Our fifth article to mark the 40th anniversary of the CPBML by looking at the past four decades through the eyes of Workers and its predecessor, The Worker. This month: the Vietnamese people's fight for national liberation…
1972: the US lashes out in Vietnam – and fails
WORKERS, JUNE 2008 ISSUE
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In the 1970s, both Labour and Conservative governments continued to support the US government's wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. This complicity was one of the most shameful acts in British history.
The Labour government led by Harold Wilson backed the US April 1970 invasion of Cambodia. In December 1970, Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath said that bombing North Vietnam would be 'justifiable'; on 13 June 1972 he praised President Nixon's 'unparalleled restraint'; and in December 1972 he backed the US bombing of Hanoi.
But however much the US government escalated the war, however much they spent (an estimated $500 billion), they could not win. The US Air Force dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on all targets in all history. US forces killed possibly three million Vietnamese. Yet the heroic Vietnamese people decisively defeated the self-styled most powerful state in the world.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the CPBML we reprint below the lead article from The Worker of 1 June, 1972.
One War: One Strategy
Protracted War Victorious in Vietnam
"The United States, like a wounded beast, lashes out wildly. The bombing of Hanoi, the mining of Haiphong harbour, the new attempts to turn Vietnam into a raging inferno are last desperate lunges of a defeated Titan. Capitalism is a dying force. On its deathbed, with the hopelessness of the damned, it determines to take with it to Hell as many human souls as it can garner. Hence the viciousness of the vanquished.
Vietnam has lost some of its sons and daughters in this war. It goes without saying that without readiness for sacrifice the war could not have been fought. Workers, fighters may die but a working class, a people cannot die. Every last barbarity perpetrated by U.S. imperialism has been recorded and will not go unavenged. Blood debts are being repaid in blood; in April alone the Vietnamese people's forces took a toll from their enemy of 90,000 killed, wounded or captured.
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| Three years later: victory as the South Vietnam Liberation Army enters Da Nang City on 29 March 1975 |
For us it is time to take stock of this world-historic achievement of the Vietnamese. Vietnam is the international touchstone of our age – the contemporary classic of confrontation between exploiter and exploited, as instructive for us as the Paris Commune of a century ago. It has been in essence a third world war – a war in which no-one in the world could remain uninvolved and unmoved. And in this war, how have we the British people performed?
Governments, Labour identical with Tory, have tailed obediently three steps behind their Washington masters, excusing and explaining each new enormity.
The working class, with a few honourable exceptions, have tried to look the other way.
The various 'Left' factions in the social democratic circus have acted entirely true to form. The 'Left wing' of the Labour Party and the King Street revisionists, never daring to support the Vietnamese, made little deprecating noises about the bombing of north Vietnam. (The burning alive and bloody murder of people throughout the country was all right – just stop bombing the north). The Trotskyists were happy to support the Vietnamese as long as they were convinced the Americans would win – at which point they could condemn the 'treachery' of the Stalinists (i.e. Ho Chi Minh). When it became clear even to them that the Vietnamese were not going to lose they made themselves scarce, found other carrion to crow over.
A whole generation of youth in Britain received their political baptism of fire from the guns of the Mekong Delta. For them Vietnam has been an almost sacred cause, a rock of faith in a shifting, doubtful world. Yet they did not translate their faith into deeds. They did not build for victorious Vietnam a movement to compare with that built by their parents for defeated Spain.
Why? Why have we, the working class of Britain, failed in our internationalist duty? Why have we left it to the Vietnamese people, in the way an earlier generation left it to the Soviet working class, to carry the burden of revolutionary war without our taking the action here that would have complemented their struggle? Can we shake off this social democratic sleeping sickness before it numbs us entirely?
Ho Chi Minh said the only true internationalism is to make revolution in your own country. We rejoice with the Vietnamese people in their victories. We grieve with them in the destruction wrought upon their land. Let us now vow that we the workers of Britain will match their intellect, their heroism and their achievement in the very heartland of the imperialist beast."