Dennis Prager recently visited Vietnam and was understandably stirred to anger.

He writes a bitter reminder that communism is the worst of all the terrible ideologies ever inflicted on long-suffering humanity.

His essay is also a stinging condemnation of the “moral idiots” in America who made a hero of Ho Chi Minh and handed over the Vietnamese people to the communists.

Communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to ask one of the communist bosses who run Vietnam that question. “Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?”

There is no good answer. There are only a lie and a truth, and the truth is not good.

The lie is the response offered by the Vietnamese communists and which was repeated, like virtually all communist lies, by the world’s non-communist left. It was (and continues to be) taught in virtually every Western university and was and continues to be spread by virtually every news medium on the planet: The Vietnam communists, i.e., the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, were merely fighting for national independence against foreign control of their country. First, they fought the French, then the Japanese and then the Americans. American baby boomers will remember being told over and over that Ho Chi Minh was Vietnam’s George Washington, that he loved the American Constitution, after which he modeled his own, and wanted nothing more than Vietnamese independence.

Here is the truth: Every communist dictator in the world has been a megalomaniacal, cult of personality, power hungry, bloodthirsty thug. Ho Chi Minh was no different. He murdered his opponents, tortured only God knows how many innocent Vietnamese, threatened millions into fighting for him — yes, for him and his blood soaked Vietnamese Communist Party, backed by the greatest murderer of all time, Mao Zedong. But the moral idiots in America chanted “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh” at antiwar rallies, and they depicted America as the real murderers of Vietnamese — “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

The Vietnamese communists were not fighting America for Vietnamese independence. America was never interested in controlling the Vietnamese people, and there is a perfect parallel to prove this: the Korean War. Did America fight the Korean communists in order to control Korea? Or did 37,000 Americans die in Korea so that Koreans could be free? Who was (and remains) a freer human being — a Korean living under Korean communist rule in North Korea or a Korean living in that part of Korea where America defeated the Korean communists?

And who was a freer human being in Vietnam — those who lived in non-communist South Vietnam (with all its flaws) or those who lived under Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh’s communists in North Vietnam?

America fights to liberate countries, not to rule over them.

True, and though sometimes – as in Kosovo and Bosnia – well-meaning America has made the wrong judgment as to just who is on the side of freedom, in Vietnam the issue was clear enough:

It was the Vietnamese Communist Party, not America, that was interested in controlling the Vietnamese people. But the lie was spread so widely and so effectively that most of the world — except American supporters of the war and the Vietnamese boat people and other Vietnamese who yearned for liberty — believed that America was fighting for tin, tungsten and the wholly fictitious “American empire” while the Vietnamese communists were fighting for Vietnamese freedom.

I went to the “Vietnam War Remnants Museum” — not a word about those who risked their lives to escape by boat, preferring to risk dying by drowning, being eaten by sharks or being tortured or gang-raped by pirates, rather than to live under the communists who “liberated” South Vietnam. …

I hope I live to see the day when the people of Vietnam, freed from the communist lies that still permeate their daily lives, understand that every Vietnamese death in the war against America was a wasted life, one more of the 140 million human sacrifices on the altar of the most bloodthirsty false god in history: communism.

The Vietnamese war is now an old story. Those who remember it with bitterness hardly speak of it, the memories being too painful and the young being uninterested. But it should not be forgotten. The truth about it should be taught to new generations so that the right lessons may be learnt from it.

The most important lesson is that collectivist ideologies are inescapably cruel and destructive, and it is a lesson that should be applied to the collectivist ideology most threatening to the free world right now: Islam.

Yet again the moral idiots are are on the wrong side; the side of  misery, oppression, and death. The communists, the socialists, the “progressives” are in alliance with the jihadists.

The right lessons about the histories of Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam, have not been learnt, most probably because they have not been taught. As Dennis Prager mourns:

There is little difference between the history of the Vietnam War as told by the Communist Party of Vietnam and what just about any college student will be told in just about any college by just about any professor in America, Europe, Asia or Latin America.

When Soviet Russia perished and Mao Zedong died;  when Russia, China, and Vietnam relented to “the natural order of liberty” (as Adam Smith called capitalism) because they’d learnt the hard way that Marxist economics do not work; the “bloodthirsty god”, communism, found asylum in the academies. In almost every university the monster reigns unchallenged, and has recently taken on a consort: Islam.

For the moral idiots of the left – many of whom have Ph.Ds – there are now two gods, communism and Allah, and Obama is their prophet.