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Show Vietnam, America s Anti-Policy (Editor's note: The following article by John Wilcock is from "The Village Voice," a Greenwich Village newsoaper, and appeared in the April 29 edition. Mr. Wilcock is a staff member of the "Voice.") By JOHN WILCOCK In the last few days of February, 1947, the United States officially purchased the leadership leader-ship of the Western world. There's no dispute about how it happened. For a couple of centuries cent-uries before that time, it had been mainly Britain Brit-ain that kept that balance of power and from which most political, social, economic, and legal precedents had flowed. There is always one such major power whose position is maintained by real or implied force. BY 1947 THE "growing cold war" was polarizing pol-arizing the world around two attitudes: communism com-munism and anti-communism. The major threats to what we sometimes call "the free world" were Greece and Turkey; Britian's Ernest Bevin told Dean Acheson that the fight against communist rebels in those two countries was costing Brit-ian Brit-ian more than it could affocd and that this country would have to drop the commitments. Three weeks later Harry Truman went before the Congress to ask for $400 million to continue the fight "to support free peoples who are resisting res-isting attempted subjugation by armed minorities minor-ities or outside pressure," and the Truman Doctrine was born. (All these facts, by way, are from a new book, "Struggle for the World," by Desmond Donnelly, published by Collins in England this week.) America's official policy ever since that time has ben roughly one of fighting or isolating communist regimes and offering financial and military support to any group who shared this policy, regardless of its other liabilities. This has brought us some strange allies: Tito, Franco, DeGaulle, Batista, Diem. AT THE MOMENT, in pursuit of our policy, we are burning people alive, torturing and gassing gass-ing them, bombing their villages, and cutting them apart with new weapons (see April 17 New Republic). Some of these victims are soldiers, but the vast majority are un-armed peasants who support a different ideology from our own. Since 1961 more than 150,000 men, women, and children have been killed in Vietnam. For what reason? Because the present U.S. administration feels that the Vietnamese, too, would sooner be dead than red and, by god, even if they don't agree with us they'll die anyway while we help them "defend" their country. From what exactly are we supposed to be defending them? The worst possibility, apparently, apparent-ly, is that if abandoned, Vietnam will "go communist." com-munist." So what? Maybe THEY would sooner be red than dead. Russia is communist and we live with the fact; China is communist and life goes on. The plain unvarnished fact of the matter mat-ter is that the United States is totally unconcern- ed about the fate of the Vietnamese themselves it is using Vietnam merely as a pawn in a world-wide battle against communism. The U.S. is the only foreign power in Vietnam, and if it wasn't there, then most of the fighting and terrorism ter-rorism would presumably end. WHAT'S SO frightening about the Vietnamese Vietnam-ese choosing or even having imposed upon them an administration that doesn't think and act like ours? The U.S. sees everything as either red or anti-red, but poor peasants rarely think that way. It just doesn't occur to them that if they don't accept our point of view, they're somehow beyond the pale. Writing in the "Times," James Reston points out that we've intervened in Vietnam at the request re-quest of the legally established government "but there have been eight governments in the past 16 months, most of them established by force." The truth is, of course, that we're in Vietnam because we are cynically hoping to tempt China into a war so that we can bomb their nuclear bases with more moral justification than we possess at present. But we are already morally, shockingly in the wrong to sacrifice innocent in-nocent people on behalf of our international aims. IT SEEMS TO me about time that the U.S. administration accepted the fact that every country in the world just doesn't happen to share the American belief that democracy based on free enterprise freedom for the rich, the white, the establishment; poverty, humaliation, murder, and disenfranchisement for so many others is the only possible way of life. We might not agree with their aims, but does that give us the right to impose our beliefs by force under the guise of fighting for THEIR "freedom"? "free-dom"? The United States government still has to learn an important lesson: that world leadership leader-ship carries with it a necessity for tolerance, too; an acceptance of the fact of coexistence even with its ideological opposites. Of course, other powers seek world leadership, And it's a fact of history that someday they'll get it. There's no fundamental commandment that states that from now on America will rule the world forever. for-ever. But there is a lot of precedent for showing show-ing that a country that insists on staying top dog by force will sooner or later be beaten. I LOVE AMERICA and see its faults as the inevitable flaws of a still-evolving and comparatively compar-atively free society. All of. us can eliminate these flaws if we choose to do so. But direct action is needed. It is not enough to assume that this (or any) country's power establishment will do the right thing. It will act like any rich bully who intends to have his own way; reacting violently to any attempt to modify its power, take its posessions, or share its wealth. Being a democracy, however, it is also susceptable to pressure parade, protest, Congressional mail, etc. Whatever happens, our murderous policy in Asia must be changed. As Lewis Mumford says: "We cannot save our government's face by blowing out our country's brains." |