Gerard
Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 13 October 2003
Simon Crean summed up the Labor Party's misbegotten view of the late Jim Cairns when he said that he "was a man of deep conviction and a man of great conscience, none more so with his passionate and longstanding opposition to the Vietnam War."
Cairns was never against the Vietnam War. What he was violently against was an anti-communist victory. Once the communists overran the South, the phoney freedom-loving Cairns never uttered a word of sympathy for the millions of victims. In short, Cairns, irrespective of what his political and media admirers claim, was a dedicated enemy of liberty.
The truth is that Jim Cairns was an extreme left-winger and an unrepentant supporter of Soviet oppression. That he, as his admiring supporters claim, was sincere in his beliefs is a fact I do not doubt, just as I would not doubt the sincerity of an Andrei Vyshinsky, a Maxim Gorki or a Felix Dzerzinsky.
Sincerity is not and never has been a measure of goodness. All too often it has been the mark of the fanatic. It was the Left’s sincerity married to its relentless commitment that brought death to more than 100,000,000 men, women and children in the last century.
Cairns once stated that he wanted to stop the Vietnam War. But it is clear from his utterances and actions that what he really wanted was a Hanoi victory. His so-called peace movement was nothing more than a Hanoi front and should properly be called the Hanoi war movement. Its sole object was to help bring South East Asia under a communist jackboot.
Not once did the peace-loving Cairns and his fellow travellers call for the totalitarian North to cease its aggression against the South. Not once did they call for the North to hold genuine elections and free its political prisoners. But Cairns support for Hanoi’s communist aggression is no puzzle to those who are acquainted with his totalitarian sympathies.
In 1975 Cairns declared at a public meeting that the "Soviet Union was a workers' paradise". This was no aberration on his part but a true expression of his sympathy for the Soviet regime and all its evil works. I have yet to come across anyone who recalls Cairns uttering the slightest criticism of any Stalinist regime, including North Korea. When it came to choosing between the democracies and communist tyranny Cairns never hesitated to make clear where his political loyalties lay.
In 1965 he wrote that "communism has, so far, shown no evidence that it is a military expedition". This is a bald-faced lie that deliberately ignored, for example, the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland, the Baltic States and Poland and its occupation of Eastern Europe; its attempt to drive the West out of Berlin by blockading the city, its crushing of the East Berlin worker’s uprising and the Hungarian revolt. And let us not forget China’s invasion of Tibet, North Korea’s attack on South Korea and Hanoi’s aggression against South Vietnam.
Despite the indisputable evidence of communist aggression and brutality, Cairns had the gall to argue that "communist advance, as distinct from Nazi advance, depended on economic and political conditions". Therefore, according to Cairns' warped ideological views communist aggression and brutality were a fiction. No wonder he claimed, after a visit to Eastern Europe in 1970, that people were no more suppressed in the Soviet Union than in Australia and that Soviet workers were "kings in their own domain." And this while the despotic Leonid Brezhnev was still dictator.
As if to ram home to the public his commitment to the Soviet Union he paid a further visit in 1971, after which he smugly announced that he found no dissent in the Soviet Union, describing its police as "slightly comical" figures. Oh really? That these "slightly comical" figures frequently hauled people off to the Gulag is not something he saw fit to mention. But then he also ignored the plight of political prisoners who were being tortured by KGB 'psychiatrists', even as their masters wined and dined him. But Jim Cairns had never been noted for expressing sympathy for the victims of communist brutality.
When he was interviewed by Bernard Clancy (Age 18/8/99) it was pointed out to him that the 'anti-war' protesters he marched with openly supported Hanoi and the Viet Cong. Clancy then asked him if he shared Hanoi's sentiments. Cairns' feeble response: "They weren't friends of mine", clearly trying to suggest that he had not taken sides. The facts, however, tell another story.
In April 1973 he chaired a meeting at Sydney Town Hall that had been organised to welcome a North Vietnam delegation and express support for their totalitarian government. Behind Cairns there hung large portrait of Ho Chi Min, the North's totalitarian dictator and the man who ordered the mass murder of about 50,000 North Vietnamese peasants.
This is the same Jim Cairns who, along with other Leftists, held a party in Prahran Town Hall to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the communist victory in South East Asia, even though the regime had carried out a bloodbath. And this creature would have us believe he did not take sides.
In a mean-spirited attempt to justify his support for communist aggression Cairns asserted: "It was all a fiction; all the talk about dominoes falling all the way to Cairo". This is a gross distortion of what was correctly predicted.
The domino theory said that a successful communist conquest of South Vietnam would be followed by other countries in the region falling to communist aggression. And this is what happened. The fall of Saigon was quickly followed by the fall of Cambodia and Laos. The result was the mass murder of millions. Yet Cairns told Parliament in May 1975 that a communist victory (not an American one, mind you) would bring an end to the suffering.
Did he recant? Did he retract anything he said? Did he express sympathy for the victims of communist barbarism? Not on your life. Even after the awful truth was revealed this hypocrite still went out and celebrated. No wonder members of the local Vietnamese community tried to lynch him and his comrades. Only the intervention of the police saved him and his comrades from serious physical harm.
So why aren't his media sympathisers drawing attention to his hypocrisy? Why don't they condemn him as an enemy of liberty? Because to them there are not only no enemies on the left, there are no atrocities either. That's why their respective papers still lie about Allende and spike stories exposing Castro's crimes.
Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor