A REMINDER FROM HISTORY – AT 10:35 A.M. ET:  The United States, in what President Ford called an act of "dishonor," cut off aid to South Vietnam in 1975, insuring a Communist victory and abandoning those who had fought side by side with us.  Congress, controlled by an increasingly radical Democratic Party,  insisted on the cutoff. 

President Ford did try to make some amends by inviting those who had helped us to immigrate to America, creating the productive, educated Vietnamese-American community we have today.  But the fact is that South Vietnam slipped into the Communist orbit and ceased to exist as a separate nation.  A "united" Vietnam emerged, a complete dictatorship.

There are Vietnamese-Americans still fighting for the freedom of their native country.  And Vietnam is none too pleased with them.  Consider this, from AP:

A Vietnamese-American pro-democracy activist has been arrested and accused of terrorism for allegedly trying to sabotage liberation celebrations commemorating the end of the Vietnam War, state media said Sunday.

Nguyen Quoc Quan, 58, of California, was detained April 17 after arriving at the airport in southern Ho Chi Minh City, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported. He is accused of planning to hold protests for Viet Tan, a banned U.S. exile group, during this week's May Day festivities and the April 30 anniversary of the fall of the former U.S.-backed South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, to the northern communists in 1975.

Authorities also found many documents in Quan's possession on "terrorist training," the paper said. Quan, a mathematician, was previously sentenced to six months in jail by a Ho Chi Minh City court in 2008 for terrorism.

After being deported from Vietnam, Quan continued to travel from the U.S. to Thailand and Malaysia to train members of the Viet Tan group on nonviolent struggles in Vietnam, Tuoi Tre said.

Hanoi often uses vague national security laws to charge pro-democracy activists with terrorism, but the U.S. government has said it has seen no evidence that California-based Viet Tan, also known as the Vietnam Reform Party, is a terrorist organization.

COMMENT:  We have chosen, over the years, to avert our eyes.  Subjected to relentless left-wing propaganda, including that mouthed by the likes of John Kerry, we convinced ourselves that the Vietnam War had been hopeless, and we accepted the outcome.

Outgoing Senator James Webb of Virginia, a Vietnam vet, has said that for more than a generation this country has lived a myth, the myth that we "lost" the Vietnam War.  We never lost a battle in Vietnam.  We abandoned the effort, even cutting off aid to our allies after all American ground troops had been withdrawn.

The Cambodian genocide occurred in the 1970s, and we averted our eyes then, too.  All the fraudulent "anti-war" activists had nothing to say.

The media has done nothing to correct the record.  It was part of the problem.

So let us think of Nguyen Quoc Quan, as he sits in prison in Vietnam, and hope that our own government today will vigorously work to free him.  That may be a false hope because too many just don't want to remember.

April 29, 2012