NPR In Full Retro-Lefty Mode, I

National Public Radio is time-warping back to the early Nineties, the days of High Political Correctness, it seems lately. Who in the world do they have writing this stuff nowadays, anyway?

A piece on economic revival in Vietnam's China Beach begins thus:

Forty-one years ago, the first U.S. combat troops arrived in Vietnam. They came ashore in the central Vietnamese city of Danang. America's involvement in that civil war lasted more than a decade. When it was over, more than three million Vietnamese were dead. So were 58,000 Americans. Three decades after Communist North Vietnam won that war, a unified Vietnam is moving steadily forward, attracting both foreign investment and tourists.

Note the willful rejection of any of the lessons of the Cold War--the forcible imposition of Communist tyranny, aided by hostile superpowers, first on the north and then the south; the reprisals and re-education camps; the mass exodus of the defeated (and now, it seems, invisible) Southerners--all passed over in silence. Very shortly after the Communist victory, political prisoners in Vietnam were circulating samizdat appeals for suicide pills. The current conditions of Vietnam's state prisons and concentration camps is not well known--wouldn't that be a better topic for the progressive, hardnosed speakers of truth to power, rather than boosting a dictatorship's showcase tourist hotspot?