The decision by your President [Penn Valley President Bernard Franklin] to remove the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and to replace it with the flag of the Republic of Vietnam is an insult to a people who have made great progress since the defeat of the American puppet government in 1975.

The RVN was a government known for corruption, atrocity, and instability. Recognizing it by flying its flag reduces history to a shoddy revisionism, based on the anti-communism of many whose nostalgia seems to have lost any reality. Does your college plan to replace other national flags with those of governments that no longer exist in order to please a constituency whose present reality is rooted in what was but no longer exists?

I suppose decades since the end of the American War have made fiction a fact in the minds of some. Removing the present flag of Vietnam is an example of silly pandering by your President. It certainly is insulting to nation of 82,000,000 Vietnamese in the present.

Kenneth J. Herrmann, Jr., LCSW, ACSW
Associate Professor, Dept. of Social Work
Director, SUNY Brockport Vietnam Program
Exec. Director, Danang/Quang Nam Fund, Inc.
http://www.AgentOrangeChildren.org
http://www.brockportabroad.com/vietnam/vietnam.html

For more information, see our story on the flag issue at Penn Valley.

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