This extract — from testimony given at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation staged in the US by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971 — is part of the latest propaganda tool in the Left’s pursuit of George W. Bush and John Howard.

It features prominently in Nam Bang!, a new touring exhibition that “examines the consequences of the Viet Nam War from a generational and international perspective.’ In reality, it is a grubby pretext for aged Vietnam protestors to maintain the rage. And once again, Vietnam veterans are the pawns in their ideological battle against the West.

Van Thanh Rudd, nephew of Kevin and a notorious Howard hater, is one of the artists represented in Nam Bang! His most infamous work is titled “Genocide: The Australian Scream,” featuring an explosion-like montage with the heads of John Howard and George Bush and a burning Australian flag. His other artistic perversion, “Portrait of an Exploding terrorist” has seen him booted out of the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane and removed from the Trocadero Art Space in Footscray. This piece has now found a home at the Nam Bang! exhibition.

The painting shows a terrorist, bearing the head of Christ, exploding on the forecourt of the Opera House, under the flags of the US, Britain, Israel and Australia. On his website, Van Thanh Rudd describes the painting as “an attempt to illustrate the death and destruction, on a mass scale, that accompanies ‘western-style democracy,’ where its economic model of global capitalism relentlessly seeks to profit from ‘underdeveloped’ countries. I’m trying to express the terror that leading western ‘democracies’ inflict upon countries who attempt to defy this unsustainable, economic system.”

Looking down on Rudd’s deranged artwork is a montage of offensive, humourless cartoons depicting John Howard as a “miserable bastard selfish prick”. Such is art.

Nam Bang! is at the Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in western Sydney until June 21. The irony of Gough Whitlam’s old electorate hosting an offensive Vietnam exhibition has not been lost on former Vietnamese refugees. Whitlam did his damned best to stop them coming to Australia. As communist tanks rolled into Saigon he cabled the Australian embassy: “Locally engaged [Vietnamese] embassy staff are not to be regarded as endangered by their Australian embassy associations and therefore should not, repeat not, be granted entry to Australia.”

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” were to perish at sea in their bid to escape Whitlam’s new communist allies.

After the dismissal new Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, reversed Whitlam’s inhumane policy on Vietnamese refugees and offered them safe-haven in Australia.

It was a turbulent time in our history. Conscription and our involvement in the war provided the media with a daily diet of headline news. The new medium, television, beamed reports from the war-zone directly into our lounge-rooms. It provided a rich node of discontent for the Left to tap during our longest and most divisive military engagement.

Our diggers were caught in a classic military-political pincer movement. As the North Vietnamese army manoeuvred against them in Phuoc Tuy, province the political Left mobilised on the streets of our major cities. Heroic battles at Long Tan, Coral, Balmoral and Binh Ba were overshadowed by moratorium marches in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Unions refused to load ships and deliver mail for our troops. Returning veterans were greeted with abuse and mocked as “baby-killers”. They felt betrayed. Many took to the bush and the grog.

Private Mark Gladwell got a job with the Transport Workers Union. As he threw his old battle jacket into the truck, the union official noticed the shoulder flash with “Royal Australian Regiment” inscribed on it. “Where have you been?” asked the official. “Vietnam,” replied Mark. “Get out of the truck and get out of here,” bellowed the union official.

Mark took to the grog and fought his demons for years. His son, Sean, an accomplished artist, displays a work at Nam Bang! based on his father’s tattoos and bearing his regiment’s insignia. Along with contributions from a couple of other acclaimed artists, Sean’s work provides a mask of credibility for communist sympathisers, Islamic appeasers and Howard haters to continue their propaganda against our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Communist atrocities during the Vietnam War have been airbrushed from the exhibition. “Re-education camps,” where hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were tortured and brainwashed, don’t rate a mention. Some of the survivors of the camps stood in silent protest at the official opening of Nam Bang!

“George W Bush needed an ape without a brain. An ape who would sell his soul to the devil himself.” This is the caption of a cartoon showing a farting John Howard swinging from a tree proclaiming, “I’m king of the apes”. Obviously, nothing is sacred in the Left’s pursuit of Bush and Howard for their leadership in the war against terror.

Not even the reopening of the old scars of our Vietnam veterans.

A large rally of protesters waving Republic of Vietnam flags was an early indication of the veracity of the Ministers observations.

A traditional ‘burning of the dog’ ceremony was interesting and well received. Viewing a display by the son of a Vietnam Veteran, Sean Gladwell, was a highlight. His father Mark, is an old friend and it was great to catch up with him after many years. He had many demons to fight after the war.

I was transfixed on the haunting Image of a Dead Man by Ron Beattie. I have seen that jacket on many vets over the years. I moved past the paintings depicting the communist North Vietnamese stories and wondered if that was what the protest rally was about. I found them interesting and saw nothing in them that could offend.

I later realised it was what they didn’t depict that was offensive.

I then moved up to the largest, most visible wall that seemed to display cartoons of the war – a bit of light relief depicting our Diggers humour in Vietnam no doubt. Wrong. The entire wall was a crude, humourless, offensive display against John Howard.

What the hell has this got to do with the Vietnam War I thought? I knew the exhibition was about the aftermath of Vietnam but lampooning John Howard’s commitment to the war against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is a long bow. ‘George W Bush needed an ape without a brain. An ape who would sell his soul to the devil himself . . . you miserable bastard selfish prick’ captioned a farting John Howard swinging from a tree with one hand and holding a banana in the other. It got worse.

The artist was obviously deranged. I believe the curator erred by allowing his offensive bile to be put on public display. I would certainly not classify it as ‘art’.

Another display depicting the American soldier in Vietnam was equally ‘confronting’. ‘He went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut her vagina almost all the way up, just about to her breast, and pulled her organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them away. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there . . . as a sign of something or other’.

‘Wait a minute’, I thought. ‘What about the atrocities committed by the Communists against the South Vietnamese to ‘encourage’ them to join the Viet Cong? ‘

And what about the great work of our Uc-Dai-Loi [Australian]Civic Action Teams?

And why display the worst of the American atrocities? Obviously because there is no evidence of any Australian atrocities committed. At least the American perpetrators were publicly exposed and dealt with under their democratic system. Communists don’t have such a system – they just shoot the whistle-blowers! It’s a fundamental difference between communist and democratic societies.

The Communist atrocities have obviously been airbrushed from the exhibition. Now I was beginning to understand the reasons for the rally outside.

Communist ‘re-education camps’ are also a serious aftermath of the war for many Vietnamese living in Australia. A number of ‘graduates’ bearing the physical and emotional scars of years of torture in these camps feel betrayed by the exhibition. Some were standing quietly in the rally against the exhibition.

So back to John Howard. If they were going to lampoon him, what about Gough Whitlam?

Cabinet papers released over recent years reveal the extent to which Whitlam went to appease the Communist government in North Vietnam. Whitlam would not allow Vietnamese refugees or ‘boat people’ to come to Australia. He even betrayed the Vietnamese who worked for our embassy. “Locally engaged [Vietnamese] embassy staff are not to be regarded as endangered by their Australian embassy associations and therefore should not, repeat not, be granted entry to Australia,” was the shameful instruction he sent just before the fall of Saigon.

After Whitlam’s dismissal Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser reversed that inhumane decision and provided safe-haven for thousands of Vietnamese refugees, or ‘asylum seekers’ in today’s parlance. John Howard was a key member of the Fraser government when that decision was made.

If it was not for Malcolm Fraser and John Howard there would not be a Vietnamese community in Australia. There would not be any ‘aftermath’ from the Vietnamese artists to display. This is not depicted in the Nam Bang exhibition.

I am not an art critic and I tried to keep an open mind about the exhibition and what it was supposed to represent. But I left with the strong feeling that the exhibition was a crude front for communist sympathisers, Islamic apologists and Howard haters. Association with the war in Vietnam gives them a perverted relevance they would never otherwise have.