John Kerry: Wrong Then, Wrong Now

The Swift Boat Veterans have posted a transcript of John Kerry and John O’Neill’s apperance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. One particular part of this interview is particularly telling as to why Kerry lacks the most basic understanding of totalitarianism. Interspersed with Kerry’s comments are a few historical facts to give them context.

MR. O’NEILL: They both hold a number of prisoners. As a matter of fact, we’ve never even – we don’t even know how many prisoners the Viet Cong and Laotians and Cambodians have because they’ve never identified any of them.

I would like to say this on Vietnamization: I think that it’s quite evident under the Vietnamization program under what’s happened that it is succeeding, that it does provide a viable political solution to the war that’s been the story of the last three years.

MR. CAVETT: No one has said that there’ll be a bloodbath if we pull out, which is a cliche we used to hear a lot. Does either of you still think there would be a –

MR. O’NEILL: I think if we pull out prematurely before a viable South Vietnamese government is established, that the record of the North Vietnamese in the past and the record of the Viet Cong in the area I served in at Operation [unintelligible] clearly indicates that’s precisely what would happen in that country.

MR. CAVETT: That’s a guess, of course.

MR. KERRY: I –

MR. O’NEILL: I’d say that their record at Thua, at Daq Son [phonetic spelling], at a lot of other places, pretty clearly indicate that’s precisely what would happen. Obviously, in Thua, we’ve discovered, how many, 5,700 graves so far, at Daq Son four or five hundred.

MR. KERRY: The true fact of the matter is, Dick, that there’s absolutely no guarantee that there would be a bloodbath. There’s no guarantee that there wouldn’t. One has to, obviously, conjecture on this. However, I think the arguments clearly indicate that there probably wouldn’t be.

In 1975 the North Vietnamese launched a brutal assault on the South, in violation of the peace accords that were to keep the free South from falling under Communist oppression. By April of 1975 114,000 refugees fled Saigon as the Communist North Vietnamese invaded the South.

First of all, if you read back historically, in 1950 the French made statements – there was a speech made by, I think it was General LeClerc, that if they pulled out, France pulled out, then there would be a bloodbath. That wasn’t a bloodbath. The same for Algeria. There hasn’t been.

I think that it’s really kind of a baiting argument. There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw. There’s just no pur- –

The South Vietnamese, abandoned by the US, were being massacred by the thousands. The best estimate of civilian casualties in the South were approximately 56,000 dead ARVN soldiers.

15,000 civilians were also murdered during the period between the US withdrawl and the fall of Saigon.

I realize that there would be certain political assassinations, and that might take place. And I think when you balance that against the fact that the United States has now accounted for some 18,600 people through its own Phoenix program, which is a program of assassination, and when you balance that off against the morality of the kind of bombing we’ve been doing in Laos and the kind of destruction wholesale of the country of Vietnam, which amounts to some 155,000 civilians a year killed, then I think to talk about four or five thousand people is lunacy in terms of the overall argument and what we’re seeking in Southeast Asia.

The end of the war saw a Vietnam reunified – under a Communist dictatorship. Offiicials from the South Vietnamese regime were sent to “re-education camps” – essentially concentration camps. Fed on a diet of 12kg of rice a month, the political prisoners in Vietnam were tortured severely. As Mrs. Lee Thi Anh wrote in a 1977 article in National Review:

Thousands of urban Vietnamese families have been forced to sell their homes and start over again in new economic areas ere even the basic necessities are lacking. (Hence corruption, once thought of as a Thieu trademark, is flourishing: a new mandarin class has emerged ready to sell anything from a place in a fertile new economic area to a visa to France

In all, some 300,000 people are being detained in re-eucation camps which are in no way similar to the show camps set up for the benefit of visiting dignitaries an foreign reporters. (The Washington Post story of February 15 was based on a visit to such a show camp.)

One out every three Saigon families has a member in one of the camps, according to French journalist Jean Lacouture, who made an automobile trip from Hanoi to Saigon in 1976. After a visit to a new economic area for former Saigon near Phan-Thiet, Lacouture wrote that it was “a prefabricated hell and a place one comes to only if the alternative to it would be death.”

Camps for former officers and functionaries of the Saigon government are usually located in malaria infested jungle areas. Thousands of camp inmates have died from lack of food, medicine, or clothing. Thousands have committed suicide some have been secretly liquidated, others perish through staged “accidents”: For example, former officers are forced to de-activate minefields with their bare hands, so the regime will not have to waste valuable bullets on them.

Over a million Vietnamese fled the country as the Communists took over, risking their lives to escape to freedom in such places as Thailand, Canada, and the United States. Show trials and Communist gulags were erected as the world community lost interest in the victims of Communist oppression in Vietnam.

Human Rights Watch has more on the repression which continues to this day.

In 1971 John Kerry said there would be no massacre in Vietnam. That we could trust the North Vietnamese to keep their promises. That the people of Vietnam would not be oppressed or harmed.

He was wrong then.

He is wrong now.