I Was There Đào Hiếu Thảo

As a journalist and a victim of communism, I have collected stories from many authors enumerating the crimes that the communist committed.  These authors have put in words what they themselves experienced, as well as what humankind elsewhere in this world were put through, that includes my “beloved country” Vietnam.

The most Venerable Dat Lai La Ma has said:

• “Communism was born from poverty and ignorance, developed by lies, falsities and violence, will die in the damnation and disdainfulness of humanity.”

The late president of the Republic of Vietnam (The free Vietnam prior to 1975) said :  Do not listen to what the communists say but look closely at what they’ve done.

Before I present to you what happened to the free South Vietnam, let’s talk about the atrocious acts of the Russian & Chinese communists, which patterns the North Vietnamese communists follow to the ‘T’. Viet Cong General Secretary Le Duan (1907-1986) declared:  We fought the US for the USSR, Red China and for our brethren Socialist/Communist countries.

 It’s unfathomable to fully describe the crimes they have committed for over 100 years, from Russia to China and throughout the whole world, even with movies, books, reports and speeches.

In 1997, six French historians published an 846-page book titled “Le Livre Noir Du Communisme” (the Black Book of Communism) which described in detail the 80-year period from 1917 to 1997.  From the time the Russian Communist took power under the symbol of the “hammer & scythe”, there were over 100 million innocent human lives wasted.

I believe that many of you have seen the film “Doctor Zhivago” that came out in 1965 based on the book of the famous writer Boris Pasternak, a literature Nobel prize winner in 1958, circulation of which was banned in Russia.

Meanwhile, in Red China, according to Historian Frank Dikotter  under Mao Tse Tung’s rule, over 45 million people were killed between 1958 -1962 during the “Great Leap forward”, Mao’s most ferocious policy was to assemble people from all over China into gigantic communes, creating a utopian paradise, in which all possessions or assets belong to the Commune.  Mao forced people to hard labor in building dams at the expense of agricultural land, resulting in public famine; those who resisted this policy would suffer torture or death by public execution –  such as being buried alive, hanged, choked to death or dissected piece by piece.  Case in point, when a starved youth stole a handful of grain from Ho Nam Village, “Red Army/Chinese Gestapos” forced his father to bury him alive.  Out of grief and remorse the father committed suicide a few days later.

Black April 1975 (April 30th, 1975) marked the invasion of South Vietnam and the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who served under the Republic of (South) Vietnam.  Millions of South Vietnamese citizens risked their lives to escape from this barbaric regime by sea, knowing that 9 out of 10 might never reach the free world.  I believe that “the crimes of the Communists can never be washed clean with water from all oceans and all the leaves in the world would not be enough to contain the writings of their atrocities” and  “evil treatments of their compatriots”.  There is a popular saying that:  “even lamp posts would escape from the Ha Noi barbaric regime if they could walk”

But the biggest exodus of the Vietnamese people happened in 1954, when over a million north Vietnamese, seeking freedom, ran away from the inhuman northern regime and left everything behind but the shirt on their back, to find refuge in  South Vietnam.  The ship that carried them southward had multiple banners with the message “Passage to Freedom” hung all over its deck.

In North Vietnam, under Ho Chi Minh’s reign, citizens were forced to worship Russian and Chinese leaders by hanging their pictures in private homes and were prohibited from criticizing the communist ideology. Whoever opposed the communist policies in any way would be labelled as enemies of the nation, as foreign spies, as abusers of democracy, as violating national security with the penalty of 15 to 20 years imprisonment.  Communist ideology contradicts Asian traditional spiritual belief and the idealistic nationalism of the Vietnamese people.

Unlike the North, the South Vietnamese people were never forced to do such things.

My dear compatriots,

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Tet Mau Than (1968 Tet Offensive, year of the Monkey);  recently there are numerous writings about the barbaric killings of the communists with the expression “human blood is still fresh in the city of Hue as of today,” where 6,000 innocent citizens were murdered with metal picks, shovels, scythes and were decapitated with machetes, were bounded with barbed wires and buried alive in mass graves during the 28 days that the northern Viet Cong attacked the central part of Vietnam.   Most of the victims killed were priests, monks, women, teachers, students, civil workers, and military personnel.

Surviving family members of these victims could only identify the deaths by their clothing, photos, identification cards, jewelry, or shoes while digging up those mass graves.

All in all 40% of houses and properties in Hue were totally destroyed.  Over 627,000 people who lost their homes, rice fields, etc. ran toward safer South Vietnamese-controlled zones.

According to the statistics of the Republic of South Vietnam 120,000 people had been killed or had vanished without a trace during this killing spree.

Author Matthew White stated that the Hue massacre was among the 100 highest in the number of lives lost.

This is indeed the ‘‘bloody stain” in Vietnamese history caused by Ho Chi Minh and his gang.  They violated the cease-fire during the first three days of the traditional Lunar New Year.  Their massive invasion and barbaric killing on New Year eve 50 years ago were the crime of genocide, instilling horror and deep emotional wounds that are still oozing up to this day, generating perpetual hatred that the South Vietnamese and Hue’s dwellers would never forget.

For the past 50 years, instead of showing remorse or apologizing to descendants of their victims, the Ha Noi regime celebrates the Mau Than victory with fanfares on the occasion of Tet.  How in the world could they rejoice upon the act of viciously taking the lives of their own countrymen!! They will be cursed perpetually!

Those North Vietnamese communists killed their own teenagers by sending them to fight in the South with the false belief they would be liberating the South from an imagined foreign domination

Here is a short list of atrocities and crimes committed by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party:

1949-1956: Five waves of agrarian reforms: 500,000 victims.
1954: Almost 1 million people left everything for freedom in the South.
1958: Obeying Ho Chi Minh’s decision, Pham Van Dong sent a letter officially approving the claims China made to the sea area in the East, including the Paracel and Spratley islands.
1968: Tet Offensive, more than 14,000 civilians killed, and more than 2,000 among them buried alive.
1974: Acting in collusion with the Government of Hanoi, China invades the Paracel archipelago belonging to the Republic of Vietnam.
1975:
– Invasion of South Vietnam two years after signing the Peace Treaty of Paris.
– Concentration Camps:  Half a million soldiers held prisoner, thousands and thousands died while there.
1975-1985: More than 1.7 million Vietnamese escaped out of their country (about 400,000 – 500,000 boat people died in the sea, maybe more)
1979: War between two communist regimes (Vietnam and China), in which perhaps 100,000 lost their lives.
1999-2000: Treaties, signed secretly, yielding national territories to China (the frontier regions in the North, the quasi-totality of the sea in the East including the Paracel and Spratley archipelagos. Since then, not a treaty revealed, not a map published…
Leading to the actual situation in communist Vietnam today:
– Loss of quasi-totality of the sea region in the East and one part of the frontier region.
– The majority of the people live in poverty despite 42 years of absolute peace.
– Vietnamese fishermen are openly maltreated, avowedly terrorized, and even killed by Chinese forces in the traditional fishing regions.  Vietnam has kept quiet, showing no reaction.
– Brutal repression of political dissidents and also religious believers not belonging to state-controlled religious organizations.
– In its 2017 classification in regard to liberty of expression, Reporters Without Borders ranked Vietnam 175th among 190 nations in the world.
– Human trafficking in children and women for sexual slavery.
– Sending cheap labor all over the world (in reality, selling slaves).
– “Leasing” entire strategic zones of the fatherland to China (our thousand-year perennial enemies) for the mining of bauxite (very polluting), with its own workers from the mainland.
– The cadres in the Communist Party have become multi-millionaires in US dollar terms.
– Vietnam is still among the poorest countries in the world, always begging for international aid, even in 2018.

China schemes to assimilate all Asian countries in all cultural and educational aspects.  In Vietnam, this work was carried on by Bui Hien, a high-level Vietnamese communist cadre.  He invented a new Vietnamese alphabet to eliminate the current Vietnamese language, in favor of Chinese sounding words thus transforming our language into Chinese.

Just recently, luc luong 47 (task force #47) with 10,000 or so workers, was established to prevent and to crush all opposing views,  comments, and remarks on the Internet.

On December 4, 2017, on the occasion of the reception for the Honorable Daniel Kritenbrink, the new US Ambassador to Vietnam, I had the opportunity to present to him a number of concerns of the Vietnamese Community in view of the crimes committed by the Ha Noi Regime.  Below are the main talking points:

Freedom of Religion – While this is being touted in their propaganda as a freedom, in fact freedom to worship is forbidden in the remote areas and when put into practice must be masked.

Freedom of Speech – This is often condemned as an attempt to:
– Disturb the peace and commit a crime prejudicial to National Security
– Engage in espionage/spy for Foreign Governments
– Conspiracy to overthrow the Government

When charged with violations of these “crimes” the verdicts are always harsh, even for women, who are with very young children and only struggle peacefully for democracy, freedom and human rights.

There have been more than 250 individuals who incomprehensibly died while in police captivity.  These dead bodies have come home, some with their throats slit and others with evidence of barbaric torture.  When questioned regarding the deaths, the Vietnamese authorities claimed that they committed suicide while incarcerated at the police station.

One of these days, when communism collapses, how much time, how much paper and ink would it take to expose all the atrocities, the cruelty, and the crimes that Marxist dictatorships have committed against humankind?

Please remember the sacrifice of the 100 million people who perished in concentration camps or were otherwise mercilessly killed under communist regimes worldwide..