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.

#OccupyWalmart Adds A Juvenile Sophomoric Touch To The Shop-In

(Updated 04 DEC 2011)
So far in the latest bitch, whine, and complain demonstration nostalgia of the 1960s we have had Teach-Ins, Sit-Ins, along with piss-and-shit-ins. Now the bush league Ad-Busters scripted, American Nazi Party endorsed #Occupy children, decided to dig out another discarded protest idea that involves a field trip.  This one from the 1960s, pioneered by the Congress Of Racial Equality (CORE): The Shop-In

Cumberland Evening Times, Friday, February 28, 1964

Negroes Stage Shop-in Protests

New Weapon Used By Civil Rights Demonstrators

In the shop-in,. demonstrators enter a store, fill shopping carts with, groceries, wheel them to the counter, have them checked out, then say they can't pay and leave the sacks and boxes piled in front of clerks.

Members of the Congress of Racial Equality began the tactic last week at supermarkets of Lucky Stores, Inc. in San Francisco, at Berkeley, home of the University of California, and at Palo Alto to the south, adjacent to Stanford University.

They contend Lucky didn't fulfill an agreement to hire additional Negroes. Lucky flatly denied it, pointed to its Negro employes and said it would have no part of "reverse discrimination."
Tuesday, the largest Negro group in San Francisco, the Baptist Ministers Union said it would sever its ties with CORE if the shop-ins didn't stop.

"CORE has a right to picket, but if it continues 'to use this tactic, we just can't go along," said the Rev. George L. Bedford, head of the group representing 40,000 of the city's 85,000 Negroes.

In 1964, CORE was picketing grocery stores that they did not like, but that tactic did not impact business enough.  So, they tried a new tactic, clogging up the stores so nobody else could buy anything.  Later in 1967, CORE was a key player in the Detroit Riot.

Now, the new kids come along with their version: #OccupyBlackFriday

Instead of a trespassing protest on private property to get a grocery store that already employs Black people to . . . employ Black people a la CORE, the #Occupy kids make a mess trespassing on private property to demand . . . people shop locally?

The original shopins were so successful that they ended up on the trash-heap of history for almost forty years.  The old fart Commies running this #Occupy circus must have some memory of the shopins of old, and how they went over.  Perhaps they do not, because until recently one had to remember them from the 1960s because there was precious little to be found about them online.  The effect was pissing people off, so maybe they do remember and it fits right in with the rest of #Occupy.  There is an old film or two about the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that PBS channels play on occasion, but that is about it.  I have been asking for source information about shopins for years and this week was the first time I found a news report from the period that mentioned "shop-ins".

In Liberal Fascism, or during his book tour, Jonah Goldberg mentioned that around the time of Hitler's rise in Germany there were protests against department stores there, similar to the Walmart hate we witness in America today.  I am still looking for direct references to that and any information is welcome.

Daniel J. Flynn has a great response to #OccupyWalmart at Human Events.  Rush Limbaugh mentioned the ruckus on his show, apparently before it spread to Target, Best Buy and other stores.

The Blaze covered the Dayton 'event' like this:

Black Friday shoppers in Dayton, Ohio, were in for a rude awakening when Occupy Dayton protesters (we’ve reported on their antics before) entered a local Walmart and Target and began mic-checking and berating individuals and families.

On the protest group’s YouTube page, a five and a half minute video has been posted. In it, Occupiers document and promote the torment they attempt to inflict on shoppers.

At the 40 second mark, you’ll see the first clip, which was taken at a local Target store. Around 1:08, a male voice can be heard asking, “Ready?” Within seconds, the protesters begin yelling, “Mic check!” Then, they launch into their seemingly endless chant:

“Hello Daytonians. We have a message for you. This will only take a moment. It is shameful that you spend your hard-earned money at a corporation who does not care about your family. They insult the 99 percent. They pay little or no taxes, while profits soar. Our tax money goes to our public schools. We find it an outrage that you continue to shop here in support of a corporation who does not support you.”

Video from The Blaze:

I am not up on Walmart getting any free ride on sales taxes.  They frequently get property tax incentives thrown at them by local governments competing with other local governments for Walmart to build a store in their town, which is really an abuse of government power.  Neither am I certain if Ohioans fund public schools with sales taxes generated at Walmart.  I am betting that the Occupiers have a few tax facts wrong.

Also, if you don't think that the American Nazis are Socialists, try looking at their endorsement of #OWS for their "anti-capitalist" positions.  Just because they mix racism with Socialism does not make them any less Socialistic.

Obama Coddles Radical Islam Just Like FDR Coddled Communists

Followup here.

"Controversial" FBI video:

 
If you view the video, William Gawthrop makes it quite clear that he is teaching about the ideology associated with Islam, not the religious aspects of man's relationship with God, but man's relationship with man.  A different way to state it, that he does not state, would be to imagine Socialism as a stated religion and limit the discussion to the economic and social ideology, including its war with the free market.

This is quite different than examining organized crime figures who attend Catholic Church and imagining/inventing that the Catholic Church is promoting organized crime.  It is examining a belief system that promotes and recruits terrorists, as Christopher Hitchens speaks about on a regular basis.


He gives examples of other ideologically motivated acts of terror too, but there is no outcry against that.


The following is from a Leftist commentator who reported on the above clip, then said jump.  Obama responded how high, Sir?  To some, any linking of jihadists to their terror networks is speech that cannot be condoned.
Obama Orders Government to Clean Up Terror Training
By Spencer Ackerman

The White House quietly ordered a widespread review of government counterterrorism training materials last month, following Danger Room’s reports that officials at the FBI, military and Justice Department taught their colleagues that “mainstream” Muslims embrace violence and compared the Islamic religion to the Death Star.

Gawthrop did nothing of the sort!  Look at the video. Just after the 18:00 mark he mentions economically poor societies that are not sending out suicide bombers and points out how the jihadists are different.  He mentions Islamic law and how Islam is the form of government to some.

At 20:20 he uses the example of a US Aircraft Carrier and how the nuclear reactor is its source of strength, a critical vulnerability.  To continue the illustration he mentions the Death Star and how it was destroyed, with a "torpedo" down a shaft to the core reactor to attack its critical vulnerability.  Then he goes back to the critical vulnerabilities of jihadist terrorists and tells analysts to focus there.

According to a Pentagon memorandum acquired by Danger Room, the White House’s National Security Staff in October requested “Departments and Agencies” to “provide their screening process for CVE trainers and speakers.” (.pdf) CVE refers to “Countering Violent Extremism,” the euphemism du jour for the war on terrorism. The memorandum says that “recent media attention” led to the review, and contains a single attachment to demonstrate that attention: “Spencer Ackerman’s Wired.com article.”

The ongoing review will examine whether counterterrorism training material throughout the government is accurate and relevant, and will make sure the briefings given to federal field offices and local cops meet the same standards as FBI headquarters or the Pentagon. Jose Mayorga, a retired two-star general who now serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, oversaw the Pentagon’s contribution to the White House review. In the memo, dated Oct. 16, Mayorga asked aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to collect counterterrorism training materials at the “service academies and major academic centers (e.g., Joint Special Operations University, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and National Defense Intelligence College)” by Oct. 31, a deadline that Pentagon spokesman Robert Ditchey says has “been extended” so the department can be “comprehensive and deliberate.”

Part of the first wave to ignore Islamic motivated terror is a scrub of CVE training slides, the words "Islam" and "terrorism" cannot appear on the same slide.  With the direction this is taking, it will be impossible to mention the threats that the government is supposed to be countering.

 

Followup here.

Atheist Leftists Are Leftists First And Atheists Second, Or Less

Update: Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December, 2011.  National Review and Vanity Fair have the details.

Here we have Christopher Hitchens speaking to a group of atheists at a Freedom From Religion Foundation gathering.  He sounds like damn near the only atheist in the building:

One of the great things about Christopher Hitchens is that he is principled.  He dresses down a Leftist surrender monkey (around the 3:40 mark) and asks what he is doing in a conference like this.  He uses as an example the Greek Myth of Antaeus to respond to the ridiculous notion that if bin Laden is killed many will spring up in his place.

The point he makes is, there are religious zealots who are fighting us, killing human rights volunteers, etc. and they need to be stopped in the name of liberty for all.  The next questioner, a Marxist/Communist is "troubled" by Hitchens' earlier answer.  "You see how far the termites have spread" is the Hitchens money quote in response to the ridiculous question and the man's accusation that the West is the big "war crimes" instigator.

Hitchens continues in this clip about Islamic slaughter in East Timor and its appearance in the Al Qaeda/bin Laden manifesto:

Now, the point of all of this goes directly to the bigger issue of Atheism in the Socialist vs. Libertarian dialogue.

A hallmark of Socialists/Leftists is their professed atheism.  Not all of them to be sure, but one must mount a tremendous search to find a non-atheist among them.  In the libertarian ranks, the search is ever so slightly shorter.  That said about both, many a libertarian and many a Socialist will side with any non-Christian/Jew who wishes to attack Western Civilization.  Much like Murray Rothbard, on a different principle, clapping for Khrushchev  because "Khrushchev had killed fewer people than General Eisenhower, his host."

In the video clips above, Hitchens (now a libertarian Atheist) dresses down two pseudo-atheists for being against the Western response to being attacked by Islamic fundamentalists.  The basis of these pseudo-atheists' objection to the war against a religious theocracy is a recurring theme: Western free-market leaning governments caused the problem, so we should leave the jihadists alone and they will settle down.  Hitchens does not accept their arguments and dices them as any thinking human being should.

Now, for my own personal "bias", I am a Christian and libertarian who can agree with Hitchens in virtually all that he said in response to these people.  I do not want to impose my beliefs on others by force, terror, government coercion, or any other tactic that the jihadists are using.  Additionally, if some person or group want to force anybody else into a religion of any kind I feel that should be opposed, even with force of arms.

Sadly, many libertarians combine atheism and pacifism into a bizarre mix that results in a defacto support for any non-Christian group that is willing to attack the West.  Their atheism is more like an endless attack on Christianity from a non-denominational agnostic view than true atheism.  Perhaps there is a dose of false libertarianism in there too.

Natural rights do not enforce themselves.  Words to live by from quite a few libertarian and conservative thinkers.  If someone is trying to take your rights by any means, you have every right, indeed you have an obligation, to prevent them from doing so, even if force is required and the police power of the state is perfectly appropriate.  One can understand leaving our powder dry when some group of people outside of our control wishes to abuse each other, issuing official embargoes, strongly worded telegrams, and the like.  However, when they move to attack us and impose their version of il-liberty on us, including our allies, the gloves need to come off.

The Left Never Questions A Kennedy

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin." - Ronald Reagan, September 25, 1987 -- remarks in Arlington, Virginia

Oh those Kennedys.  Our republic is in a sad state of affairs when so-called Conservatives invoke any Kennedy on a regular basis, including JFK, for almost anything good.  Examples are numerous, worthy of a long book, but I will stick to just a few.  The first example is of a Senator Edward Kennedy absurdity is near the end of a tediously long speech, given in New York city on 12 AUG 1980 with respect to a progressive income tax:

The vast majority of Americans cannot afford this panacea from a Republican nominee who has denounced the progressive income tax as the invention of Karl Marx. I am afraid he has confused Karl Marx with Theodore Roosevelt--that obscure Republican president who sought and fought for a tax system based on ability to pay. Theodore Roosevelt was not Karl Marx, and the Republican tax scheme is not tax reform.

First, he scolds Ronald Reagan (the Republican nominee) for missing a possible Adam Smith answer from 1776, which really does not address progressive income taxation at all, but revenue taxation:

The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Progressive taxation was first recorded on paper during the French Revolution in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789:

A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.^[16]

However, The Gipper was substantially correct, in the works of Marx and Engles, The Communist Manifesto of 1848, progressive taxation comes up right after abolishing private ownership of land:

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 

In Senator Kennedy's zeal to misdirect his audience from Marx and to try to make candidate Reagan look foolish, he directed everybody to . . . Theodore Roosevelt.  Trust Buster and Progressive "Bull Moose" Party founder Teddy Roosevelt.  Yes, he was a Republican for a little while, but they were just not progressive enough for him.  He was at war with anybody who was too successful, just like his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt was when he began his National Socialist reign.  Senator Kennedy's remarks become even more comical when you read his brother John F. Kennedy's remarks in Madison Square Garden almost 20 years earlier, on 21 OCT 1960:

This issue which divides Mr. Nixon and myself, which divides the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, has divided us through many years of our history. It divided the country in l932, and the American people choose progress. It divided the country in 1912, and the American people chose the New Freedom and Woodrow Wilson.

(Emphasis mine)

The 1932 reference is to FDR, who prolonged a depression into the Great Depression.  New Freedom must be newspeak for the totalitarian regime that Wilson enacted in America.  Since JFK's speech was given to an audience of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, newspeak is a safe bet.

Full disclosure, I got the idea from this William F. Buckley, Jr. lecture.

Update:  Tracking down the Reagan quote in the Ted Kennedy speech proved difficult. For one thing, I made the stupid assumption that Kennedy's speech writer was referencing something from in or around the 1980 campaign.  Not even close.  I found an old James J. Kilpatrick article that reveals Kennedy was attacking Reagan for a then sixteen year old statement.
It would be great to find the 1964 version of the Reagan speech that Kilpatrick wrote about, but even with our advanced research tools the closest references I could find are these and no transcript or video -

1961: Dec. 11 "The Danger of Losing Our Freedom by Installments," Annwl Dinner of the Huntington Memorial Hospital's Medical Staff, Huntington Sheraton Hotel, Pasadena, Calif.

1962: Feb. 21 "Losing Freedom By Installments," Uvalde Chamber of Commerce Banquet, Southwest Texas Junior College, Uvalde, Texas. 

Kilpatrick also notes some of what I noticed in his critique of the Kennedy speech.

Socialists/Leftists Are The Most Bigoted People Anywhere

Before you start rattling off a list that begins with Ku Klux Klan (KKK), you might want to look at their origins and then thank me for the link, agree that they were Leftist, Statist, bigoted busybodies who wanted to restrict individual liberty through legislation and terror.

Now, for the freshest Leftist bigotry in America, we need only look at the MSNBC video of one young Mr. Touré exposing his own bigotry toward race-mixing (video and story at the link, video also embed below).  As quoted by RCP:

Martin Bashir, host: "Toure, you were just nodding your head agreeing with Karen? What, on the ethnicity of the accuser?"

Toure: "Yes, absolutely. Charles Blow was talking about this the other day. What sort of comb, he says, does these women use? We're going to see how open the GOP is to this black -- their 'new black friend' when they find out he is harassing blonde women as opposed to black women. That sort of thing of black sexuality -- predatory black sexuality. Very frightening in this country, still. Very threatening. So we'll see how that plays out. "

The Charles Blow comment in question is eluding me for some reason after searching  Google, You Tube, and other search facilities.

Apparently Mr. Touré does not get out much.  If he did, he would see every variety of racial mixing in American society without a bit of Conservative harassment to be found.  That is, unless you categorize the New Black Panther Party and King Samir Shabazz as some, as yet unknown, flavor of Conservative:

Sadly, the video above is now missing the clip embeded below and the good King Shabazz does not appear when searched on their site.  He shouts from a bull horn that he wants to kill all white people and screams at Black men "sliding through South street with filthy White cracker whores".  National Geographic terms this as King Shabazz preaching separatism "only to his people."


Point being, nothing has changed with the Progressives/Socialists/Leftists of the 1860s.

No Socialist Watches His Own Video Clips

It is impossible to surf the Leftist dominated 'net without finding some hilarious post from a Leftist/Communist/Socialist.  One can avoid porn easier than one can avoid clueless Leftists who do not even read or watch what they comment on.  This exhibit is much more blatant than my observations about Leftists and PBS.

Behold the caption by dwendt66 for the following video of Jerry Rubin hawking a book:
A McCarthyite suggests to Jerry Rubin on a 1970 Donahue episode if his new book "Do It" advocates a Communist take over of the USA.
Now, here is the video:

That 'McCarthyite' was quoting from Jerry Rubin's book, DO iT! and at 0:44 Rubin responded: "I call it a Communist takeover of all private property."  Rubin continues on about his advocacy for Communism and expresses his belief that the peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa have the right to "take over American land."

For those who do not know how Jerry Rubin met his demise, he died jaywalking on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.  The glowing New York Times "week in review" story glosses over the circumstances that the Seattle Times revealed three paragraph-sentences into their story on 29 NOV 1994:

Rubin had been at the University of California-Los Angeles Medical Center since Nov. 14 (1994), when he was hit by a car while jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard near his Brentwood home.

Note that the Brentwood area of  Los Angeles was and still is a pretty expensive neighborhood.  The Wikipedia entry reveals: It was a weekday evening and traffic was heavy, with three lanes in each direction. A car swerved to miss Rubin but a second car, immediately behind the first, was unable to avoid him.

The reader can digest all that themselves without further comment from me.