The Communist by Kengor Paul

Author:Kengor, Paul [Kengor, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Mercury Ink
Published: 2012-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

WE WANT WAR!

From 1951 to 1957, Frank fired away from the pages of the Honolulu Record. Once again, Harry Truman was a target, remaining in the White House until the arrival of Republican President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower in January 1953.

In January 1951, Frank wrote a piece railing against Truman’s State of the Union Address. By this point, Truman was the Truman of history. Six years into his unexpected presidency, the former farmer and haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, had gotten some rude life lessons from Joe Stalin. Truman had initially hoped Stalin might seek peace, but he quickly learned that Stalin and the men in the Kremlin were political gangsters. In his State of the Union Address, Truman said he was willing to consider negotiating “honorable settlements” with Russia but that America “will not engage in appeasement.”

Congress roared with approval. Frank roared with indignation. He was convinced Uncle Joe wanted peace, and Truman wanted war. Frank reported: “Our nation, which through its official spokesmen in Washington, repeatedly says it wants peace, is busy girding for full war mobilization, according to President Truman in his State of the Union message to Congress Monday.”3

This “according to” was how Frank began his column. He was most concerned that the United States might resist North Korea’s regime. As Frank and his comrades argued, this was a regime that aspired to create one giant Korean “democratic republic”—allied with Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. America, Frank insisted, parroting the line of the Soviets—not to mention the Chinese, the North Koreans, CPUSA, and communists everywhere—should stay out of Korea. Korea should be allowed to emerge according to its own Russia-friendly specifications, not America’s specifications. “One concludes that the Washington idea of an ‘honorable settlement’ in Korea would be the complete crushing of the North Koreans and the emergence of a Korean republic shaped to our specifications,” wrote an angry Frank. “Conversely, you get the idea that if a united Korea friendly to Russia is allowed to appear, that is ‘appeasement’ and we will not accept it.”

In his next sentence, Frank applied this thinking to Vietnam: “That seems to be the pattern elsewhere in the world. If the French can crush the people of Viet-Nam and restore their colonial grip on these Asians through a puppet ruler, that apparently is an ‘honorable settlement.’ ”

Again, by this same narrative, the Western nations (America included) should not be meddling in Vietnam’s internal affairs. As for Soviet or Chinese involvement, Frank and communists everywhere failed to portray that as meddling of any kind.

Frank’s agitation on this issue is significant, especially given the historical big picture. Consider:

Americans do not appreciate that Vietnam began unraveling long before the 1960s. Soviet agitation started in the 1920s under a Comintern operative named Mikhail Borodin. Known as “Stalin’s Man in China,” Borodin sized up Vietnam. There, Borodin would seek his masters’ ambitions with help from some friends, including an international agent known as Lee Suei.4 “Lee” was the future Ho Chi Minh, godfather of Vietnamese communism. Through

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.