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John Kerry: “It Didn’t Happen”
We posted John Kerry’s video from C-Span last week wherein he denied there was a bloodbath in Viet Nam after we abandoned the country.
James Taranto at Opinionjournal.com’s Best of the Web today slaughter’s Kerry’s historical revisionism:
In 2001, California’s Orange County Register published an investigation of communist re-education camps in postwar Vietnam:
To corroborate the experiences of refugees now living in Orange County, the Register interviewed dozens of former inmates and their families, both in the United States and Vietnam; analyzed hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more than 800 individuals sent to jail; and interviewed Southeast Asian scholars. The review found:
–An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.
–165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.
–Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.
–Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three to 10 years.
. . . According to John Kerry, “it didn’t happen.”
Things were even worse in Cambodia, as the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2005:
–When the Khmer Rouge victoriously entered Phnom Penh 30 years ago, many people greeted the rebels with a cautious optimism, weary from five years of civil war that had torn apart their lives and killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. . . .
–During the nearly four years following that day–April 17, 1975–Cambodia was radically transformed. . . .
–Everyday freedoms were abolished. Buddhism and other forms of religious worship were banned. Money, markets, and media disappeared. Travel, public gatherings, and communication were restricted. Contact with the outside world vanished. And the state set out to control what people ate and did each day, whom they married, how they spoke, what they thought, and who would live and die. “To keep you is no gain,” the Khmer Rouge warned, “To destroy you is no loss.”
–In the end, more than 1.7 million of Cambodia’s 8 million inhabitants perished from disease, starvation, overwork, or outright execution in a notorious genocide.
But don’t worry. According to John Kerry, “it didn’t happen.”
Last week, as we noted, Kerry’s colleague Barack Obama opined that genocide in Iraq would be preferable to America’s continued presence there. But John Kerry has shown the way. If genocide, or some lesser horror, does occur in the wake of a U.S. retreat, Obama can simply assert: “It didn’t happen.”
Kerry’s caller to C-Span (a Kerry supporter, by the way) was right: if we pull out of Iraq it will be a bloodbath. Kerry needs reeducated.
If Kerry and the Dems don’t think our withdrawal from Viet Nam produced a nightmare for those we left behind, they are denying the facts. However, there is a difference between the pull out in Viet Nam and a hasty retreat in Iraq. The North Vietnamese were satisfied with butchering their victims in South Vietnam and Cambodia.
Al Qaeda will not be so contented. They will follow us home.
P.S. I’m so glad Kerry “didn’t happen” to become president.