Mao and Other Monsters: Communism Assaults Asia
Did you know?
Western liberals enabled the conquests of communist dictators from Mao to Ho Chi Minh
Once Vietnam fell to communism, Cambodia and Laos followed, just as the “domino theory” had predicted
The North Korean government has fed its people bark and grass
In 1949, as Stalin continued his conquest of Eastern Europe and the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb thanks to the help of American commie spies like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their comrades, the world’s most populous nation went communist. Mao Zedong and his Red forces defeated Chiang Kai-Shek and his Chinese Nationalists, ending a battle that had raged since the late 1920s and been immortalized by the communists’ nasty “Long March” in 1934–1935. But with the communists in control of China, the death counter really began clicking.
Chairman Mao did not pull off his amazing victory alone. He had plenty of help from his progressive friends, including cheerleaders in the American press corps. Foremost among them was Edgar Snow (1905–1972), a nearly forgotten left-leaning journalist—one of many who helped the cause of international communism.
Snow might seem an unlikely candidate for dupe to Mao Zedong. He wrote not for the New York Times or the New Republic but for the popular and conservative Saturday Evening Post. The love letters to Stalin by New York Times reporter Walter Duranty were one thing, but it was something else for a reporter at the anti-communist Saturday Evening Post to be infatuated by a communist revolutionary. Nonetheless, Snow’s Red Star over China (first published in 1938) became what Cold War historians M. Stanton Evans and Herb Romerstein have accurately described as “an unabashed commercial on behalf of the communist Mao Zedong and his Yenan comrades.”1
Snow’s account was packed with intimate details from multiple lengthy first-person interviews with Mao himself. He had access that few to no other journalists had. He recorded twenty thousand words of interviews with Mao—and he accepted virtually all of what the communist leader said uncritically, while he was anything but uncritical of Mao’s opponents, Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalists. No wonder Mao was happy to give Snow exclusives.2
Today Mao is recognized for the mass killer that he was. But at the time he was preparing to commit his mass murders, Edgar Snow described Mao’s bloodthirsty movement as a “thoroughgoing social revolution” and even “democracy.”3 He described Mao himself as a “rather Lincolnesque figure . . . with large, searching eyes” and an “intellectual face of great shrewdness.” Snow portrayed Mao as an everyman. “The story of Mao’s life was a rich cross-section of a whole generation [of Chinese],” recorded Snow. “There would never be any one ‘savior’ of China, yet undeniably one felt a certain force of destiny in Mao.”4
This romantic figure was sure to become “a very great man.” According to Snow, “everyone knew and respected” Mao. Snow, personally, had “never met anyone who did not like” or “admire” Mao. The Chinese communist leader had a “deep sense of personal dignity,” and appeared “quite free from symptoms of megalomania” (in contrast to Chiang). He was an “ardent student of philosophy” and insatiably curious about international events and foreign affairs.
According to Snow, Mao saw FDR as a man that Red China “could cooperate with.” The chairman was especially intrigued by the New Deal.5 He was practically a Chinese New Dealer.
The youthful Mao, said Snow, had harbored “strongly liberal and humanistic tendencies.” He carried from his youth an intense work ethic and an “iron constitution.” He was blessed with an “extraordinary mind.” Overall, said Snow, “Mao impressed me as a man of considerable depth of feeling. I remember that his eyes moistened once or twice when he was speaking of dead comrades.”6
Snow framed the Red Chinese as anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and even (at times) Christian. Snow spent time with them, hunting, fishing, smoking, laughing. They were one with themselves and nature. Chiang and his forces, on the other hand, were downright repressive; they were bandits, brigands, kidnappers, killers, fascists, dictators, cretins. They made Snow feel much less safe. The Reds simply wanted to “stop civil war.” The communists were so genuinely kind and good-hearted that only they could be so caring as to spare Chiang’s life. If Chiang ever desired to see compassion, he might look to the poor yet benign communist souls that he and his ilk had tormented for so long.7
Snow’s book, which was translated and reprinted in multiple editions, contributed to the Chinese communists’ ultimate victory. With very different results from the ones Snow had predicted.
Within the first two decades of communist China’s existence, upwards of sixty to seventy million people were killed. They died from purges, malnutrition, starvation, the collectivization of agriculture—and generally from the wrenching transformation of society under totalitarian communism. Most of the deaths happened under Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1957–1960) and Cultural Revolution (1966–1969). The former, Mao’s collectivization of agriculture, reaped bitter fruits indeed—mass starvation without precedent in history, surpassing even what Stalin had done in the Ukraine. It was a famine due not to weather or natural disaster, but strictly to a political ideology.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine by Jasper Becker (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
Under Mao, the Chinese nation was forcibly transformed into one gigantic social laboratory. Private possessions were eliminated, from clothes and hygiene products to pots and pans. The Chinese were denied the most basic liberties, from freedom of speech and the press to conscience rights. Even “private fires” for cooking food were banned, with the only permissible smoke being that which emanated from collective kitchens.8
In Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts, there’s a vivid depiction of the inmates of Mao’s nation-turned-insane-asylum scavenging the fields during the day for seeds, frogs, salamanders, insects, tree bark, anything to eat, and at night wandering the paths in search of human corpses to devour. Similar accounts of the daily horrors of Red China are found in poignant books such as Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao, and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. The sixty-five or seventy million dead under Mao estimated by The Black Book of Communism and the more recent, authoritative Mao: The Unknown Story, possibly exceeds the total dead among all nations in World War I and II combined—in just one nation.
Mao’s “Sinification” of Marxism—his Chinese adaptation of the Marxist philosophy—had wider consequences, beyond China’s borders. The Chinese dictator applied the teachings of Marx to the landowner-peasant agricultural society that was predominant in Asia, in contrast to the industrial societies of the West. His implementation of Marxism in China opened the door for a wider extension of communism into Asia, the most heavily populated region of the world. Within just one year of Chiang’s China becoming Red China, the Korean peninsula would find itself divided in two in a hot war between the communist north and the non-communist south. Soon Vietnam would also be divided, and Cambodia would be annihilated by an unspeakably brutal communist regime.
Mao, Family Man
Under Mao, the families were steered in to omnipresent communes, with children pulled from their parents. As China-watcher and Mao admirer John King Fairbank reported, all parents were to work twenty-eight days of each month and to eat in large mess halls, “while their children went into day nurseries. This would bring . . . all [China’s] labor, including its womanpower, into full employment.” At long last, Mao had emancipated China’s women.
Meanwhile, he was having his way with them. His personal physician, Li Zhisui, notes that during the horrific period of communist re-education known as Cultural Revolution the aging despot was serviced by a harem of handpicked young girls, always the most desirable virgins plucked from nearby villages for the Marxist master’s full-time satisfaction. Dr. Li says that his patient, who refused to bathe or brush his teeth and had chronic venereal disease, was “sometimes in bed with three, four, even five women simultaneously.” The girls’ parents were expected to support this contribution to the revolution cheerfully. Mao showed himself to be a sexual progressive; he seems to have taken some young men for himself as well.9
Way back in 1919—not coincidentally, the same year the Comintern was established in Moscow—two communist parties were founded in Korea. Both claimed to be Bolshevik in origin. The Comintern intervened to try to force the two into one party in complete subservience to Moscow, and the battle became brutal, with many in both factions killed.10
But these events were obscured by the continued Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula, which had begun in 1910 after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War. This was the ravenous Japan of the bellicose Bushido code, the mad killing machine that left in its wake vicious war crimes from Bataan to Nanking—and would only be stopped by two atomic bombs in August 1945. With Japan’s formal surrender to General Douglas MacArthur on the USS Missouri on September 13, 1945, Korea was finally freed from a horrific thirty-five-year occupation.
But not unlike the liberation of Eastern Europe, the freedom was short-lived. The question of what to do with Korea after the defeat of the Japanese had been debated at the wartime conferences of the Big Three. At Cairo in November 1943, the Allies had pledged that “Korea shall become free and independent.”11
At Yalta, Stalin agreed to FDR’s concept of a multilateral “trusteeship” for Korea among the Big Three12—with no U.S. troops placed in Korea and full U.S. trust placed in the Kremlin. Stalin knew a deal when he saw one. But by the time of Potsdam, six months after Yalta, Truman had replaced the deceased FDR, and the new president already knew better than the old one. So the U.S. War Department devised a plan to divide the Korean peninsula into two zones, one in the north to be occupied by the Soviets and the other in the South, by the Americans.
Stalin’s troops invaded northern Korea on August 9, the same day that America dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered a few days later, and U.S. forces entered southern Korea on September 8.
Communist mischief ensued. Hyon Chun Hyok, jockeying for power with a young commander named Kim Il-Sung, was assassinated. The Soviet “trusteeship” took the form of remaking northern Korea in the Soviet image—a one-party communist dictatorship of complete mass centralization and collectivization.13 The Kremlin refused pleas by the United States and the newly created United Nations for a national unification of the Korean peninsula with free and fair elections. Elections were held only in the southern portion, under American protection, where the government of Syngman Rhee took charge. The Republic of Korea was formally established in the southern half of Korea in August 1948.
In the northern half, the communists declared a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under the leadership of Kim Il-Sung. It had Soviet backing, of course, and it would soon have the more crucial support of a communist China, after Mao’s victory in October 1949.
Then, in late June 1950, Kim Il-Sung sent a massive military force of seventy-five thousand troops storming into the south. The United States, which had been fully unprepared for the assault under the poor leadership of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, scrambled to the aid and assistance of the south.
A mass mobilization of Western troops from over a dozen nations under the auspices of the United Nations headed to southern Korea, led by General MacArthur. They would battle the communists for three years. The Korean War was on.
From 1950 to 1953, millions of Koreans died in the war. One to two million North Korean and South Korean soldiers perished in combat, as did many Soviet and Chinese soldiers who got in on the act. And fifty-five thousand American boys gave their lives, equal to the number that would die in Vietnam over a much longer period. It was a tragedy that, like Vietnam, did not end in a victory for America and the forces of freedom. It ended in a stalemate armistice signed July 27, 1953, with the once proud nation divided at the thirty-eighth parallel, the infamous DMZ, or De-Militarized Zone, the Berlin Wall of Asia, the hottest spot in what is left of the Cold War. It ended with a population of nearly twenty million northern Koreans living in a totalitarian communist hellhole.
Which still continues to this day. The North Korean prison state has lasted so long that its lifespan is poised to exceed that of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Kim boys are going to out-Stalin Stalin. In some ways, they already have.
North Korea is often referred to as Stalinist. It is, indeed, a fitting monument to the late Soviet tyrant. And yet the level of repression there far surpasses even Stalin’s control. Observers have had to reach for novel language to characterize this singular system.
Christopher Hitchens, atheist and ex-Trotskyist, called the entire North Korean nation a “concentration camp.” He explained, “Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished.” Even “slave state” is too generous a term for North Korea, he said, because at least slave owners fed their slaves. The only thing that really works there is the secret police. North Korea is literally a land of darkness; satellite photos show the northern half of the Korean peninsula as an island of darkness in a sea of the surrounding countries’ electric lights.14
Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who visited North Korea in the late 1990s, described it as a “theocracy.”15 Its leaders have elevated themselves to god-like status, demanding worship from the North Korean masses. Paintings of the Kims, North Korea’s rulers since it became a communist country, adorn every street corner, factory, school, and home. Giant statues of these midgets of Marxism stand everywhere, and North Koreans have been made to literally prostrate themselves before them.16
North Korea is always at the bottom of every scorecard on liberty—Freedom House’s ranking of countries’ political rights and civil liberties, the international index of press freedom from Reporters without Borders, the Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom. All radios and televisions are fixed to receive only government stations. The government’s Ministry of People’s Security has spies in every workplace and neighborhood to inform on anyone who says anything less than adulatory about the regime, even at home. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans—a common estimate is two hundred fifty thousand—are held in prison camps. Executions, often performed in public, are routine.17
The personality cult and leader-worship that is everyday life in North Korea commenced with the first Kim. “Thank you, Father Kim Il-Sung” is the first phrase North Korean parents were instructed to teach their children. From cradle to grave, North Korean citizens are still stalked by the omnipresent face of the “Great Leader” (and of his son, the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il). As one assessment put it, “The [Kim] dynasty is much more than an authoritarian government; it also holds itself out as the ultimate source of power, virtue, spiritual wisdom, and truth for the North Korean people.”18
That’s the fiction of the quasi-religious myth that these communist tyrants have forced down the throats of their people. The reality is bloody repression and every kind of corruption. As soon as Kim Il-Sung took power, he began—like the Bolsheviks and Mao before him—to purge his own ranks. He may have executed as many as ninety thousand in nine purges over the course of his rule19—in a country of only twenty million. And that is a small slice of the death that has filled the country under the Kims.
Also like communists elsewhere, he launched a brutal religious persecution. Before the division of the Korean peninsula in the 1940s, the northern portion of Korea had half the population of the south but three times the number of Christians. Missionaries referred to Pyongyang, the capital of the north, as the “Jerusalem of the East.” There were so many Korean Christians that even today South Korea is second only to the United States among nations with the largest number of Christian missionaries.20
“From its inception, the brutal suppression of religious activity and rival systems of thought and belief was a systematic policy of the DPRK,” states a report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “Thus, it is not surprising that religious groups were viewed as one of the chief political competitors of Kim Il-Sung’s Korean Workers Party. When Kim Il-Sung came to power, religious adherents and their families were labeled as ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ and targeted for repression.”21
The Devil Is in the Details
“We [could not] turn into a Communist society along with the religious people. Therefore, we purged the key leaders above the rank of deacons in Protestant or Catholic churches and the wicked among the rest were put on trial. The general religious people were . . . put into prison camps. . . . We learned later that those of religion can do away with their old habits only after they have been killed.” —Kim Il-Sung22
He also engaged in a vast campaign to indoctrinate North Koreans in what we have seen is essentially a new religion. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says that the religious cult created around the Kims has touched every individual in the ironically named “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (DPRK). Students were made to memorize the “Ten Principles for the Establishment of the One-Ideology System of the Party.” And every North Korean citizen was expected to attend one or more of an estimated (incredible) four hundred fifty thousand “Kim Il-Sung Revolutionary Research Centers” at least weekly for instruction, inspiration, and “self-criticism.”23
All adult citizens were required to wear a button with Kim Il-Sung’s picture on it. Today, every household in North Korean must maintain portraits of both the “Great Leader” Kim Il-Sung and the “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il. Inspectors visit homes to chastise and fine families who fail to properly take care of the portraits. Every government building and subway car displays the two portraits.24 Disloyalty to King Jong Il and his late father, Kim Il-Sung, is a punishable crime. Offenses include allowing pictures of either leader to gather dust or be torn or folded.25 Former North Korean prisoner Kang Chol-hwan has described how his prison camp had a shrine to the Kim family; the inmates, otherwise dressed in tattered rags, were required to put on a special pair of socks before entering the holy of holies.26
The “Dear Leader,” the second crazy Kim to rule this tragic nation of captive communist serfs, was Kim Jong Il, son of the “Great Leader.” Fittingly, he was actually born in the USSR, where his father was in charge of a Soviet military brigade made up of Korean and Chinese Communist Party exiles. He assumed the leadership of North Korea in the summer of 1994 on the death of his father. His birthday is a national holiday. The regime teaches that a double rainbow and new star appeared in the sky at the moment of his birth. State media claimed that in the first round of golf Kim ever played, he broke the all-time world record for the best round of golf in history. The little man bagged five holes in one! The government press also reported that Kim composed more and better operas—and at a younger age—than anyone in history. Songs such as “Dear Leader Dispels Raging Storms” were karaoke hits in North Korea.27 A North Korean newspaper described the Dear Leader as “an outstanding great master of witty remarks as well as the greatest man ever known in history.”28
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-hwan (New York City: Basic Books, 2005).
The communist government of North Korea is guilty of every kind of corruption. Women were forcibly enlisted into Kim Jong Il’s “Satisfaction Corps,” to provide their omnipotent leader with sex. According to Professor Phil Williams of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Ridgway Center, “This is a criminal state not because it’s been captured by criminals but because the state has taken over crime.” James Przystup of the National Defense University described North Korea under Kim Jong Il this way: “It’s the mafia masquerading as a government.” Journalist Allan C. Brownfeld characterized North Korea as a “vast criminal enterprise” that counterfeits currency and peddles illicit drugs.29 North Korea grows and ships opium, heroin, cocaine, hashish, and ephedrine, the base for methamphetamine. Particularly disgusting, in July 1998, two North Korean diplomats passing through Egypt were discovered with five hundred six thousand tablets of Rohypnol, the sedative “date-rape” drug.30
Another Useful Idiot
“People are busy. They work 48 hours a week. . . . We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. . . . And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It’s like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.” —Jimmy Carter’s observations on life in North Korea”31
Of course the profits from all this criminal activity are spent not on food for the starving masses but on luxuries for the Kims—and on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. The North Koreans first successfully detonated a nuclear device in October 2006, about twelve years after the so-called “Agreed Framework”—supposed to stop this vicious and unpredictable nation from acquiring the atomic bomb—was negotiated between the Kims and the Bill Clinton administration by Jimmy Carter.
Beginning in 1995—a year after Jimmy Carter had raved about the marvelous shopping opportunities in Pyongyang—the communist dystopia in North Korea managed to produce a famine that starved two to three million people to death in four years, out of a population of twenty million.32 The famine was caused not by weather or natural disasters but rather what a UN official called “systemic dysfunction”— in other words, the predictable failures of communist central planning. “I hope and pray,” said Andrew Natsios of World Vision, “that this is the last of the great totalitarian famines.”33 Well, pray as we might, there will continue to be totalitarian famines so long as there is totalitarian communism.
North Korea has 80 percent of the Korean peninsula’s mineral resources, with more arable land and fewer people than South Korea. Yet capitalist South Korea thrives, its standard of living having soared to Western levels since the early 1990s, while communist North Korean starved.
Let Them Eat Bark
During the famine the North Korean government set up distribution centers where the masses had their choice between “brown cakes”—made from tree bark extract—or “green cakes”—made from grass.34
There were reports of cannibalism from Chinese authorities along the northwestern border of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Hundreds of millions of dollars in relief and food aid was sent by South Korea, the United States, and the United Nations, but much of it was pilfered by North Korean officials.35 As the people starved, the Dear Leader sent his personal chef to Tokyo to buy fresh sushi, to Copenhagen for gourmet bacon, to Tehran to buy caviar, and to Paris for the finest wines and cognacs.36
All of North Korea is a prison state—with prisons inside it. The infamous Camp 22, for example, is a concentration camp. There, countless thousands of men, women, and children accused of political crimes are held. Prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners, and the camp even maintains gas chambers, where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings. Entire families are gassed together, left to agonizing, cruel deaths as state scientists in white coats watch through the glass, taking notes.37
After Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011—reportedly “in a fit of rage” over the communist state’s inability to competently construct a dam (informed of a leak, he “rushed to make an on-site inspection of the facility” where he was “unable to contain his anger and died suddenly”)39—he was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un.
A True Believer
Kwon Hyuk, former chief of management at Camp 22 in North Korea, exposed the gas chambers there. He admitted, with painful honesty, that he had felt no pity for the victims: “At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country. . . . Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.”38
The third Kim started off his reign with a bang, executing his vice minister of the army, Kim Chol, with a mortar round after assuming leadership from his pappy. On the orders of Kim Jong Un to “leave no trace of him behind, down to his hair,” Kim Chol was forced to stand on a spot that had been X-ed out and was “obliterated” with a mortar round.40
Like his father and grandfather before him (and Mao, the granddaddy of all the Asian communist dictators, before them), the current Kim has an insatiable appetite for women, whom his secret police round up for his pleasure. Kim Jong Il’s “Satisfaction Corps” has been replaced by Kim Jong Un’s specialized “Pleasure Squad.” Some of the girls are as young as thirteen, often plucked from their school classrooms by soldiers. Their families, who are not allowed to see or speak to their daughters from that point, are told that the girls are being used for “important government projects.” This chain gang of sex slaves contains some two thousand North Korean girls.41
How much blood is on the hands of the Kims? That is difficult to say.
There are the carcasses of the two to three million who starved to death in the famine in the 1990s—some 10 to 15 percent of the total population. There are the nearly hundred thousand who died in party purges. The Black Book of Communism, which was compiled in the mid- to late-1990s, points to another 1.5 million dead in concentration camps. And then, as The Black Book also notes, there were at least another 1.3 million deaths from the Korean War, instigated and organized by the communists. Plus at least another half-million victims of the effects of the widespread malnutrition—somehow in workers’ paradises, it’s always a struggle to get enough to eat—prior to the great famine of the 1990s.43 In total, then, we are looking at 5.4 to 6.4 million deaths thanks to communism in North Korea.
Another Useful Idiot
Paul Boyer’s The American Nation, a civics textbook used in American public schools, includes only these two brief sentences on North Korea: “Kim’s government, a Communist dictatorship, redistributed land to poor peasants and nationalized most industries. Although Kim’s government limited freedom of speech, it expanded education and established formal equality for women.”42
After North Korea fell to communism, other Asian nations followed. Another brutal but even lengthier war—again involving America—ensued in Vietnam. When that painful conflict ended in 1975, over fifty thousand American boys were dead, millions of Vietnamese had perished, and Vietnam was communist. Hundreds of thousands of “boat people” headed for the waters of freedom—many making their way to the shores of America—as a result of the communist persecution that continues to this day.
The communist revolution in Vietnam was started not in the 1960s or even the 1950s, but in the 1920s. And here again, the Comintern and Soviet operative Mikhail Borodin—tasked by Stalin with spreading Bolshevism through Asia—were influential. Communism first came to Vietnam by way of China in December 1924, when an international agent known as Lee Suei was sent by the Comintern to work as “secretary, translator, and interpreter” in Borodin’s mission to help the Chinese Kuomintang in Canton. This man, “Lee,” was the future Ho Chi Minh, the godfather of Vietnamese communism.44
Not Exactly What the Founders Had in Mind
In September of 1945, Ho, who had mastered the art of propaganda at the Lenin School, held a ceremony where he invoked the words of the American Declaration of Independence. Ho needed allies, and he knew that the likes of the late FDR and other liberals had a reputation for being both anti-French and anti-colonial. “Thus began Ho’s courtship of the U.S. by citing the Declaration of Independence and appealing to the American ideal of liberty,” notes historian Ron Radosh. Ho’s biographer, William Duiker, explained that Ho’s aim was to “induce the United States to support the legitimacy of his government, rather than a return of the French.”46
Appealing to America’s founding ideals is an oft-used communist tactic. In fact, communists and their sympathizers have frequently framed modern communist revolutionaries as virtual reincarnations of the American Founders.47 To give just one example, in 1943 Howard Fast, a Stalin Prize winner and pal of Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis (Davis regularly ran Fast’s columns directly above his own in his Chicago Star, which followed the communist party line), had written a book entitled Citizen Tom Paine, portraying Paine, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and other American revolutionaries as akin to Fast and his fellow current-day communist revolutionaries.
During the Vietnam War, the CPUSA and its mouthpieces regularly compared Ho Chi Minh to the Founding Fathers, as if Ho were fighting not for the ideas of the Bolshevik Revolution but the American Revolution. Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s most famous pediatrician—and an infamous dupe of the communists—repeatedly referred to the Vietcong as “communist patriots” and wrote, “The Vietnamese people declared their independence from France, much as we declared our independence from England in 1776. Their war of independence was fought by a united front of various political groups and was led by the communist patriot Ho Chi Minh. . . . The motivation for revolution is the same today as it was in 1776: the desire for justice and a better life.” Spock claimed that “Ho is sometimes called the George Washington of Vietnam.”48
Ho’s shrewd communist propaganda lived on after his own death, through the Vietnam War and into the twenty-first century. President Barack Obama once claimed, “Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”49
Like other leading Asian communists, Ho Chi Minh embraced the faith as a young, wide-eyed student in Paris in the late 1910s and early 1920s. From Paris he went directly to the USSR, refining the craft of revolution under the nurturing of Lenin’s Comintern. He returned to Asia in 1924, the year of Lenin’s demise.
German Marxist revolutionary Ruth Fischer met Ho in Moscow in the 1920s. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1954, Fischer referred to Ho as a “disciplined Communist,” one who had “proved time and again his profound loyalty to Communism.”45
Ho Chi Minh was arrested in Hong Kong in 1931. The French officials who ran colonial Vietnam demanded that British officials in Hong Kong return him for execution, but the British refused, and Ho Chi Minh returned to the welcoming arms of Stalin and his sycophants in Moscow. By the time of World War II, he had infiltrated his way back to Vietnam, and shortly after the Allied victory he was able to install an independent communist government in Vietnam.
By 1946, Ho’s forces were engaged in armed conflict with French forces. The war ended in May 1954 with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In July 1954, a treaty divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, with the north remaining communist. Millions of Vietnamese escaped to the south. Five years later, in May 1959, Ho Chi Minh and his forces, with the backing of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, invaded South Vietnam.
American involvement in Vietnam can be traced back to the Truman administration, but significant high-level involvement began only with President John F. Kennedy, who sent military advisers to South Vietnam, troops to provide training and combat support, and a massive infusion of new weapons. When Kennedy came to office in January 1961, the United States had fewer than a thousand advisors in South Vietnam. The new president quickly upped America’s commitment, dispatching the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron to Bien Hoa Air Base outside Saigon in early November 1961.
Insight into Evil
The Roman Catholic Church—including several popes—has been among the most prescient and insightful critics of communism. We have already seen how Pius IX condemned the pernicious ideology in 1846, even before the publication of The Communist Manifesto. In 1878 Leo XIII called it “the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.” And in 1937 Pius XI described communism as “pernicious,” “Godless,” “by its nature anti-religious,” a form of “perversity,” a “fury,” “poison,” an “extreme danger,” a “deluge which threatens the world,” a “collectivistic terrorism . . . replete with hate,” a “plague” that leads to “catastrophe, a “satanic scourge” that “conceals in itself a false messianic idea, a form of “class-warfare which causes rivers of blood to flow,” a “savage barbarity,” a “truly diabolical” instrument of Satan and his “sons of darkness,” a false promise, and yet one more “sad legacy” of the fall of man.50
What JFK—and many other Americans—feared was that a communist takeover of Vietnam would allow the virulent ideology to spread to neighboring countries—a scenario known as the “domino theory.” Kennedy, an intense anti-communist and defense hawk, seems to have been ready to draw a line in the sand, though historians debate the degree to which he might have increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam had he not been assassinated in November 1963. What is certain is that a severe escalation transpired under Kennedy’s successor, the dreadful Lyndon B. Johnson, who was president until January 1969. By then, America was embroiled in full-scale, total war in Vietnam.
We should not pass over one tragic mistake by the Kennedy administration in silence—the betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam from 1955 through 1963. Diem was an intense anti-communist, his understanding of the dangers of Marxism-Leninism stemming in part from his devout Roman Catholicism. He was a pious Christian who would have preferred a monastery to the leadership of Vietnam—better suited for the priesthood than presidency, and up for Mass at 6:30 every morning. Diem was a man of character, a principled politician as well as patriot who fully respected and honored the faith of his country’s large Buddhist population.
But Diem was vilified by detractors in the United States. The communists in Vietnam knew that the respect that he had rightly earned from the populace was the greatest obstacle to their takeover of their country—with the collusion or at least the sanction (scholars still debate which) of the United States. The Kennedy team approved the coup d’état against Diem. Ironically, Diem was assassinated the same month that Kennedy himself was assassinated by a communist.
The best piece of recent historical scholarship outlining this travesty is Canadian author Geoffrey Shaw’s superb The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam, which tells the sickening story of the demonization, slow and steady abandonment, and final betrayal of Diem by certain elements in the United States. Diem had his supporters, to be sure, from CIA station chief William Colby and secretary of state Dean Rusk to two excellent ambassadors, American Frederick Nolting and Briton Robert Thompson. Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, also supported Diem (in a rare moment of lucidity for LBJ). After visiting Vietnam in 1963, Lyndon Johnson told Kennedy that Diem was “the Winston Churchill of Southeast Asia” and, “Hell, he’s the only boy we got out there.”51
Kennedy, too, initially liked Diem, but he was eventually turned against him by the incessant demonization of Diem by the New York Times (particularly from reporter David Halberstam) and esteemed liberal “wise man” Averell Harriman. “The actions of these men led to Diem’s murder,” Shaw grimly concludes. “And with his death, nine and a half years of careful work and partnership between the United States and South Vietnam was undone. Within a few weeks, any hope of a successful outcome in Vietnam—that is, of a free and democratic country friendly toward the United States—was extinguished. Truly, in order to solve a problem that did not exist, the Kennedy administration created a problem that could not be solved.”52
After Diem’s assassination, the war in Vietnam would spin out of control. Once Kennedy himself was also assassinated, LBJ began micromanaging and mismanaging the rapidly escalating conflict. “They can’t bomb an outhouse without my permission,” Johnson bragged.53 Not that LBJ’s intentions were bad. “Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression,” he said. “It is not conquest; it is not empire; it is not foreign bases; it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.”54 This was a noble purpose. But how it could best be pursued, and whether it was achievable, were difficult questions.
The Vietnam War had a tumultuous effect in America’s domestic politics. As the numbers of U.S. troops coming home in body bags rose (hitting upwards of thirty thousand dead by 1968)—as the draft commenced, and as the Civil Rights movement, drugs and sex, and the rise of the New Left and cultural Marxism all roiled the youth culture, the nation’s universities erupted. America’s campuses and streets saw unprecedented unrest, including violent attacks on the police. Opposition to the Vietnam War reached a fever pitch.
But the effect on the Vietnamese people was far worse. While flower children lost their virginity and blew their minds on LSD on college campuses and at Woodstock, and fifty-eight thousand American boys lost their lives in Southeast Asia, the people of Vietnam lost far, far more, from the property and basic civil liberties to their lives. Over a million were killed in this horrific war, and then still more under the communists, whose takeover followed the American withdrawal.
American policy makers—including both the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon—had long feared that a communist takeover of Vietnam could set off a wider domino effect throughout Southeast Asia, with nations from Cambodia to Laos potentially falling into the communist camp. Chiang Kai Shek’s China, the most populous nation on the planet, had already fallen to communism, as had North Korea, and America was now facing the prospect of more Asian nations becoming allies and proxies for either the Soviets or the Red Chinese. By the late 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split was in full force, the Chinese communists having fallen out with their former sponsors in Russia, and the United States knew that China could be looking to expand and extend its own communist empire southward.
And that is precisely what happened. “Cold War thinking was that if South Vietnam fell to communists, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall as well,” writes Earl Tilford, a Vietnam War historian and veteran. “That happened in Cambodia and Laos less than six months after Saigon fell on April 29, 1975.” A Chinese general told Tilford that he had been one of the hundred and forty thousand “People’s Liberation Army” volunteers in North Vietnam in 1972. The Chinese army was building a road through northern Laos toward Thailand—as Tilford knows well, having been stationed at Udorn Royal Thai Air Base, Thailand in 1970 and 1971. This so-called “China Road” was loaded with antiaircraft guns. Tilford remembers, “An Air Force RF-4C Phantom reconnaissance aircraft was so badly shot up on April 10, 1970, that it crashed while attempting to land at Udorn. Both crewmen successfully ejected, the plane careened through two officers’ hooches and engulfed a trailer housing the radio station. The screams of nine airmen inside were heard across the base before the transmissions—and the men—died.”55
Tilford’s account of Chinese activity in this particular theater of operations is just one of endless examples of both Chinese and Soviet mischief that could be cited here. The point is that fears of communist expansion in Asia were entirely justified. The Soviets hoped for communist ascendancy, even after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s. At the very least, the Kremlin was cheering for a crushing U.S. defeat. And so the Soviets supplied military aid to the Vietcong, engaged in diplomatic troublemaking, and shamelessly incited terrible wars—including the June 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East—as well as launching “active measures” that included propaganda, disinformation, and assassinations across the world.
One of the best eyewitnesses to Soviet intentions in Vietnam was a great Cold War spy, the number two man at CPUSA, Morris Childs, who, as we have already seen, was secretly working for the FBI. He was very close to Leonid Brezhnev, who fully trusted him. The Soviet leadership was very candid with Childs, including on the subject that dominated American headlines: Vietnam. The Soviet leadership used facts and figures to reassure Childs that they were doing all they could to assist communist North Vietnam militarily and politically. The Soviets briefed him in great detail on the extent and nature of their military aid, as well as their exciting plans to enlist leftist Western intellectuals in a propaganda campaign to undermine U.S. forces in Vietnam and to try to prompt an American withdrawal. A central part of the Soviet disinformation campaign was to argue that the Vietnam War was really just another inevitable “nationalist” uprising by an indigenous force that was in no way a serious communist threat to American interests.
And ultimately communist propaganda did succeed in duping American liberals into believing that Vietnam’s communists were just anti-imperialists who desired democracy as much as communism. Run-of-the-mill protestors against the Vietnam War may have been simply in favor of peace, and unaware of the international scope and dimensions of the war, obscured by the propaganda push to mislead them. And many of the protestors were understandably, and rightly, frustrated by the horrible mismanagement of the war, especially by the Johnson administration, whose toxic mistakes in the conduct of the war were killing tens of thousands of Americans and far more Vietnamese, with no end in sight. Protestors marched outside the White House shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
But some of the more radical protestors actively sympathized with the Vietnamese communists, whom they much preferred to American Democrats and Republicans. American communists like Columbia University’s Mark Rudd, who headed the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), complained, “Liberals, including Robert Kennedy, his martyred brother John, and LBJ had given us Vietnam in the first place.” Rudd would shut down Columbia’s campus in the spring of 1968, and it was just one of many campuses where the chaos was so volatile that classes had to be cancelled.
When SDS was not radical enough to achieve their objectives, Rudd and comrades like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn created more violent splinter groups, such as the Weather Underground. “We have only begun,” promised the 1974 Weather Underground manifesto, Prairie Fire, which was dedicated to (among others) Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. They vowed that “the only possibilities are victory or death.” The Weather Underground’s “revolutionary program” was “to disrupt the empire” of “U.S. imperialism” and “incapacitate it.” The Weather Underground invoked the words of Che Guevara: “In our own hemisphere,” declared the authors, “Che Guevara urged that we ‘create two, three, many Vietnams,’ to destroy U.S. imperialism . . . and opening another front within the US itself.”56
President Johnson refused to pursue the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 1968. It was a sign of the political toll that the Vietnam War was taking inside the United States. Republican nominee Richard Nixon won the presidency and quickly pursued a policy to win the war, or at least to avoid losing. The Paris Peace Accords was signed in January 1973, formally ending the war, but not ending the actual fighting on the ground. Then in January 1975, the North Vietnamese launched a massive attack on South Vietnam, which fell on April 30. The infamous fall of Saigon was captured by vivid images of American helicopters, mobbed by desperate crowds, pulling up and out of the city.
Freedom Man
When communism finally conquered Vietnam, persecution, mass executions, torture, and deprivation of civil liberties quickly followed. An estimated five hundred thousand to a million South Vietnamese underwent forced “re-education” from 1975 until roughly 1986, when they were returned home from brainwashing centers. Millions more fled to the jungles or took to the ocean. The “Boat People Exodus” ensued, with hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as two million—“boat people” heading for the high seas, leaving behind their possessions in search of freedom and normal lives. Hundreds of thousands never made it; they drowned in the process.
President Ronald Reagan remembered them in his poignant January 1989 “Farewell Address,” paying tribute to what America’s attempt to stop communism in Vietnam and to the suffering people left behind:
I’ve been reflecting on what the past eight years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one—a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early ‘80s, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.”57
Today, Vietnam remains under communist despotism. Sources ranging from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to the Harvard University Press work, The Black Book of Communism, record one million dead Vietnamese victims of communism.58
The Killing Fields of Cambodia
Cambodia fell the same year that the last American helicopter lifted out of Saigon. What communism brought to Cambodia was unspeakably horrific, with the violent death of a percentage of the population that far surpassed the proportion killed anywhere else, even under the worst moments of Mao’s bloody tyranny.
Cambodia succumbed to a man named Pol Pot and his brutal Khmer Rouge movement. Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in the 1920s into a large and fairly well-off family. His estranged brother would later remark that “the contemptible Pot was a lovely child.” The young Pol Pot and his sister were lucky enough to have a private religious education, studying at a Buddhist pagoda in the capital city, Phnom Penh. Pot did so well academically that he earned a college scholarship to study radio electricity in Paris. As in the case of other future Asian Marxist leaders, including Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, it was in Paris that the young Pol Pot acquired a rabid interest in far-left politics, becoming a passionate communist. Of the eight or nine core individuals who founded the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) with Pol Pot, nearly all had studied in Paris, where leftist European intellectuals taught them their Marxism-Leninism.
Pol Pot left Paris and returned to Cambodia in the early 1950s. As Cambodia gained its independence from colonial France, Pol Pot and his Marxist friends helped establish the Communist Party in Cambodia. He and his Khmer Rouge replaced the American-supported Lon Nol government in 1975. With that, communism was on in Cambodia.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were textbook totalitarians, seeking to change human nature itself. Their attack on the most basic human rights began with savage haste. Cities and urban areas were immediately evacuated, with Cambodians forcibly relocated into rural areas. Once they were separated from all their possessions and thrust into the countryside, collectivized into common farms and re-education centers, Cambodians’ entire lives were regimented. Private property was eliminated, including even personal hygiene products.
Communism, at its essence, is class hatred, and Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge quickly focused their energies on the elimination of entire classes and professions. The educated classes were targeted, with doctors and lawyers being shot. Of course, religion was despised. The vast majority of the Cambodian population was Buddhist. At the start of the Khmer Rouge’s purge, there had been upwards of eighty thousand monks in the country. They were now forced to renounce their vows and marry, or face execution. It is estimated that as many as forty to sixty thousand were killed. By some accounts, there were as few as one thousand monks left in Cambodia after four years. The year 1978 was rechristened the year zero.
From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot’s governing Khmer Rouge harvested the most heinous “Killing Fields” in history, with roughly two million or more Cambodians perishing in a mere four years (estimates range from as low as 1.6 million to as high as three million). While that total does not match Stalin’s or Mao’s total death toll (or Hitler’s), it actually exceeds the victims of butchers as a percentage of the overall population, which at the start of the Cambodian genocide stood somewhere between five and seven million. Some 20 to 40 percent of the Cambodian population may have been annihilated in just four years under Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.59
Sam Rainsy, a Cambodian politician who experienced the genocide firsthand, points out that the bloodletting done by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s is historically “comparable only to the attempt to exterminate the Armenians during World War I, the holocaust of Jews committed under Hitler, and more recently the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda.”
The human faces behind the statistics tell an even grimmer story.
“My wife held the youngest of our sons in her arms,” recalls one survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. “I held the hands of the other two. Our elbows were then tied. We were blindfolded and I knew we were about to be executed. I was able to untie myself and lift my blindfold. The Khmer Rouge were stuffing the mouths of those they were leading with rags and grass to prevent them from screaming and were cutting their throats like animals—the throats of men, women, old folk and children alike.”
When the Khmer Rouge was not lining up people and slicing their throats, it was starving them to death. Hunger remains “an issue I can talk on for hours,” recalls Bo Meng, who lost six siblings and his father during those years of starvation and execution. Now a restaurant owner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Meng recalls how single spoonfuls of corn kernels served as family meals. Another survivor, Loung Ung, tells in her gripping memoir First They Killed My Father of how her older siblings shook the trees at night “hoping to find June bugs” to eat while she and her younger brothers and sisters scoured the ground to catch frogs and grasshoppers for nourishment.
The horrors in Cambodia and Vietnam can be directly attributed to the communist ideology that the United States had hoped to halt in Asia during the Vietnam War, a noble albeit tragic cause that was far from flawlessly pursued. And while America’s involvement in Southeast Asia will long be debated and questioned, there remains no question that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into hell on earth.
What communism brought to Asia was nothing new. It was what communism always brings: horrific suffering, death, and sorrow.