Dennis Prager Visits Vietnam

My revived hatred of communism

Here is the truth: Every communist dictator in the world has been a megalomaniacal, cult of personality, power-hungry, bloodthirsty thug. Ho Chi Minh was no different. He murdered his opponents, tortured only God knows how many innocent Vietnamese, threatened millions into fighting for him – yes, for him and his blood soaked Vietnamese Communist Party, backed by the greatest murderer of all time, Mao Zedong. But the moral idiots in America chanted "Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh" at antiwar rallies, and they depicted America as the real murderers of Vietnamese – "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

The Vietnamese communists were not fighting America for Vietnamese independence. America was never interested in controlling the Vietnamese people, and there is a perfect parallel to prove this: the Korean War. Did America fight the Korean communists in order to control Korea? Or did 37,000 Americans die in Korea so that Koreans could be free? Who was (and remains) a freer human being – a Korean living under Korean communist rule in North Korea or a Korean living in that part of Korea where America defeated the Korean communists?

And who was a freer human being in Vietnam – those who lived in non-communist South Vietnam (with all its flaws) or those who lived under Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh's communists in North Vietnam?

America fights to liberate countries, not to rule over them. It was the Vietnamese Communist Party, not America, that was interested in controlling the Vietnamese people. But the lie was spread so widely and so effectively that most of the world – except American supporters of the war and the Vietnamese boat people and other Vietnamese who yearned for liberty – believed that America was fighting for tin, tungsten and the wholly fictitious "American empire" while the Vietnamese communists were fighting for Vietnamese freedom.

*I hope I live to see the day when the people of Vietnam, freed from the communist lies that still permeate their daily lives, understand that every Vietnamese death in the war against America was a wasted life, one more of the 140 million human sacrifices on the altar of the most bloodthirsty false god in history: communism.