Võ Văn Ái

[5][6] A specialist on human rights and religious freedom, he contributed frequently to reports and testimonies to the United Nations, U.S. Congress, and European Parliament.

[9] In August 1968, the New York Review of Books published a letter from Ái about American aircraft dropping napalm on Saigon.

[12] He played a key role in drawing world attention to human rights abuses under the country's Communist regime.

Ái has described Communism as a "nihilistic" system built on negative aspects of Western philosophy that "produces a species of slavery," which is to say "living according to the dreams of others and following the orders of others."

Communism drains human beings of creativity and destroys their relations with individuals, with the world, with other species, and with the universe.

[10] Ái found it frustrating that Western intellectuals and activists who had marched in the streets against U.S. involvement in Vietnam "remained silent as thousands of Vietnamese died in reeducation camps or drowned on the South China seas."

Critics of U.S. involvement in the war, he later wrote, "could not admit that the 'heroic' freedom fighters of yore had turned into tyrants, and the 'henchmen of US imperialists' were now the victims."

[13] In October 2013, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by ÁiVan Ai about Vietnam's "brutal crackdown on free speech," which coincided with a major diplomatic offensive.