A few quick comments:

Michel Foucault: I could have found a better example, but I wanted to get Wikipedia involved. Here’s a straightforward quote: “I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.” And here’s a more common type of quote: “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”

Serious Marxists: Yeah, I really do think there was a difference between these guys and those who would seem to be their US equivalents. Marxists were bent on creating a “new socialist man,” and were quite willing to wipe out huge numbers of humans to do so. These guys were serious about it. Their US equivalents, for all their errors and sins, were not of the same character. Some killed along the way and some deceived along the way, but they were not trying to force a full change in human nature, as were the commies. Their death tolls reflect this; in no case did the US purposefully kill one third of a population, as happened in Cambodia. In measuring “badness,” the Marxist leaders of the USSR and China were at least an order of magnitude above.

I will not call an Anti-War activist Anti-American: No, nor was I. I was merely pointing out that many of these events were funded by the Soviets. Some of the participants had good intentions, and I even knew high military officials of the era who would admit that “the kids had a point.” Vietnam was a horrible operation and there were many valid reason to complain about it. The stream that I object to – and the one that was pursued by the Soviets – is the one that always blamed the West for everything and at the same time fully absolved the USSR. That is neither sensible nor honest.

Hope that helps clarify a bit.

PR

The USSR and Marxism – Can the USSR honestly be called a state of “serious Marxists” any more than the US could have ever been called a nation of serious free market capitalism and liberty? Sure, there were true believers but the nature of state is to use those that believe as means to an end, and that end is personal political power.

Anti-War Movement as an Anti-American Movement – Even if primarily funded by the Soviet Union, or by rich socialist with some sort of capitalist guilt (“Useful Idiots” like King Camp Gillette, or George Sorros), there is hardly anything less Un-American than an anti-war movement. Just like Iraq and Afghanistan, we had no need to be in Vietnam, the draft was (and is) slavery. I will not disown Abolitionists because they were Christian, weren’t anarchist, or didn’t share my economic view, I will not call an Anti-War activist Anti-American for the same reasons. I say bravo for taking their money and using to fight an evil, just as I say bravo to those who take Koch’s money and then fight the state.

Perhaps The Liberty Fund?