XPost: alt.feminism, alt.liberalminded, alt.politics.communism   
   XPost: alt.politics.radical-left, alt.society.liberalism, soc.culture.filipino   
   From: libsHATEUSA@traitors.com   
      
   By Anders G. Lewis   
   April 9, 2004   
      
   To the American Left in the 1960s, Hanoi was the Eternal City.  It was the   
   place to go to protest America’s war in Vietnam and to express one’s   
   solidarity with Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime. In Hanoi one could find,   
   according to Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, a “socialism of the heart” and a   
   budding “rice-roots democracy.”  “We suspect,” they observed, “that colonial   
   American town meetings and current Vietnamese village meetings, Asian   
   peasants leagues and Black Belt sharecroppers’ unions have much in common….”   
   It was also in Hanoi that one could, in Ramsey Clark’s words, witness “the   
   chief and universal cause of the revolutionary impulse,” namely “the desire   
   for equality.” “You see no internal conflict in this country,” Clark happily   
   reported.  At least, he stated, “I’ve seen none.”  Finally, it was in Hanoi   
   that one could, in Susan Sontag’s words, visit a place “which, in many   
   respects, deserves to be idealized,” and see a people who “really do believe   
   in the goodness of man….”[1]   
      
   Noam Chomsky was among those on the Left who traveled to Hanoi.  In his At   
   War With Asia (1970), the linguist-turned-activist fondly recounted how he   
   found a country that was “unified, strong though poor, and determined to   
   withstand the attack launched against [it] by the great superpower of the   
   Western world.” Everywhere he went, Chomsky found people “healthy, well-fed,   
   and adequately clothed.”  Indeed, he saw great promise in Vietnamese   
   Communism. “My personal guess is that, unhindered by imperialist   
   intervention, the Vietnamese would develop a modern industrial society with   
   much popular participation” and “direct democracy.”   While in Hanoi,   
   Chomsky broadcasted a speech of solidarity on behalf of the Communists.  He   
   declared that their heroism revealed “the capabilities of the human spirit   
   and human will.”  “Your cause,” he continued, “is the cause of humanity as   
   it moves forward toward liberty and justice, toward the socialist society in   
   which free, creative men control their own destiny.”  Chomsky was so moved   
   by his journey that, at one point, he proudly “sang songs, patriotic and   
   sentimental, and declaimed poems” with his hosts.  He admitted that some   
   Western observers, those too encumbered by bourgeois prejudice, might find   
   his actions distasteful.  He was not concerned.   “Let the reader think what   
   he may,” Chomsky wrote. “The fact is,” the whole experience was “intensely   
   moving.”[2]   
      
      
   Noam Chomsky went to Vietnam to protest a war he insisted was “simply an   
   obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men….”[3]  He opposed the   
   war in word and deed while it was being fought, and he continues to write   
   against it today.  In the 1960s, he aided antiwar students and participated   
   in one of Boston’s first antiwar demonstrations.  He also joined the   
   infamous October 1967 march on the Pentagon.  Chomsky thought it was a   
   glorious affair with “tens of thousands of young people surrounding what   
   they believed to be - I must add that I agree - the most hideous institution   
   on this earth.”  He helped form the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars   
   (CCAS), an organization that demanded “total, immediate, [and] unilateral   
   American withdrawal” from Vietnam.  And in 1969, Chomsky supported the   
   October 15 nationwide Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam.[4]   
      
      
      
   Read more: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12904   
      
      
   --   
   Left-wing liberals are EVERYTHING they accuse the right of being.   
   They are mean, vicious, hateful, greedy, cold-hearted, closed-minded,   
   selfish, intolerant, bigoted and racist.   
      
   Liberals HATE America!   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)