If you wanted to see the perfect example of the ethical and
moral collapse of the Mainstream Media, you could not do better
than a long article in the New Yorker of May 23, 2005. The
article is entitled, “The Spy Who Loved Us.” Written by a teacher
at the University of Albany, named Thomas Bass, it’s about a man
named Pham Xuan An. Now very old, An was — among many other things
— a correspondent in Saigon during the Vietnam War for
Time magazine. He was apparently considered a particularly
brilliant and well-informed correspondent and very well liked by
his colleagues in the Western press corps during the war.
He was also a Communist spy, working for the North Vietnamese,
informing them of what he knew about American military plans, troop
movements, political agendas.
He even helped the Communists win large battles by directing
Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops against American and South
Vietnamese forces. He helped plan the Tet Offensive of 1968,
including helping the man who planned the attack on the U.S.
Embassy. This was the offensive where thousands of innocent
civilians were massacred by the Communists.
When the war ended, An offered to go to the U.S. and continue
spying for the Communists there. The offer was denied and he lives
quietly in Ho Chi Minh City, where, among other pets, he keeps
fighting cocks — a practice generally considered barbaric in the
circles of New Yorker readers, but another sign of his
cuteness to Professor Bass. In fact, the whole article is about how
cute and smart and clever and brave a guy An is. A lovable,
brilliant, brave man who sent Americans and innocent civilians to
their deaths. Bass even explains that almost all of An’s former
colleagues in the Western press still love the guy after learning
he was a spy for America’s enemy in the Vietnam War. They even gave
money to bring him here for an auld lang syne visit not long
ago.
In this article, which I would guess to be about 8,000 words or
more, there is not one hint, not one whisper, of sympathy for the
American soldiers who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam.
Not one sliver of anger at a man who took American money and helped
kill Americans. Not a word about the mass murder of civilians
during Tet.
Prof. Bass, the perfect modern academic, obviously greatly
admires this man, spent days with him, and has not one bad word to
say about An’s bosses, who, again, killed civilians without remorse
by the thousands, who even sent An to be “re-educated” after the
war because he had so much contact with Western ideas.
I am not sure how many mothers or fathers or children or widows
of Vietnam war casualties read the New Yorker. I am not
sure if anyone who edited the piece — and it is edited well,
although utterly without moral input — had friends or family who
fought there (such as my late father in law, Col. Dale Denman,
Jr.). But how insulting, how insulting must an article like this be
to them. How insulting it is to us all: to lavish praise on a man
who helped kill our fellow Americans, to describe him in endearing
terms, to try to make him seem like a kindly uncle.
If the New Yorker is one of the flagships of the
Mainstream Media fleet, they are sailing in maddeningly disloyal,
contemptuous waters and obviously have been for a while. Small
wonder the media gloried in Mark Felt and Watergate last week. In
those days, Americans actually trusted the Mainstream Media. The
New Yorker piece by Prof. Bass makes it clear how wrong we
were. He’s a fine writer but a man whose piece lacks any moral
compass at all. And what of the fellow journalists in Saigon
cheering him on? Now we know a bit more about why the war turned
out as it did.
Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in
Beverly Hills and Malibu, and author of “Ben Stein’s Diary” each
month in The American Spectator. Click here to
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