from Alan Rooney The gist of my argument about U Thant's July 30th speech on Vietnam is that it does not help the anti-imperialist cause but that part of the Left still looks to U Thant for some kind of leadership on Vietnam, Alan Kinchin argues that the Left can and should latch on to that part of U Thant's speech which defines the Vietnamese struggle as "a war of national independence". I still disagree. I feel that such a polemic would add further confusions to the arguments about Vietnam, For example, if we try to persuade people to oppose the U.S. Government's policies by quoting the odd, progressively worded sentence from U Thant we can get into political trouble, We can only expect to have U Thant's more typical reactionary statements thrown back at us, When we argue that the U.S. should get out of Vietnam now we are in complete conflict with U Thant's policies, And 'U.S. get out of Vietnam now' is the key slogan of the October 22nd demonstration, This is right. It would be very confusing if we were to carry banners with slogans like ' U Thant says Vietnam is war of national independence’, This is not fanciful. U Thant has considerable influence on C.N.D., Left M.Ps, the British C.P. and ‘Tribune’ and these bodies might well spend much of their time trying to make a lot of U Thant's speeches, unless we can convince them of the need to campaign for a clear-cut anti-imperialist alternative. For instance, Stan Orme M.P. wrote in 'Tribune' (Sept. 8) that the delegation of six Labour M.Ps (Mikardo, Allaun, Atkinson, Mendelson, Russell Kerr and himself) went to the United States last week to urge, among other things, that the U.S. Government accept that "a negotiated peace settlement must be entered into based on the 1954 Geneva Agreement, with the ceasefire to be brought about along the lines courageously advocated on a number of occasions by U Thant",. Stan Orme added that: "we shall be speaking on your behalf". But he isn't. We have got to make it clear to this part of the Left that we are campaigning for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, And that is why we must take up the arguments of the N.L.F. and the North Vietnamese and avoid the diplomatic confusions of U Thant,
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