James Groppi
James Groppi
A radical Catholic priest known by several designations as James E. Groppi, Father James Groppi, or incorrectly Reverend James Groppi, was a key leader of the far-left of the religious anti-Vietnam war protesters. In fact, he was one of the most extreme leftists of that group (Webber, Armstrong, Fernandez, D and ).
Groppi was a "civil rights leader" who worked in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, among the poor but his record of supporting communist fronts and causes was a significant one, which most of the media either ignored or didn't know about.
Groppi as a Viet Cong Supporter
In the Washington Star of August 12, 1968, in a small article entitled "Father Groppi Lauds Viet Cong", UPI, his true far-left identity came out in his own words. The whole article is reproduced below.
"The Rev. James Groppi, civil rights leader, has compared the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong resistance to American forces to America's struggle for independence from England."
"The white Catholic priest told a Hiroshima Day peace rally the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are struggling against foreign intervention and are trying 'to get foreign persons off their land'."
"Whether we like it or not, their struggle is much more courageous than our own struggle when we were trying to get England off our backs," he said. He called their effort 'nothing short of heroic'."
"The attitude of North Vietnamese toward U.S. troops is the same as the attitude in the Negro community toward white police who 'completely infiltrate' the community, Groppi said."
"He said the Vietnam war amounts to 'black people killing yellow people for white people who stole land from the Red people."
Groppi Lies About Vietnam Casualties
In a Washington Post article by Jonathan C. Randal, WP Foreign Service, entitled "Paris Rally Attacks Nixon", Versailles, France, Feb. 11, 1972, he wrote the following:
"Milwaukee priest James Groppi told reporters: 'We have killed more Vietnamese than Hitler killed Jews. We are tired of it. We are tired of us killing. We want out and don't care about conditions".
This was at the French Communist Party created/hosted "Paris World Assembly for Peace and Independence of Indochinese People", a basic creation of the Soviet KGB and the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Groppi was one of a number of American "religious" figure participants quoted in the Randal article (which was very informative and comprehensive).
Groppi's claim that we killed "more Vietnamese than Hitler killed Jews" was so off target of the truth that it should be ranked as either the rantings of a very mentally unstable person, or a deliberate disinformation effort. With Groppi, it looks like the former rather than the latter, because even the Soviets accepted the figure that the Germans/Nazis killed at least 6 million European Jews in their deliberate "Judenfrei" extermination campaigns during WW2.
Also, Soviet troops liberated many Nazi concentration and slave labor camps, including Auschwitz, so these liberators saw the bodies of those murdered Jewish people, as well as those of Gypsies (i.e., Roma and Sinti peoples), Russian POWS, Poles, and even Allied POWS including Americans.
North Vietnam has stated that they lost between 1.2 and 1.6 million people (i.e. soldiers) in the Vietnam War (including but not actually said for those killed in Laos and Cambodia, plus some in Thailand). [See the new website on Vietnam run by the "Vietnam Veterans for Factual History, at "www.VVFH.org", for details].
Groppi was known as a radical hothead even in the movement but his statements over time revealed that he had serious emotional problems, which is probably why he later ended up driving a cab in Milwaukee instead of remaining a parish priest.