'AMERICA AND CRISIS': An Exchange of Views:

...It is shocking that he would have the audacity to speak of that por-tion of South Vietnam governed by the Thieu clique as being "a remarkably unregimented and free society," merely on the word of a Times dispatch...

...Where was Novak the Christmas of 1972 as American B-52's visited one of many real bloodbaths upon the Vietnamese people...

...policy in 1975 was of a wholly different order, on a different moral plane entirely...

...the endgame was a massive invasion of the North Vietnamese army, equipped by Russia...

...Freedom of speech, political dissent, and civil rights are not now practiced there more than before...

...He would have us reinstitute the Domino Theory in all its tarnished glory...

...MICHAEL NOVAK...

...Neither your strength nor your words, Michael, in-spires fear...

...I was sickened, it is true, by the cruel Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972...

...But to point to that one example even is not enough, for there is shame upon the last ten, if not thirty, years of our history...

...1. He's ashamed of the U.S...

...It is true that some of them actually believed in the cause of Ho Chi Minh and thus were (and are) blind to the monstrous atrocities perpetrated by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong...

...Israel should be scared to death that she has us for an ally, when this is the company we foster...

...However, the list of his false state-ments, based as they are on such fla-grantly deliberate misinformation, is too long to go unanswered...

...Still, there are exceedingly few democracies in this world...

...To the Editors: Since I am also prone to making passionate statements, I am in no position to criticize Michael No-vak on his diatribe, "America and Crisis," in your May 9 issue...

...Some call nations of relative freedoms and justice the sources of op-pression, which must be subverted and overcome, and call regimes that are frankly, openly, and publicly in denial of civil liberties, democratic procedures, a free press, and all the other basic human liberties, examples of "libera-tion" whose victories we ought to celebrate and assist...

...ring like rare common sense...

...Indeed, that is all Novak does in his article-take on the role of apologist for "the best and the brightest," a group of which he is obviously a member as much as he would like us to think him a neutral outsider...

...Nor does the usual editor when he dignifies the prominent spaces of his periodical with an essay that should have been relegated to the letters-to-the-editor section...

...3. He describes the Americans and their Vietnamese supporters as the good guys and the Viet Cong, North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge as the bad...

...Of course, neither they nor Tbieu believed this and were bolstered in their misconception by Nixon's secret agreement with Thieu, as Lyndon Johnson had done secretly before Nixon...

...Novak and others on the right ought indeed to be ashamed of America for what it did in southeast Asia...

...If American foreign policy is in trouble in the aftermath of the "fall" of south-east Asia, it is because that policy has been wrong and not because America was prevented from completely destroy-ing the area in order to "win" the war there...

...Never so ashamed...

...He writes that the government chose "high technology and heavy armaments, instead of small cadres and rifle power, as the instru-ment of strategy...

...Thankfully, there are some cool heads in Congress like Mc-Govern and O'Neill, plus millions of resolute people in the many areas of the peace and equal rights movements who are not about to let our country be sold forever to the militarists and the multinational robber barons who have had their way with our government for so long...

...Should the war have been supported at all...

...The Vietnamese may have had enough of war, and may know recon-ciliation, without becoming as gray and lifeless as Eastern Europe...

...I write this reply from Israel...

...A certain skepticism about this does them honor...

...To the Editors: When I read Michael Novak's piece on the end of the war [May 9], I was again reminded of how unfortunate it is that he seeks to pub-lish his views in a journal which has always been known for its clear moral vision...

...This is not to say that some of the opponents of the war are above criti-cism...

...I write it after attending the Slovak World Congress in Rome, and listen-ing to exiles from around the world describe the political situation both in Eastern Europe and in their new lands...

...at the end of his column, it can only be said that it was worthy of Spiro Agnew...

...Even in 1975, I get the impression that Novak only thinks the United States government miscalculated or used the wrong contingency plan in Indochina, not that our government was criminal, immoral and imperialist...

...All others were in danger of ending up in the tiger cages...

...It would be a large act of faith to assume that today there is greater freedom in South Vietnam than there was under Thieu...

...At the end, no popular uprising or Viet Cong revolt ended South Vietnam's independent history...

...5. Yes, he's right in saying that few peoples trust our government anymore...

...Does he not realize that the horrors which struck him so in March 1975 were the daily reality of life in Vietnam long before that reel of film was taken in March 1975...

...Novak writes of the New York Times as if it was gospel, or even revelation...

...contractors), not our it's and pilots...

...he would, apparently, have our militaryeconomic might continue to support the dictatorships that exist or existed in South Korea, Portugal, South America, for example...

...Is this to say that our motives were nice, but our methods too messy...

...And that made the hundred year struggle too brutal to support...

...If we who are members of the same social and educational elite in the U.S...

...GARY MITCHELL Minneapolis, Minn...

...I never thought I would read the words of such a craven apologist for the terror in the Vietnam ruled by Saigon in the pages of Commonweal...

...And that is how it should be...

...Some make it seem as though the white race is the deepest source of moral and political evil on this planet, rather than as though it is involved in human evil as thoroughly as the other races, while yet having at least one cultural achievement to its credit: the establishment of the relatively most democratic and free political institu-tions on this planet, which set the standards of practice that others emu-late...

...That is the ques-tion...

...My correspondents believe that they have been and are now defending a position that is moral, honorable, rea-sonable, and on the side of liberty and justice in the world...

...It will not do to attempt to por-tray the numerous manifestations of the corruption of South Vietnam's ruling elite as harmless signs of that country's freedom...

...after all, what dictator ever paid attention to any legislature...

...If South Vietnam was indeed a "remarkably unregimented and free so-ciety," it was so only for those who engaged in no political activity opposed to Thieu's government...

...Novak applauds...

...government for running out on the South Vietnamese...

...2. He claims that our government, plus the right and the left, turned callously away from the humanity of the South Vietnamese people...

...Novak does not understand what is happening in this country or in the world anymore and he is upset...

...And I say thank God...

...People rebelling against tyranny and imperialism fright-en him...

...I am also tired of Novak constantly obfuscating the place from which he speaks and try-ing so desperately to assume the posi-tion of objective, pained and neutral observer...

...so widely differ in our grasp of reality, how can we calculate how those not educated in our way nor by our media -Russians, Arabs, North Vietnamese, Chileans, Nigerians, Lithuanians, etc.- interpret Vietnam of March, 1975...

...All the foundation money in the banks of his benefactors cannot provide a clue if he does not take his own advice and "smell the air and see...

...CHARLES F. KLINOER Worcester, Ma...

...As for Novak's vicious and repre-hensible attack on the news media (a scapegoat in the making...

...For Novak does not like the prospect of a revolutionary world...

...I'm sure your readers can add up the body counts quite accurately in order to de-termine which race has been doing most of the killing of peoples, all col-ors, over the past 30 years, or whose weapons have been supplied to the kill-ers...

...In taking a position that is both/and rather than either/or, and in trying to maintain a certain objectivity, I believe myself to be standing in the best tradi-tions of the Commonweal, accepting wholesale the ideology neither of the Right nor of the Left...

...Would M. Novak like all this suffering and destruction and blood-profit to continue...

...6. And, the kind of foreign policy M. Novak prefers has infected many of us with its cancer: of seeing "national in-terest" in every place and situation that are really none of our business, of closing our doors to the remnants who came as refugees and accomplices from Cuba and South Vietnam, of paranoia that we must somehow restore our im-perial primacy in some irrational, frantic fashion...

...I concede that...

...But more to the point still, does Novak not realize why he saw what he did upon television...

...But it is certainly unfair to imply, as Novak does, that the "peace movement" as a whole was unconcerned about the peo-ple of South Vietnam who did not want to live under the Viet Cong...

...Your readers can also determine quite easily that the peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds are the vic-tims of the carnage now...

...My dismay at the disorderly collapse of U.S...

...Was that what our own Revolution was all about...

...On the anti-war left, as in these letters, self-congratulation a-bounds, and self-criticism is a virtue more highly praised than practiced...

...It disturbs me even more to realize that they may be correct who say that that bombing, more than any-thing else, persuaded the North Viet-namese to negotiate as until then they had refused to do...

...It was the peace movement of the left that finally convinced enough citizens and Congressmen to stop the bombing and the wasting and the killing of an entire civilization...

...Isn't it painfully obvious to even Massah Novak that our billions in military equipment and thousands of military people couldn't thwart the revolutionary aspirations of the majority of Asian peoples...

...By contrast, the opinions expressed by my correspondents seem to me to be in the service of reaction: contributing to the spread of authoritarianism, injustice, brutality, and terror which relentlessly cover this planet like a shroud...

...I am more concerned about the meaning of Vietnam in such places than in Worcester, New Brunswick, and Min-neapolis...

...Many cannot stand it when the criti-cism they so freely dispense to others is turned upon themselves...

...What I gather he is really saying is that our frail democracy, with its light shining around the world, is sustained only by military might willing to pro-tect and enlarge its economic interests and power...

...Acts of inhumanity which were making huge profits for our capitalistic economy, for our "tiger-cage" builders, for our multi-national, military-industrial complex have come home to roost in inflation, unemploy-ment and galloping welfare costs...

...I believed it became immoral when its means be-came disproportionate to its ends...

...Novak's criticism of the idealization of North Vietnam by some of the war's opponents did not prevent him from idealizing the situation in South Viet-nam...

...they voice the conventional wisdom of the "movement left," both in its pente-costal (Dick, Mitchell) and in its sober (Klinger) wings...

...Our republic is not "in greater danger than at any time in forty years," unless Michael has over-heard some plotting against our nation from amongst his benefactors, a group whose words he speaks when he says "we ought to steel ourselves for worse to come...

...I never believed that the United States intervention in Vietnam was in and by itself morally wrong...

...4. Eerily, he proposes that our government revive its bankrupt policy of Pax Americana and the role of world policeman until the Third World grow up to "liberty," American-style...

...The generals and their wealthy patrons may have been free to be degen-erates, but the rest of the population was strapped with the yoke of support-ing the moneyed classes and their war...

...The people of America, though, can ready themselves for cele-bration in the revolutionary spirit of 1776 and join in the Vietnamese peo-ple's triumph over tyranny and im-perialism with the knowledge that we, as a people, in the last ten years have begun to reclaim our revolutionary heritage in the resistance we as Ameri-cans waged to the policies of a cor-porate and military elite...

...It is therefore simply not a morally tenable position to stand in the middle, as Novak does, and criticize those who opposed the war along with those who prosecuted it...

...DANIEL E. DICK Reply It may be that everything my cor-respondents write is correct: None of the points they have raised is original...

...It is almost beyond my ability to control my anger when I hear such pathetic and calculated statements...

...That Congress nullified this with the War Powers Act meant little to Thieu and his gang...

...Is this the s'ort of leader Mr...

...What dualism is this that separates form and content...

...But there is a larger point...

...In not a single communist nation, including North Vietnam, does a democracy ex-ist...

...Still, the manner of the American departure from Vietnam was both shameful and ominous...

...From abroad, the words of Solzhenitsyn in the U.S...

...But since in political matters it is impossible to know for certain whose analysis of the situation is in fact correct, moral, and intelli-gent, maybe their attack on my rea-sonableness, morality, and grasp of reality is more to be believed than mine on theirs...

...The truth about our involvement in Vietnam is that it was, from beginning to end, wrong by any moral stand-ard worthy of the name...

...I resent as well Klinger's accusation that I speak from the Right...

...Yes, Michael, you have smelled the air and seen, but you can no longer cloud our eyes and "shroud the world in gray" with your duplicitous words and disingenuous posturing of crisis...

...For God's sake, let us stop...

...Unfortunate-ly, they were not entirely unthinkable to the ones prosecuting the war...

...Besides, it became clear to "peace move-ment" types somewhat earlier than it did to other folks that the means needed to achieve the end of saving some people from the Viet Cong were so grossly evil as to be unthinkable...

...One of the high moral costs of the war in Vietnam, indeed, is the new and rigid orthodoxy which has grown up among those who now wrongly think of themselves as constituting the Amer-ican Left...

...I never believed Thieu an admirable leader nor the only alternative in South Vietnam...

...For it is spring, a time of rebirth, a blossoming of change...

...In his land, less free than ours, there were considerably more freedoms than in many others, including North Vietnam...

...Perhaps M. Novak would have been more at home on a nice Southern plantation, with lots of restless slaves and a covey of Southern belles to despair with him over the coming of Emancipation and the end to Aryan privilege...

...Does he not realize that "the interpretive elite" of which he writes- and of which he fails to see he is a member-are telling us "what is hap-pening and what is yet to be" in Viet-nam for their own purposes and from their very real points of view...

...an exchange of views 'America and Crisis' New Brunswick, N.J...

...Fact: the Buddhist church refused consistently to join the Viet Cong, and a vast majority of the Vietnamese also refused, even when they could have...

...I am grateful that my correspond-ents call me by my first name, and speak to me as a friend...

...In such an ortho-doxy, morality is not only excessively clear but has put even the large, vague things exactly backwards...

...Will he never stop speaking with the editorial "we" or talking of "usr Novak writes that he was "never so ashamed of America as during the last days of March, 1975, watching the long lines of refugees, the infants, the par-ents, the broken armies...

...Sorry for the passion in response, but I don't think this was what Rein-hold Niebuhr had in mind at all, when he protested for liberty...

...The out-look for liberty on this planet seems to me bleaker than at any time since the 1930's-and more subtly dangerous...

...There is nothing to be valued in being fearsome...

...World conflict arises because perceptions-and interests-are not in harmony...

...He ignores the fact that the 1973 Paris Agreement made it absolutely clear to them that they were going to have to survive on their own with only our monumental materials (plus our military/technical support thenceforth disguised as civilian employees of U.S...

...yes, Michael, it is you who are frightened, not necessarily us...

...I can't believe that Mr...

...The point is that the number of people so attached to us as to be possibly endangered by a Viet Cong takeover increased with our deepening and lengthening involvement...

...I do resent Mitchell's innuendos about "benefac-tors...

...Perhaps it will be perceived that the American people are not the same as the American gov-ernment, and that the people's love- a love of life, liberty, peace and yes equality-inspires a strength with which we were able to resist the words of fear spoken by "the best and the brightest," by our government and by those like Michael Novak...

...Really...

...If they did not like the Americans, they did not like the opposite option, either...

...When I visited Vietnam briefly in 1967, many described to me how it felt to be between the hammer and the anvil, as they put it...

...If there is any one time that I can point to being most ashamed of America it was then...

...I consider my-self thoroughly a man of the Left...

...I think they are dreadfully mistaken...

...Why should they, when what we proclaim as dire consequences for our "allies"-should they lose-turns out to be something quite different...

...It is not plain that the democracies of Western Europe, Japan, Israel and a pitifully few other bright spots on this planet will survive until 1984, or that the United States will be a free nation thirty years from now...

...the nature of that collapse was of greater moral consequence to the world than any prior episode...

...I do not think that those who opposed the war have to answer for losing it or for the consequences of losing it...

...Novak has forgotten the past decade's history so inhumanely...

...Indeed, the level of illusion, falsehood, misinformation, propaganda, na'ivet6 and moral callous-ness in them is so high I hardly know how to respond...

...Perhaps, Novak's mantle of machismo has slipped...

...But they must not be permitted to shame those who opposed the war...

...He is afraid that neither "our strength nor our word inspires fear...

...I held a job with the Rockefeller Foundation for twenty months, worked hard, built a new program, and re-signed as planned eight months ago...

...Thus, to say that Thieu was a dic-tator is not to say he was untypical of the vast majority of the world's ISO leaders...

...But perhaps we, as a na-tion, do hold out something new to the world-the example of a people turn-ing their rulers back from a policy of death and destruction...