I used to live next door to an elderly couple who were survivors of the Nazi death camps. I never really talked to them about this, but I figured it must have been unbelievably, unimaginably horrible. I did feel very sorry for them, for lack of a better description, and I marveled at how well they had come out of it. Successful business people, now retired, big family that visited on weekends, nice home, vacations in Florida, etc. What amazingly resilient people, I thought.

Now I realize I had it all wrong. I now know that the fact that they are OK now shows that the camps then really were not all that bad. At least not bad enough to worry about repeating. In fact, it was probably virulent and scurrilous American propaganda that unfairly made them out to be that way. By doing this US authorities, who knew damn well that there were times they had failed to provide adequate sunscreen lotion to German POWs who volunteered to work outside, could shift the focus of war crimes tribunals away from themselves-- the real criminals-- and make the Nazis look like the bad guys.

I came to this epiphany courtesy of the wise and level-under-the-poofiness-headed counsel of Sen. John Kerry. The Senator courageously noted, in a national radio interview, that he had met many survivors—umm… graduates—of the North Vietnamese re-education camps filled by the masses of South Vietnamese who had been wrongly-educated enough to help the US during that war but didn’t have strong enough grips on the helicopter runners when we “redeployed” and left them there with their loving countrymen. Many of these supposedly victimized folks, said the Senator, were leading productive lives in the Vietnam of today. Exactly how and by whom a “productive” life in today’s Vietnam is defined wasn’t addressed. But the Senator’s point was that he was righteously fed up with this right-wing Bushist propaganda invoking Vietnamesque nightmare-scapes that would be awaiting Iraqis if Americans hightailed it out of Baghdad as they did Saigon 30-odd years ago. The truth, according to Uncle Joe— um, John—is that the post-war repercussions in Asia were more camp-like than deathly. After all, those folks are fine now, so no harm, no foul, right? So, I guess, he thinks it would be in Iraq. At least John is willing to take that chance.

You just can’t make this stuff up. John Kerry is offended that the North Vietnamese Communist regime’s treatment of its southern citizens after the war there is being impugned by the evil neo-cons. That is the result of his deep reflection regarding the serious issue of what might befall Iraq in the wake of a US withdrawal. If he thinks the pro-victory crowd is making up horror stories for political gain, that’s one thing. But to take up the point that the hapless Vietnamese who were not murdered outright but packed off to concentration camps were really not that ill-used or that the fact that some came through and thrived in the end somehow makes the whole thing okay and not worth going out of our way to avoid repeating. .. is just sick in a very strange way. We know Kerry has never been familiar with what most would call “normal” life, but one would have to see the world through wildly warped glasses to get this picture. This is the kind of jaw-dropping asininity that spills from the quiche-hole of a well morticianed and partially animated corpse who came within a normal, unmaximized hair of being the President of the United States. Looks like Ohio saved more than just America.