AMERICA AND CRISIS:
Novak, Michael
AMERICA AND CRISIS MICHAEL NOVAK In the late 1930s, the peace move-ment in the U.S. was triumphant. Magnificant rallies rocked the nation's campuses. No one wished to hear again of war. In this...
...So unwelcome were his contributions in The Chris-tian Century that he felt obliged to found a journal of his own, called Christianity and Crisis...
...and "in-cidents" in Berlin...
...In recent months, remarkably, no one has written of the Vietcong...
...Faulty as our sys-tem is, no other remotely approaches it in liberty...
...the rise of guerrilla activity again in Malaysia...
...No one cared about our allies, mothers and fathers, grandparents and children, who had compromised their lives because they preferred a way of life like ours and trusted us...
...We need that Reinhold Niebuhr now...
...Americans did leave an ally in the lurch...
...Liberty has never been so threatened, not even in the late 1930s when Rein-hold Niebuhr, with others, was writing of the "fall" and the "crisis" of the West...
...They had as allies the Chinese and the Russians...
...And that made the hundred-year struggle too brutal to support...
...Is this what happens to a people that puts its trust in us...
...That is also why, despite the distaste of the Buddhist leadership for the government of General Thieu, the Buddhists never turned to the Vietcong...
...That commits its destiny by accepting jobs with our personnel...
...many were not functional...
...and we had the sorrow of using our freedom badly...
...I'll never be able to work for it again...
...In a decade, aside from ourselves, there may be not a single democracy in the entire world...
...the turning elsewhere of Thail-[and...
...That is why the corruption, the disorganization, the casualness, the laughing and the playing in Sai-gon, have long continued...
...no one en-forced discipline...
...The South Viet-namese had ammunition for a single month...
...Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh...
...The Republic is in greater danger than at any time in forty ye"ars...
...No one marched upon the White House demanding that an armada of ships and airplanes be provided to help the refugees to safety...
...Americans did break their commitment...
...I have never been so ashamed of America as during the last days of March, 1975, watching the long lines of refugees, the infants, the parents, the broken armies...
...It is, indeed, our liberties that permit us to be sinful as well as good...
...But the peace movement, especially those whose political sympathies are usually with the 'Third World," also underestimated the human factor...
...Overdo the going in...
...Neither our strength nor our word inspires fear...
...they heaped con-tempt upon the South Vietnamese...
...And for good reason...
...they castigated the "corrupt" leader-ship of the South-and it was corrupt -but they extolled the totalitarian, disciplined leadership of the North...
...Eleven divisions of North Vietnamese troops were in the country, supplied with weaponry by Russia, far superior to any possessed by the South Vietnamese, in stock-piles sufficient to sustain an offensive over an entire year...
...So Lyndon Johnson was more pro-phetic then he knew...
...They chose high technology and heavy armaments, instead of small cadres and rifle power, as the instru-ment of strategy...
...The effects of the disintegration of South Vietnam are matched by those of the collapse of Cambodia and Laos...
...In exquisitely personal terms, Americans did tuck their tails and run...
...They never appreciated how many of the South Vietnamese did not wish to live under the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese...
...In the next few months, we will likely see fresh pres-sures from North Korea upon South...
...We are reduced to a second-rate army...
...The "Third World" is not the planet's hope...
...The wealth of the Arab world, in particular, is now so great that the Arabs can at any time bring Italy, Great Britain, Japan, India and France to economic collapse...
...I'm so ashamed of the U.S...
...They idealized the North Vietnamese...
...I do not understand how any-one in the world should ever trust the United States again...
...There was no peace move-ment in their ranks, no dissent, no liberty...
...What sort of leadership, on the right and on the left, have we been cursed with...
...that arming ourselves would soon become a moral imperative...
...The North Vietnamese were lucky...
...rush out...
...As the Saigon correspondent of the New York Times tardily reported (March 30), South Vietnam re-mained, despite obvious abuses, a remarkably unregimented and free society...
...They liked Thieu very little...
...It seemed to me a fitting image of our interpretive elite, those who tell us what is happening and what is yet to be...
...I wonder how many will be punished as "collabora-tors...
...Rush in...
...They col-lected statistics on the political pri-soners in the South, but did not no-tice that there is no dissident politics in the North...
...Smell the air and see.ll the air and see...
...It is weak in liberty, it spreads ressentiment, it shrouds the world in gray...
...Once Americans were out of Vietnam, the journalists became in this respect more truthful...
...That accepts our aid...
...We ought to steel ourselves for worse to come...
...the brazen swing leftwards in Portugal...
...they liked the Viet-cong even less...
...In this context, Reinhold Niebuhr was accused of immorality and retrogression for suggesting that the future was not likely to be peace-ful...
...Does anyone imagine that a world led by "Third World" nations will be a world of liberty...
...In recent days, I have watched Gar-rick Utley struggle to contain a grin as he reported on the collapse of South Vietnam...
...So deep a tragedy, so deep a cruel-ty, has not been seen since the Amer-icans first brutally escalated the war...
...The best and the brightest" under-estimated the human factor in Viet-nam...
...Overdo the running out...
...a major change in Turkey...
...The South Vietnamese had the misfortune to choose us...
...They have seen the Vietcong and North Vietnamese in operation...
...the pressures on Israel to surrender territories for a demonstrably empty American gua-rantee and for a weak pledge by Egypt-weak because Egypt wants to be free to go to war even while weakly saying it may not...
...Thou-sands of families bear the scars, tell tales of "discipline...
...Which side, would one expect, ought to have superior morale...
...For our adversaries, it is a period of maximal opportunity...
...that the crisis of the West was upon us, which we might not survive...
...Their planes, helicopters, and other equipment were both inferior and lacking in spare parts...
...gov-ernment," an American in Vietnam said of his unit's recent sneak retreat...
...He had looked into the faces of the 108 Vietnamese families that had worked with the Americans at Nha Trang, people whose political commitment had been public, people who had been promised safety, peo-ple vulnerable to retribution,-and he had to watch them over blazing rifles as the Americans roared aloft alone, while their friends reached out in vain for place...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
