It is beyond doubt that the American Government is guilty of war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. We, in Britain, have a duty to expose and oppose this American aggression as well as the lies and complicity of Wilson, Brown and the Labour Government. As the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign has cogently argued, the most effective way in which we can show our opposition to imperialist aggression is by uniting with the resistance of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and with the North Vietnamese. There is no doubt that this policy is gaining more and more support in Britain. But, despite the daily evidence of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, our solidarity with the human targets of imperialist forces is frustrated. We are frustrated by policies of those on the 'Left' which can only be described as 'defeatist', 'capitulationist' and 'statesmanship'. As yet, the policies of the British Communist Party, C.N.D. and the Parliementary Labour 'Left' have mainly been confined to acting as public relations agents for U Thant's rontifications on Vietnam. How presumptuous such people are! Comfortable, complacent outsiders telling the heroic Vietnamese resistance what to do. We know how the British people responded to such outside interference when we were under - Nazi attack in the Second World War. We rightly rejected it. So now we shold not rally round the reactionary diplomatié advice of U Thant on Vietnam for the same reasons. We should not urge the Vietnamese resistance to come to any conference table on any terms but their own, Whatever political impact the Vietnam solidarity campaign can make in Britain, world opinion will depend on the Vietnam policies of the Communist countries, notably that of the Soviet Union. On his recent visit to Britain, Kosygin did not criticise the Labour Government's complicity in U.S. war crimes, neither did he pledge full solidarity with the Vietnamese resistance. (Kosygin did visit the City of London, Buckingham Palace and the Carlton Club). It was not surprising to hear Wilson say on television recently that he was sure that privately Kosygin would not want Britain to disassociate from U.S. actions in Vietnam, even though the Soviet I: ader may not say so publicly. No denial of Wilson's remarks has come from the Kremlin. It would seem that the small amounts of Soviet Union aid that do go to Vietnam are partly in response to the revolutionary noises from the People's Republic of China. We must not fail the Vietnamese resistance as we failed the Spanish in the 1930s. Johnson and the Pentagon are now intensifying the imperialist war. Socielists must respond by intensifying their own efforts in solidarity with the Vietnamese resistance, AN IMPORTANT CORRECTION from Tony Topham and Ken Coates.
An unfortunate misprint in our drticle las week made it say the opposite of what we meant: we wrote that it was important to separate "control" ideas from "participation" blandishménts: seizing the one in order to better attack the . other. We have no wish to attract participational support as the misprint implies - on the contrary we think it vital to draw a very sharp division: between workers’ control and domestication of unions in participation which we oppose.