Kerry, Communism, and the Korean War

[tim_duncan2000]

Many people (myself included) don't support Kerry because, among other reasons, of what he said about the Vietnam Veterans in his 1971 testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But then I started thinking about some of his other claims. Specifically, the claim that Communism wasn't as big of a threat as people made it out to be. I found this article, and the guy really made some good points.

The Cold War and the ominous threat of Communist expansion are long over. Still Americans should start thinking about communism again. Why dig up the past? Because our current enemy—loosely organized Islamic radicalism—is not nearly as serious a threat as the one Sen. John F. Kerry (D.-Mass.), pooh-poohed under questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971:

“I think it is bogus. Totally artificial. There is no threat. The Communists are not about to take over our McDonald Hamburger stands.”

Was it worth fighting to resist Red expansion? Kerry thought not.

“To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy.”

Several writers have addressed Kerry’s slanders against every American who served in Vietnam and his accusations of unspeakable daily war crimes committed “with the full awareness of officers at every level of command.” But Kerry’s direct statements on communism, while less potent politically, are even more interesting because they place the man squarely on the losing side of history.

Russian Soldiers in Our Streets

Former Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R.-Ala.), a Vietnam POW who suffered four years of solitary confinement in Hanoi and who later wrote When Hell Was in Session, was Kerry’s Senate colleague from 1985 to 1987. When Kerry was testifying in Washington in 1971, Denton was in his sixth year of captivity in North Vietnam.

“We barely won the Cold War,” Denton said to me last week. "If we had gone the way Kerry was voting while I was in the Senate, we would have Russian soldiers walking in our streets today.”

Laugh if you like, but this is not the exaggeration it may seem. When Kerry testified in 1971, the outcome of the Cold War was still very much in doubt. Communism was on the move not only in Southeast Asia, but also in South and Central America, in Yemen, in East and West Africa. Stateside, only a prescient few even recognized the Cold War as a war that could and must be won decisively.

John F. Kerry was obviously not one of them. In his opinion, America merely “reacted to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians, and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers, and the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles…a direct reaction to this so-called Communist monolith.”

Communism, Kerry told the Senate committee, was not a global threat, but one form of government among many, just like ours:

“Politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs. And you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship…”

Kerry went on to suggest that it was the American system that was failing to meet its people's needs, even as whole peoples faced extermination under communist regimes in Asia.

With his testimony and public witness, John F. Kerry handed global communism perhaps its greatest propaganda victory since Sputnik. Imagine this handsome young veteran officer, his chest gleaming with medals, as he cited dubious accusations from unreliable sources, implicating America as the world's greatest war criminal, and her policies as outdated “paranoia about the Russians.”

Kerry went so far as to remark, in 1971, “I think we are reacting under Cold War precepts which are no longer applicable.”

Link

I also found this excellent reply from C. Alan Hopewell, Ph.D., M.S. PsyPharm, ABPP and a Former Major in the United States Army. He brought up more good points on another about something else that I had wondered about:

What might Kerry have thought about the Korean War given what he said about Communism? I know US and UN forces were not able to rid the entire peninsula of the Communist menace, but at least there is a part of it that's democratic and prosperous (that would be South Korea). I think many of the citizens of South Korea would have agreed that Communism was a threat because they saw what they did when they invaded (and that it is indeed still a threat because of their weapons programs and all the artillery still massed at the border).

It is now thirty years since the United States and an international coalition of forces with SEATO which had been dedicated to the freedom of the South Vietnamese and the recognition of legitimate treaty obligations signed by a number of international parties abandoned the Republic of Viet Nam, allowing a full scale invasion and conquest by Communist North Viet Nam. It is also almost fifty years since the United States and the United Nations stopped communist aggression in both Korea as well as Cold War Germany, so it is a good time to do exactly what Kerry invited us to do – to ask “why” in thirty years.

After World War II, a republic was set up in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula while a Communist-style government was installed in the north. During the Korean War (1950-1953), US and other UN forces intervened to defend South Korea from North Korean attacks supported by the Chinese. My father, one of only two survivors who had been blown out of a B-17, who was deliberately shot while parachuting to the ground, who spent two years in the infamous Stalag Luft III prison camp in Germany where 52 of his comrades were brutally murdered on the personal orders of Hitler and Himmler, and who survived the subsequent winter death march from Poland to Bavaria, was recalled to service for this conflict. When, as a young boy, I asked Kerry’s questions “why” he had his wounds and was still called to service, he replied that he was serving his country, along with the thousands of others who were injured more severely, were also imprisoned, or who had already seen their share of war. He never put himself in a glorified ad campaign, he never sailed on JFK’s yacht, and he did not marry different wives who were wealthy. He just said that this was his duty to his country, and he never complained. Years later, my brother also aided in supporting our success in Korea while stationed as a Marine in the Pacific.

An armistice was signed in 1953, splitting the Peninsula along a demilitarized zone at about the 38th parallel. Thereafter, South Korea achieved rapid economic growth with per capita income rising to roughly 20 times the level of North Korea, becoming one of the wonders of Asia in terms of freedom, economic growth, and democracy. Fifty million people are now free and economically secure. North Korea, ruled by clinically insane Kim Chong-il, has one of the worst records in the world of starvation and oppression of its own people. In addition to now threatening others with nuclear weapons which Kerry’s Democratic party insured that he would have by failing to provide security provisions, the lunatic Kim Chong-il also routinely kidnaps actors and actresses from the south and from Japan, has them act in Godzilla movies, and engages in a number of other bizarre behaviors indicative of mental imbalance.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld keeps under glass on his desk a satellite photograph of the Korean peninsula from space. South Korea below the 38th parallel is a glitter of lights, an explosion of energy and brilliant blaze fueled by the fires of freedom. There is only one small point of weak light in all of North Korea, the tiny area of Pyongyang City.

Also after World War II, West Germany was threatened by East Germany and the Soviets, first with blockade and then by invasion and liquidation by nuclear aggression. Although many liberals minimized such fears and fought against our efforts in Europe in those years, the proof of such plans was made clear and established without doubt with the declassification of the VENONA secret cables in the 1990s. (In July 1995, in a ceremony at CIA Headquarters, Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch released the first group of NSA's Venona translations to the public). The sacrifice of those who served in Germany and Europe like myself during the post war years insured that Germany, a country of about fifty million inhabitants at the time, also became one of the wonders of the world in terms of freedom, economic growth, and democracy instead of being overrun by the Soviets, as was fully their intention. Serving as the Chief of Psychology at the Second General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany at the time, I can assure you that many servicemen and women now “go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face” as a result of their service in Germany, even during the Cold War, to keep all of western Europe free. But it is their sacrifice, not their cowardice, that kept Europe free. And none I knew “cut and ran” after being there for only four months, and I never had any dedicated service men or women come to the hospital after receiving three minor wounds, request medals, and then request early separation in the manner of Kerry.

 

[Bonnie]

Interesting article, although it's not such a stretch given Kerry's voting record as a career poltitician.

The group Kerry associated with during his anti-war protesting days were a very militant group, in fact he only distanced himself from that group when at a meeting he was at they talked about kidnapping a US Senator and killing him.

 

[ConchoBill]

IMO, this election is really big. It seems to me that John Kerry and his buds are ready to bring us to socialism and I personally want no part of that. On the other hand, we have the President who represents the US at his best. The big deal is to change enough minds of relatively ignorant people to get the right result.

 

[tpahl]

IMO, this election is really big. It seems to me that John Kerry and his buds are ready to bring us to socialism and I personally want no part of that. On the other hand, we have the President who represents the US at his best. The big deal is to change enough minds of relatively ignorant people to get the right result.

Uh, we already have socialism and our current president helped bring it to us.

Travis

 

[Bonnie]

IMO, this election is really big. It seems to me that John Kerry and his buds are ready to bring us to socialism and I personally want no part of that. On the other hand, we have the President who represents the US at his best. The big deal is to change enough minds of relatively ignorant people to get the right result.

Just like last election, many people were on their knees praying for the right outcome, I think were going to need more of that this time.

 

[Zhukov]

Just another example showing that the only thing Sen. Kerry has ever consistently been is: wrong.