Democrats And The Killing Fields

by Arthur Hermann - May 1st, 2008 - The Wall Street Journal

After nearly two decades of devastating war and 58,000 American combat deaths, the U.S. left Southeast Asia. As the last helicopter lifted off from Saigon, the New York Times's Sydney Schanberg wrote an article with the title, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." And the Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?

With the North Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge taking over, the world was about to find out.

At least 65,000 Vietnamese were murdered or shot after "liberation" – the equivalent in terms of Vietnam's population at the time, of killing three-quarters of a million people in today's U.S. The new communist regime ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps, where perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or were worked to death (the last inmates were not released until 1986).

That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea.

Cambodia's fate was even worse. At least one and a half million innocent Cambodians were butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps, put to death by a fanatical regime that believed that anyone who wore eyeglasses must have "bourgeois intellectual tendencies" and be shot.

To this day I have a friend here in the Inner Banks who denies all of this. He is proud of having helped to drive us out of Vietnam and he insistes that none of this holocaust ever happened.

Please note, he does not try to argue that Democrats are not responsible. He denies that the holocaust in Southeast Asia happened.

Wonder why Republicans and Democrats can't seem to get along? I am confident this different view of reality is a major cause. No one who understands what happened in Vietnam can tolerate the anti-war, pacifist, appeaser mentality of Barack Obama. We consider it idiocy. The damage to the economies of this area are proof of the failed socialist concept. Except to socialists like Barack Obama. Obama thinks he will be a "uniter", but he starts with an expectation we will accept his insane belief in a socialist system that has never worked and a pacifist world view that is appallingly naive. How can I unite with someone who has no rational grasp of history?

I ask the same question of my friend and I get a blank stare.