(continuedfromabove)

"Perhaps, if Lord Mayor Campbell Newman understood why a previous generation of Australians opposed their Government's decision to send soldiers to Vietnam, the extreme 'nausea' he felt towards members of the Labor Party who had participated in Remembrance Day commemorations ("ALP in Mayor's sights" 17 Nov 07) would have been directed elsewhere.

"The war started when the unelected government of the Republic of South Vietnam, which had only been created as a result of the 1954 Geneva Peace conference and was not supposed to last beyond the nationwide elections scheduled for 1956, canceled those elections. Even Australia's Foreign Minister of the time Richard Casey acknowledged that the Communists would have easily won those elections in the south as well as in the north.

"The southern regime began jailing and killing anti-French independence fighters, and the ensuing popular uprising grew to become the bloody conflagration which claimed the lives of 520 Australians, 58,000 Americans and a horrific 5.1 million Vietnamese. Many more were maimed and much of Vietnam's landscape was chemically defoliated or turned into a moonscape.

"Campbell Newman should know better than to attempt to vilify those hundreds of thousands of decent ordinary Australians, including Labor Party members, who marched in the streets in order to end this barbarity."

Even though my letter was not published, the Courier Mail did choose to publish another very good letter on Monday 19 November -- although not a letter quite as good and my own, if I may be permitted to offer my own possibly subjective opinion -- which was critical of Newman.

So, clearly I believe that those who opposed the war including the wharfies were absolutely right to have done so. The resentment that some veterans may feel towards the wharfies should, instead, have been directed at the politicians including the aforementioned Menzies who lied to the Australian public in order to justify sending our soldiers to that war.

James Sinnamon (author)

The link given in daggett's previous post concerning the Courier Mail story "Campbell Newman attacks ALP over war veterans" of Saturday 17 November should have been:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22771554-5007200,00.html

... and NOT:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22771554-5007200,00.html:

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I posted the above on behalf of daggett, because daggett's daily quota has been exceeded.

I believe this is for the benefit of OLO users as were my posts on behalf of daggett to another forum, for example, at : http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#97663

I ask that, if certain other OLO contributors attempt to seize upon this post in order to disrupt this discussion as happened elsewhere (see
"Privilieged Whites" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6482#97663), please ignore them.