Forty-nine years ago, a kind of ideological “Fifth Column” comprising members of America’s “New Left” hailed the triumph of their comrades in Hanoi over the embattled Republic of [South] Vietnam.  After over a half a century of agitation and propaganda, they lauded a communist conquest logistically enabled by the Soviet Union and Communist China, achieved by conventional military means and effected through a blitzkrieg involving half a million men and several hundred tanks, as an achievement on behalf of peace.

In similar terms, at once pacifist, humanitarian, and false, they would have us believe, and perhaps believe themselves, that a totalitarian communist victory was the just and necessary end of nearly twenty-five years of bloody conflict in the former states of Indochina.  Had the radical activists of the New Left been willing to learn from history, had they been willing merely to consider the historically verifiable effects of Marxist theory translated into democidal practice, then they might have foreseen that the decade of “peace” that followed the fall of Saigon would build up more misery and death in Indochina than the previous quarter-century of war.  Perhaps they did not care, or perhaps they were too busily engaged in restructuring the academic values of the universities from whence they came.  Whatever the cause of their selective, intellectual blindness to historical reality, any earnestly objective historical assessment must surely number the American “peace” activist among the victors of the Second Indochina War.  And in America no less than in silenced and subjugated Indochina, history is the prized and zealously defended possession of the victorious, who portray themselves as the heroes of that masterfully misrepresented war. 

Perhaps, most ominously of all, the victors have been ensconced for decades within imitation-ivory towers, from which they have enjoyed and exploited to the full the benefits of unrestricted academic fields of fire.  Not surprisingly, therefore, they have managed to inspire and train succeeding generations of their students to boldly go where they have gone before.  The laudable objective, in keeping with the standard-issue Orwellian nightmare they helped to inflict on Indochina, is a societal Utopia awash with “peace” and “social justice.”  From historical myopia, an activist dystopia emerges in the making.  What they espoused so vociferously for Indochina, they would wish, today, upon America.

Having set a victorious, historical precedent for what is to be done and how to do it, these victors are now entitled to evaluate and celebrate their progress.  From a radical left perspective, there is much to celebrate: thus far they have taken America, “one nation under God, indivisible,” and relentlessly and tirelessly divided it.  They have taken a once-great nation and rendered it unable or unwilling to live up to the ideals that have constitutionally defined it and within which rest the secrets of its greatness and longevity.

Are we not, therefore, entitled to ask where things went wrong, and to inquire by what lawful democratic means they might be righted?  There is little doubt that the current politico-cultural malaise began with “Vietnam,” during a war that was willfully and deceitfully rendered “controversial” by activist ideologues whose ideological sympathies lay with the other side.  In the organized phenomenon of campus protest, the resultant and ongoing failure of administrators of tertiary educational institutions to live up to their responsibilities, defend the sanctity of academic values, and ensure that students were taught how to think and not what to think, the seeds of America’s potential ruin were sown.

The great universities of America existed to teach the youthful, intellectually “elite” whom they admitted and to safeguard the intellectual freedom necessary not just to challenge the Establishment, but to probe with equal intellectual rigor the ideologies and methodologies of those who seek to overthrow it!  If such an educative process were universally restored, there seems to be little doubt that the result would be a concomitant increase in thoughtful young Americans and a much needed decrease in the production of indoctrinated pawns.  Open, free, and respectful discussion of issues can bring understanding, but when it comes to the ideological disparagement and toxic silencing of alternative voices, the casual skipping classes to demonstrate under circumstances in which the ignorance of the cause is equaled only by passion of the activist in protesting it, none of this seems conducive to a genuinely “liberal” education.  Forgiving students out of fear or sympathy for the missing of classes, disruption of invited speakers, and the commission of activist vandalism suggests an education institution that has abandoned its duties to provide safe, conducive learning environment for students who are paying for their education, and would prefer to influence American society after they have graduated.

Albeit late in the day, educative institutions must return their educators to their academic role and recognize that the “scholar-activist” is an oxymoronic contradiction in terms — and particularly so when the scholars’ intellectual honesty is compromised by their activist conceit.  A responsible university administration would also resolve to suspend and, if necessary, expel students who prefer activist disruption to scholastic endeavor, and pre-empt their return, either singly or in the company of others, by the enforcement of the laws of trespass.  They must redefine what the process of education should entail within and according to the principles of a free and democratic society, in which all is permissible within the law short of the activist subversion of democracy itself.  If they fail to do this or prefer to do otherwise, if they choose to model themselves upon totalitarian principles, then the American taxpayer should not be burdened with supporting them.  Nor should the American taxpayer, especially those among them unable to enjoy a college education, be required to pay for the indoctrination of American students by tenured activists who regard America and democracy in general with haughty, pseudo-intellectual contempt.

As a civilized society, and in the interest of that society’s self-preservation, instead of tolerating violent demonstrations, we must ensure that the participants are punished under law.  For the offensively militant, “non-citizen” protesters who prefer to demonstrate within and against a country other than their own, deportation may assist them in finding nations more ideologically conducive to their aspirations.  Similarly, neither a state nor a federal government should be under any obligation to financially support an activist who receives government assistance with the one hand and throws the aptly named Molotov cocktail with the other.

When we see today the left-wing campus and “community” protests in support of the genocidal ambitions of Hamas, let us consider what our views might be if the protesters were demonstrating on behalf of white supremacists and the political agenda of a racist lynch mob.  Both ideologies are hateful and repugnant, but even the KKK stopped short of microwaving their victim’s babies.  And still, we hear the chants in favor of Israel’s destruction “from the river to the sea.”  We are reminded of the pathologically self-righteous chanting heard throughout the Second Indochina War, including the memorably ignorant and asinine “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh — the NLF is gonna win.”  (Ho Chi Minh was never a member of the NLF; he and his Stalinist associates invented it.)  Let us give them their due: they knew how to work a united front scam, the kind of thing that explains today why a dyed-in-the-wool communist radical is passionately concerned about global warming, racial discrimination, and the provision of “tuck free” swimwear but seems remarkably devoid of any sustained concern about what as formerly referred to as “the workers.”  One wonders why the American “New Left” apparently knew nothing of a textbook communist united front deceit — unless, of course, they were actively complicit in supporting it.

There seems little doubt that the America that defeated fascism in Europe and the Pacific during WW2, and that made irreversible advances in the cause of racial equality thereafter, has neither the time nor the tolerance for subversion perpetrated by racist right-wing extremists.  But one wonders how it is that for nearly fifty years a radical leftist “Fifth Column” has managed not only to divide the nation, but to transform it into an America that grants cultural and academic security of tenure to activist apologists for tyranny and the advocates of an ideology responsible for the democide of millions in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam.

Stephen Sherman was a first lieutenant with the U.S. Army 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Vietnam, 1967–68.  He is currently a founding director of Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (VVFH.org) and editor of that group’s publications.

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