Which Way Did Those Refugees Go?

In a classically hilarious Firing Line episode from 1969, Noam Chomsky has the laughable position that more refugees fled South Vietnam to the north than fled in the other direction.

One exchange begins at the 15:30 mark.  In that exchange about Vietnam, Chomsky blames Vietcong atrocities on American intervention in Vietnam.

At the exchange beginning on the 27:00 mark, Chomsky spins the fiction that the first Communist insurrection in Greece (the one prior to the WWII German invasion) was really an organic, internal "uprising" and not Soviet sponsored at all.

Back to Vietnam, at 37:29 Chomsky states that "there is more evidence that South Vietnam tried to colonize North Vietnam than conversely". Buckley asks if the "infiltrators" from South Vietnam going into the North bumped into the refugees coming south. This is where Chomsky begins his big whopper of a tale, saying that refugees traveled in both directions. At 38:30 Buckley asks about the people going "north to south" and Chomsky is 'baffled'.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by no means a Western mouthpiece even after the fall of the Soviet Union, here is the breakdown of Vietnamese refugee migration from 1954-1956:

The State of The World's Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Chapter 4: Flight from Indochina, War and exodus from Viet Nam -

With the founding of a communist government in the north, more than a million people moved south in the years 1954–56. Their numbers included nearly 800,000 Roman Catholics, an estimated two-thirds of the total Roman Catholic population in the north. There was a smaller movement in the opposite direction, The State of the World’s Refugees as some 130,000 supporters of the communist Viet Minh movement were transported north by Polish and Soviet ships.2

2 L.A.Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and OtherWar Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954–1975,Westport Press, New York, 1988; A.R. Zolberg et al., Escape from Violence: Conflictand the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, pp. 160–70.

That is greater than a 7 to 1 ratio of people fleeing Communism vs. people fleeing 'oppressive' Western influence.  The number of Catholics alone fleeing North Vietnam vs. those fleeing North is 6 to 1.  Since folks towing the Communist line in the West had a direct line to Soviet propaganda, there is little doubt that Chomsky had the 130,000 number etched in his head.

Years later, after the North Vietnamese took over (with the help of the United States Congress), there was another mass exodus  of Vietnamese.  This time they fled by sea from every port in the country, to any port that would take them.

Socialism, especially the International variety, kills more people than any other ideology on earth and everybody outside of the faculty lounge knows it.

Occupy Wall St. honors Communist terrorist group with new protest – Glenn Beck

Via Glenn Beck's blog The Blaze. This deserves more investigation. As you have seen in other posts here, not much leftist "innovation" is very innovative at all. They constantly recycle their misdirection and are pretty successful at fooling people who never bothered to look up the past.  First, take a look at the poster the Junior League Communists are using to create even more disruption for innocent bystanders:

Interesting appropriation of this event (longer version video link that prohibited embedding):

The interesting part is the Chinese man challenging the tanks was opposing exactly what the #Occupy clowns are demanding.  Twenty years later, the man's identity is still a mystery.  From the longer version video link that prohibited embedding, we see that the man was spirited away by four other men, rather than being run over by tanks on the spot.  The AP story does not mention this.

Now for the Glenn Beck take:

Occupy Wall St. honors Communist terrorist group with new protest – Glenn Beck (click for the rest):

UPDATE: I admit to starting this post with half tongue-in-cheek as mockery for our treatment by the media for 8.28. But, honestly—I’m convincing myself a little. The official Occupy Wall Street site is literally calling the march the “N17 Mass Direct Action.”
Again from the Council on Foreign Relations: “November 17, Revolutionary People’s Struggle, Revolutionary Struggle (Greece, leftists)” is “A radical, leftist Greek terrorist group, also known as 17 N or N 17” who aims to launch “an anti-capitalist popular uprising against the Greek middle and upper-classes.” When is the last time you heard someone say “we have our Christmas party on D22.” “I was born on F9.” Who says “N17” for November 17th? Is that common here in America?

I know their public excuse for the “direct action” is two months of “occupation.” I understand that is what they are saying publicly. But, this is just the leadership of this group honoring a bunch of their heroes with a subtle tip of the cap. The true believers get a chuckle while the useful idiots march in solidarity with something that they don’t understand.

Like I said, this deserves more research.