| I speak to you today from Hanci as one American to another. Like you I _ love my country and like you I believe in justice and human freedom. _ Brothers- you know what kind of war we are fighting against the people of Vietnam. It is barbaric, It is an aggressive war of conquest that . - all of us hate and few of us understand. When we fought for our own _ independence and freedom, no-one had to tell us what it was atout or draft us to make us fight. And we didn't have to go 10,000 miles. We ' fought in our revolutionary war against foreign troops, mercenaries and Benedict Arnold. We had only pitch-forks and muskets and we hid in forests and fields. We were rag-tag and the occupiers were the strongest army of that day. We were hungry and poor, We fought them house by house and farm by farm. . that war was our war of liberation. They said we were terrorists. We, Americans, in our own towns and villages} And they, the colonial occupier, they were the ones calling us rebels and rabbleee. Who came thousands of miles over the sea to-kill and destroy? The British did it to us and we are doing it to the Vietnamese. Who shows that. } heroism, that love of country, that deep belief in freedom and justice | which is more powerful than any weapon ever made? We did in 1776; the ‘| people of Vietnam do today. We are fighting the same war against them that the Nazis did against the people and for the same reasons. Let me quote from the New York Times of Feb,12th,1950: "Indo-China is a prize worth a large gamble. In the North are exportable tin, tungsten, manganese, coal, lumber and rice; rubber, tea, pepper and hides. Even » before World War II Indo-China yielded dividends estimated at 300 million dollars per year." Sisenhower said in 1953: "If Indo-China goes, the | tin and tungsten’we so greatly value would cease coming. We are after _) the cheapest way to prevent the occurence of something terrible- the loss of our ability to get what we want gnom the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory and from south-Jast Asia." eee _ So we are the cannon-fodder. We are the ones they deceive into killing ) Vietnamese, attacking, occupying, using gas and chemicals, bombing their '| schools and hospitals- all this horror to protect the empire of our rich "| men, They ow 60% of the world's resources, That's the real and only - reason we pour out 60billion dollars on aris. That's why we occupy _ countries everywhere and keep over 3,000 bases on other people's soil and invade every country which tries to free itself as we did in 1776, ° We invade Vietnam, Dominican Republic, Congo and set up mur stooges . everywhere. The men who sit in the Pentagon and push the buttons- they're _ the ones who sit on the boards of directors and sign those military — | contracts- for themselves, They send us out here as company cops - ' protect their stolen proportyee.e I've travelled all through North Vietnam while the bombs were falling. Let | me tell you this. We're bombing every hospital and sanatorium, every school, every church, I've seen the people who were strafed running out’ of hospitals, the old-age homes, on crutches, Red Cross flags were flying on the buildings. We are using lazy ogs which slice-up kids in villages. from one end of the country to another. We're using poisons, we are using gas and that. gas is poison and we know it. It kills our own soldiers even when they wear gas masks, And we're using chemiclas which kill people as well as destroy their food, And those tin-pot Hitlers in Saigon have put millions of people in concentration-camps under our orders.
Cont'd over... J