The call by the American anti-war movement for international disys of pretest on the weekend of the 25th-26th of March met with notable response in London, despite the country being in the midst of feverish last minute election activity. Most of the anti-war groups carried out some type of action. ; be ‘
On Saturday evening, the 26th, the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament organised a demonstration of over 1,000. which wound. its way through the West End, chanting slogans against the war in Vietnam. Whilst 1,000 demonstrators in a city the size of London is not very significant in itself, -ntvertheless it has to be appreciated when one understands that the anti war movement in this country, despite the escalation of the war in Vietnam, has been at a low ebb in recent months, The march is the first sign of an upturn, At the end of the demonstration a segment of the marchers attempted to demonstrate in front of the American Embassy, but the police were well prepared and at times actually outnumbered the protesters.
At the meeting on Friday evening at the London Welsh Association Hall, sponsored by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in conjunction with the American protest actions, there took place one of the clearest expressions of eriticisn of Wilson's policy and the whole conception that pervades the anti war movement here, that negotiations should be a focal point of the English anti war : movement's resistance to the war in Vietnam. The speakers were Robin Blackburn a leading participant in the publication, New Left Reviews; Raymond Williams, noted writer and author of 'Culture and Society! and 'The Long Revolution;' Ken Coates, of The Week and International Socialist Journal; Ralph Schoenmsn of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, who had recently returned from North Vietnam. The meeting was chaired by an American now living in London, author of the recent book, 'Free World Colossus,! Robin Blackburn, the opening speaker, related his experiences in Havana, where he attended the Tricontinental Conference as an invited observer for the Russell Foundation, He noted that the English press had virtually, in these closing days of the election campaign, eliminated all mention of Vietnam from its pages, almost ‘im deference to Mr, Wilson, One would almost conclude that there was no war going on. ‘Let's face it,! he said, ‘there wasn't much being said about it in the election. But we should try to make it an election issue by raising it at election meetings. Blackburn said he had met many of the young National Liberation Front fighters at Havana and they explained the nature and ferocity of their struggle. ‘the Conference! he said, ‘was an example of the widespresd resistance by the 'third World', against imperialism,! The picture related to him by the N.L.F, members was a general picture applicable to Latin America and Africa, a world wide. phenomenon that brings forth a world wide response. He mentioned the resistance movements in many countries, who never received attention in the western press, He called for the socialist movements in the imperialist countries to adopt positions of solidarity.
In his concluding remarks, he reported to the meeting that the National Liberation Front fighters. told him that the time might come in the future, when it would be necessary to send voluntesrs to Vietnam, even if only as a token gesture and in token numbers and that one of the things we might do in this country is to collect names in preparation for this,
Raymond Williams stated that for him it was significant that the meeting was taking place in the midst of an election. He said it was important to see the connection between the various struggles and their differing forms,
London Vietnam activity continued
Williams continued: "I'm glad I'm here tonight speaking from this >l
and that tomorrow night I will be speaking at «= Labour Party meeting, and
you know how dull that can be." The main problem with intellectual thinking
in the west, he went on, is that it does not see the historical necessity
for revolution, and here is where they fail in Vietnam. There has been an
institutionalising of brutality in the colonial world, he said, and a
considerable lag in liberal understanding of that brutality. "There are four
common positiors on Vietnam in this country,” he said, "not simply two; one
for and one against the Americans. On the one side there were two positions,
and on the left there are two basic positions. All on the American side:
one, there, is the position of containing communism; and, two, there is the
position that the strategy of containing communism is incorrect, but that the
Americans are doing it as the wrong time and in the wrong place."
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"He demonstrated the two positions on the left by relating his own experience
in February;. 1965, when he came down to London from Cambridge with a group
of students after they had collected several thousand signatures on a posit~
ion demanding negotiations. Then suddenly the Johnson line became the Wilson
line! We were left looking silly - getting down to saying what kind of
negotiationse....l now see the call for negotiations as a trick, while we
didn't put forward the position as a trick, but out of the best instincts,
eeeWe must go back to the argument about revolution and democracy. We in
England . tend to equate revolution with disaster, disorder, and we see it in
process. and we want to stop it," \/e must have a position, he said, of support
for the revolution. "We must see that violence is built into the system."
He quoted Tom Paine, who stated, when the rows of heads of the beheaded
royalty in revolutionary were pointed out to him: They are fighting with a
violence they have learned from those that have oppressed them,
In a sustained attack on the leadership's position on Victnam, Ken Coates
blitzed Wilson and company with the statements they had made on the wer in
Vietnam when they were in opposition, "Wilson talks deliberate lies," he
said, quoting Hansard and Wilson's speech to the 1965 T.U.C. "\/ilson lies
in his teeth when he uses Nye Bevan to bolster his argument of support for
the Americans, Bevan resigned from the shadow cabinet of the Labour Party
in order to influence policy. The tradition of the left was that of support
for the colonial revolution, and he quoted speeches by Bevan on the Chinese
revolution and Russian revolution to illustrate his case, He quoted statements
by members of the present Cabinet who had accused the Tories of supporting
the Americans in Vietnam because of American support for Britain's financial
set-up, He denounced those in the Cabinet.who used the small majority to
justify their acquiesence with Wilson's support for Johnson, Speaking of
Greenwood, he said, "How many times we marched behind7m the Easter March, when he used to make all those wonderful statements against the bomb and
against war?" In the Wilson Government, Greenwood has been in charge of a
department which ordered the using of gas against students in Bahrain, and many other misdeeds in the colonial world. A-last minute «speaker was Ralph Schoenman, He had come straight from his
journey to Vietnam and the United States, When in Vietnam he had collected
a great deal of documentary evidence of the criminal nature of the war in Vietnam which the Americans were waging. He had used this evidence in the defence of Dave Mitchell, in the U.S., who is refusing to be drafted on legal grounds under the Nuremburg statutes. This statutes define the American mthods in Vietnam as illegal under international law, the present U.S. leadership.were just as much war criminals as were the Nazis.
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A Recut TO TONY TOPHAM AND KEN TARSUUK from Unris Utiey My differences with Tony Topham and Ken Tarbuck appesr to concern (a) cur immediate political prioritiess (b) the relationship between "foreign" and "domestic" concerns; (¢) the utility of "single~issue" campaigning. I have never claimed that international issues are "prior" in any theoretical wnse (anymore than I would claim that domestic issues are theoretically prior. a merely ssserted that the international issues which confront us as socialists are more grave than at present on the home front. In view of the ever present threat of nuclear war, the attempts being made by the West to smash liberaticn movements, the deteriorating character of race relations throughout the world end the increasing immiseration of two-thirds of the world's population, I should have thought that this was a rather unexceptionable assertion. Admitting, of course, the very gross social evils still present within Britain, it none~ theless seems to me that socialists should address a good deal more energy and thought to these international problems than they are ourrently doing. Would Tony Topham and Ken Tarbuck care to deny that the Left at present is giving virtually no attention at all to the problem of nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Third World, and that its challenges to the Right on such scandals as the independent nuclear deterrent, East of Suez policy, the arms bill, Vietnam, Aden and Rhodesia has been feeble in the extreme? Would they care to deny, in short, that the Left offers no alternative socialist foreign policy? The foreign and domestic policies of any government are, of course, closely related both in the sense that very much the same political assumptions and ~ concerns often underly policy-making in these respective spheres and in the sense that the consequences of action in the one sphere are felt in the other. Nonetheless foreign and domestic concerns are different concerns - foreign "affairs" is obviously atout relations between states or sectiow of states and about the internal politics of other countries, Furthermore new factors are introduced in international issues which are not present (or are only felt very indirectly)in domestic politics. Thus the Americans are in Vietnam because of what they conceive to be a military threat to their attempt to "contain" Communism in Asia, because the liberation of South Vietnam would immeasurably weaken their political position throughout Asia, because the American nation is ideologically committed to a crusade against Communism in the name of "liberty", and so on, These motives cannot be deduced or derived from the internal policitics of the U,S.A. Likewise socialists have to recognise that we have to confront the arguments for these foreign commitments in the terms they occur ~ we merely "fudge" these issues by talking about the needs of the capitalist economy, etc. We must also recognize that there is a distinet possibility (especially under a Labour government) of advances being made on the home front whilst foreign policy remains as reactionary as ever. I am not indisolubly wedded to single~issue campaigning, but I certainly do not think it can be objected to because (a) it assumes the neutrality of the "state" - after all if we do not believe that we can influence the policies of non~socialist governments thenit is difficult to see how any of the reforms of the last fifty years have been achieved; (b) there is a much better tactic “working for socialism" - unfortunately we are presented now with specific evils and cannot defer the fight against these until the remote time when we assume "state power", Single issue campaigning is a poor tactic if we are offered anything better. Personally I would be delighted to join a movement or party which had a broad socialist programme and was fighting for it. Unfortunately no such movement exists. As the only groups which really fight on the issues which worry me are non-party “liberal-minded idealistic" pressure groups like CND, CARD,BCPV, and the Radical Alliance they will continue to ressive my smpport, Of course it would be wonderful if the "independent working class" was committed to these objectives as well, If it were then we would have a genuinely socialist labour movement and there would be no need of these pressure groups. Tut this is not an.
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