79-09-B6

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Joan Baez II

Transcript On the last commentary I spoke of a singer, and one-time anti-war activist Joan Baez and how she has come to realize that communist North Vietnam is guilty of the utmost in inhumane treatment of the South Vietnamese people. She published an open letter in which she said the facts, "form a grim mosaic" of torture and terror. "People disappear and never return; people are shipped to re-education centers, fed a starvation diet of stale rice, forced to squat bound wrist to ankle, suffocated in boxes; People are used as human mine detectors, cleaning live mine fields with their hands and feet. For many life is hell and death is prayed for." Joan has asked help in her present mission of mercy from these who were once allied with her in the anti-war movement. Her two letters to Jane Fonda have gone unanswered. Nothing has made it more clear that some of the one time anti-war leaders were less sincere than Miss Baez; that indeed they perhaps had a cause that went beyond peace, than the response to her open letter by William Kunstler, well known lawyer and activist in New Left causes. Kunstler calls her open letter, "a cruel and wanton act." Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, men, women, and children put to sea in boats to escape the cruelty of their communist tormentors even though they know the odds are 50/50 they'll die. Mr. Kunstler excuses this by saying, "the sudden release of long pent-up emotions can easily result in regrettable instances of the denial or subversion of fundamental rights and liberties." And then he says these "violations of human rights are not relevant to this discussion." What discussion does Mr. Kunstler refer to? Well he says that excoriating Vietnam for this slaughter of the innocents serves "to divide the left over an absolutist mythology at precisely the moment when the near tragedy at Three Mile Island seems to be pulling it together." In other words the new left party line is now "anti-nuclear power" and like the Vietnam war it can be used to deceive sincere people into helping the new left influence, American policy once again. Let me remind you there is no anti-nuclear movement behind the Iron Curtain where any number of nuclear power plants are being constructed. When Joan Baez called Danniel Ellsburg and asked him to sign her human rights letter, he gave her a pitch about her "future in the anti-nuclear movement." These people who reveal that the anti- war movement was only a means to an end now have another means to an end -- anti-nuclear power. Is it too much to ask what the end really is? Or is that pretty evident without asking? This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 79-09-B6 Production Date 06/29/1979 Book/Page RPtV-458 Audio Youtube? No
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