This was followed with a vindictive attack on Prime Minister Howard and Dick Cheney over the Iraq War. Getting into full stride this lying leftwing hack falsely stated that “‘Scooter’; Libby, stands trial for attempting to smother criticism of the war”. This is an outrageous and premeditated lie. Libby was accused of perjury, nothing more. But the truth is that he was ‘gunned down’ for having defended the Bush administration from malicious attacks by the Democrats and their media storm troopers, of which Price is clearly one. Having smeared Libby he then parroted the leftist mantra that the war is a “disaster”. For someone like Matt Price any wars fought by conservative administrations to check tyranny are always disasters.

In the opinion of this brilliant military historian the “Iraq misadventure — not so much quagmire as catastrophe — in, of all places, Vietnam” (Misplaced loyalty to a diminished leader, 18 November 2006). One would have to be a political bigot, a complete ignoramus or both to write this tripe. Irrespective of assertions to the contrary the US military and South Vietnamese forces virtually wiped out the Viet Cong during the Tet offensive. But media liars like Price reported the crushing defeat of North Vietnam’s guerrillas as a military disaster for the US.

And now these creeps are trying to do the same for the Iraqi people. For scum like Matt Price the truth does not matter anymore than the lives of Iraqis or Vietnamese peasants. What matters is their loathing for America and their contempt for conservatives. This is why they use their Vietnam template to describe the Iraq War. Let me ask this question of those who think I am being too judgemental in calling Price scum: Why did he not condemn the Hanoi regime for committing mass murder and implementing a systematic policy of committing atrocities against South Vietnam?

What about Mai Lai, a Vietnamese village whose inhabitants where massacres on the orders by Lieutenant Calley 16 March 1968? What the left leave out is that what differentiated the US military from Hanoi and its Southern stooges is that the Mai Lai massacre was an isolated act that appalled the US military. Even the Nixon-hating Daniel Ellsberg was clear on this point:

My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognized by virtually every soldier in Vietnam. . . . They know it was wrong. . . . The men who were at My Lai know there were aspects out of the ordinary. That is why they tried to hide the event, talked about it to no one, discussed it very little even among themselves.

But this is not what leftwing journalists want hear. And that’s why they deliberately ignore all references to the North’s policy of terrorism by massacre. For instance, there was the Tay Loc atrocity where Viet Cong thugs set about massacring scores men, women and children in a sickening act of calculated butchery. Then there was the case of a bus carrying 22 peasants that stopped by the Viet Cong. These freedom fighters systematically murdered every single passenger. There were hundreds of massacres like these that our leftist journalists refused to report. For those who doubt me read the following mea culpa that Uwe Siemon-Netto made to the English magazine Encounter 1979:

Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there. Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Vietnam. [As Nguyen Manh Tuong stated at the 1956 National Congress in Hanoi: “It is better to kill 10 innocent people then let one enemy escape”.] We knew that after the division of the country nearly 1 million North Vietnamese had fled to the South.

Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw [take note, Mr Matt Price] the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Why, for Heavens sake, did we not report these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the Mai Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre? Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was — and still is — one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi? What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese?

What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, “so much for the talk of a massacre?” True, no Cambodian-style massacre took place in Vietnam. It's just that Hanoi coolly drives its ethnic Chinese opponents into the sea. That's what Nasser threatened to do to the Israelis, no massacre intended, of course.

Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive? Did we not turn public opinion against them, portraying them, as one singularly ignoble cartoon did in the United States, as a bunch of pimps, whores, war profiteers, corrupt generals or, at best, outright reactionaries?

Considering that today’s Vietnam tragedy may have a lot to do with the way we reported yesterday’s Vietnam tragedy; considering that we journalists might have our fair share of guilt for the inhuman way the world treats those who are being expelled by an inhuman regime which some of us had pictured as heroic, I think at least a little humility would be in order for us old Viet Nam hands, Mr Lewis included. And if I did not strongly believe in everybody's right of free expression at any time, I would even admonish him to keep quiet about Indo-China, at least for a while.

Robert Elegant, who has also reported the Vietnam War, wrote in a similar vein for Encounter, August 1981, about the shabbiness and dishonesty of much of the ‘reporting’ from Vietnam. Yet the same thing is happening again with respect to the Iraq War. In 1997 Chi Thien Nguyen, a Vietnamese dissident described to The Australian — the paper for whom Price writes — the appalling conditions he endured during his 12 years in Hanoi’s Gulag, you know, the one that Price forgot to mention in his sympathetic comments about his Vietnam vacation. Nguyen called the suffering of the Vietnamese people an “outside prison” and called on the world’s democracies to pressure Hanoi to end its “cruelty and barbarity”, which still continues. But perhaps Mr Price thinks Nguyen is a liar.

After the North over-ran the South in 1975 — thanks to the Democrats cutting off funding — it imprisoned 40,000 South Vietnamese in Hoa prison, just outside of Saigon, even though it was only built to house a couple of thousand inmates. It was estimated that about 80,000 South Vietnamese were quickly murdered while thousands more were shipped to labour camps. The death toll from the regime’s Gulag has yet to be estimated but clearly runs into hundreds of thousands. Let us not forget the Boat People of which as many as 250,000 may have died at sea.

Despite Matt Price’s grovelling apologia for the Hanoi regime is as vicious as ever. The labour camps still operate as does the secret police and the persecution of Christians continues. It’s interesting that none of the above seems to bother the progressive and so humane Mr Price.

Price likes to pretend constant attacks on the Iraq War, and President Bush in particular, by his fellow political bigots in the world media do not amount to aid for terrorism. But they do, just as they did in the Vietnam War. As the former NVA Colonel Bui Tin admitted:

Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us. How North Vietnam Won The War: Bui Tin Interviewed by Stephen Young

Like the rest of his comrades who make up the media, Matt Price lacks the moral courage to defend what he writes. To try and do so would put him in an invidious position from which only a recantation could guarantee his escape. But why can’t the The Australian’s editor, Paul Whittaker, muster the guts to tell Price that from now on he must stick to honest journalism?

How a Murdoch reporter swallowed communist Vietnamese anti-American agitprop

The 1968 Chicago riots and My Lai

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor