Cease Fire!
H., I.
We propose that the U.S. government declare in favor of an immediate cease-fire. Nothing less will do if the mounting slaughter is to be stopped, nothing less than a forthright declaration to...
...If Hanoi means the first, then in effect it is declaring its agreement with President Johnson and Secretary McNamara that the war will be lengthy...
...Is that how Communism is being "stopped...
...to propose that the Vietcong suggestion of a 12 hour Christmas cease-fire be extended indefinitely...
...It should take the lead toward peace, a settlement leading toward the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Vietnam...
...The reports coming out of Hanoi are confusing, perhaps deliberately so...
...This makes nonsense, to put it kindly, of President Johnson's statement on August 3 that "In 20 months we have agreed to 15 different approaches to try to bring peace, and each...
...How can we tolerate a policy that will multiply the Duchais by the hundreds, and its dead by the thousands...
...Would Hanoi and the Vietcong respond positively...
...increases its military force in Vietnam, it will become harder and harder for the Russians to maintain the relatively restrained posture they have shown thus far...
...If the war continues, if the war grows in magnitude, and we do not as a nation exhaust every opportunity to bring about a cease-fire, the U.S...
...Until Washington or Hanoi says something like this, we cannot place much confidence in their protestations to favoring peace...
...The casualty rate goes up: it now approaches 250 a week for the Americans alone...
...has been turned down by the other side...
...proposes that the shooting stop and, as a token of goodwill, it immediately ceases the bombing of North Vietnam...
...Is that how the U.S...
...bombing of North Vietnam...
...There are reports that it may decide to send ground-to-ground rockets, capable of long-range bombardment of U.S...
...If Hanoi means the second, it is raising, for reasons of its own, a quite legitimate point...
...The North Vietnamese are moving regular army divisions into combat...
...casualties in Vietnam...
...Nothing less will do if the mounting slaughter is to be stopped, nothing less than a forthright declaration to the world that as of a certain date the U.S...
...The United States, however, has a special responsibility to take the initiative in proposing a cease-fire...
...There can be no certain answer...
...These would be torturous...
...Consider a report in The New York Times, November 30, by Neil Sheehan, which describes the shelling of Duchai, a complex of fishing hamlets, by the U.S...
...What is the true extent of U.S...
...have been reduced to rubble or blasted into skeletons...
...Let us immediately put an end to the shooting and the bombing, and then let us proceed, under the UN or Geneva Conference auspices, to work out a settlement...
...Meanwhile, it is of the greatest importance for the peace movement to keep insisting that public officials speak with candor...
...Reasonable estimates" of the dead—civilians, not soldiers— come to 600...
...Very well, we will take you at your word...
...The State Department is forced to admit (with a comic cadenza about Dean Rusk's antennae) that in September 1964 America turned down an opportunity to hold secret peace talks with Hanoi, under UN auspices...
...will bear a terrible responsibility...
...Surely if the U.S...
...declare a "unilateral cease-fire," that is, declare that as of a certain date it will freeze military positions and no longer attack Vietcong troops, and that it proposes the Vietcong reciprocate...
...and it is fighting on foreign soil, plunging steel and napalm into a foreign nation...
...Was there, as has been reported, an indirect response from Hanoi, through France, after the five-day pause in U.S...
...The wounded are "believed much higher than 600...
...Why does not one or the other say: "You claim to favor negotiations...
...But meanwhile the killing would have stopped...
...Another way that has been suggested by leaders of Turn Toward Peace is that the U.S...
...Where is the American conscience...
...One way this could, or could have, occurred A section of comments, opinions, and proposals on strategies of protest concerning Vietnam and related issues would be for the U.S...
...troops in Vietnam, apart from air and naval personnel...
...Discussion of such questions—there are many more—must be brought into the open...
...Honor, common sense, humanity, political intelligence—all require that this country declare itself unambiguously for an immediate ceasefire...
...army and air concentrations in the South...
...By spring there may be 500,000 U.S...
...This mutual escalation is the path to madness and blood...
...We do believe that such a proposal from Washington would place the Communists under heavy world-wide pressure, as there would be significant tendencies within the disarranged Communist camp favoring acquiescence...
...Most of the 15,000 inhabitants have fled the town, and its "solid brick and stucco houses...
...is bringing "freedom" to Asia...
...At home reactionaries have begun to raise the slogan of bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, a piece of demagogy certain Americans, fearful for the lives of their sons and therefore ready to entertain fantasies of quick victory, might find hard to resist...
...In any case, why do both sides fail to call each other's bluff...
...Given a cease-fire, it would be possible to begin peace negotiations...
...they might even collapse...
...they might come to an unhappy political conclusion...
...It is the most powerful nation in the world...
...Pressure on the Soviet Union to increase its military involvement grows each day...
...it claims to speak in behalf of democracy...
...troops be a pre-condition for negotiations or propose it as an aim to be realized through negotations...
...Meanwhile both sides equivocate, both lie...
...It is hard to know whether the Vietnamese Communists—North and/or South— insist that the withdrawal of U.S...
...Toward that end we must strain our every effort...
...fleet these past two months...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
