Ho Chi Minh Gave Protest Its Purpose

For two months, Vietnamese Americans in Orange County have been demonstrating in protest of a storekeeper’s prominent display of a Ho Chi Minh poster and a Communist Vietnamese flag. The display in Truong Van Tran’s video store has brought out up to 15,000 demonstrators in Little Saigon and triggered protests 400 miles away in San Jose, where more than 5,000 recently attended a democracy vigil in sympathy with their brothers and sisters in Southern California.

No doubt these protests have been baffling to Americans under the age of 35 whose views of Vietnam have been shaped by Oliver Stone propaganda flicks and revisionist history by the American left wing. But they protest for the same reason Jewish survivors would at a public posting by one of theirs of Hitler and a swastika. For the same reason Armenians would abhor an Armenian merchant’s display of a portrait of the Turkish genocidal criminal, Talaat Pasha.

Ho Chi Minh and his followers are portrayed benignly as Vietnamese patriots. They were not. They were Stalinist butchers. The Viet Cong were not freedom-loving revolutionaries; they were disciplined Communist cadres driven to bring Soviet-style totalitarianism to South Vietnam.

These current passions are stirred by memories of the wanton brutality wrought upon them by Ho Chi Minh’s armies --atrocities that underlie the understandable anger and vehemence of today’s Vietnamese Americans rightfully concerned their tragic past will be ignored.

Here are some historical reminders taken just from the massive Communist North Vietnamese invasion launched against the South in the spring of 1972:

* The Communists took over Binh Dinh province on the central coast and held public executions of local officials suspected of ties to the Saigon government, with reports from one hamlet of 47 officials being buried alive.

* We learned that in An Loc and Quangtri, Uncle Ho’s army slaughtered thousands of terrified civilians fleeing the scene of combat.

* U.S. intelligence also learned of a mass murder near Quang Ngai province where Communist troops selected out 40 civilians for execution--with a grisly twist. They strung land mines around the chosen victims and then, with horrified wives and children watching, detonated them to blow apart the defenseless captives.

These are real stories from real places about real people. So today why should it come as a surprise that the awful memories of our Vietnamese neighbors are equally vivid? Especially so because the brutal sickness of the Communist thugs continued after the fall of Saigon--as they routinely rooted out and killed South Vietnamese citizens. They placed the vanquished into forced labor and starvation or into the misery and death of spare and ugly “reeducation” camps.

Many of those survivors are among the protesters. And those who didn’t survive were the grandparents, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of those who--in their gathering by the thousands--are pleading to us and their own never to forget what happened.

There was a hard-won peace in Vietnam in 1973 and a chance for that nation to repair from decades of war. But liberals in Congress, embittered by Richard Nixon’s refusal in wartime to collapse under their pressure, passed the War Powers Resolution--denying to Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, the means to enforce the peace agreement.

The Soviets then provided massive resources by pouring in weapons, supplies and ammunition for their North Vietnamese allies to take south in 1974. Our Congress responded by sharply curtailing the flow of aid to South Vietnam--a government asking no more of America than to provide sustenance to their self-defense. In 1975, with Nixon run out of town, the new Congress of self-absorbed “Watergate babies” cut aid to South Vietnam still more.

Gen. Van Tien Dung, the field commander who led the final Communist offensive to conquer the South, boasted that these U.S. aid cuts “made it impossible for the puppet troops to carry out their combat plans and build up their forces. . . . (South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van) Thieu was then forced to fight a poor man’s war.”

The extremist left in America tut-tuts mightily over Linda Tripp’s presumed betrayal of Monica Lewinsky, but spares not a teardrop over its complicity in the betrayal of a nation. The Vietnamese who protest today had their lives, their patrimony and their country taken away -- but, thank God, not their spirit and restored freedom. They are great Americans.

Kenneth L. Khachigian is a veteran political strategist and former White House speech writer who practices law in Orange County. His column appears here every other week.