Everything that rises must converge: Vietnam edition

“From Breitbart TV (via Tom Maguire and Don Surber), here’s the Darling of Davos, John Kerry, laying out some Brahman truthiness for the proles on C-Span:

Sen. John Kerry said during a C-Span appearance that fears of a bloodbath after the US withdrawal from Vietnam never materialized. He says he’s met survivors of the “reeducation camps” who are thriving in modern Vietnam. An award-winning investigation by the Orange County Register concludes that at least 165,000 people perished in the camps.

Well, sure. But those were just the stubborn ones who refused to be “re-educated.” And sometimes you have kill off 165,000 people to save them.

Not to mention a couple million Cambodians — though the “war protesters” of that era, and their historical apologists, like to lay those deaths at the feet of Nixon and Kissinger in precisely the same way today’s anti-war crowd is angling to lay any Iraqi civil war and sectarian purge at the feet of Bushco, once they’ve forced a retreat and created a power vacuum.”

More on this topic from Tiger Hawk: Reinventing history

“The Democrats, many of whom have labored mightily to compare Iraq to Vietnam in the hope of sustaining the “quagmire” narrative, find that the comparison is suddenly and maddeningly inconvenient. After all, Vietnamese and Cambodians suffered a great deal of violence and persecution in the years following the American withdrawal from Indochina and nobody — other than Iranians, perhaps — wants to see similar ugliness in Iraq.

Fortunately, John Kerry, who knows all about the advantages and disadvantages of invoking Vietnam for political ends, has hit upon a solution. Rather than admitting that there is a huge risk that violence will escalate in Iraq as it did after the American withdrawal from Indochina, he is reinventing the history of the earlier war and claiming that no such bloodbath occurred.

It will be interesting to see whether other Democrats follow Kerry off that cliff.”
It will indeed…
Jenny Hatch