“Nothing new under the Sun” — Ecclesiastes
This is a story of then and now: 1974 and 2024; Hanoi, Beijing, and Washington—from U.S. betrayal of South Vietnam in 1973–1975 to America’s unilateral surrender to Beijing in 2023–2024.
Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden slow-walked prepaid aid to Taiwan. Mr. Biden all but announced unilateral surrender of Taiwan at an APEC conference in San Francisco in November 2023.
The intentions of the top leadership of antiwar protesters of 1974–1975 and the progressives and socialists of 2024 were the same. Many hated the United States and lusted and acted to change it. They found hope for democracy in Hanoi and prosperity in Beijing. They allied with the enemy in Hanoi and in Beijing.
In Vietnam, the top leaders of the Left were a distinct, passionate, and successful minority force for change, particularity in Congress. Yet they never won the hearts and minds of the American people.
At the peak of street protests in October and November 1969, a “silent majority” rose to defend Richard Nixon. On Nov. 16, Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech polled 77–79 percent favoring Nixon’s Vietnam policies. Only 6 percent disapproved. Massive protests had mobilized support for the president.
Very small percentages of the public were ever both against the war and admirers of war protesters.
Until the end, the U.S. people wanted a victory and despised Hanoi’s friends. Americans wanted to defeat communism, were unimpressed with the Vietnam antiwar teach-ins, rated the SDS and Black Panthers highly unfavorable, sided with the police in the riots at the Democratic convention in 1968, and believed antiwar activists were aiding the communists and performing acts of disloyalty against the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.
Finally, in 1980, five years after the fall of Indochina, a Harris survey found that 73 percent of the public agreed, “The trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.”
Still small leftist front groups for peace had falsely, but successfully, claimed to represent very large constituencies—e.g. women, lawyers, doctors, students, racial minorities, and war veterans.
Though they belonged to nominally independent organizations, many participated in Vietnamese, Soviet, and East Bloc funded, controlled, or dominated peace and antiwar conferences. They virtually never opposed their communist sponsors. Some met Vietnamese officials across the globe and made broadcasts on Radio Hanoi.
Col. Stanislav Lunev, a defector from Soviet military intelligence (GRU), in “Through the Eyes of the Enemy,” stated that the “GRU and KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad.”
Mr. Lunev further claimed, “The GRU and KGB had a larger budget for antiwar propaganda in the United States than it did for economic and military support of the Vietnamese.”
Yes, an astonishing claim, but we must presume Soviet support was significant.
Military Aid
Little noted by the U.S. media, which loved to portray the war as an indigenous liberation struggle, China gave early military aid to Hanoi. In 1958, China provided 50,000 Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifles, and it provided 90,000 guns of all types in 1962. In August 1964, it sent 15 MIG-15 and MIG-17 jets and later ground-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery to North Vietnam.In 1964, China agreed to deploy 300,000 Chinese troops to North Vietnam. In 1965, China sent seven divisions to North Vietnam, including troops for road repair and construction, two rail supply lines between China and Hanoi, mine sweeping, and logistics.
Time magazine failed to publish Time photographer Armond Noble’s 1966 photos of captured Chinese weapons.
Chinese engineering troops built more than 750 miles of roads. Some 320,000 Chinese troops served in Vietnam; of these, 150,000 antiaircraft troops stayed until late 1973. Some 1,446 Chinese soldiers were killed in Vietnam, and 16 of 6,000 Soviets died there as well.
Now
In telling contrast, by 2024, the leftist progressives, socialists, and communists were a large influential minority contending for rule over U.S. politics, culture, and economics. They had more troops, more collaborators, and higher prospects for winning—defeating and transforming the United States—than their 1970s counterparts.Indeed, libertarians and conservative isolationists joined the Left in appeasing U.S. enemies Russia and Iran, but particularly communist China.
Inside China, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) spending on domestic security, totalitarianism, exceeded its worldwide spending on the People’s Liberation Army. Massive surveillance and censorship politically controlled 1.4 billion people.
The Many Friends of Communist China
By 2024, hundreds of thousands of collaborators throughout the United States wanted bountiful and beautiful friendships:- U.S. politicians and public health bureaucrats adopted a Chinese-communist-inspired “Zero COVID” lockdown of the U.S. economy, health care, schools, churches, democracy, and civil liberties.
- U.S. media, the Democratic Party, military leaders, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the FBI parroted CCP propaganda about a white racist, extremist, fascist United States oppressing all persons of color including Chinese-Americans.
- The Silicon Valley financed and built the artificial intelligence, surveillance, and censorship technologies of China’s totalitarian state and then brought this techno-tyranny back to America.
- A desperate and shameless Hollywood allowed communist Chinese purchases of its studios and censorship of its movies.
- A plethora of academies and talented professors on Chinese payrolls stole technology, indoctrinated Americans, and censored critics of communist China.
- Corporate profiteers—indifferent to Red China’s genocide, bullying, and aggression—sacrificed American jobs to cheap or slave labor.
- China traders enriched Red China and through trade deficits effectively financed modernization of the People’s Liberation Army, communist China’s propaganda war, and an army of unregistered lobbyists and foreign agents for Red China.
- Elite civilian universities and happy military exchanges with China converted U.S. military leaders into engaging appeasers and distracted them from their military duties with issues of race, right-wing extremism, and climate rather than military training, readiness, and deterrence.
- U.S. military training and education dismissed American values and institutions and neglected Chinese political warfare at U.S. military academies, National Defense Universities, and other war colleges.
In short, by 2024 many American elites—sycophants, collaborators, talents, and crony capitalists—quietly believed that the communist-ruled People’s Republic of China’s social, political, and economic model was superior—or at least profitable to a privileged few.
Moral Equivalency and Superiority
Tom Hayden’s Port Huron Statement of 1962 for the SDS implied moral equivalency of U.S. imperialism and communist imperialism. Yet in their deeds thereafter, Hayden and SDS/Weathermen thought communism had a superior vision of the future. They proved it in violent riots in Chicago, Berkeley, etc. and Weather bombings.Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd wrote about Maoist China: “The Communist Internationale boomed with conviction. ... Everywhere is the pulse of purposeful activity. ... We saw thousands of people digging a canal while music blared from outside loudspeakers.”
(Reminiscent of accounts of black slaves singing while picking cotton.)
Lynd and Hayden knew the tune and its lyrics.
“We simply give the order to sing to anyone who knows how to sing the songs we need,” said Soviet propagandist V. Pereverzev in 1929.
Christopher Lasch observed that Hayden and Lynd’s “Other Side” was like “earlier accounts by American radicals in the twenties and thirties of their sentimental journey to the Soviet Union.”
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
A few academicians joined the Hanoi and Beijing teams. A Maoist faction of academia formed the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) not only to end the war in Vietnam, but to commend Mao’s revolution in the Great Leap Forward (1957–1960) and to promote the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969), which cost tens of millions of lives.CCAS’s 37 collective contributors wrote, and CCAS published, “The Indochina Story” in 1970. It provided no attribution to individuals for particular topics.
Still notable among the collective today are Noam Chomsky, Richard C. Kagan, Ngo Vinh Long, and Edwin Moise.
Meeting in China in July 1971, the PRG, Hanoi’s political front in the south, told members of CCAS to “unify, unify, unify” around the PRG’s Seven Point Peace Proposal. Some CCAS members—Marilyn Young, Noam Chomsky, and others—joined Mayday actions in 1971, attempting to shut down the government in Washington. Some 14,000 were arrested.
The most noteworthy published contributors to the “Bulletin of Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars” during the Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath, 1968–1977, were Dan Berrigan, Edmund Clubb, John Fairbanks, Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Gabriel Kolko, Bruce Gareth Porter, Stanley Sheinbaum, Stanley Spector, Ezra Vogel, Arthur Waskow, and William Appleman Williams.
CCAS’s direct successor “Critical Asian Studies” stated, “The historical tradition of socialist thought remains a source of inspiration for some of us.”
It was socialism of the communist kind.
After the Fall
A coalition of 40 organizations continued U.S. peace movement shipments of cash and goods to the communists in Vietnam.In effect pledging solidarity forever, the peace movement sanitized Reeducation and New Economic Zones. Friends of the Indochina Organizing Committee and Indochina Resource Center praised the noble intentions of socialist engineering.
The U.S./Indochina Report stated that brutal reeducation camps were “training” a million soldiers, police, drug addicts, and prostitutes “for productive work”—not the same as, but reminiscent of, signs reading “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gates of Nazi death camps, or the CCP’s reeducation camps for Muslims and Falun Gong adherents.
Veterans
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) was a very small minority made famous by John Kerry and Ken Burns. A few hundred members of VVAW claimed to speak for over 2.5 million American veterans of Vietnam, though they only showed up in handfuls to protest the war on Hanoi’s side.As POW heroes returned from the “Hanoi Hilton,” the “peace” movement opposed the “contrived patriotism” of the homecomings, calling the POWs “hypocrites, liars, and pawns.” The movement demanded amnesty and presidential pardons for deserters, draft resisters, convicted criminals, and the dishonorably discharged.
In contrast with the few VVAW members, Vietnam vets were “glad” or “proud” of their experience or service. Some 90 percent of those who saw heavy combat were proud of their service.
Over time, the peace movement successfully transformed the image of proud Vietnam vets from brutal baby killers into hapless, pathetic victims of Agent Orange, PTSD, drugs, alcohol, homelessness, and suicide.
All victims of an evil United States. America remained evil.
Military Then and Now
During Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara showed absolute contempt for the joint chief of staff, according to H. R. McMasters, General Charles Cooper, and Adm. Thomas Moorer.By 2024, the threats to the United States from China were existential, military readiness was lacking, and prospects for losing a war over Taiwan were real.
The joint chiefs of 2024 were now the problem, not offering any military solutions to the CCP’s rise.
- General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bragged that he read Mao, Marx, and Lenin.
- Admiral Mike Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, required reading Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”—by hating whites.
- The U.S. Air Force, though short of pilots, reduced the number of white officers from 80 percent to 67.5 percent, and white applicants for military service declined.
- The military chased after an imaginarily large number of extremists in its ranks.
- The Air Force Academy stopped punishing young cadets for lying, cheating, or stealing and instead indoctrinated them against using offensive words like “mom” and “dad.”
- West Point sent cadets for training in China under Schwarzman Scholarship at Tsinghua University—“a training ground for Chinese Communist Party and government elite,” according to Peter Schweizer.
Youth Then and Now
The 1960s college youth who captured mythological inflated historical attention were a privileged, draft-dodging minority. In fact, those aged 18–29 supported the United States in Vietnam more than any other age group and voted for “mad man” Nixon over peace candidate McGovern.By 2024, the domestic legacy of the Vietnam peace movement lived well in the ethos of growing blame and hate in U.S. constituencies, particularly in the indoctrinated minds of millennials and Gen Z.
In 2024, large minorities of Gen Z condemned the United States and favored socialism and communism.
Among 150 million Americans following TikTok were a large majority of young Americans who chose TikTok for their information. China-controlled TikTok inspired American divisions of gender and race while encouraging unity of its own youth in patriotism, childbearing, and hard work in TikTok China.
Ethnic Students Then and Now
Organizing a rally in Carbondale at Southern Illinois University, CCAS had to conduct a coast-to-coast search to find a reliable 15 Vietnamese students willing to join a protest.Vietnamese political ops inside the United States relied upon U.S. proxies at the top of the antiwar movement, not handfuls of Vietnamese students.
In stark contrast, by 2024, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students—the intimidated and volunteers—gave the CCP a large base for recruiting agents of political influence.
Legacy
The peace movement left a permanent blame and hate legacy across many U.S. institutions and among several generations of Americans.It gave birth to America’s cultural revolution. With the assistance of Henry Kissinger’s decades of engaging and appeasing China, survivors, proteges, and successors of the movement made the United States vulnerable to communist China at home and abroad.
Worse, communist China has all but captured the minds and friendships of many U.S. elites and talents, beyond the Ivy Leagues to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, professional sports, and corporate boardrooms.
U.S. tech corporations perfected the technologies of censorship, surveillance, and oppression in support of the CCP and then brought them back to America.
Marilyn Young remembers: “The Sixties … centrally about the recognition, on the part of an ever growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they lived—peaceful, generous, honourable, just—did not exist and never had.”
She advocated “the emergence of a more nuanced history of the U.S. as opposed to the patriotic meta-narrative taught in grade school.”
She would become one of the most influential historians of the Vietnam War taught in grade schools and above.
