75-08-B2
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Vietnam
TranscriptThe lights are going out in Southeast Asia and soon a great silence will settle over the land. It won't just be the silence that follows when the fighting stops. I'll be right back. A debate has already begun whether the Communist forces in Vietnam will eliminate great numbers of people in the lands they've captured. Those who've been most vocal against helping the South Vietnamese in their fight to remain free pooh-pooh the idea and call it scare talk. Some of them I'm sure are aware they won't have to eat their words. With a surrender will come a lowering of a curtain around the entire area. We'll hear only what the conquerors want us to hear. There will of course be escapees or correspondents who will wait until they're safely out before telling us of atrocities they witnessed. But like with the great slaughter in Red China there will be a reluctance on the part of many to believe these stories. It's easier not to believe them and so the debate will never be resolved. The only losers will be the human beings who will be executed behind that curtain of silence. Sometimes it seems the Europeans are more realistic about these things. They're already getting the word. A diplomatic report to France puts the figure at 3,600 of those already put to death in one town alone in the central highlands taken by the communists a few weeks ago. Who were these executed and why? Well the usual types the conquerors will already have earmarked when they arrive. South Vietnam civil servants, former employees of American companies or of our military. Why should this surprise anyone? In the library of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University you can see the Gestapo book listing by name the ten thousand Englishmen who were to be executed when the Nazis invaded England in World War II. Dictators have a very practical idea, eliminate anyone who has the potential to be a leader and who therefore could make trouble and above all strike terror to the hearts of the rest. In Rome the Jesuit Society has been notified that the Vietnamese Catholic Bishop of Fa Lat has been executed. Why? Well he was a bishop, wasn't he? The refugees add to the mounting horror with stories of wholesale slaughter of local police and government officials. They report that captured soldiers are tied together in bundles and killed with a single grenade. The London Daily Telegraph carries similar dispatches and adds, quote, "A minimum figure of a million executions in the whole of South Vietnam if the communist take over does not seem far-fetched and it could be much higher." Unquote. Let's see a million in a country of 19 million to give you an idea of what that means. If it were our own country that would be the same as executing between 11 and 12 million Americans. The horror mounts in the dispatches to European capitals. To discourage the people from fleeing the communist advance, one report tells of Viet Cong driving Russian-built trucks at high speed over and through crowds of refugees. Others were shelled by artillery. One of Britain's leading experts on Vietnam, P.J. Honey, has written, quote, "No matter how the U.S. Congress may rationalize, no matter how communist apologists in the free world may argue, no matter what conciliatory promises Hanoi or liberation radio stations may broadcast, a communist victory in South Vietnam will result in killings on a vast scale." Unquote. Meanwhile we still have thirteen hundred men listed as missing in action over there. That was only one of the ceasefire terms violated by Hanoi. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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