A Threat to All Mankind
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
PERSPECTIVES A Threat to All Mankind All was confusion in South Vietnam in the wake of the Tet holiday attacks on the cities. Although we reacted to the Vietcong mortar and rocket shellings with...
...And with China jeering at the alleged partnership between the USSR and the U.S., Moscow is no more inclined to give up the struggle than our hawks are...
...Saigon proved powerless to prevent looting, or to provide adequate shelter for the poor people who were made homeless...
...Soviet prestige is threatened by any "peace with honor" our superior fire power might impose...
...In these circumstances the American "will to win," our patriotic fervor, must be dampened by three significant considerations...
...This turmoil imperiled the whole American enterprise of carving a democratic state out of a culture incapable of either integral nationalism or free government...
...The first is that our fire power, our helicopters and our economic advantages are really not enough to cope with jungle guerrilla warfare...
...These ideological myths were calculated to convince us that our imperial prestige was involved when we stumbled into a civil war in an obscure nation...
...Even the hamlets won over by the pacification program were once again insecure, for troops had to be withdrawn from the countryside to reinforce the defenses in the towns and cities...
...We have paid a high price in blood and money to save a little sliver of a nation that has no conception of national identity, and whose mandarin landlords remain notoriously tardy in keeping their promises of land reform...
...It threatens not only to destroy the little nation they both pretend to be helping, but much more...
...Hundreds of civilians were killed across the country...
...Thus the senseless struggle going on in the tiny Southeast Asian nation is a threat to all mankind...
...President Johnson, in a Dallas address, assured his audience that "free men will never bow to tyranny...
...America's simple ideological pretensions stood in a strange but revealing contrast to the muddled historical realities...
...Some columnists asserted that President Nguyen van Thieu mistakenly regarded the Vietcong offensive as a coup engineered by Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, the two being wilful rivals within the military junta...
...In short, the Vietnam war, as United Nations Secretary General U Thant never tires of explaining, is well-nigh insoluble because the prestige of two giant nations is involved...
...Although we reacted to the Vietcong mortar and rocket shellings with vigor, it required some 22 days and the destruction of 70 per cent of its buildings to recapture the old imperial city of Hue...
...Second, our famed democracy becomes an "ideology" when we seek to impose it on a peasant culture, and it is at a great disadvantage against the Communist creed of "wars of national liberation...
...The authority of the "democratic" government in Saigon was weakened in the supposedly safe urban centers...
...There is considerable irony in this struggle between the world's two superpowers, both of whom label themselves "anti-imperialistic...
...But have we seriously considered the hazardous struggle with the USSR in which we are involved in Vietnam...
...Our "free society" is not as imposing as our ideological myths would have us believe when measured against the ideological myths and social realities of Vietnam, North and South...
...The third and most important factor that should give us pause is this: The U.S.-Soviet contest in Vietnam threatens the precarious nuclear partnership which is responsible for the precarious peace now secured through the "balance of terror...
...thousands were left homeless...
...The ideology has not changed from the days when he asserted, "We will By Reinhold Niebuhr desert neither our principles nor our friends...
...At present, the U.S...
...Who," he asked, "are these generals who claim to speak for a nation...
...For the latter makes that wily old Communist patriot, Ho Chi Minh, the father of a united country, while we are only the residuary legatees of the French colonialists...
...In a recent interview with Life magazine, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin warned that Russia would come to the aid of any young nation that had been the beneficiary of a "war of liberation" if its "socialism" was endangered by our "capitalistic imperialism...
...Indeed, have we not seen Soviet artillery bombard the South Vietnamese cities with long-range shells and rockets during the last offensive...
...is sending additional men and weapons to Vietnam to avoid a Dienbienphu at the hands of the Vietcong...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
