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How a Murdoch reporter swallowed communist Vietnamese anti-American agitprop
Gerard Jackson
Some readers think I have been unfair to David Nason, The Australian’s Washington Correspondent, for accusing him of being a leftwing bigot. What these naïve souls do not understand is that Nason’s mendacious reporting from the US is not, I regret to say, an aberration but part of a pattern of ideologically motivated deceit.
Recalling Nason’s goddamn awful review of Women at War (The Australian’s Thursday Media liftout, 7 March 2002) made me realise how bad he really is. This documentary was made in 1998-99 by David Elfick and shown on SBS, aka the Socialist Broadcasting Service, on 8 March 2002. It is, I believe, gloomily acknowledged that one can predict the conclusions of a political documentary by merely taking note of those who made it. In this case the perpetrator was David Elfick who was also executive producer of the Rabbit Proof Fence, a piece of notorious fiction that was passed off by the left as historical fact to prop up the stolen generation lie*
Women at War was just a nasty piece of agitprop in support of the vicious bunch of totalitarian gangsters that tyrannise Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Nason gave it a deeply sympathetic review, relating the story of Tuong Vi, who, so this phoney documentary claimed, was a North Vietnamese female soldier during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and how she would emerge from her shelter after a bombing raid on Hanoi, stand at the edge of a crater and start singing; others would also then emerge and start singing and laughing and dancing with her. (I bet you thought this kind of crap went out with Stalin’s death).
Naturally, the deeply sceptical and insightful leftwing Nason swallowed this agitprop wholesale. (However, when it comes to Bush’s America, our Mr Nason has his co-called critical faculties in neutral). Now let’s begin with the so-called Hanoi raids that so shocked Mr Nason. The Americans blasted the Haiphong-Hanoi area. The city was never targeted and only military installations were bombed. If Nason did his homework, which he never does, he would have known that the humane communist regime deliberately located military facilities in residential areas.
For instance, the regime built a SAM assembly plant in heavily populated southeast Hanoi. Fortunately low-flying F-4 Phantoms were able to directly take out the plant without bombing civilians. Other military facilities were destroyed by fighter-bombers using the newly developed smart bombs. By the end of 1972 it was all over
The regime, as expected, greatly inflated the number of civilian casualties and accused the Americans of using mass bombing against Hanoi. However, the New York Times’ Malcolm Brown reported directly from Hanoi that “The damage caused by American bombing was grossly overstated by North Vietnamese propaganda.” On a visit to Vietnam the historian Stanley Karnow also wrote:
I expected to observe ruins everywhere. But Hanoi and Haiphong are almost completely unscathed and the surrounding countryside to have been barely touched.
Nevertheless, the New York Times insisted on parroting communist propaganda. On 21 December it shamelessly published a report by Tass, a KGB controlled Soviet ‘news’ agency, claiming civilian casualties were high and that thousands of homes had been destroyed. The regime later admitted that 260 civilians were killed. And none of these would have died if the regime had not deliberately placed them in danger.
(I very much doubt that the Hanoi regime’s use of its own citizens as human shields would have troubled our Mr Nason. Supporters of “progressive regimes” are notoriously tolerant of the vile way they treat their citizens).
So much for the bombing of Hanoi. Now for superwoman Tuong Vi. Does anyone with more than two brain cells really believe that after a bombing raid people came out of their shelters singing and then held a barn dance? (Perhaps Mr Nason’s brain cells are divorced).
B-52 bombs made 12-metre deep craters, that’s a 42 foot hole, Mr Nason. (The Viet Cong’s tunnels were only about 5 metres deep). And the damage doesn’t stop there: the repercussions from these blasts can have a dreadful effect on the human body. After one fierce bombing run an NVA soldier surrendered to US Marines. He was described by Captain William Dabney as
...an impressive man, almost six feet tall, healthy looking and of imposing physique. Suddenly a low-flying jet came over and the effect on the prisoner was staggering. He literally lost control of himself — his muscles, his eyes, even his bowels —and fell in a quivering heap to the bottom of the trench.
Weeks of relentless bombing had destroyed him psychologically. (The Vietnam campaign is lucidly described in Unheralded Victory by Mark. W. Woodruff, Harper Collins Publishers and available in Australian bookshops).
Although my mother survived the blitz it still left some psychological scars. Every time she heard thunder she immediately thought of air raids . But according to Mr Nason air raids were a reason to party in North Vietnam.
(OK, OK, he didn’t make the film but he still swallowed its agitprop message just as he swallowed the phoney baloney stolen generation story, and that makes him, what Americans colourfully call, a jerk).
Elfick and Tina Diaz, a producer with the Nine network’s intellectually stimulating Getaway program, knew nothing of superwoman Tuong Vi until they had “a priceless stroke of luck” when they met Truc. And who is he, you may ask? He’s from this tyrannical regime’s Ministry of Culture and Information. (They don’t come more Orwellian than that).
Who is so stupid as to think this was luck? Are these two lefty apologists for a murderous bunch of political gangsters so dense as to believe that meeting this totalitarian mouthpiece was an accident? Well, why not?
This pair remind me of Malcolm Muggeridge’s stories about starry-eyed Western intellectuals in Stalin’s Moscow eagerly absorbing even the most outrageous propaganda. The more things change the more...
Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims is a must for those who want learn something about how intellectuals enthusiastically soak up lies from Marxist regimes while wilfully shutting their eyes to the evil around them. His mammoth Anti-Americanism is also highly illuminating. A more recent example of the left’s nauseating mindset is Commies by Ronald Radosh.
What I’m really looking forward to is Nason’s review of Elfick and Diaz’s next filmic venture. Now what might that be? How about Fun in Vietnam’s Gulag? We could have Viva Vietnam’s Gulag or Romance in an Asian Gulag. I’ve got it! How about Love in a tropical Gulag. I’m sure it would beat anything that came out of Siberia.
(Of course, what we really want is for some journalist to tell the truth about that murderous regime and its disgusting Australian apologists. But this is something the likes of Nason will never do).
Unfortunately Nason was not the only journalist bigoted enough to fall for Elfick’s agitprop. Nicole Brady wrote an embarrassing review (The Age Green Guide 7 March 2002) in which she claimed that “inspired by their great leader [and mass murderer] Ho Chi Minh’s statement that without the liberation of women Vietnam could never be liberated….” That a journalist from the Castro-loving Age should consider communist enslavement as “liberation” didn’t surprise me one bit.
Missing from both ‘reviews’ and the documentary was any mention of the systematic murder of thousands of Hue residents by the communists. Perhaps this is where Tuong Vi really got her combat experience, torturing civilians by burying them alive? This is one massacre that Hanoi and its Australian toadies will never film or write about, isn’t that right, Mr Nason? As for the likes Tuong Vi taking on US Marines, don’t make laugh.
Militarily the Hue operation was a disaster for the North. More than 5,000 of its troops were killed, masses of them wounded and the rest routed while the psychopathic Viet Cong were virtually wiped out. The US lost 216 men and the South 384, a total of 600. It was lying leftwing journalists who hailed the operation as a military victory for the communists, And now their sons and daughters are pulling the same stroke. And people ask me why I have only contempt for the media.
Little Miss Brady went on to assert that these ‘women soldiers’ showed no regrets because they were “fighting for their freedom”. As in Orwell’s 1984, no doubt, where “Freedom is Slavery” was one of the state’s three main slogans. Brady’s review reveals, in my opinion, an absence of common sense as well any real knowledge of the Vietnam War. Perhaps this is because she also lacks intelligence. I think Brady is the kind of journalist that Malcolm Muggeridge came to despise — and no wonder.
Reading what journalists are prepared to say in defence of an indefensible regime reminds me of what Muggeridge said of the despicable Walter Duranty (the New York Times notorious Moscow correspondent in the 1930s): “There was something … preposterous about his unscrupulousness, which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing.”
*Andrew Bolt, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald-Sun, exposed the Rabbit Proof Fence film as a fraud. Incidentally, the Herald-Sun is a Murdoch paper. Occasionally, Rupert does get it right in Australia — but only occasionally.
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Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 6 February 2006