Vietnam and the Left:

...But the West has had its chance...

...I very much wish matters were otherwise...

...And they are unlikely to negotiate while they are winning...

...get out of Vietnam and are rather prepared for that...

...Thus Peking is unlikely to be reasonable...

...We have been betrayed— a betrayal that compromised the whole democratic process...

...ican involvement in Vietnam, I support, almost literally, every form of opposition...

...We can destroy it or we can withdraw from it while there is still time...

...government declaring a ceasefire and negotiating...

...In speaking in various parts of the country on the Vietnam issue I have invariably called on men of draft age to refuse military service, and have urged men now in the armed forces to apply for immediate discharge...

...It is a silence so loud it can be heard...

...3. Question three is also not directed to those who share my position, but I would comment that if the first question posed very real problems for those of us in the Socialist party and in the pacifist movement, the third question is equally rough on those who pride themselves on being hard political realists...

...We would support any steps that will lead us closer to the position we urge: withdrawal...

...There has been, in some parts of the Vietnam Protest movement, a strident and shrill tone, a willingness to make the Vietcong our special heroes...

...I have no doubt whatever that a U.S...

...And if we must finally speak from prison—God forbid—it may be that only then will our voices have the power to be heard...

...It is disturbing to me—and I think it would have been disturbing to Marx himself, who was rooted in the humanist traditions of the West —to realize that all that the East may take from us just now is "Marxism" and machine tools...

...The American spirit is quite alien to the concept of existential and heroic action on the basis of ambiguity...

...Hanoi has less control over the National Liberation Front than most of us realize, and is probably not in a position to negotiate a settlement if she wanted to...

...I believe that the best of our traditions have universal mer it and I deeply regret that these traditions will not, for the moment, have a real impact on Asia...

...2. Question two must be dealt with by my friends who answered "no" to the first question...

...withdrawal in Vietnam will mark the beginning of a general U.S...

...Had matters taken a different turn some decades ago, there might now be viable democratic alternatives for those Asian states that move toward totalitarian solutions...

...First, it is doubtful if the "majority of the people seem to favor a bad policy"— opinion polls differ on this, depending on how the questions are worded and what week they are asked...

...Yesterday we hated Russians...

...We cannot prevent "Asia from going Asian" without in the process destroying it altogether...

...policy in Vietnam without in the bargain seeking to locate some absolute good port...

...I am not happy to think of China and Indonesia setting a pattern of "Asian socialism...

...Obviously those who favor withdrawal, a position held by most of us in the Socialist party and in the pacifist movement, are not opposed to the U.S...

...It is now quite impossible to take anything Johnson says at face value...

...Even if we are jailed, we must speak...

...Given the force of nationalist sentiment in Asia, they may succeed where we have failed...

...We have already lost most of our friends in the course of defending them...

...But even if the public is alienated, we must speak...

...had a revolutionized West set for Asia the example of a truly revolutionary and yet profoundly democratic socialist movement...

...4. The fourth question requires more space than we have here...

...How is democracy to operate when the mass of people simply ignore the printed facts, and when, through his automatic command of TV time, the President can transmit his own hvsteria as if it were the truth...

...But there is a new problem in contemporary society where, the teach-ins aside, the mass of the public can so easily have its opinion moulded on issues that are distant from their immediate lives...

...On the matter of the draft, I obviously support and encourage resistance to the draft...

...This is a very serious and profound problem for those like myself who are committed to democratic values...

...If we cannot speak with the voice of of conscience, that voice will be silenced in our society...

...We cannot now police Asia...

...Paul and Lenin, nor the mechanistic views of a Henry Ford...

...There is another problem to be noted...

...Russia dares not be too reasonable, for fear of losing ground to the Chinese in the world Communist debate...

...We endure war...

...In fact, confronted by an evil as monstrous as the Amer...

...I do not attack the U.S...

...had all those things happened, the present would offer less dreadful alternatives...

...Unlikely though it is that the U.S...

...Both sides are willing to use Vietnamese as pawns...

...Readers of DissENr are surely aware that in the area of foreign policy the Johnson Administration is now entirely lacking in credibility...

...The Administration has lied (I use the word "lie" in its very strict and literal sense—not as an act of po...

...had a socialist West ended colonialism a generation ago...

...Somehow it is typically American of the young "anti-Americans" of the New Left— and some of their older leaders who ought to know better—that they are simply not able to oppose the almost absolute evil of U.S...

...My guess is that most Americans will "support" whatever Johnson does abroad as long as they can get Medicare, Voting Rights, and changes in Taft-Hartley...

...I am after all a Westerner...

...government will follow this course, it is imperative for the independent radical to urge it, if only because it helps to pressure the government from further expanding this war...

...I think "Vietcong" type of insurrections will begin in Thailand and possibly also in Cambodia and Malaysia...

...The radical is first of all a man of conscience and only second a political animal...

...What, for example, are we to make out of a situation like the Dominican fiasco, where between 80% and 90% of all serious Latin American experts opposed the Johnson intervention, and where reporters on the scene were sending back daily reports flatly contradicting Administration statements, and where it was still possible for Johnson to register about 90% public support in opinion polls...

...But I also think most Americans are willing to see the U.S...

...I would hope that such absolute opposition to the Johnson Administration could be carried out with a spirit of decency and integrity such as would prevent our being alienated from the general public...

...only then will we be believed when we cry out as we must that those who conduct the war in Vietnam are war criminals...

...litical rhetoric) to us so massively and so frequently that it will be terribly hard to know when the Administration really wants negotiations and when it doesn't...

...We voted for Johnson...

...She probably does want a settlement— but the bombing of North Vietnam has placed new and serious blocks in the way of any initiative from Hanoi...

...There was little chance Russia would heed our appeals to end its brutal action in Hungary in 1956 but that would hardly have excused or justified our urging upon the Russians some more "reasonable" course than her simple withdrawal...

...involved in South Vietnam...

...Particularly if the blood they are trading is not their own...

...troops and military forces from South Vietnam—while keeping in mind that with so large a force "immediate withdrawal" will require weeks or months even if begun at once...

...government because I am un-American but because it is the government itself that now violates every human value I was taught not only in the socialist movement, but in the public schools of this nation...

...Without an external object of hatred it is doubtful if most modern societies, either capitalist or communist, could survive their own internal tensions...

...I think a PekingJakarta axis will dominate Asia, with India and Japan seeking to contain China and Indonesia...

...It is the NLF, finally, which must negotiate...

...In both cases there are certain concrete facts involved, facts that press against people daily, and it is the facts one must deal with in order to change minds...

...But when the issue is distant, when the public is not directly affected one way or another, it is astonishingly easy for the "establishment" to displace the object of hatred, and to shift that object from one nation to another...

...I question whether in a situation like Vietnam, where the government lies so openly and where so many people are desperately eager for an "approved target of hate," one can talk about "democratic politics" with any real sense at all...

...Madison Avenue cannot make Harlem Negroes love Jewish slumlords, nor can Madison Avenue persuade middle-class whites that integration of slum Negro children into their schools is a good thing...

...Thoreau put it best when he said, regarding civil disobedience, that the good citizen is the one who upholds the moral law when the government to sup- is violating it...

...When a radical, confronted by profound political immorality, limits his appeals and suggestions to those steps the government is going to take anyway, or is likely to take, the radical movement has lost its moral basis for existence and has also lost the intellectual basis which marks it off from liberal and conservative positions...

...Peking knows that every day we remain in South Vietnam we undermine further our moral and political standing throughout Asia—and Peking has, I think, as little regard for human lives as does Robert McNamara...

...Today we hate Chinese and most Americans seem to believe we are fighting Chinese troops in Vietnam— something not even Dean Rusk has yet alleged, expert as he has proven at the manufacture of facts...

...Had the French and German socialists brought down their national governments in World War I, rather than being "responsible" and killing one another...

...We got Goldwater...

...Thus the prospect for negotiations is poor, given the unbending positions of both the Vietnamese and the Americans...

...withdrawal from all of Asia...

...We spoke for peace...

...But not even a President from Texas can remake the history of the past fifty years...

...Nixon's recent statements about the need for total victory gives a warning that any American victories in Vietnam will only spur on those Republicans (Nixon chief among them) who are only too willing to trade blood for votes...

...Peking has little to lose and much to gain from keeping the U.S...

...I may deplore the shrill anti-Americanism of some of the students, but I prefer that by far to the silence of a part of the old and democratic left...

...I am referring to the traditions from Moses through Christ to Bernard Shaw and Gene Debs—not to the strain of fanaticism that encompasses St...

...Thus far we have refused to negotiate with NLF anyway and if the tide of battle turns in our favor we are likely to lose interest in negotiation (if, indeed, we are really interested now, which I doubt...