Not to speak ill of the dead but many (I among them) believe we could have prevailed in Vietnam had it not been for the liberal media and especially Mr. Cronkite shaping public opinion against the War.
The end result of Mr. Cronkite's actions was to doom the Vietnam people we abandoned to unthinkable hardships. With the fall of Saigon, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to "re-education camps." An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials and, according to published academic studies in the US and Europe, more than 165,000 people died in these re-education camps. Hundreds of thousands more were abused or tortured. These factors, coupled with poverty, caused hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country many becoming "boat people." On the open seas, the boat people had to confront forces of nature, and elude pirates.
Related events in Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge regime to murder millions more people in their "Killing Fields."
Mr. Cronkite may have been a great newsman but this stain on his record needs to be a lesson to all Americans about what can happen when we abandon our commitments. Let's remember this as we deal with Iraq and Afghanistan.
No comments:
Post a Comment