Costumed antiwar demonstrators armed with hand-painted signs; banal antiwar slogans; diatribes against the president: To those of us old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam War hysteria of the late 1960s, it all sounds eerily familiar.But this isnât a repeat of that Sixties show. No, todayâs antiwar fervor is merely the latest vocal outburst of frustrated, Blame-America-First leftists. They are trying desperately to regain their power from those days when they pushed the country into abandoning an ally â admittedly a less than perfect one â to merciless communist invaders. Thanks to a strange, convoluted ideological union of Nixonian realpolitique and pro-communist appeasement, America shamefully withdrew support for South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese immediately overran the country with massive military forces. They instituted the classic communist political control that resulted in hundreds of thousands of executions, and in the imprisonment and oppression of the surviving population. It is a measure of the communistsâ cruelty that the so-called âboat peopleâ braved rape, robbery, torture, and murder to sail the hostile waters of the South China Sea and flee their oppressors.
Today, the American war effort is once again imperiled by a bizarre marriage of ideologies. On the right, these include an element of the surviving realpolitique wing (the âpaleoconservativesâ), who still resist American intervention in Iraq and the Middle East. They are joined but overshadowed by the more vocal and considerably nastier hard left antiwar leaders, as well as the useful idiots who make up the sign-carrying crowds of antiwar marchers. As has been extensively documented by David Horowitzâs DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a large percentage of the people screaming for immediate U.S withdrawal from Iraq and condemning American intervention of any kind, even for self-defense, burnished their political credentials during the antiwar days of the Sixties.