pes OMS Le
There are certain fundamental points which must be understood if any discussion about the war in Vietnam is to have value. The population of Vietnam has fought against foreign invasion and domination for bie Asal a years without respite. Two generations have grown up in Vietrem knowing only conditions of violence and occupation by oppressive troops. In every village in Vietnam the characteristic landmark was the guillotine and tens of thous~ ands of citizens were mutilated and executed for the sole reason that their loyalty was held in doubt by the occupier of the moments
Secondly, the basic characteristic of the American war in Vietnam has been experimental, In the name of "Special Warfare" great masses of the civilian population have been used for experiments in mass slaughter. Chemicals involving arsenic compounds have been used indiscriminately through~ out Vietnam by the United States. Toxic gases have been standard equipment of the puppet army, 59% of the rural population were placed in concentration camps under conditions of forced labour, perhaps the largest proportion of any national group to be subjected to such conditions, Within these camps, 300,000 secret police and army conducted dismemberment and disembowelment. In village after village pregnant women had their stomachs ripped before the gathered populace, When the French were defeated and the Americans, through their agents, began these practices for which the documentation is both available and overwhelming, there was no armed resistance for a period of five years. There are hundreds of villages in Vietnam in which mass burials of live people were carried out by the forces of Ngo Dinh Diem, financed and directed by the CIA. Students, Buddhists and children were buried up to their necks and decapitated. After suffering such atrocities which, both in character and scale, compare closely with the Nazi occupation of Hastern Europe, a guerilla struggle of resistance broke out in 1959. The struggle was primitive in that it depended on bows and arrows, bamboo spears and animal snares. Arms were only available through their capture from the enemy. Bear in mind the experimental character of this war and then realise that in one year alone, namely 1962, more than 50,000 air attacks on villages with napalm were carried out.
Napalm, a chemical, is a jelly gasoline which behaves literally as @ ball of fire burning all in its path, Napalm cannot be extinguished. Victims of napalm are unable to put out the fire, but become molten masses of fire until nothing remains, These weapons have been used by the U.S. against villages, schools and hospitals as a matter of policy, over and over again and throughout the country. A further chemical, phosthorous, acts as an acid, and has been used throughout the country. Phosphorous burns as does napalm, but phosphorous is a white cloud which envelops all with which it comes in contact. Experimental fragmentation bullets and shells have been employed. A bomb which is a container holding tenthousand steel darts has been used widely. Each steel dart is self-propelled and kills at a range of three hundred yards, Each dart is sharpened as a razor and slices all in its path. Each container holds tenthousand such darts, Hundreds of bombings missions have occurred in which these containers have been dropped indiscriminately over areas such as the Mekong Delta.
Why does the United States experiment in Vietnam? Because they consider this struggle to be the prototype of similar resistance throughout the pwerty stricken sections of the world, If they lose in Vietnam it is
continued/
possible for starving peasants to drive out industrial powers anywhere,
The other essential of the war in Vietnam is the fact that the United States
has viewed the Vietuam war primarily as a staging ground for war with China,
We have had all the evidence to which we are entitled, which is to say there
is no remote justification for further ignorance or further misunderstanding
of American intentions, The Director of the State Department Policy Planning
Board formulated Plan Six which called for the creation of an incident off
the ports of North Vietnam to provide a pretext for bombing further North.
After a period, further bombings were to be held. Any pause for the response
was planned to create additional pretext for bombings. The object is to
provoke China into resistance in order to be allowed to destroy her induste
rial centres and to remove her from the Twentieth Century, American
imperialism is aware that the emergence of China as a major industrial power
will be a death blow to the control by American capitalism of the under-
developed world and its resources,
To repeat: the two basic facts about this war are that it is experi-
mental in the manner of Spain and preparatory for an assault on China,
The United States has purposely and steadily increased the scale of
this ware President Johnson's electoral victory was overwhelming and there
was no obstacle to a settlement of the war if it was wanted by the United
States. The North was bombed because the United States wanted to bomb the
North and troops have been sent because the United States wants them sent.
This is the record. What does it teach us? It should teach us that American
words cannot be trusted because American actions betray them. The Peace
Movement has been deceived by words in a manner reminiscent of the 1930's,
"We seek no wider wars we wish not territory for ouselves" - President
Johnson, 19653 Adolf Hitler, 1939. The use of the language of peace to
camouflage acts of war is Hitlerian.
We must be clear, therefore, about why suddenly in April of this
year Johnson was prepared for negotiations which had always been refused,
The negotiations were advanced when 300,000 troops were blueprinted for
Vietnam. Wilson's Peace Mission was conceived in Washington, together with
bombings within thirty miles of the borders of China. In short, the negot-
iations proposed and the peace missions advanced are camouflage in a Nazi
sense for a policy of military adventure long prepared and long underway and
now fulfilled, When we ask the Vietnamese to negotiate, what, in fact, are
we asking them to do? When we acquiesce in peace missions, what do we expect
the Vietnamese to discuss = a sovereign state is being bombed and a foreign
army is invading the South, If 59% of the Americans had been placed in
concentration camps, if Americans had been subjected in their millions to
napalm, phosporous, gas, dismemberment, disembowelment, would we have the
arrogance to ask them to negotiate or talk peace while the perpetrators
ef these crimes were increasing the scale of them and pronouncing their
determination to remain in occupation. Let us clear - negotiations as
as advanced from Washington and peace missions as advanced by its
cat's paws are fraudulent because they do not require the cessation of the
aggression. On the contrary, this would permit the disintegrating puppet
army to regroup and thus in practice keep American troops in Vietnam
indefinitely. Do we not have the example of Laos next door? Have the
Chinese not been negotiating for fifteen years in Warsaw? These peace
missions have been advanced for one reasons to enable the United States to
say, "You see, we have tried everything but the Vietnamese and Chinese do
continued/
not want peace, Therefore we must ‘continue to bomb their hospitals and schools with napalm un+i1 death and desolation" (to use Johnson's words ) "preak their will to resist."
What is our responsibility? We have only one responsibility *- to stand together with the Vietnamese just as we stood with the French resistance to Hitler. There is only one solution to the war in Vietnam which is honourable and serious - that is the removal of American troopse This is the first condition for the acceptance of the international agreements already negotiated at Geneva in 1954. The responsibility of the left in this country is to show our solidarity with the just struggle of these people. We shall be told that it is impractical to demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops and so we must support peace missions. This is dangerous : talk. These peace missions are devices both to silence us and to legitimise ageression = that is the nub of the matter.
We do not want to discover a formula permitting the retention of U.S. troops under whatever guise, therefore why flirt with schemes which have this as their object? Our responsibility is to tell the truth about Vietnam, mobilise opposition to what is going on in more than a symbolic or romantic sense. We are all corrupted through being beneficiaries of exploitation. Our standards of living derive from the brutality in Vietnam and the underdeveloped world. It is only after these liberation struggles have been successful that it will cease to be possible to buy us off with the spoils of exploitation. Only when we begin to experience that exploitation, which we avoid experiencing because there are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans to be exploited, will conditions of struggle exist in Britain. All those who wish the defeat of the Nazis should wish the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam - that is the issue, Postscript
As we went to press we received the following press statement from Bertrand Russell; we feel that it is a logical sequel to the article above (itself, written by one of Bertrand Russell's secretaries) :
"The bombing of dams in North Vietnam is a horrible and vindictive attack on a civilian population. We know that serious consideration has already been given in the U.S. to the bombing of the Red River dykes for which the destruction of the dam is apparent preparation. If this happens, between 2 and 3 million people will drown, the rice crop will be destroyed, causing mass starvation, Is there no ounce of humanity left in this Government that it should fail to condem and publicly reject this barbarism?
A delegation to Prime Minister Wilson is being assembled quickly to demand that Britain should forcibly infozm President Johnson of its detestation of this wickedness, Among those who have already agreed to participate in such a delegation ares Iris Murdoch, Professor Wedderburn, Ruth Glass, David Glass, Ralph Miliband and Lord Silkin. Further names will be announced later,
Se Oe Se Oe SF Ee eS OE OS OF SE OS OD OS OE EE OO SS Os Oe Oe Oe OS Se Oe ee we ee ee ee ee ee Oe es Oe notes continued from page 9 at his desk in the Ministry of Fuel and Power, with a mandate to nationalise coal, electricity and gas, expecting to find detailed plans all ready. They were not. He had to start from scratch. Under this Government, despite all the noise about an integrated transport system, the new ministers have carried on in the grooves established by their predecessors, witness: rails and mines.