What attitude should the Vietnam protest movement in the United States have towards the American army? Should the militants refuse to go into the army? These were the themes of Fred Halstead's speech in Caxton Hall, London, on Wednesday, Sept. 18th. He had just visited Saigon along with Barry Shepherd, editor of the American Militant. The meeting was organised by the International Marxist Group. Halstead, a revolutionary socialist and Socialist Workers' Party candidate in the forthcoming presidential election in the United States, is a prominent figure in the New York anti-war movement.
He told the audience of how the anti-war movement in the United States had reached a crisis of not knowing where to go next. "Millions have moved into opposition," he said, "with probably a majority of the population being opposed to the war in one way or another, there have been some of the largest demonstrations on any question or at any time, and yet all this has not stopped the war."
He spoke about the wide impact of the Vietnam war upon the United States and the changes that have taken place because of the war. "It has created a revolutionary process," he said. "The United States is freer today than it [illegible] before the second World War, for the exchange of controversial views and ideas." In contrast to when he first became a socialist, he said, literature stalls selling a wide range of socialist literature are now to be seen in all major colleges. This is a direct result of the Vietnam war and the movement that has grown up around it. "This freedom was not given from on high, but it was taken in struggle." he said.
The [illegible], he went on, is presently limited to [illegible] people... "It has to spill out to other sections of the population before it will have a decisive impact. 100,000 students cannot stop the war. Activity must be spread to those sectors of the [illegible] community which could stop it. 100,000 truck-drivers could stop the war if they mobilised against it; and so could 100,000 soldiers. The problem is to spread it into the working class." With the exception of the black population, this was extremely difficult, he said. But there is one possibility - the G.I.s, the majority of whom are working class.
The choice for young people who are opposed to the war, when they are faced with the draft, is to go to prison or to leave the country, maybe for life. This takes them out of the resistance to the war. He showed how the potential had changed now that the draft boards had begun to remove deferments for graduates - the young people who have been through the radicalisation of the past few years. "The mixture of the young college activist with the blacks and poor whites is explosive." he said.
"It was to demonstrate these possibilities," he said, "that we went to South Vietnam. When we talked about going to Saigon, people told us that this would be foolish - they said we would be killed or have a bullet in our backs. We were not risking our lives as far as the G.I.s were concerned," he stated. "We knew the opposition was wide among G.I.s as it is in the [general] population."
He told how they went to Saigon like a couple of tourists, and were not stopped, either because the American authorities did not want the embarrassment of stopping someone who was a presidential candidate, after having had the capitalist politicians there; or the South Vietnamese government is in such a state of confusion, it does not know what it is doing.
"We talked to individual soldiers wherever we could meet them. We went along the streets passing out leaflets, in bars, into service clubs and onto a large base.
"We found a minority of G.I.s for the war," he said, "and a larger minority were against, and the bulk were confused. There was no hostility from G.I.s. The only real trouble they got into was in a bar in Saigon, when a white soldier sparked off a fight after making a racist remark about a black G.I. who was speaking to Fred. A fight ensued.
[illegible] Halstead went on to say [illegible] outside the United States: it begins with opposition to [illegible] the imperialist system." [illegible] understanding of [illegible] general.
In his conclusion he brought to the attention of the audience, the recent developments among GI's against the war, (see other article). He mentioned that a very important demonstration of GI's was scheduled in San Francisco on October 12th. The audience showed great interest in several GI anti-war papers which are published inside the army.
Halstead explained how there is an extremely tense atmosphere and it is not excluded that there will be a racial explosion. "The war exacerbates all the problems of U.S. society," he explained.
After leaving South Vietnam, he went to Thailand where he stopped off in Bangkok. "If anyone wants to know why the U.S. is fighting in Vietnam they should go there," he said. "If you walk down-town, you see the names of American, West [German] [illegible] all grafted [illegible].
He related an incident in Japan where Halstead and Shepherd attended an anti-war conference where he took issue with Emrys Hughes, M.P. who had spoken at the conference to the effect that he hoped that U.S. would see the light like Britain and give up its colonial holdings. Fred pointed out that in fact Britain was still imperialist: all that had changed was that the U.S. had become the world's cop.
"This condition," Halstead said, "requires the U.S. to spend eighty billion dollars on military overseas expenditure. It is the reason for the permanent draft. The draft was not always permanent, but it is now."