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The Vietnam war will go down as one of the great epics of history. The people of a small under-developed country have taken on and defeated in turn Japanese, French and, now, U.S. imperialism. The struggle has been truly of David and Goliath proportions. U.S. imperialism is the mightiest military force the world the world has ever known-yet despite all its technical "know-how" the most sophisticated weapons, hundreds of thousands of armed men and the use of most inhuman methods it has been quite unable to beat the Vietnamese peasantry and their armed vanguard. Of course, capitalist propaganda tries to paint a different picture: the Americans are merely trying to save South Vietnam from the aggressors of the North, it claims. They seek to "save" the south in a very strange way: by turning whole areas of what is normally the most lush vegation in the world into desert, by bombing to the ground hundreds of towns and villages and by putting millions of people into resettlement areas which are remarkably like huge concentration camps.
The North Vietnamese and NLF have been able to run rings round the Americans for one basic reason: they have combined a struggle for national independence with a social revolution. The social revolution has consisted of destroying the old landlord system, which brutually exploited the mass of Vietnamese peasantry, and the socialisation of what large industry there is in the liberated zones and the North. While the Vietnamese liberation forces have not created organs of mass workers and peasants democracy, there are innumerable committees organising people in the streets, farm cooperatives, factories, etc. This gives the revolutionary armies very deep roots in the people. This is the basis of the guerrilla armies of the NLF. This is why the army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the North) has inflicted such huge defeats on the Saigon forces in recent months.
The dragging our of the Vietnam war and the growing antiwar movement (the most important aspect of which has been its development in the army) forced the U.S. administration to go in for "Vietnamisation". This policy consists of the Americans gradually withdrawing their land forces (whilst stepping up bombing, etc.) and handing over land fighting to the puppet forces of Thieu. This policy has been a complete failure as the military events of the last period have shownareas populated by millions of Vietnamese have been liberated because the puppet army virtually fell to pieces. The American response was typical-the resumed bombing of the north. This is difficult to imagine in Britain, The blitz, which some of us can remember, pales into insignificance by its side. Only the atom bombing of Japan has involved the use of a comparable explosive power. The bombing is not aimed primarily to ellect the military struggle. The Americans have learnt that they cannot win the war on the ground that way. It is aimed to lay North Vietnam waste so that pressure is put on the Vietnamese leaders to call of the struggle in the south. Thus its targets are not primarily military they are the factories, the dams, the hydroelectric plants, the houses, hospitals and even schools. This is why the Americans have introduced plastic fragmentation bombs these being designed to make proper medical treatment impossible because X-rays cannot detect plastic. This bombing has a wider aim: to teach the peoples of the world the price of defying US imperialism. However, there is little reason to think that the Americans will succeed in this the Vietnamese have fought too long to be intimidated just now and even if they wanted the leaders of the North would have the greatest difficulty in getting the huge numbers of armed peasants in the south to lay down their orms. But having said this, we need to do what we can to solidarise ourselves with the Vietnamese people. In trade union struggles, student struggles and women's liberation struggles we have learnt that unity is strength. It is the same in the international struggle against capitalism. It was the fight of the Vietnamese people (along with that of the Cubans, Chinese, Koreans, etc.) which stimulated the growth of the radical youth movements in the west, (these in turn said the basis for the start of such things as the women's liberation movement). The anti-imperialist movements of the west have helped the Vietnamese too apart from the effect on morale, these struggles have helped to build the anti-war movement in the US army.
There is another more pressing reason for us to continue with solidarity activities. The main danger to the struggle of the Vietnamese people now comes from the pressure being put upon them to make a compromise by the leaders of Russia and China. This is why Nixon went to Peking and Moscow: If anyone doubts that the Russian and Chinese leaders are working for a compromise -let them remember the way Nixon was toasted as "a great representative of the American people", in Peking and Moscow at exactly the time he stepped up the war in Indo China. The Vietnamese have painful memories of being persuaded to make compromises. They had actually liberated nearly all of Vietnam in 1954, but the Vietminh army withdrew to the North. They were promised elections to unify the country (which Eisenhower said Ho Chi Minh would win with 90% of the votes), instead landlordism was re-imposed in the South and the Americans stepped in to put down the peasant revolts against landlord brutality.
This is why it is necessary to have a clear political line-for victory of the Indo Chinese people against US imperialism. It is totally inadequate just to call for peace Nixon would like peace! But there are different kinds of peace. We must support the kind of peace the Vietnamese people want-one in which they are able to re-build their country without imperialist interference. We do not call for peace in a strike-we proclaim our solidarity with the strikers. We want them to win and we tell the world that because that is the best line to take, It is the same principle in the Vietnam war-by going on the the streets saying that we stand for victory for the Vietnamese revolution we make it harder for the Russian and Chinese leaders to force a compromise. By taking the solidarity line we best explain to people the real nature of the war-this not only helps the Vietnamese, it also helps us to build a revolutionary movement.