On Sunday, leftist Michael Moore, who, in classic leftist tradition, has railed against the Vietnam War for years, decided to celebrate the loss of the Vietnam War in order to decry the very idea of America fighting against evil abroad.
That prompted a blistering reply from Daily Wire editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro::
Moore has used the Vietnam War as his impetus for railing against America’s involvement overseas for years; in his book Here Comes Trouble, he told a story about his heroic relinquishing of a date with the future prom queen in eighth grade and subsequent date of the least attractive girl in his class at the behest of a black teacher in his Catholic school that he also had the hots for. Praised by the teacher, he was supposedly devastated when she disappeared from the school, the very week coinciding with the Tet Offensive, giving Moore the chance to reminisce:
The Tet Offensive of 1968 sent a shock wave through the American public because, opposite of everything we had been told about the United States soon “winning” the war – “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel!” – in fact, Tet showed just how powerful the other side was and how badly we were losing. The Viet Cong were all over Saigon, even at the door of the U.S. embassy. We were nowhere near to winning anything.
Moore wrote that the students later discovered the teacher’s husband had been killed in Vietnam and she had had a breakdown.
In May 2014, he wrote an open letter to former President Barack Obama telling him he should not increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, in which he wrote: “We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).”
A few notes.
First: the Tet offensive was a military failure for North Vietnam, but the leftist media in the United States seized upon it to paint a picture of America in retreat, thus paving the way for ultimate withdrawal from Vienam.
Second: Following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, communist despot Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S. backed government in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime, during their five years in power, killed somewhere between 1 and 2 million people in their country. An official of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights called the atrocities “the most serious that had occurred in the world since Nazism” and “nothing less than autogenocide.”
Third: The Vietnamese boat people largely fled Vietnam starting in 1975 after the communist North Vietnamese took control of the country. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees stated that between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea.
For Moore to celebrate the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam is a monstrous insult to the dead who were killed after we left.