annals of propaganda

Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University Eugene V. Genovese, at a teach-in at Rutgers on the subject of the Vietnam War, held from midnight to 8 AM on April 23, 1965, said:

Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.
On July 28, 1965 New Jersey Republican Senator Wayne Dumont, the Republican candidate for Governor, met with the President of Rutgers, Dr. Mason Gross, and requested an investigation of Prof. Genovese. Dr. Gross declined to do so on the grounds that Genovese had not violated any rules which might require an investigation.

Senator Dumont subsequently went to the press with the Genovese story and made it an issue in his campaign for the governorship of New Jersey. On October 8, 1965 the Rutgers Board of Governors rejected Senator Dumont's request for the dismissal of Professor Genovese.

Reviving what was by then a dead issue, private citizen Nixon, who would become president of the United States three years later, and depart the Presidency in disgrace in 1974, decided to use the Genovese issue to make propaganda for the continuation of the war in Vietnam. In a letter to the New York Times dated Oct. 27, 1965 he made the following statement:

The victory for the Vietcong which Professor Genovese "welcomes" would mean ultimately the destruction of freedom of speech for all men for all time not only in Asia but in the United States as well.
And in the concluding paragraph of his letter he wrote:
We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost and the victory for the Communists which Professor Genovese says he "welcomes" becomes inevitable, the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world.
His letter was printed in the Times on October 29, 1965.

Well, What Happened?

April 30, 1975: A North Vietnamese tank crashes through the gate of the Presidential palace grounds in Saigon. The Vietnam war is over.
The Vietnam war ended 9½ years later. After a landslide reelection victory over Hubert Humphrey, who was the John F. Kerry of 1972, Nixon decamped to San Clemente, California rather than face impeachment. A lot happened between October 29, 1965 and April 30, 1975.

 
A B-52 air drops Western Values to Vietnam.
Result of a napalm attack on a South Vietnamese village on June 8, 1972
 

And despite all the terror that America's leaders, imbued as they are with Western Values, could muster, the end result was, according to the Fact Book of the CIA, last updated on January 10, 2006, a Communist government in Vietnam.

Click to (+) enlarge.
Ironical Chronicle
Chart: US soldiers killed in action in Vietnam by year.
Did Americans, or the people of the world lose their freedom of speech, as Nixon, in a fit of logorrhea, and the Times with a penchant for repeating it, said? They didn't.

And what happened to their favorite metaphor, the Domino Effect? If they believed it themselves they were hallucinatory paranoids. If they didn't they were pathological liars. And they ruled the country. Many of them made it into the Bush regime.

How many US soldiers died in Vietnam from the date of Nixon's letter until it was all over? 43,900, as you can read off the chart to the right. How much of the earth's resources were squandered and its environment poisoned at the direction of this Orwellian psychopathic leadership? And to what end?

But Americans did lose a lot of their freedoms. Not in 1975, but in 2001. Not due to the Vietnamese or any other Communists, but due to their own home-grown fascists. And not due to external threats, but as a perceived necessity in a country being ratcheted up for perpetual war.

OTTO,
February 26, 2006