VIETNAM: SORROW AND PITY
H., I.
It is finally over. The outcome had not really been in doubt for some years, and only a massive intervention by the U.S., if even that, could have changed it. Elementary humaneness therefore...
...hysterically to get onto escaping planes and ships...
...in recent years with the cause of freedom...
...dark mutterings about further betrayals are heard...
...A greater absurdity still is the notion that Vietnam should be seen as the crucial test of the U.S...
...Marines clubbing the fingers of South Vietnamese trying...
...I.H...
...All too often, in fact—in Greece, Chile, Portugal, Brazil—the U.S...
...The reasons for this were many: ignorance and indifference, Europe-centered myopia, a view of the world that assigned greater weight to recovery of French power than to the unwillingness of Vietnamese to remain under French rule, an inability to see that the renovation of all politics and all power systems in Asia after the defeat of Japan would not wait on American conceptions of timetables and priorities, or conform on naive demand to American images of the world...
...led by Bayard Rustin, there has arisen an outcry that the result of the Vietnam War is to tarnish the "credibility" of the U.S...
...Whatever else we may conclude about Vietnam, it seems safe to say that the Communist victory was decisively enabled by the otiose politics of the American intervention...
...it is the consequence of reactionary foreign policies pursued by recent administrations, both Democrat and Republican—including the one that Moynihan served...
...And greatest absurdity of all is the unqualified, simple-minded identification of the U.S...
...Nor is there any reason to take seriously President Ford's pious requests for an "end to recrimination...
...That there might be a "third" or "middle" way between authoritarian Communism and exploitative capitalism...
...One remembers the outpouring of American boastfulness and the repeated predictions of imminent victory, from the Westmorelands and the Rostows...
...Serious people will now turn their minds to such matters, avoiding the chauvinist demagogy of the Buckleys and the ideological simplism of the authoritarian Left...
...In time we hope also to contribute to this discussion...
...And also, one should add, a failure to understand that rescuing, or trying to rescue, French imperialism in Indochina could only result in strengthening the hold the Communists, under the able leadership of Ho Chi Minh, had already established over the Vietnamese nationalist movement...
...At no point was there any serious encouragement for the idea of a "third force"—the idea of democratic liberties in the cities and land to the peasants— perhaps in the circumstances all but unrealizable yet in principle the only one that might have spared Vietnam its ordeals of past and future...
...What followed is depressingly familiar: repeated American efforts to manufacture regimes in Saigon 213 without popular support or political vision, regimes marked by bleak repressiveness, mandarin elitism, social incapacity, indifference to the masses, contempt for freedom...
...Would that it were so...
...In the coming period it will nevertheless be important to study these last few decades in close and dispassionate detail, so as to determine whether the Vietnamese outcome was indeed foreclosed or whether other policies might have opened a small chink of freedom...
...Nor is it surprising that those who found themselves in the armies of Saigon often lacked the will to fight or the readiness to die—for what...
...That efforts by the U.S...
...On this matter we should do our best to avoid both the "wave of the future" apologists for Left authoritarianism and the easy formulas that fit too nicely with our own wishes and preconceptions...
...One remembers all those American catchphrases, from "strategic hamlets" to "Vietnamization...
...That its victory in Vietnam may have seemed inevitable after a certain point and indeed preferable to an endless continuation of a horrible war—these conclusions led many people to oppose further U.S...
...Insofar as the claim of the U.S...
...In certain right-wing circles, ranging from the National Review of William Buckley to (painfully) the Social Democrats, U.S.A...
...as a worldwide defender of freedom...
...The bloody shirt of "isolationism" is being waved...
...Is the lesson to be learned that the U.S...
...The Vietnamese people were confronted by a choice between two kinds of authoritarianism, the more modem in the North and the socially obsolete in the South, and it is hardly surprising that a good many chose the kind that had, at the least, made its mark in the anticolonial struggle and that spoke the language of revolt...
...to be a defender or ally of freedom has been tarnished, it is not the consequence of a "failure of nerve" or a "withdrawal into isolationism," as Daniel Moynihan has been publicly muttering...
...The American role was as squalid in the last days as it had been throughout the whole intervention...
...for Ky and Thieu...
...ought to pursue a policy of strict noninterference in the "underdeveloped" countries...
...214 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...
...It is necessary to proceed to a sustained and serious public discussion of what Vietnam signifies...
...the lugubrious posturings of Kissinger even though he must have known that the fall of Saigon had been rendered inevitable by the pact of Paris—all these brought to an ugly culmination a history of confusion, deceit, stupidity, crime...
...The idea that the U.S., still the strongest power in the world, could, even if it wished to, withdraw from the global power struggle is an absurdity...
...has continued to align itself with dictatorial reaction, supporting dictators of the Right whose brutality and ineptitude usually paves the way for more stable dictatorships of the Left...
...The spread of this authoritarian system in whatever variant is not, for socialists and democrats, a cause for rejoicing...
...These are rough approximations of the questions to be asked...
...But to say this is by no means to share any of the illusions or succumb to any of the deceptions regarding the political meaning of a Communist victory...
...That the victory of Communism is "inevitable" in the Third World...
...Quite the contrary, let there be some recriminations, especially at the ballot box, against those who drove us deeper and deeper into the Vietnam disaster...
...Let us be restrained: this kind of talk is utter balderdash...
...One remembers the wretched puppets: Diem, Khanh, Ky, Thieu, obtuse military men and mandarin reactionaries, incapable of understanding the social ordeal of their country and unwilling to sympathize with the people experiencing it...
...With whatever verbal variations, American policy remained a mindless sort of anti-Communism linked with imperial arrogance, support of authoritarian puppets as little devoted to freedom as the Communists and far less skillful in mobilizing popular sentiment...
...to encourage the values of liberalism in an illiberal world are inherently self-defeating, assuming, for a moment, that such efforts were seriously undertaken...
...Whatever sufferings may still await the Vietnamese people, we are grateful that organized warfare has come to an end...
...MEANWHILE, there is no reason whatever to join those enraptured "leftists" and beguiled liberals who are hailing the Communist victory...
...American policy, writes the Asian expert Harold Isaacs, began in 1945 by acquiescing in and then actively aiding the return of the French to their former colony at the end of a war with Japan...
...The American overlords found their spiritual partners in Vietnamese at least as politically retrograde as themselves...
...in world politics, a failed test that must lead democratic countries throughout the world, especially Israel, to turn elsewhere for help...
...The true issue with regard to foreign policy is not, as Kissinger and his friends would have us suppose, the "credibility" of American commitment...
...the revelation that Nixon had indeed made a secret promise to Thieu, clearly without legal basis...
...And then, most shameful of all, came the invasion of Cambodia, which made of that country, until then precariously avoiding full-scale involvement, a victim of blood...
...involvement...
...The true issue is: toward what social and political ends will that commitment be exerted, in behalf of what kinds of governments and political leaders...
...Indeed, once that hold had been consolidated and all internal Vietnamese rivals defeated, the political outcome of the struggle that would follow over the next few decades was largely sealed...
...the cheap stunt of airlifting Vietnamese orphans...
...Elementary humaneness therefore yields a kind of relief...
Vol. 22 • July 1975 • No. 3
