American Fellow Travelers : Friends of Cambodia and Vietnam
INTRODUCTION
What is now fading into an obscure chapter of 20th century history but remains vivid in the memories of those who lived through it, was the mass murder (nearly 1/3rd of the population) in the “killing fields” of Cambodia by the left-wing Communist Khmer Rouge. In memory of friends who passed in the service of their country and especially for unoffending Cambodian families whom American celebrities strove to fill with unavailing grief, we pause to remember.
AMERICAN PATRIOTS
A few of the inspiring quotes from Jane Fonda are
“If you understood what Communism was, you would hope, you would pray, on your knees that we would someday become communist”, at the University of Michigan (Nov. 21, 1970).
“I, a socialist, think that we should arrive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism”, at Duke University (1970).
"We've got to establish a Socialist economic structure that will limit private profit-oriented businesses. Whether the transition is peaceful depends on the way our present governmental leaders react.”, at the University of Texas (December 11, 1971)
Hanoi Jane after helping to torture captured US Air
Force and Navy pilots in North Vietnam. At age 34,
she is pictured manning an enemy anti-aircraft gun
for the Communists at the peak of the war in 1972.
The air war over North Vietnam made extensive use of electronic counter-measures as US interdiction sorties tried to jam enemy Surface-to-Air (SAM) missiles and radar directed anti-aircraft fire. And so the communists were desperate to discover those captured airmen who had been trained in the art of this electronic warfare. To accomplish this, left-wing Americans befriended grieving wives and families of captured US serviceman in order to create biographies to include military training and expertise.
Jane Fonda and John Kerry both compiled these lists and carried them to North Vietnam and to Viet Cong representatives in Paris resulting in the torture and death of US prisoners who were subsequently identified as experts. These POWs were known to have survived capture but never returned. It is also indisputable that knowledge of US radar jamming technology improved in communist North Vietnam after such activities by Jane and John. And so today, both Fonda and Kerry are idolized as Heroes of the Communist Revolution in the North Vietnam War Museum in Hanoi.
One small result of Hanoi Jane’s fund raising
efforts for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Please note that while Communists in China and Russia were drastically increasing aid to the Khmer Rouge, their previously ineffectual revolution was only able to seize power in 1975 after Congressional democrats eliminated all US military assistance to the free market right-wing government of Lon Nol. The Republicans had been supporting the fight against the communist Khmer Rouge since 1970. And so despite repeated and strident Republican warnings, the famous democrat Senator George McGovern knew better
"The growing hysteria of the [Republican] administration's posture on Cambodia, seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing [right-wing] government in Phnom Penh would actually mean… We should be able to see that the kind of [left-wing] government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government… run by some of the best-educated most-able intellectuals in Cambodia."
This was especially ironical as EVERYONE with any education was selectively murdered by the communists over the next four years. The influential democrat Christopher Dodd representing Connecticut in the US House of Representatives chimed in with
"The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now."
The New York Times echoed this sentiment with editorials supporting the left-wing correspondent Sydney Schanberg [April 13, 1975, whose dispatch was entitled “Indochina without Americans: For Most A Better Life”] and which read in part about a Communist victory
“… it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone… [and as to predictions of mass slaughter] … It would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as national policy under a Communist government once the war [opposing Communist aggression] is over."
The New Republic wrote that the fall of a free-market right-wing society to the left-wing Communists would happily result in
“… the Cambodian people will finally be rescued from the horrors of a war [of Communist aggression] that never really had any meaning."
This was echoed by left-wing activists John Kerry and Anthony Lake who demanded a Communist victory and taught that Republican warnings of a blood bath were only trying to “stir up anti-Communist hysteria.” Individual lives and liberties might not mean much to these democrats but it is hard to imagine they had no meaning to the 1/3rd of all Cambodians who were slaughtered and left to rot in the sun.
CONCLUSIONS
That this genocide was supported by left-wing American celebrities such as Jane Fonda and John Kerry (q.v. Indochina Peace Committee “IPC”) and Tom Hayden and Joan Baez and numerous Hollywood figures is a criminal obscenity. That these leaders were never brought to trial in the US for their fund raising efforts and monies sent abroad to enemy combatants in time of war yet compounds the outrage.