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A KIND OF TREASON: Garrie Hutchinson was a paid foreign agent and remains a fan of mass murderer Ho Chi Minh
Former Victorian government veterans heritage officer and military history writer Garrie Hutchinson admits in his autobiography that he received money from the North Vietnamese government to show enemy propaganda and recruit people to their cause.
It’s a far cry from his recent media spin that said he was merely “accused” of “showing National Liberation Front films”.
FOREIGN AGENT
His book “Not Going To Vietnam” describes his recruitment after a meeting at the North Vietnamese Embassy. It then explains (page 42):
“(perhaps it was from the North Vietnamese) for a couple of weeks touring NLF propaganda films around England…I didn’t ask where the money or the films came from, and if that was a kind of treason by negligence, so be it. I was glad to help my cause…”
After his meeting at the Embassy he had asked himself “Had I been recruited? It hardly seemed to matter to me” and then reflected on his reading about the espionage activities of notable revolutionaries. (page 39-40)
The financing Hutchinson and his comrades received “would be enough to feed us, pay for petrol and have a comradely beer with such masses as we would find.”
He disingenuously adds “I didn’t ask where the money or the films came from, and if that was a kind of treason by negligence, so be it.”
A DEVOTED FOLLOWER
The book also confirmed that as late as 1998, Hutchinson who later worked for Labor Right Minister from the ACT Ros Kelly, was a devotee of Ho Chi Minh (page 249):
When Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 I was in London, and now, finally I was in a queue shuffling quietly towards the mausoleum. I know it was unfashionable to admire public figures, especially lifelong communists, but there is something about Ho Chi Minh that I still find appealing and sympathetic. He has blood on his hands, but not much for the leader of a country which has been at war for fifty (or a thousands years).
In fact Ho Chi Minh was killing rival revolutionaries as early as 1945, sanctioning the murder of tens of thousands of anti-Stalinist Trotskyists.
After he’d murdered all of his rivals for power, he turned on the people:
During this era, Hồ, following the communist doctrine initiated by Stalin and Mao, started a land reform in which hundreds of thousands of people accused of being landlords were summarily executed or tortured and starved in prison.
Even after a lifetime of writing books about footy, speeches for an avowedly anti-communist former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, working as a media adviser to Ros Kelly, supporting the US liberation of Kuwait in 1991, aiming to “make millions from film” (according to one of his autobiographical descriptions in a 1975 funky book of poetry), Hutchinson went through all that and remains a fan of one of history’s most obnoxious mass murderers:
“He was not accused of corruption or selfishness. He was the underdog who won. He wrote some poems. He died just young enough… Ho is ageless.”
Rather incredibly, that was his view at the time of writing the autobiography, published in 1998.
Garrie Hutchinson’s epitaph will not be quite so high fallutin’. More like: once bought, he stayed bought.
Discussion
7 comments for “A KIND OF TREASON: Garrie Hutchinson was a paid foreign agent and remains a fan of mass murderer Ho Chi Minh”
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how many ways are there of saying sickening?
It might have been helpful and informative if you had published the full circumstances and detail of this incident.
Generally speaking, if one is criticizing the policies of one’s own government (as in this case one has a right and duty to do), then it would be inadvisable to accept funding from foreign governments or intelligence agencies.
All the same: big deal.
Let’s remember the main point here: we were in the wrong. We had no business invading and occupying their country, and killing their people.
War resisters did us all (including the diggers) a favour in ending the war and bringing the troops home.
PS. I had trouble posting to the other thread. I hope there is no problem here…
This should be investigated by ASIO
War hater – learn your history dickhead – we had every right to help the South Vietnamese in their brave struggle against communist oppression. Idiots like you undermined that, and helped a brutal totalitarian communist regime ultimately murder more than a million of its own citizens, people who still suffer under the yoke of that disgusting ideology today.
loves2spooj,
‘South Vietnam’ was a phoney puppet state illegally established by the US which never had a day’s legitimacy in its nearly 20 years existence and which wouldn’t last a day without being propped up by massive US support.
We were not ‘defending’ the Vietnamese – we were attacking them and killing them in huge numbers, somewhere between 2-4 million of them in our beaut little war.
It was fundamentally wrong and immoral from first to last, we should never ever have been there in the first place.
War hater – pay attention…
The following letter apeared in the Wollongong Mercury.
You may learn something from someone who was there and witnessed stuff first hand.
“Forever grateful for sacrifices
This years marks the 42nd anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.
The communist regime in Vietnam has been lying to its own people about Long Tan battle ever since, but in August 2006, for the first time in 40 years, they admitted that they’ve lost that battle and that it was the Australians who won – tactically and militarily.
With Vietnam Veterans Day this week, we’d like to pay tribute to the Australian soldiers who had protected South Vietnam’s freedom. That freedom was taken away in April 1975 when the communits took over Saigon.
They started a vengeance policy, putting one million people into concentration camps, confiscating churches and houses, forcing people to flee their homes.
There were two million Vietnamese who escaped the regime since, but only half made it to a safe land; the other half either perished at sea, died in prison or were killed by the communists while escaping.
Some Australians believe it was a civil war and that North Vietnam fought to defend itself.
That theory is untrue.
If you visit the Communist Party of Vietnam website and click on its founder’s official biography, you will see that Ho Chi Minh “deemed it his task to spread communist doctrine in Asia in general and in Indochina particularly.”
Thirty three years on, Vietnam is still very much governed by a dictatorial and oppressive regime.
Freedom and democracy are non-existent. All of this has justified that the Australian Defence Force presence in Vietnam during the Vietnam War was just and right.
In this week of Vietnam Veterans Day, we would like to pay tribute to 18 Australian soldiers who died during the Battle of Long Tan and to more than 500 Australian soldiers who died in Vietnam during the war.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to all the Australian men and women who served and fought for our freedom and democracy. They are our heroes and they made us proud. We are forever grateful for their courage and bravery.
We are grateful especially to their families for the sacrifices they’ve made.
Their sacrifice will forever be in our hearts.
Lest we forget.
Teresa Tran
Prisident
Vietnamese Community in Wollongong”
Well Cav,
I read that letter but I dont agree with it. I doubt most Vietnamese would agree with it either. She should give a source for the figures she quotes.
I dont think it was a ‘civil war’: it was an imperial occupation of the arbitrarily created South, resisted by the indigenous population. Collaborators would have got a rough deal for obvious reasons.
The South Vietnamese ‘Government’ could hardly be described as democratic either. A puppet state; a corrupt, nasty military dictatorship without popular support relying on repression and massive US backing to survive.
We achieved nothing but devastation with our occupation of South Vietnam. We have to also accept some responsibility for the nasty aftermath of the war, including the Khmer Rouge. More than likely things would not have been so bad had we not intervened in the first place.
We should never, ever have been there and the only course of action is to quit. Same goes for Iraq and Afghanistan. Out today.