76-03-A3
- Main Page \ Reagan Radio Commentaries \ 1976
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Vietnam[edit]
Transcript[edit]A soft but ugly sound is beginning to filter through the bamboo curtain surrounding what once was free S. Vietnam. I’ll be right back. More than a year ago on one of these broadcasts I said a curtain of silence was fah falling over Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos as the conquering communists established their rule. At the same time I predicted that one day sound would filter through the curtain of silence. We would learn piece by piece the story of what had happened to people whose only sin was a yearning for freedom and human dignity. The time has come. When the wind blows in from the west across the Pacific one has the feeling that it carries the sound of soft moaning such as we once heard as the when an East wind blew across Dachau, Belsen and Auschwitz. Perhaps one day soon we’ll add other names to those symbols of horror, names easier to pronounce—NV16, LIT.6—the communists are very practical. North. Vietnamese call their camps “Trai Cai Tao” which means “re-education camps.” The South Vietnamese call them “Trai Tap Trung” which means concentration camp. Just as in that earlier time the horror story is beginning to come to us piece by piece from escapees, refugees whose loved ones have disappeared into the camps and now and then a European journalist. It’s still far from complete but somewhere between 200 and 300,000 South Vietnamese are being purified in the “re-education camps.” The picture is one of inhumanly hard labor, starvation rations, disease & little or no medical care. And of course there is stern discipline we can call torture for short. Our own returned P.O.W.’s. are familiar with what that torture might be. There is being kneeling on a hard surface until it becomes agony. Also being beaten while you are kneeling. Some are placed in metal boxes which we probably left behind. They are cargo containers we called conexes. The idea is that with the prisoner in the sealed metal box his captors beat on the metal sides with clubs until the din becomes for the man inside becomes excruciating. Former Army Capt. Ngo Dinh Ly escaped from this summer after undergoing this torture. He says it can drive a man insane. In the line of work there is clearing minefields in which many die, but then what’s a life if a mine is eliminated. A job reserved for soft city dwellers or people of some education is making fertilizer by mixing soil & human excrement with your bare hands. This can be fatal too because no soap is provided for washing and you must eat with your bare hands. Dysentery is widespread and often fatal. North Vietnam wants admission to the U.N. We vetoed their request.1 Now a North Vietnamese official says confidently the veto was due to our election. They’ll try again after Nov. 2nd. He’s confident they’ll be admitted then. I hope he’s wrong. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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