PrintHow we won the war in Vietnam
I can just hear the sneers at this headline. Won? The senseless Vietnam War, which killed people for no reason at all? The answer is yes. We won the real war in Vietnam; that war was called the Cold War. It was fought to defend free peoples against the hyper—aggressive Soviet Empire. And I am not the only one who thinks so.
Vietnam was a battle in the Cold War ——— which wasn't all cold by any means.
The United States fought two major proxy wars against the Soviet Empire and its allies, like Mao Tse Tung's China. One war was fought in Korea, and cost 34,000 American lives. The other was Vietnam, and cost 58,000 American lives. Thousands and thousands of Koreans and Vietnamese died along with us, fighting as allies and friends.
Those wars were pure hell, as General Sherman said. All wars are hell.
Suppose we had not fought in Korea and Vietnam. The "Cold" War would have been lost. What would have happened? When America became involved in Vietnam, the Soviets and Chinese Communists were a single block, although tensions between China and the Soviet Union were rising. Eastern Europe was one great concentration camp. Soviet imperialism was on the march in Asia, Africa, South America, and Western Europe. Korea and Vietnam were bloody holding actions that allowed democracies to grow strong enough to outlast the enemy.
Consider just how many people were killed domestically by the Soviet Empire and its allies over seventy years ——— not in wars, but in tyrannical campaigns to control their own peoples. According to an authoritative team of French historians, Marxist regimes exterminated 100 million human beings in the 20th century. That is not even counting wars fought by those regimes against other countries.
Just a reminder: Even in the last few years probably more than a million North Koreans have died from starvation and persecution, all because of their fat and paranoid Marxist dictator Kim Jong Il's economic blunders and refusal to open his country sifficiently to international aid. Communist Vietnam has killed tens of thousands of its people in "re—education camps" since the Vietnam War.
We forget the relentless killing machines of Marxist tyrannies, their determination to wipe out entire classes of human beings, small capitalists, rich peasants, farmers who refused to be corralled into communes, dissidents. In Cambodia, Pol Pot killed people simply for wearing glasses; they might have been dissidents. We must not forget the biggest threat of the 20th century.
In the fantasy world of the American Left, Vietnam was not worth fighting because the Cold War was only a fiction whipped up by the military— industrial complex. If only those 100 million dead souls could answer that lie. The American victory in the Cold War was dearly bought, but if the Soviet Union had not been stopped, its victims might now number ——— how many? 200 million? 300 million? An endless number, as the Soviet Empire went from victory to victory?
In truth, we should have parades celebrating the sacrifice of Americans and our Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War. It was an agonizing battle. But it was thrust upon us, and there was no other way. Don't let the Left get away with lying about it.
To really understand the last hundred years, we need to remember only two
numbers: six million and 100 million. Six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Christians and handicapped people were deliberately exterminated by the Right Fascist ideology of the Nazis.
But Hitler had only thirteen years in power. Over a period of seventy years, Left Fascism was able to destroy 100 million human beings.
Left or Right, Fascism is Fascism.
The next time you see a Vietnam vet, thank him or her from the bottom of your heart for winning the longest war of the 20th century.
