Kerry called America “criminal”

In 1971 John Kerry called America a “criminal” nation. According to the February 14, Baltimore Sun (registration required),

At a Wall Street rally of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War … Kerry referred to 1st Lt. William L. Calley Jr., who was convicted for his part in the 1968 My Lai massacre that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians.

“Guilty as Lieutenant Calley may have been of the actual act of murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal … the United States of America,” Kerry told a noontime crowd of about 100, according to a New York Times account.

Shortly before Kerry’s infamous Senate testimony that same year, where he accused the U.S. Armed Forces of Nazi-like atrocities in Vietnam, he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said that he himself had taken part in “atrocities” in that country:

“I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others,” he said, “in that I shot in free-fire zones, fired .50-caliber machine bullets, used harass-and-interdiction fire, joined in search-and-destroy missions and burned villages.”

Despite those words, Kerry and his fellow sailors have since said that while Vietnamese civilians were killed by the guns from their Swift boat, the deaths were never intentional and came about as they were returning enemy fire.

After Kerry testified before the committee, Sen. Mark O. Hatfield, an Oregon Republican, asked for an investigation into the alleged atrocities.

In his book, America in Vietnam, author Guenter Lewy noted a subsequent inquiry by the Naval Investigative Service that found that many of the veterans who spoke in Detroit refused to be interviewed even when offered immunity, and some who reported the most grisly atrocities were fake witnesses who had used the names of real veterans.

Now what do we call a person who automatically believes and publicly repeats, without regard for truth, the most horrendous indictments against a particular group? We call that person a bigot, do we not? If the object of his hatred is the Catholic Church, we call him an anti-Catholic bigot. If the object of his hatred is the Jews, we call him an anti-Semite or a Jew-hater. And if the object of his hatred is America, we call him an anti-American.

Kerry considered America an outlaw, criminal, Nazi-like nation in 1971 because of the war in Vietnam. And he considers America an outlaw nation today. Why? Because when key members of the UN Security Council stabbed the U.S. in the back and refused to enforce Resolution 1441, the U.S. was forced to proceed to war against Iraq without UN approval. Kerry has consistently ignored the Bush administration’s laborious, good-faith efforts to get the UN Security Council’s approval, just as he has ignored the back-stabbing by France, Germany, and Russia that made such approval impossible. (And, of course, he bald-facedly lies about his own vote for the war resolution which gave President Bush full discretion to make war on Iraq if in Bush’s judgment further diplomatic efforts would be of no avail.) He has repeatedly said that the first thing he would do as president would be to go to the UN and ask for the U.S. to be re-admitted to the “community of nations,” meaning that the U.S. is not at present a member of the “community of nations.” Thus, for Kerry, the fault in this affair was solely America’s. But for Kerry, the archetypal “San Francisco Democrat” of Jean Kirkpatrick’s 1984 speech, the fault must always be America’s. His numerous indictments of American foreign policy between 1971 and the present have the same flavor as the statements already quoted. His entire public career has been one long exercise in blaming America first. John Kerry is an anti-American who wants to be President of the United States of America.

Despite my saying the above, I do not veer one inch from my position that I want Bush to lose the election, first, because he deserves to lose, and second, because a Bush loss provides the only hope of bringing back a mainstream conservatism that will stand against the left. But let us not fool ourselves for one second about what a Kerry victory would mean.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 16, 2004 09:22 PM | Send