Dr Peter L Johnston
MBBS FRACGP
Why Protesting at the Shrine Makes Sense
Parallels Between The Vietnam War and the War on Covid
My early medical training took me to Vietnam. So I’d like to recap the story of Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War. When the Vietnamese defeated the French to gain their independence, America embarked on one of its series of disastrous wars. The Australian government, aware of its dependence on the US for its defence, didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to ingratiate itself with Uncle Sam. So, our prime minister, Bob Menzies, wrote to President Diem asking for an invitation to the war. Having got his invitation, his government introduced conscription in 1964 to get sufficient troops to land a task force in South Vietnam.
The stated reason for US interference in Vietnam was the ‘domino theory’. Our American allies were protecting us by putting a stop to Communism spreading down from China through South-East Asia and reaching Australia. The Liberal party, aided and abetted by the mainstream press, which in those days was censored on issues of national security, pushed the fear factor. They did it so successfully that Bob’s successor, Harold Holt, in 1966 won a landslide victory in an election fought on the issue of conscription and the Vietnam war. More than 61% of Australians voted to go ‘all the way with LBJ’, and draft 18-20 year-olds to help do the job.
This decision forced the army to plan a campaign against a country, about whose geography, terrain, culture and politics, they knew little. In our allotted region of responsibility, the Phuoc Tuy province, our military leadership learned the Long Hai hills were a haven for Viet Cong guerrillas. So they laid a mine field to protect the villagers from them. What they didn’t realise was the enemy were on both sides of the minefield. Enterprising Vietnamese children dug up the mines and placed them in the path of our own troops. In my time in triage at the hospital in Vung Tau, at least 80% of the war wounds I saw were caused by metal fragments from our own mines.
As I reflect on this, I see parallels with our current battle against Covid-19.
A Threat from China
The ‘domino theory’ was a belief that Communism would spread from China. The USA government at the height of the Cold War warned that other countries would fall like dominoes under the totalitarian dictatorship of Chairman Mao.
In 2020, the US government told the world a lethal virus called Covid-19 came out of China and was threatening the world.
The Fear Spreads
Politicians and mainstream media whipped up the story that Communists were threatening democracy in Vietnam. In truth, their leader, Ho Chi Minh was our ally in the Second World War. He wanted independence for his people but was being blocked by the corrupt leadership of President Diem in the south. After Buddhist monks in Saigon set themselves on fire in protest against the Diem regime, an embarrassed American government organised the assassination of Diem by the CIA.
Politicians and mainstream media whipped up the threat to the world of a disastrous pandemic, comparing it with the Spanish flu of 1919-20 which killed millions of young people. In truth, Covid-19 was a virus that took out the elderly and the chronically ill but spared the young.
Fighting as the Prospective Solution to the Problem
Fighting the enemy using superior scientific weaponry in the form of guns, mines, helicopter gunships and tanks were the prime weapons against the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong guerrillas. Carpet bombing and defoliants like agent orange were the weapons used in attempts to destroy the landscape and force the enemy out of their tunnels.
Fighting the enemy using the latest in scientific technology, a vaccine that works like a software package was the plan. It would tell human cells to make a spike protein to repel the enemy, the Covid-19 virus.
Recruiting Cannon Fodder
Given that Australia was not directly affected by the war in Vietnam, and National Service had been scrapped a few years earlier, it was clear there were not going to be enough volunteers to mount a successful campaign in Vietnam. So conscription was introduced. If a young man’s birthday came up in the lottery, he was mandated to bear arms. If he objected or failed to turn up for recruitment, he was labelled a draft-dodger and could be jailed.
Given that it was going to be difficult to get sufficient volunteers to reach the 70% or 80% required to attain the theory of ‘herd immunity’, the government encouraged all citizens to ‘bare arms’ for a jab. But rather than offer bribes like the US, our governments are mandating that all people who refused the vaccine be dismissed from their jobs, banned from public entertainment, restaurants, travel, sports, pubs and just about everything that makes life worthwhile.
Selling the Message
On Anzac day each year, we pay due respect to those who fell in battle to defend our freedom. Yet in 1966, more than 61% of Australian voters gave Holt’s liberal government a mandate to deprive thousands of young men of their freedom. These young men were drafted to fight in a foreign land for an unjust cause. Yet the messaging was remarkably successful. So many Australians were worried about their own security, they were prepared to sacrifice their young men who had had the misfortune to be born on the wrong day.
The message to have the vaccine has been wildly successful with upwards of 79% of Australians having had at least one jab. The message to severely restrict the freedom of those refusing the jab has also been successful because most Australians are again worried about their own security. They have been led to believe unvaccinated people are endangering their health and should be pressured into conforming. This is why newspapers are getting so many messages of approval for their stand on mandating the vaccine for all health care workers. Don’t mistake this for wisdom. This is the voice of fear bringing out the ugly side of human nature. You are hearing from the 79% already vaccinated.
Laying a Minefield – a Strategy for Victory
The aim of a minefield is to act as a deterrent to enemy invasion. In the Phuoc Tuy province, the minefield failed in its mission because our military leaders failed to take into account the ingenuity of the enemy – in particular the clever, courageous Vietnamese children.
The purpose of a vaccine is to lay a minefield for an incoming microbe. Once the vaccine promotes antibodies, those antibodies destroy the invader as soon as it steps into the bloodstream. The Covid vaccines are failing because they too failed to take into account the ingenuity of the enemy. The virus mutated to form a new strain, the delta, which rendered the new high-tech weapon obsolete.
Kicking an Own-Goal
Australia’s fear-driven response to the Vietnam war resulted in killing and maiming many of our own soldiers. Over 40% of the 521 soldiers who died there were conscripts. More than 3000 were wounded. The worst were those who lost multiple limbs from the mines we ourselves planted.
Around 60,000 Australians served in Vietnam. When they failed to bring back success and glory, the government didn’t want to know them. These warriors had done the dirty work for their country, either voluntarily or because they were forced to do so. In Vietnam, they demonstrated the mateship our country made famous in the trenches of the First World War. Back home, that mateship was not returned to them by the people. This led to an epidemic of a new disease called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In truth PTSD was only a new name for a disease that has affected soldiers for centuries under different names. But it never occurred in such a large percentage of veterans.
What will be the outcome of our fear-driven response to the Covid-19 virus? The potential medium-term and long-term results of a drug that interferes with the immune system is too horrendous to contemplate. One third of the world’s population have already had the jab. It has the potential to be truly catastrophic. I certainly hope it’s doesn’t reach this level of disaster. Most of my family and young friends have had the jab.
The Victims are the Young
We sent our young men off to Vietnam. Some died, some returned with permanent injuries. The greatest number returned, only to suffer mental illness. The night terrors, the chronic anxiety and the alcohol and drugs used to handle the symptoms, afflicted, not only the veteran, but his partners and children. The number of subsequent suicides among our veterans are greater than those we lost in the war itself.
The long term toxic effects of the jab might affect the 70 year-old in his eighties, but the 12 year-old will suffer it in his twenties. Once again it will be the young who bear the brunt of this crime.
If I were a teenager, I would have experienced my life being screwed up for nearly two years by draconian lockdowns and repressive measures. If I were offered to be free to get a life by accepting snake oil into my body, I would probably do so, even if my parents advised me not to do so. After all, the teen years are the years of establishing one’s own autonomy and making one’s own decisions. The dark forces behind this pandemic narrative know that. These are the very people they want to poison. They are the people whose lives and health we are jeopardising with this rush to vaccinate.
What can we learn from the debacle of the Vietnam War?
- When I google Australian cultural values, this is what I read. “Australia’s main values support equal rights and equal opportunity. Aussies are known for being open-hearted and open-minded and think that everyone has the right to a fair go.” These are the Aussies I’ve known all my life until this year.
Yet when you create sufficient fear with pie in the sky illusions like the ‘domino theory’ and ‘herd immunity’, Aussies, like all humans, can react with fear and throw away their values in favour of embracing a self-protective low moral code of behaviour. We saw this in the election of 1966 and we are seeing it in an even bleaker form today as police fire rubber bullets at protesters, who only want equal rights, equal opportunity and a fair go.
- Decisions made with a view to dominating or harming others, generally go wrong. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are classics of our time, but America’s action in Vietnam was similar. It interfered in the sovereignty of another country for its own purposes, and tried to dominate and harm its citizens. Political analysts use the term ‘blow back’ these days. Eastern tradition calls it ‘karma’.
The decision to lock down citizens, control their movements, destroy their jobs and livelihoods, ban their gatherings and force them to take experimental substances into their bodies is more reminiscent of the infamous Dr Josef Mengele of Auschwitz. It is all about dominating and harming others, while pretending to be helping. What goes around comes around. It is unlikely to end well.
- America had all the high-powered weapons. North Vietnam had only mortars and AK 47s. But they wanted their freedom and independence, were unified in their goal and occupied the high moral ground. Many of us in Vietnam admired them and wished we were fighting on their side, instead of with the unmotivated South Vietnamese. It was their unity and integrity that gave them such strength.
The medical profession has the high-powered weapons in the war against the virus, but those weapons are weak and ineffective compared to the power of a healthy immune system operating from integrity. Statistics from Israel show natural immunity after getting Covid is 27 times stronger than that provided by Pfizer vaccines. A similar picture is emerging in studies done on the military in USA. It’s the old story: ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.
- Aeschylus (525-456 BC) “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
The American invasion of Vietnam was founded on a lie and it went backwards from there on, culminating in the war crimes perpetrated by Nixon on Laos and Cambodia when he bombed these countries without telling the American people.
The whole pandemic story is riddled with lies. Covid-19 deaths have been overestimated. In the US, when Covid-19 appears on death certificates, nursing homes receive extra payments. Deaths of young people from Covid-19 are highlighted in the press, while deaths following the vaccines are suppressed and put down to natural causes. The full ingredients of these Covid vaccines are not disclosed, but independent experts claim they contain Graphite oxide, a poison not approved by the FDA for human consumption. They believe it’s this chemical that causes the fevers, pains and symptoms most get in the first two days after the jab.
So why have protesters chosen to use the Shrine of Remembrance? I don’t know the official reason but I applaud the symbolism of their actions. The mainstream press have reacted with rage, using words like ‘outrage, sacrilege and disgusting’, applauding the police for their rough handling of these detested ‘anti-vaxers’.
Yet these people are freedom fighters, doing what our diggers did in every war Australia has participated in. It’s just that they were facing rubber bullets instead of metal ones. They are fighting for our freedom, our Australian way of life. The right to freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to work in the roles we have chosen, freedom to see our families and dying relatives – freedom to play and watch sport together, go to concerts and meet with our friends at pubs and social gatherings. They are fighting for freedom from the tyranny of a state government that more closely resembles a totalitarian government like North Korea.
Let’s salute these true blue Aussie freedom fighters.
