With all due respect, I have to disagree with you on this one.: Imagine some middle-aged German fellow putting a Nazi flag and a picture of Hitler up in his store. Remember the flap caused by a college student displaying a Confederate flag in his window?
To my mind such a comparison is totally faulty. To my mind, the more appropriate comaprison would be if a group of Arab-Americans beat up a Jewish storeowner for displaying a poster of Chaim Weizmann or Ben-Gurion. Just like Weizmann, Ho Chi Minh is widely viewed today as a liberatory nationalist who won self-determination for the Vietnamese. Don't forget this was the man who pleaded with Woodrow Wilson for Asian self-determination in 1918, who had around 80% support across Vietnam, and who died with a picture of John Brown, the Northern anti-slavery hero, on his desk.
: For many Vietnamese, especially for the ones that ended up in the United States, the communists were nothing but butchers and thieves. Many of these people lost everything, and have lost family members as well. Much like expatriate Cubans, they are not happy about the present regime in their country.
I've no doubt many people see Ho Chi Minh as a thug. Many people see Winston Churchill the same way, many of my relatives among them, and probably with more justification. Many people today see francisco Franco as a hero. You'll find people who hold every different shade of political viewpoinbt. are we obliged to agree with all of them?
: It is interesting to note what is considered a 'hate crime' i
n one instance, a harmless expression of one's patriotism in another. All part of the game, I suppose.
Sir, here is the difference- and no, it sin't a game, it's deadly serious.
1) Can a movement whose declared and partially if imperfectly realized goal was universal brotherhood, equality and self-determination for an oppressed people be compared to a movement whose avowed goal was the wholesale extermination of certain groups of people and the enslavement of others.
2)Is being an anticommunist the price to pay for being an American.
3)If the answer to the second question is No, then how can the supprssion of communist views, howevre unpopular, be jsutified.
4) If the answer to teh first question is Yes, then what weight can possibly be given, in a realistic sense, to justice, freedom and equality? In other words, if excesses committed in the name of human brotherhood are judged equivalent to excesses committed in the name of heirarchy and oppression, then have we not devalued human brotehrhood itself?
In response to teh shameful treatment of Truong Van Tran I have written a letter to my hometwon newspaper, The Boston Globe.
