500 Attend Rally, Hear Moore Hit U.S. Viet Policy

Continued American bombing of North Vietnam is "leaving us in the position of having either to bomb or to look ridiculous after future guerrilla attacks," Barrington Moore Jr., senior research fellow in the Russian Research Center, told an overflow crowd of over 500 last night in Lowell Lecture Hall.

Speaking at a rally sponsored by the Ad Hoc Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Moore said that the United States should not only halt the present bombings but should emulate the example of Gen. DeGaulle in Algeria and withdraw entirely from Vietnam.

Americans are believing a "great myth," Moore said, when they accept the idea that the Vietcong are agents of North Vietnam and that South Vietnamese peasants want to be liberated from the Vietcong.

In, fact, he said, South Vietnam is engaged in a civil war which stems from a 25-year-old "peasant revolt against a corrupt and oppressive oligarchy." This revolt, Moore said, has continued throughout the periods of Japanese, French, and American intervention in Southeast Asia.

If the U.S. withdraws from Vietnam, Moore said after his speech, a more representative government might be formed from a "fairly broadly based socialist coalition."

The Ad Hoc Committee has scheduled another rally for today at 1 p.m. on the steps of Memorial Church.