Wednesday, August 29, 2007
ORDER PRESERVED
Mark Steyn on varied perceptions of withdrawal from Vietnam:
To The New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had “few negative repercussions.” And it’s hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when its publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that’s almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation’s role in ending the war three decades later.
Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is apparently some sort of elite institution for which people pay many thousands of dollars to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as Professor Nye), told NPR last week: “After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order.” If by “preserved order,” you mean “drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives."
You wonder how the likes of Professor Nye would have enjoyed life under the “order” of communist North Vietnamese.