A Sick and Tired Writer

Max Friedman

The Augusta Free Press

Just when you thought the Vietnam Left had finally died off or gotten the message that they were wrong about the communists in Indochina, up they rise, one by one, like moldy old mindless zombies from a grade-Z horror movie.

The staged Cindy Sheehan freak show at Crawford, Texas, near the president's home, looks like a scene from "Plan 9 From Outer Space," voted one of the worst sci-fi horror films ever made. Now "Phoney Joanie" Baez is back "On the Road Again" - like the old movie star whose beauty and appeal has faded, but who hopes for one more comeback.

Sheehan, an old lefty from the '60s, and admitted co-founder of Medea Benjamin's marxist Code Pink (known in anti-communist circles as "Code Pinko"), had duped the mainstream media, again. The MSM thinks she is just an aggrieved mother of a brave soldier who was killed in action in Iraq, not bothering to read her own writings on her Web site, wherein she reveals herself to be an egomaniac, America-hater of long standing in the left.

After getting major MSM news coverage during the boring news days of July and August (major progress in Iraq and Afghanistan don't count as important news stories anymore), Sheehan was joined by a traveling freakshow of leftists from around the country, but mainly from California. Given land to pitch their sideshow tents on by a Bush-hating Democrat Texan, they have set up Camp Casey, a sort of mini-Woodstock populated by the dregs and dupes of the American left.

Please don't give me any arguments about these being sincere, grieving parents of those honorable soldiers killed in action in the fight against terrorism. Many are more like leaches of the left who attach themselves to any anti-American cause that comes down the pike. A few might be honest in their motives, but they are being used today, just as folks like them were used by the communist-led anti-war in the '60s and '70s (which I saw from the inside).

Now, lefties love folk music, and Joan Baez, a very good singer loves to entertain, be it professionally on stage or at left-wing causes, for which she usually turns out to be the perfect performing clown. So she shows up at Crawford last week, puts on a kumbaya show, and thinks that al-Zarqawi will put flowers in his hair while slitting the throats of some innocent prisoner. Some people never learn, and Baez is one of them.

While her pacifist protests against the Vietnam War were probably from her genuine beliefs in peace (she was reportedly raised in the Quaker faith), the communist left hit her between the eyes with an ideological 2x4 wooden beam attack in 1979. Now why would the Hanoi-lobby want to attack one of their own? Simple - she strayed from the Hanoi-line that communism would deliver freedom and a workers' paradise to the people of Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) instead of slavery and genocide.

While Baez didn't say much about the genocide by Hanoi's one-time ally, the Khmer Rouge, while they were perpetrating it on the people of Cambodia (an estimated 1 to 2 million people died from executions, torture, starvation, disease and while trying to escape), nor the during the harsh occupation of Laos, she did begin to have some twinges of conscience when she heard and saw the horrors of the refugees who fled from Vietnam during the boat-people exodus and then in the refugee camps along the Thai border with Cambodia. She's a late learner, this one is.

It is impossible to give an exact figure on how many people died trying to escape Vietnam or after having been attacked by Thai pirates, but the estimate is that for every one person who made it to safety, another one to two died at sea. Since approximately 750,000 boat people made it to Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, as well as to U.S., charity-operated and other ships of countries traveling in the Gulf of Siam, the death toll could reach over 1 million.

Also, stories from former Viet Cong officials, escaped South Vietnamese political, religious and military people and a few foreign clergymen, began to tell the world of what life was like in communist-occupied South Vietnam. While the communists admitted that they held at lest 200,000 prisoners of the Saigon regime for re-education, early realistic figures based on the accounts of former prisoners puts the number over 400,000 to 500,000 at a minimum, while famed human-rights activist Ginetta Sagan's masterful study, "Violations of Human Rights in The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, April 1975-December 1988," later put that figure at upwards of 1 million.

An earlier death-rate studies by Karl Jackson and Jacqueline Desbarats, based on first-hand interviews with escapees, put the initial deliberate killings (executions) at about 65,000 ("Indochina Report," April-June 1986), a figure later raised to a minimum of 83,000. Sagan then raised this figure based on a 10 to 15 percent death rate in the re-education camps, because of additional interviews with former VC and released ARVN/GVN personnel possibly 100,000. This may not include hidden executions of former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese defectors ("Hoi Chanhs"), who numbered at least 250,000 and 8,000, respectively. Sagan wrote that "may individuals have reported that they (i.e. Hoi Chanhs) were almost completely eliminated."

One must also remember that illness (an estimated 80 to 90 percent mortality rate in communist prison hospitals due to a lack of supplies or adequate care), land-mine clearing by hand, suicide and starvation may not have been counted into the 83,000-plus execution figure.

In 1976, Baez and a few others of the Hanoi Lobby did begin to speak up about what was going on in communist Vietnam. More than 90 "persons who were active in the antiwar movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s submitted its plea in a petition to Vietnam's permanent observer at the United Nations," (Associated Press, Dec. 30, 1976). Among the signers of this petition, besides Baez, were veteran Communist Party sympathizer Paul O'Dwyer; Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd (one of the less left of the clergy bund); poet Allen Ginsberg; and a few others, including Rev. Richard John Neuhas, a leader of the pro-Hanoi CALCAV (Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam), who later left the hard-left after having seen everything he had hoped for in Indochina go down in flames and blood.

People who did not sign the petition included peace pacifist frauds such as Father Philip and Daniel Berrigan, two brothers who never met a communist cause they couldn't support. Needless to say, Hanoi basically ignored this petition. However, when Baez put together a major ad for the May 30, 1979, edition of key newspapers across America, the left reacted with the vengeance of an SS Division. (She also had a column in the Washington Post of June 12, 1979, entitled "The Toll of Violence in Vietnam," which explained the May 30 ad by Baez and her group Humanitas/International Human Rights Committee).

The open letter to communist Vietnam said that "four years ago, the United States ended its 20-year presence in Vietnam. An anniversary that should be cause for celebration is, instead, a time for grieving. With tragic irony, the cruelty, violence and oppression practiced by foreign powers in your country for more than a century continue today under the present regime. Instead of bringing hope and reconciliation to war-torn Vietnam, your government has created a nightmare that overshadows significant progress achieved in many areas of Vietnamese society." And this was from a woman who said she "still considers herself of the Vietnamese people."

The ad continued, "For many Americans, especially among those who actively opposed the war, there is a reluctance to face or admit that wholesale travesties of human rights occur daily in Vietnam. For some, the ravage and rape of decades of war, the struggle to survive in the face of food shortages, calamitous weather and continuing military strife (i.e. in Cambodia) counter-balance or justify the existence of repression. For others there is simply no awareness, for what-ever reason, that human rights violations are so common in the new Vietnam."

The ad was signed by, surprisingly, Daniel Berrigan, Rep. Yvonne Braithwaite Burke (D-Cal., only because she had a large Vietnamese constituency), Cesar Chavez (United Farm Workers Union), Douglas Fraser (UAW president), writer Nat Hentoff, old CPUSA member/possible KGB operative I.F. "Izzy" Stone, and even lefty actor Ed Asner (who would then turn around in the '80s and support the communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua - the man never learned).

Interestingly, the Baltimore paper, The Sun, in its June 10, 1979, editorial entitled "Hanoi's Persecutions," wrote that "an international conference on Indochina's refugees, sought by Britain and the U.S., is needed urgently." Besides dealing with Cambodian refugees in Thailand and the boat people of Vietnam, it noted, "A second purpose should be to condemn the Hanoi regime for ethnic (Chinese) persecutions of a type and scale resembling Idi Amin's expulsion of Ugandan Asians early in this decade," and that "Hanoi is evidently 'purifying' its country on racists grounds."

Jane Fonda turned down the opportunity to sign on to the ad, as did the hardest core of the Hanoi Lobby, who turned on her like a flock of vampires on a fresh neck.

Baez was said to be "singing with someone else's voice" in Sovietskaya Kultura; "hysterical charges' (Daily Worker, June 6, 1979); "a cruel and wanton act," Guardian/Kunstler; and other attack terms.

The Baez ad was signed by some genuine liberals, and surprisingly, by some key members of the Hanoi Lobby, including communists, marxists and socialists, including Prof. Staughton Lynd, who still remained opposed to the U.S. efforts in Vietnam. A followup column by leftist, avowed pacifist at-any-cost teacher and writer Colman McCarthy, appeared in the Washington Post Style section of July 29, 1979. Entitled "Humanity in the Face of Politics," though continuing his anti-U.S. tirades over Vietnam, he did manage to write "from parts of the left she is being depicted as being off on a campaign of moral self-indulgence. However, well-meaning her intentions, this argument goes, she had no business attacking the current government in Vietnam for human-rights violations. The attack was seen as betrayal of her earlier thinking about the rightness of North Vietnam's position during the war. Maybe she's a lightweight after all, switching sides like this."

He then goes on to defend Baez's right to criticize Hanoi, saying that "Baez has been able to defend herself against the critics from the left. But the reaction to her position suggests that parts of the left enjoy nothing so much as intellectualizing. Why take a stance when an issue can still be debated, position-papered and cerebralized? 'Joan didn't think this through' is the current putdown."

To which I say to McCarthy, horse-hockie. The Hanoi supporters knew exactly what they were doing when they attacked her, namely covering up for communism's horrible genocidal system that destroys both bodies and souls in the name of the people and for a workers' paradise.

Seems that the workers preferred their paradise to be somewhere else, such as the United States - or why would millions of people, in the greatest outward migration in Vietnamese and Cambodian history (and that of Laos) be leaving the benevolent lands of Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Souvanavong, and risking their lives in the process?

No, Joan Baez was on to something, but she didn't have the guts to take off her Quaker visor to see what communism was really like in action. Now, 25 years later, she is again supporting the enemies of our country concerning Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, she will probably sign some letter or ad to somebody protesting the treatment of Islamofascists against their own people (I don't recall her doing much during the Taliban rule, or if she did, nobody paid any attention to an old folk singer).

I guess we can put Baez's journey to Camp Casey down with Hanoi Jane's upcoming veggie-oil bus tour to protest U.S. involvement in Iraq, as a last-gasp attempt by the left entertainment group to resurrect their past stupidities and treason. Maybe they, along with Cindy Sheehan, can get together and sing a few verses of "Running On Empty."