Yes.
Changing the subject does it bother you that the current ‘peace movement’ is associated with a Communist group like ANSWER?
Yes it does. It doesn’t distress them at all. They don’t seem to mind the origins of the people with whom they are cooperating and they didn’t seem to mind that it gave hope to Saddam Hussein. He was very honest in saying that time was on his side because public opinion in the West which he thought was represented by the people in the streets would cause the coalition to collapse and he would be able to outlast us. So in effect these people who were marching for peace were actually making war more inevitable by hardening Saddam’s will to hang on.
Do you think the antiwar protestors from the Vietnam era are partially responsible for the 81 million people enslaved in Vietnam today and Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia?
Yes I do. But more than that as I say in the book it distresses me that there were so few honest liberals that there were so few people who looked at the consequences of what happened in Southeast Asia after [the Communists] won. We did what they wanted we pulled out and they had been insisting that nothing could be worse than U.S. participation in that war and that Vietnam would be much better off without us.
In fact in the book I reproduce a New York Times headline story that said in it’s headline something along the lines of ‘analysts believe that Southeast Asia would be nothing but better off without an American presence.’ Then of course what happened as you say was that the Vietnamese were enslaved. Thousands upon thousands took to the sea in leaky boats. In Cambodia there was a genocide the likes of which the world had not seen since the second world war. Yet very few people — Joan Baez and a handful of others — ver protested what went on in Southeast Asia after we left.
When there was no longer a United States to demonstrate against suddenly these people lost their concern about the human rights of people in Southeast Asia.
In a related question why do you think that there are so many people on the Left who always look to blame America first?
Well these habits were formed in the Vietnam era. They’ve remained fixed even today. As to why they hate America that’s a deep philosophical question and I’m not sure I have the answer. I think part of it is that you can’t possibly have an appreciation for world history and be an America hater because if you look at the history of the world it’s very bloody very unpleasant and most people in most places have had to live with cruel and despotic governments.
Our country is hardly perfect — no country is — but I challenge anyone to find in the history of the world a nation that has had more power and has used it more benevolently than we have. I do not understand this hatred for the United States. I think it arises from ignorance of world history and it has a life of its own. In the universities the Left is basically the entrenched professoriat now and they have all those young minds that they can mold. I think that may account for some of it as well. But I would say in every case it is based on a thorough misunderstanding of history and our place in it.
After the miserable performance of the UN in this latest crisis do you think that the UN is going to soon become as irrelevant as the League of Nations?
