutionaries. This is discussed in some detail in Shirley Christian’s book, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, op. cit.

Ibid, p.103. It was also President Carter who abandoned the moderate forces represented by the Social Christian and Conservative parties, some trade unions, the Roman Catholic Church leadership, and the large private enterprise umbrella organization called the Superior Council or Private Enterprise — COSEP.

Daniel Berrigan. Night Flight to Hanoi. Macmillian Co, 1968, p. 70.

Shirley Christian, op. cit.

“Inside Communist Nicaragua: The Miguel Bolanos Transcripts.” The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 294, Sept 30,1983.

L Francis Bouchey, J Michael Waller, Steven Baldwin. The Real Secret War. Council for InterAmerican Security, 1987. See also, S. Steven Powell. Covert Cadre. Green Hill, 1987, p. 239.

For an excellent review of the true nature of these tours see J. Michael Waller’s article appearing in Human Events, June 13, 1987. In this article he describes not only the methods used by the communists in Nicaragua, but also the incredible degree of dedication held by the gullible Americans taking these tours.

Paul Hollander. The Survival of the Adversary Culture. Transaction Publishers, 1988.

The role played by liberation theology in the revolutionary movement in Latin America cannot be overemphasized. For a more complete discussion, I recommend Michael Novak. Will it Liberate. Questions About Liberation Theology. Paulist Press, 1986.

“Inside Communist Nicaragua: The Miguel Bolanos Transcripts.” op. cit.

L Francis Bouchy et al. The Real Secret War. op. cit., p. 129.

This can be learned by reading his own words and by those of his travel companion, Daniel Berrigan, during his trip to Hanoi, while our men were fighting and dying in the battlefields of Vietnam. Daniel Berrigan, Night Flight to Hanoi. op. cit. See also the confessions of a dozen leftist intellectual converts flowing from the Second Thoughts Conference, as compiled by John H Bunzel (ed.), Political Passages. The Free Press, 1988, and David Horowitz. Nicaragua: A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left. Commentary, June 1986.

In fact, except to the most pathetically naïve, Berrigan and Zinn’s confessions of faith appear puerile and moronic. Yet, by his credentials as a journalist with the New York Times and by his manner of writing, Salisbury gives the uninitiated reader a sense that he is reading an objective report of events. It is because of this sense of credibility that Salisbury does his most damaging work. The communists in the North were quick to recognize this. See Harrison Salisbury. Behind the Lines-Hanoi, Harper & Roe, 1967. The value of Salisbury’s articles and books is emphasized by the fact that the North Vietnamese officials read his articles over the loudspeaker system in the POW camps to demoralize the Americans held captive. Jim and Sybil Stockdale. In Love and War. Harper & Roe, 1984, p. 245.

One of the more famous of these stories was that of Niels Tanner, who despite unbelievable tortures, refused to give the names of his fellow pilots, instead he gave the names “Clark Kent” and “Ben Casey.” Jim Stockdale tells us that, “American leftists wrote the North Vietnamese government exposing Niels, and he had been in leg irons ever since. He was kept in one of the tiny dark cells in the Mint, except for those once a week hobbling visits to the deserted yard for a face wash.” Stockdale, In Love and War, op. cit., p. 261-62.

L. Francis Bouchey et al. op. cit., p. 58.

Ibid., p. 58-59. Joyce Hollyday, in an article for Sojourners magazine, described the reasoning of the WFP organization. By placing themselves between the Sandinistas and the Contras, they knew the Contras would not shoot Americans. In this way, they hoped to stop the effectiveness of the Contra fighting force. Hollyday even describes how they met with one of the nine comandantes, Sergio Ramirez, and offered their “shield of love” proposal. At a WFP meeting in New York in early 1985 an individual who attended stated that one of the leaders expressed their hopes that some of their activists would be killed so that U.S. public opinion would be turned against the U.S. policy in Nicaragua.

Ibid., p. 145-146.

Marvin Alisky. La Prensa of Managua: Chronicler of its Country. p. 15-29. In: International Freedom Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1988. See also: Nicaragua: Civil Liberties and the Central American Peace Plan. Puebla Institute, January 1988, and Humberto Belli, Breaking the Faith: The Sandinista Revolution and its Impact on Freedom and Christian Faith in Nicaragua. Crossway Books, 1985.

Nyuyen Van Canh. Vietnam Under Communists, op. cit., p. 145-163.

Tran Tri Vu. “The Discipline House” In: Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden, op. cit., p. 277-280. Mrs. Lu Thi Duc, wife of a re-education prisoner, says that her husband was also tricked. After the fall he was told to report for a ten day re-education course. He was taken into the forest and remained in a concentration camp for years under the harshest of conditions. When she joined other prisoner’s wives to protest the new government many were arrested and their children left abandoned to care for themselves. Ibid., p. 281. Al Santoli makes an interesting observation about the re-education process. He says, “I have now interviewed a large number of Vietnamese who have been in re-education camps. I am deeply concerned because if you study the structure of the early Nazi concentration camps — the overwork, underfeeding, lack of medical treatment, and severe punishment — the similarity is stunning. Ibid., p. 273.

Ibid., p. 279.

Ibid., p. 279.

For a very convincing discussion of this obsession with anti-anticommunism, see John H. Bunzel (ed.), Political Passages. The Free Press, 1988; David Horowitz. “Nicaragua: A speech to My Former Comrades on the Left.” Commentary, June 1986, p. 27-31.; Peter Collier and David Horowitz. “Another Low and Dishonest Decade on the Left.” Commentary, January 1987, p. 17-24. For an excellent discussion of the use of “McCarthyism” to silence the anticommunist right, see Peter Collier and David Horowitz. “McCarthyism: The Last Refuge of the Left.” Commentary, January, 1988, p. 36-41.

  Peter Collier and David Horowitz, op. cit., p. 17-24.

Truong Nhu Tang, “Psychological Warfare, In: To Bear Any Burden, op. cit., p. 166.

Daniel Berrigan, op. cit., p. 129. Berrigan also says that Premier Dong told him “Still one takes hope, because public opinion in your country has made some progress in understanding the role of the Front and in accepting it. We note also that some members of Congress are beginning to understand the place of the Front,” p. 127; and that “the chief task is to oppose this needless and indeed hopeless escalation of the war. In this task public opinion in your country is of the essence. The citizens must demand that your President concludes a just peace with our nation…”, p. 128-129. Dong acknowledges the success of this propaganda program when he tells Berrigan, “The fact that we are here today speaking of such things shows that we have made a common front..”, p. 128.

Nguyen Tuong Lai, “Soldier if the Revolution.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 148.

S. Steven Powell. Covert Cadre. Green Hill, 1987, p. 37.

Ibid, p. 42.

Truong Nhu Tang, op. cit., p. 145.

L. Francis Bouchey et al., op. cit.; Allan Brownfield and J Michael Waller. The Revolution Lobby. Council for InterAmerican Security, 1985; and S. Steven Powell, op. cit.

For a detailed historical treatment of this process see Shirley Christian, op. cit.

Steven Powel says of one of the most important front groups, The Institute for Policy Studies, “Not only did the IPS make an unceasing effort to undermine U.S. polices, but a number of fellows and associates worked in league with the communist regime in Hanoi, even as American soldiers were dying in the rice patties and jungles.”  S. Steven Powel, op. cit., p. 43.

S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter. The Media Elite. Alder & Alder, 1986, p. 50.

Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 166 and Truong Nhu Tang. A Vietcong Memoir, op. cit, p. 146-147. He states that “the idea that continued American intervention was immoral was gaining widespread credence in the U.S. according to our intelligence analysis, not only among the militant antiwar groups, but in the population generally. These were the signs that told us the offensive was a success, and at this stage of the war we received them with as much satisfaction as we received news of any military victory. Ibid, p. 211.

This influence was not always accomplished directly but often through American Leftists. For example, Steven Powel says that key people from the Institute for Policy Studies collaborated to form the Dispatch News Service, which fed antiwar stories to the mainstream media. Many of these stories they received directly from representatives of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese apparatus. S. Steven Powell, op. cit., p. 34-35.

Peter Braestrup. “Grasping Straws.” in: Al Santoli, op cit., p. 216.

Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 216.

Truong Nhu Tang, op. cit., p. 231.

Eddie Adams. “The Tet Photo. In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 184.

For a full review of the horror of the Vietcong campaign against the civilian population of South Vietnam, see: The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam, prepared for the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972.

Several excellent books have been written, both during the war and after, concerning the general terrorist policies of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese government and specific cases of the policy in action. See: Douglas Pike. The Vietcong Strategy of Terror (written specifically for the United States Mission in Vietnam); Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. The Vietnamese Gulag. Simon & Shuster, 1986; David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. Portrait of the Enemy. Simon & Schuster, 1986; Truong Nhu Tang, op. cit.

S. Steven Powell, op. cit., p. 37.

Richard Nixon. No More Vietnams, op. cit., p. 92; and The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam, op cit.

Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams, op. cit., p. 92.

Truong Mealy. “The Underground School.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 62.

L Francis Bouchey et al., op. cit., p. 29; See also James R. Whelan and Franklin A Jaeckie. The Soviet Assault on America’s Southern Flank. Regnery Gateway and Council for InterAmerican Security, 1988; and “A Nigaraguan Freedom Fighter Tells His Story.” In: West Watch, Vol. 11, No. 2, Council for InterAmerican Security, March 1988.

L. Francis Bouchey et al., op. cit., p. 22.

Ibid., p. 22.

Ibid., p. 22.

Ibid., p. 27.

“Inside Communist Nicaragua: The Miguel Bolanos Transcripts.” The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, No. 294, September 30, 1983.

For a complete description of the Sandinista attack on the church, see Humberto Belli. Breaking Faith. Crossway Books, The Pubela Institute, 1985. See also: Humberto Belli. “Revolutionary Love.” In: Nicaragua in Focus. Puebla Institute, April 1988, p. 43-53.

General Edward Lansdale tells the story of a Vietcong village they landed near in the U Minh Forest. To the south of this village was another village inhibited by Catholics who had fled the North. Lansdale said, “There wasn’t a single communist who could ever come in and start talking bad, because the villagers would take out their knives right away. They had escaped the terror in North Vietnam. They knew who was the enemy.” General Edward Lansdale. “The Chinese Priest.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 79. As with all communist regimes, religion is viewed as an enemy of the revolution. Nguyen Cong Hoan says of Vietnam under communist rule, “the present state of religious life in Hanoi and the rest of Vietnam is quite sad — on Sundays and Christian holy days, the government enforces collective labor to dig ditches or patch roads, to prevent people from going to church. Or they force people to attend mandatory political classes on party line. However, when certain Westerners visit, the government allows people to go to church or temple… The communists control and repress religion through associations that carry out the party policy… Priests and monks who obey the party blindly are appointed to lead these associations… The propaganda machinery of the government openly slanders the major faiths. A film, All Saints Day, defamed Catholics through the image of a girl raped by a priest during her confession on All Saints Day.”  Nguyen Cong Hoam. “Promises.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 287.

Humberto Belli. Breaking the Faith. The Pubela Institute, 1985, p. 139.

L Francis Bouchy et al., op cit., p. 20-21.

Tom Bates. Rads: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and its Aftermath. Harper Collins, 1992.

Russ Bradley. Bad News: The Foreign Policy of the New York Times. Regnery Gateway, 1984, p. 188-291. Peter Collier and David Horowitz stated that Ramparts magazine during the war carried cover pictures of a six year old carrying a Vietcong flag with the caption “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” Peter Collier and David Horowitz. “Another Low and Dishonest Decade on the Left.” Commentary, January 1987, p. 17-24. The importance and power of the media in revolutions was recognized in the 18th century by Nicolas Bonneville when he said: “The smell of printer’s ink is the incense of modern revolutionary organization.”

Richard Nixon, op. cit., p. 130.

John G Hubbell. P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner-of-War Experience in Vietnam: 1964-1973. Reader’s Digest Press, 1976, p. 585.

Harrison E. Salisbury. Behind the Lines-Hanoi. Harper & Row, 1967, p. 5.

Peter Collier. “Looking Backward: Memories of the Sixties Left.” In: John H. Bunzel (ed.),  Political Passages: Journey of Change Through Two Decades, 1968-1988. Free Press, 1988, p. 173.

Ronald Radosh. “On Hanging Up the Old Red Flag,” ibid., p. 225.

S. Steven Powell, op cit, p. 39.

Jim and Sybil Stockdale. In Love & War, Harper & Row, 1984, p. 361; and Janis Dodge. “Pilots in Pajamas.” In: Al Santoli, op cit., p. 243. For more detail concerning Cora Weiss, see S. Steven Powell, op cit, p. 38-39.

S Steven Powell op. cit., p. 39.

S Steven Powell, op. cit. p. 39

Daniel Berrigan op. cit., p. 61.

Mark Berent.“ Rules of Engagement,” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 144.

Dan Pitzer. “The Release,” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 160. Pitzer was also told by his interrogator, Major Bai, “Look this is your Capital, look where our flag is, look where your flag is. Why do you resist? Your own country looks at the people who support our cause as heroes. Why do you stay here and suffer?”

Daniel Berrigan. op. cit., p. 40.

Moreliet in 1796 probably expressed this best when he said, “The people, burdened with their daily work, have neither the ability, time or desire to read. This enormous mass of people could never have been led into the terrible movement of these past three years (the French Revolution) by metaphysical-philosophical, or eloquent works. Other levels were needed — not books, but words.” James Billington. Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the revolutionary Faith. Basic Books, 1980, p. 38.

S. Steven Powell op. cit., p. 33-34.

Allan C Brownfield and J Michael Waller. The Revolution Lobby. Council for InterAmerican Security, p. 80.

L Francis Bouchy et al., op cit., p. 157.

Ibid, p. 157.

For more detailed information, see the above work plus S. Steven Powell, op. cit., and Allan Brownfield and J Michael Waller. The Revolution Lobby, op. cit.

L Francis Bouchey et al., op cit., p. 9; See also: Allan Brownfield and J Michael Waller. The Revolution Lobby, op. cit. This book has the most carefully researched information concerning the far Left’s attempt to influence Congress and the media concerning Central America.

Ibid, p. 10-11.

Ibid, p. 15.

Ibid, p. 13-14

Ibid, p. 14

Ibid, p. 16

Ibid, p. 18

Ibid, p. 25-26.

Ibid, p. 23; For a close-up of Bertie’s tour with the FDN and his unfortunate tragic death, see also: West Watch, Vol. 10, No. 5, July 1987, p. 4.

Quote taken from an interview conducted by the Department of State on December 8, 1987.

For more details on how Congress abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia, see Richard Nixon. No More Vietnams. op. cit.

Truong Nhu Tang. op. cit., p. 284.

Nguyen Cong Hoan. op. cit., p. 286.

Nguyen Tuong Lai. “The New Socialist Man.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 293.

Ginetta Sagan. “Prisoners of Conscience.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 266-269.

Ibid, p. 268-269.

“The Freezeniks.” National Review, September 7, 1984.

See Beta Romero and Kassie Neou. “Holocaust.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 245-259. I would also recommend to the interested reader Haing Ngor. A Cambodian Odyssey. Macmillian, 1987; Sydney H. Schanberg. The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Elisabeth Sifton Books, Penguin, 1985; and Molyda Szmusiak. The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood, 1975-1980. Hill and Wang, 1986.

Berta Romero and Kassie Neou. “Holocaust.” In: Al Santoli, op. cit., p. 250.

Norman Podhoretz. Why We Were in Vietnam. Simon & Schuster, 1982, p. 179.

Ibid.

Written by Russell L. Blaylock, MD

Dr. Russell L. Blaylock is President of Advanced Nutritional Concepts and Theoretical Neurosciences in Jackson, Mississippi. He has written numerous path-blazing scientific papers and many books, including Excitotoxins — The Taste That Kills(1994), Bioterrorism: How You Can Survive (2001), Health and Nutrition Secrets(2002), and Natural Strategies for Cancer Patients (2003). He is Associate Editor-in-Chief and a Consulting Editor in Basic Neuroscience for Surgical Neurology International (SNI).

This article may be cited as: Blaylock RL. The use of propaganda and psychological warfare by the Left. HaciendaPublishing.com, August 8, 2016. Available from: https://haciendapublishing.com/the-use-of-propaganda-and-psychological-warfare-by-the-left-by-russell-l-blaylock-m-d/

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