Bill Zimmerman

Bill Zimmerman

Anti-war Apparatchik

Here is an op-ed recently published by him. Note the propaganda in here, how we poisoned the land forever, and bombed a hospital in Hanoi. (A SAM blew close to a B-52 and threw off the drop, which is how the hospital got hit.) This guy is SO PROUD of himself and all his friends who brought "liberation and justice" to the South. Get your barf bag handy before reading.

Zimmerman’s memoir, Troublemaker, puts him in “The Vanguard of the movements of the Sixties.” These movements included: civil rights in the South, 1967 March on Washington (assault on the Pentagon); May Day 1971 demonstrations (to shut down the US government); (With Hanoi minders, censorship and data) filming “evidence” of US bombing of civilians in Hanoi (May 20-8, 1972); organizing grassroots lobbying (1973-75) to end the war in (cutting aid to S. Vietnam); and medical deliveries to North Vietnam (and “liberated” territories of South Vietnam) in 1972. Zimmerman’s signal achievement in the antiwar movement was raising money and medicine for the enemy in war through Medical Aid for Indochina, MAI, (announced October 1972). Caring for the victims of U.S. bombing had a broad humanitarian appeal. MAI’s predecessor efforts from 1969 to 1972 raised $80, 682.64 of which $52,000 was sent through British Medical Aid for drugs and $27,000 was hand carried to Hanoi. One of MAI’s predecessors was CPUSA sponsored Medical Aid to Cuba. Both praised the superiority of Communist “free” medicine in Soviet Union, Cuba and North Vietnam over their capitalist competitors. MAI was formally “founded to coordinate…help the people in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the liberated zones of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” The Hayden-Fonda Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, immediately began to collect funds for Medical Aid for Indochina and to rebuild Bach Mai Hospital, a nine-year project that fleeced the pocketbooks of the many to advance the political causes of the few. To the “humane” Vietnamese Communists Bach Mai was worth far more as a war trophy and as cash flow than it was as a functioning hospital. Through 1979, the FRIENSHIPMENT pro-Hanoi propaganda program, sanitizing reeducation camps and forced migrations, was supported at least in part by tax-deductible contributions to the Bach Mai Hospital Fund. MAI made Zimmerman a major actor in the pro-Hanoi movement after peace was declared in Paris in early 1973. Zimmerman’s MAI became a major player in Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Indochina Peace Campaign, IPC, and allied organizations and coalitions lobbying Congress. Afterwards, Zimmerman became a loyal apparatchik for Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda for decades (and be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars) through the late 80's to Hayden's political agenda: races for the US Senate, Assembly, and State Senate; initiative campaigns on toxics and environment; and foreign policies, e.g. Central America. Zimmerman ran scores of political campaigns in California for statewide initiatives against corporate capitalism and for progressive candidates. Zimmerman worked on campaigns for Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, physician assisted suicide, legalization of marijuana and MoveON.org.

This is a "stump" essay which will be revisited when time permits. We will attempt to find more detailed attributions for this and other information. We welcome correction or alternative points of view.

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