Indo-China-America's Algeria

...And since almost the whole of Vietnam, outside the major towns and fortified places, can be considered "enemy territory" the chances are high that this campaign, if at all successful, will wipe out the means of livelihood of large masses of people...

...they involve deliberate policy...

...Americans are at this very moment engaged in perpetuating atrocities in Indochina...

...But no, Buckley's boys are deadly serious...

...Indochina is fast becoming America's Algeria...

...And we promise you we've got other trumps to play...

...Unless this is kept firmly in mind one succumbs to the fallacy of believing that when we, the children of light, commit a crime it is not "really" a crime, but that when it is committed by them, the children of darkness, it is a heinous offense...

...Large C-123 transport aircraft now spray them over "enemy territory" in the Vietnamese countryside...

...Out in the forest, up in the hills, far from dense population, we could easily—and mercifully, for that matter—use some of our stock of nerve gas, and so paralyze a whole area, or strip of country, bringing peace once more, and saving Vietnam from Communist tyranny...

...The major issue concerns not the political Neanderthalers of the National Review but the sophisticated Frontiersmen of Washington...

...Unless one attacks inhumanity everywhere, but especially in one's own backyard, one has no right to attack it when it is committed by one's adversaries...

...Has any one of them ever considered resigning, if need be, in order to focus attention upon such horrors...

...Lxwis COSER...

...The National Review, that hate sheet with a Yale accent, is still not satisfied...

...It feels that we should have told Moscow: "Yes indeed, we're using poison gas to defoliate the jungle and track down the hit-and-run Communist bands...

...In fall 1962, after the failure of earlier attempts, American "advisors" to South Vietnam's army initiated a strangthened "defoliation campaign" under the quaint title "Ranch hand...

...How can such humane, enlightened, liberal men condone these actions through their silence...

...But where is the voice of protest of America's intellectuals...

...And, finally, has it not occurred to these tough Realpolitiker, who assure us ad nauseam that the cold war is a war of men's minds, that such atrocities practiced against Asian "lesser breeds" are apt to turn all dark-skinned humanity into ferocious haters of America...

...This affects, of course, as The New Republic has pointed out, more than just hostile armed men in the jungles: it hits the peasants, and it involves their livelihood not just at present but in the future, since the new "defoliation" can destroy vegetation more or less permanently...

...An earlier scheme to uproot whole village populations was given the cute name "Operation Sunrise...

...The fight against atrocities is indivisible...

...And these are not individual excesses...

...The idea of bringing peace through nerve gas is so incredible that one might suspect the author of some clumsy attempt at Swiftian irony...

...it believes that even the present policy is tainted by softness...

...March 26, 1963...

...First the A-Bomb used against Japan, then napalm bombing in Indochina, now the poisoning of the very vegetation upon which the peasantry of Asia depends for its life—truly, the foreign policy of the New Frontier is foundering in extreme brutality and monumental ineptness...

...No matter whether it is committed by Russians, Nazis, Frenchmen or Americans...

...What about all these "liberals" from the banks of the Charles River, the Rostows, the Schles continued on page 214 ingers, the Wieseners, the Bundys...

...The starving survivors will then be initiated into the virtues of democracy—Diem style...

...The objective of this campaign is the wiping out of rice fields in "enemy territory" and the defoliation of the jungle by chemical means...

...Has none of them the guts to cry out in shame...