Hawks on the Other Side : Vietnam Peace Movement 1963-1967.: Volume I of Comrades in Arms: How the Americong Won the Vietnam War against the Common Enemy-America

SOF’s Robert Brown Interview of Roger Canfield

Brown: Welcome Dr. Canfield. It’s about time we talked about your research on the Peace movment during the Vietnam War.  

Canfield: It is a pleasure I’ve been looking forward to it.

Brown: The surviving activists of the antiwar movement in various conferences and in Ken Burns’ “Vietnam” are demanding full disclosure of their alleged positive role during the Vietnam War. 

Canfield: Yes, they do, but as we both know, it’s pretty much a fraud, widely believed to be true. 

Brown:  Let me play Devil’s advocate here. I’ll give what they say and you respond. OK. We begin. Antiwar activists insist they just exercised their rights as American citizens. They marched, prayed, organized, educated, wrote and spoke. The appeared in the streets, meeting halls, and in Congress.Sounds nice.

Canfield: They did not grant such freedoms to others. They held teach-ins where opposing views were not welcomed, indeed, shouted down. Despite appearences the movement was not a grassroots movement of millions of volunteers, mostly restless youth. Leftist organizers ran the movement. By the way, in all polls youth were the strongest supporters of the war.

Brown:  Nasty as they were, the antiwar activists were very influential whether we like it or not. 

Canfield: Partially true. With the complicity of the media, the left dominated news of the war. They buffaloed the Congress into cutting aid to South Vietnam and preventing Nixon and Ford from helping south Vietnam when Hanoi violated the 1973 Peace Accords. The American people despised the “peace” movement. They wanted an American victory. 

Brown:  Over the top, they say they were one of the greatest generations in American history.

Canfield: The founding fathers, civil war, WWII. Civil rights. Give us a break. 

Brown: They really, really insist they were patriots.

Canfield: You do not love your country hoist Viet Cong flags and take money from communists and the other members of the hate America crowd. They did not love the evil country they wanted to overturn. The real patriots were the 90% of the hundreds of thousands of combat, repeat, combatveterans who were proud of their service and would do it over again.  

Brown:  They claim they protested at some cost to themselves. For engaging in civil disobedience, conscientiously objecting to the draft, and disturbing polite society, some faced imprisonment, exile and even death.

Canfield: The facts are otherwise. The protest leaders were often the sons of the rich and powerful who got educational exemptions from the draft, subsidies for a life of protest. Millions protested unmolested. None were successfully prosecuted out of the hundreds actively collaborating with the enemy in war. Thousands received amnesty for draft resistance, desertions and dishonorable service. Hundreds became tenured America hating professors. 58,000 Americans paid the ultimate cost, giving their lives for the freedom of protesters. The peace movement is complicit in aiding Hanoi’s ruthlessly sacrifice of 1.4 million of their soldiers’ souls. The protesters paid nothing in comparison to all others. 

Brown:  Wow, they go on to want to be recognozed as heroes.

Canfield: Perhaps as a vanguard of a different America. The 75% who volunteered to serve, bleed and die in the war were the heroes. They did not run and hide. They returned to be spit upon and called “baby killers.” They were the demeaned, unrecognized heroes. America trying to save Indochina from communism and America from progressivism remains the high moral ground of patriots and heroes.

Brown:  Peace and justice was their claim of nobility, e.g. girls poking flowers down the gun barrels of grimacing soldiers at the Pentagon in October 1967. 

Canfield: The peace movement was far more naughty than nice. A jury covicted riot organizers at 1968 Democrt Convention in Chicago who planned, a “blood must flow,” riot. The Weathermen were outright terrorist bombers. Hundreds lobbied without registering as foreign agents.  

Brown:  The movement brags about becoming a channel for communications between the POWs and their families.

Canfield: Hanoi, with the collaboration of Women Strike for Peace, created COLIFAM to exploit POWS and their families and to recruit them to the antiwar cause.  POW families cared for their loved one, dead and alive. COLIFAM calously and corruptly did not. 

Brown:  They say the USA was missing many opportunities for peace, delaying the happiness and prosperity of the peoples of Vietnam, the peace movement worked tirelessly to bring the USA to the negotiating table to find a political rather than a military solution to the war.

Canfield: America’s Presidents engaged in extensive efforts to negotiate in secret and in public. Hanoi was disinterested in peace talks. 

Brown:  Certainly their mobilizations of protesters fought long and hard to get bombing halts, and to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam—just what Hanaoi, Moscow and Beijing wanted. .

Canfield: True. Multiple bombing halts occurred as well as complex rules of engagement saving enemy lives at the expense of American troops and pilots.   LBJ sought multiple bombing halts and negotiations–all mistakes he later said. We now know, Hanoi tells us so, Hanoi was disinterested in negotiations and used bombing halts to repair and prepare for their next acts of terror and war, not peace.  

Brown:  The peaceniks still claim the  NationalLiberation Front, the Viet Cong, was an independent force for the liberation of South Vietnam. 

Canfield: Hanoi now admits that the NLF was a wholly owned subsidiary of Hanoi dutifully following Hanoi’s orders through COSVN, which the peace movement and the media still say did not exist. 

Brown:  They say America had no effective answer to “peoples’ warfare.”

Canfield: Phoenix, CORDS, rufpuff in the end did well in winning the hearts and minds of the people.. During 1972 “Easter Offensive” South Vietnamese forces, with U.S. air, naval and logistical support, soundly defeated the communists. CIA Director William Colby wrote, “on the ground in South Vietnam the war had been won.” But the Congress abandoned South Vietnamand stolen their victories. 

Brown:  The Vietnamese social revolution promised land to the tillers.

Canfield: Hanoi promised, South Vietnam delivered Land to Tillers. South Vietnam’s Land to the Tillers gave land to farmers and compensated the owners rather than confiscating private property. 

Brown:  The peace movement insists it exposed America’s massive war crimes against innocent women, children and peasants: My Lai, free fire zones, hospitals, schools and dams. The US inflicted horrific damage and loss of life.

Canfield: My Lai was a horrible exception unlike Hanoi’s terrorist policies. American war crimes were infrequent, investigated and prosecuted. Terrorism was Hanoi policy, approved from the top. The Peace movement became enthusiastic tools of communist war crimes propaganda against the USA.

Brown:  The virtue signaling peace movements says it continues to this day to care for the millions of victims of the war and those killed, wounded or deformed in its aftermath by land mines, unexploded ordnance, and Agent Orange.

Canfield: They won recognition of the Communist regime and millions in cash for the sacred bones of American dead. Credit for aid goes mostly to massive American taxpayer’s tribute paid for MIA recovery. The peace movement cared nothing about desperate refugees and the Boat People. It worked for forced repatriation of boat people. It viciously attacked those who spoke the truth like Joan Baez. It remains silent about millions who lost their freedom and lives. In the three years after “liberation,” more people died in the Cambodian “killing fields”, South Vietnamese “reeducation camps,” “new economic zones,” and as “boat people,” than had died in combat in the previous 14 years.  

Brown:  Today’s “progressives” say the progressive forces of the “peace” movement, by defeating US imperialism, developed a reassessment of America’s historical sins and set the stage for its future transformation into a nation dedicated to peace and social justice rather than capitalist greed.

Canfield: Yes, thank the “peace” movement for today’s hate America left.  Today millions of Americans run toward the lights and sounds of peace, social justice, progressivism, socialism and communism. If their visions transform America, they will surely be reported as history’s heroes. We have to fight that with the truth. We can begin with honest history.