The New Left Meets The Real Thing
Schwarzschild, Stephen
DURING THEIR VISITS TO HANOI David Dellinger (editor of Liberation), Tom Hayden, and Nick Egleston (recent chairman of SDS) were invited to gather a group of about 40 American radicals in order...
...My own opposition to the American war in Vietnam continues to be as complete as it had been before—I still see no viable alternative to a victory of the Vietnamese Communists (all other possible alternatives having been polarized out of existence by the ruthless American war) and prefer it immeasurably to the brutal American policy now being pursued...
...Yes, he has been ordained by a bishop and officiates at a church...
...The Americans were expected not only to oppose the war in Vietnam but also to favor, on balance, an NLF victory...
...I could not, therefore, extract an antiRoman-Catholic opinion from either of them...
...The question whether criticism of the Vietnamese should be muted never came up...
...The Americans represented small factions— in some respects at odds with one another— of a movement on the outermost periphery of American society—whereas the Vietnamese were representatives of an effective government in one area and of a para-government in another...
...Even someone like myself who knows nothing about Vietnam but what he reads in the newspapers and in a few supplementary sources heard nothing that I had not known beforehand...
...The unspoken premise was that the Vietnamese were effectively fighting America as it is—and "pas d'ennemies a la gauche coinbattante...
...The American reports were multitudinous, relatively brief, mostly extemporaneous, quite subjective, and sometimes in conflict with one another...
...the second day for reports from South Vietnam...
...With no exception that I know of, the Americans became aware of the mindless and repressive society in which we found ourselves...
...In the afternoon again much time was spent in making the question clear...
...Still, because this is the only way we know to be human, we try to embody and to advocate radically libertarian social ideals...
...To admit this, however, would be tantamount to a contradiction of the official propaganda line that "all of the Vietnamese people" are arraigned with the NLF and that theirs is a "neutral, popular front...
...Still, in discussing possible future press relations, the Americans stressed that one should mute one's criticism of the Czechs in order to prevent undesirable consequences for the Vietnamese and for future American-Vietnamese contacts—a rather eloquent expression of the stance of New Left people toward Communists...
...Two evenings, for example, were set aside for a series of North and South Vietnamese propaganda films that might be effective with Asian or African peasants but surely could not be expected to be persuasive with an even slightly sophisticated group...
...representatives of the Black Power movement...
...It took a long time to explain that question...
...Anything that did not fit into his picture was either disregarded, condemned as treason and called untypical of the Vietnamese people, or treated as still an open question that could be answered only after the Front had ruled upon it...
...As the week drew on, however, my initial fear turned out to be unjustified...
...At least one of them mentioned in passing that he had been a member of the Vietnamese delegation to the Geneva Convention in 1954...
...YET OUT OF THESE QUASI-OFFICIAL reports no "hard news" whatever emerged...
...There was certainly a representation of the sick, who outraged one or the other Czech puritan Communist by talking, mostly in the language of "shit," about nonmarital sex relations and the abortions of girl friends...
...Ultimately, of course, it had to be conceded that there was no record of American defections, black or white...
...One might even be prepared to go so far as to say that the Vietnamese who had to practice them might, in order to be able to live with themselves, have to get some kind of personal satisfaction out of these tactics...
...Madame Binh, head of the South Vietnamese delegation, took all of one afternoon and most of the next morning for her opening statement...
...a few writers, most of them associated with Left periodicals...
...There were, no doubt, some who actually had no idea of what a Communist is...
...It was apparently assumed that there was none...
...What most of the Americans had in common was the belief that anyone who batters the American Establishment effectively makes a contribution to the defeat of capitalist imperialism and he may not be criticized in any way, for fear of detracting from his effectiveness...
...But American, or New Left, anarchy soon took over...
...Such a group did in fact meet with their Vietnamese counterparts last September in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia...
...Yes, he still says mass...
...So far as I know, not a word was ever said about this afterwards...
...The contrast between the two groups was striking...
...There were surely some who did not want to know and regarded every enemy of American imperialism as a comrade...
...While some of these blood-curdling tactics were being described, I made it my business not to look at the speaker but to study the American listeners...
...young academicians...
...became quite frequent...
...There was, however a considerable amount of nonverbal criticism...
...We plied him with questions about religious and cultural trends in his country, "third force" personalities known to us, and the facts concerning religious groups in his organization...
...The NLF military expert gave a long presentation of the situation in the field as he saw it and some of the informal and quite brutal guerrilla tactics that had to be used in combating the American aggressors...
...Yet, to my knowledge at least, no one but myself confronted any Czech with articulated criticism...
...These reports were often written out and mimeographed beforehand and extremely lengthy...
...A black man, a minister, and a student actually conducted a flowerpower demonstration off the central square of the city...
...The prominent role of black men in the army was discussed...
...Is he recognized by Rome...
...I am sorry to have to say that, with the exception of some of the members of pacifist, especially Quaker, organizations who maintained straight faces, there was nothing but approval to be seen in any facial expressions, and there were even a few audible chuckles...
...The Vietnamese reports were well-prepared...
...It was, furthermore, absolutely impossible, even in private conversation, to break through the official propaganda line to which all of the Vietnamese rigorously adhered...
...This group, in which there were very few trained political technicians or Vietnam experts, was confronted by two Vietnamese delegations who had brought along their own experts in all areas under discussion and their own translators...
...Many of us dispersed through Bratislava in so many directions at the same time that it would have been extremely difficult to keep track of all of us...
...Is his saying of mass still recognized by official Roman Catholic authorities as licit...
...Along with some AFSC and FOR people, I spent a long afternoon with the official Buddhist representative of the NLF...
...It was, however, entirely impossible to come to grips with such problems: he insisted, first, on giving us what was in effect a two-hour filibuster, reviewing rudimentary knowledge and views obviously perfectly familiar to us...
...At the very beginning I had heard a few of the Americans express relief at finally being in a "socialist" country and no volunteered critical observations...
...I did not hear such an announcement—but this certainly was the mood of the gathering...
...Extremely little, if anything, that is new or significant emerged from the meeting...
...DURING THEIR VISITS TO HANOI David Dellinger (editor of Liberation), Tom Hayden, and Nick Egleston (recent chairman of SDS) were invited to gather a group of about 40 American radicals in order to arrange a meeting with a group of Vietnamese...
...They were highly disciplined and in their way very competent...
...At least within the confines of the American caucus, phrases such as "fascist," "paranoiac," "get out of here with my life," "totalitarian," etc...
...They inclined, thus, to interpret the new NLF program as if it were an "agrarian reform" document...
...On the other hand, the numbers of South Vietnamese defectors are, of course, vast— to the point where the NLF people claim, with considerable credibility, that they train some of their officers by letting them be inducted into Ky's army and having them instructed under U.S...
...Finally, the answer came forth that all the Vietnamese present were from the North and that they, therefore, did not have such information...
...Apart from the original organizers, the American contingent consisted in about equal measure of a few religious radicals from the American Friends' Service Committee (AFSC), other Quakers, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), and one or two off-beat clergymen...
...Yes, they'll come in the afternoon...
...Is he still recognized by Rome...
...Certainly, none was expressed...
...I, for one, can draw only one ideological conclusion: radicalism at this point can consist only of a radically realistic view of the utterly hopeless situation in which we find ourselves: American capitalist imperialism is flooding much of the world with blood and vulgarity, while neither "coalition politics," nor "old-style socialism," nor the New Left have any relationship to the real world or hold out any hope for political effectiveness—and "the socialist blocs" not only exhibit no significant regaining of humane or humanist values but are, in fact, widening the destructive circle...
...They were clearly formulated as quasi-official, diplomatic documents...
...all spoke with governmental authority...
...All this, however, not because of what I witnessed in Bratislava but despite it...
...As FOR CZECHOSLOVAKIA, the situation in that country, even as revealed during such a visit of little more than a week, struck me as much more oppressive and frightening than the descriptions we have been getting in the press...
...It soon became clear that the Vietnamese were from very high echelons...
...Indeed, the Buddhist representative insisted that a Roman Catholic priest, whom he named, was a member of the NLF Central Committee...
...Each subject was assigned to a single expert...
...This is precisely the main point about the encounter between the New Left and the real Communists in power...
...auspices...
...Several sessions were devoted to explore possibilities of dissuading Americans from participating in the war...
...Newsweek quoted an anonymous reporter for Ramparts as having heard Tom Hayden exclaim: "Now we're all Vietcong...
...The first day of the conference was set aside for reports from the Americans about the struggle against the war and the conditions for social revolution in this country...
...The most one can say of these methods is that they possibly may be necessary, if not desirable, in defense against at least equally brutal and politically even less justified foreign invaders...
...The American reaction to the Vietnamese ranged all the way from calculated political "popular frontism" to naive to wilfully blind to literally sick to craven...
...At first, the Czechs tried to keep us together in supervised places...
...Could we ask some people from the NLF...
...This had, the previous evening, been illustrated in one of the propaganda films...
...One of the American blacks asked the relevant question: how many black soldiers had defected to the NLF...
...There were some nasty manifestations of this 80 NOTEBOOK total identification with the Vietnamese Communists...
...Well"—this after half-an-hour's involved, translated give-andtake—" the priest is right now temporarily not recognized by the Vatican...
...This was especially annoying since the Americans had, after all, been selected because they supported the cause of their Vietnamese counterparts—and yet they were addressed as if they had to be indoctrinated from scratch with the crudest tools of persuasion...
...Their hosts were the Czechoslovak and Slovak Peace Committees—though it should be made clear that the American participants defrayed all other expenses out of their own pockets 78 NOTEBOOK or through their respective organizations at home...
...young community organizers and student organizers of the New Left...
...79 NOTEBOOK In a private conversation, I probed the attitude of this gentleman and that of the head of the North Vietnamese lawyers' guild toward the Roman Catholic church...
...It is perfectly obvious that the church is virtually identified with the American cause in Vietnam...
...the remaining time for smaller group discussions about special aspects of the Vietnam situation...
...I feared, therefore, that this representation of the New Left was buying the Czech party line completely...
...the third for North Vietnam...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
