The War Continues

The national liberation forces of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be trying to kill American and Saigon troops tomorrow, just as they have had to kill Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese troops in their thousand-year struggle to be free.

These Southeast Asian patriots deserve our support. The American troops still in Vietnam and Laos, and the troops not yet assigned to Indochina, no less deserve our support. We can best serve our American brothers, and our Asian brothers and sisters, by ending America's involvement in Indochina. The road will not be an easy one to navigate, but we might try to learn persistence and diligence from our Vietnamese teachers.

One thousand years ago the Vietnamese drove out a better-equipped and trained invading Chinese army. The cost was high. But for three hundred years the Vietnamese enjoyed relatively secure boundaries. Three hundred years later the Vietnamese were forced to take up arms against an invading Mongolian army led by Kubla Khan. Again, the cost was high. But a united front of landowners, merchants, artisans, and peasants did not hesitate to shed blood--their own and that of the invading troops--in an effort to preserve Vietnam's territorial independence.

The list of aggressors seemingly refuses to stop: the French and Spanish in 1859, the Japanese in 1940, the French again in 1945 (Britain used defeated Japanese troops to restore French dominance over the area), and, finally, America secured for itself a neo-colonial presence following the collapse of France's effort to maintain direct colonial rule.

At the end of World War II, when the French replaced the Japanese and began their drive against the city of Hanoi in December, 1946, Ho Chi Minh appealed to all Vietnamese patriots to resist this latest foreign attempt to re-enslave Indochina. He told the world, "We would rather sacrifice all than lose our country. We are determined not to be enslaved."

The Vietnamese resistance should be taken at its word. Liberation forces have killed over 55,000 American troops since 1961 (14,092 since Nixon took office). Each week Vietnamese patriots kill 560 American and Saigon troops. But the price for their stubborn resistance has been high. One and a half million Vietnamese have died trying to expel the American invaders and their fascist puppets. Eight million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians are homeless. Twenty per cent of Vietnam's land mass has been defoliated by America's war against vegetation.

The statistics grow larger with each year, but the meaning remains clear--the United States government is determined to use whatever means are necessary to safeguard its interests. When the cost in American troop casualties proved too high, commensurate with the benefits received, the American game plan changed, to replace American bodies with Asian corpses. Thai, Korean, Laotian, Cambodian, Meo, and Vietnamese mercenaries are employed to preserve America's pre-eminent position in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnamese will continue to die as they continue to resist the American invasion. The American government will continue to kill them as long as they resist. It is as simple as that.

Unless the American government is brought down, or the Vietnamese resistance ends. Clearly no group in the United States is capable of challenging the existing economic and political order. And given the nature of Vietnamese society and Vietnamese history, it is clear that these people will never cease their struggle against foreign domination.

Our role in aiding the Vietnamese resistance movement has been a difficult one, if only because of our inability to sustain long-term commitment. American students struggled through the 1960's to end America's role in Southeast Asia, and the effort did meet with some success. An incumbent President was driven from office. A national political convention was reduced to a riot, and revealed as the fraud it really was. All things change, and the student movement fell apart--we expected too much too soon. We should have learned from the Vietnamese, who have been fighting for their freedom for a thousand years. Social justice is not a gift--it must be fought for, and it must be defended.

Tomorrow we will march, and although we will be peaceful and will follow the route which the police have assigned to us, in our hearts and in our minds we will be fighting for the Vietnamese. Our movement is small, and it is in disarray. But it will grow. The Chinese Communist Party was founded by 12 men in a small room in 1921. Some of us are Communists and some of us are anti-war liberals. All of us hate this war, and all of us have pledged ourselves to seeing that America's involvement in this war is liquidated.

We will not do it tomorrow. Perhaps we will never be able to argue that we were in some way responsible for ending America's role in Indochina. But we must persist, we must remain visible, and we must understand that nothing is ever given--if we want it we must take it. Even if it takes a thousand years.