VIETNAM WAR REVISIONISM ON THE RIGHT
<http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j050100.html>
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon has been the occasion
for a whole series of retrospectives, reassessments, and general all-around
breast-beating, and everyone seems to be having a grand old time of it. The
Left or what passes for the Left in this post-Marxist era is busy slapping
itself on the back for having foreseen the disaster: unfortunately, such
foresight seems entirely lacking on that side of the political spectrum when it
comes to contemporary quagmires such as Kosovo and Iraq. As Atlantic
correspondent Benjamin Schwarz put it in an excellent article published in
Newsday:
"The war galvanized a pro-war left that embraces Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright's foreign policy doctrine of 'virtuous power.' Since the
American victory in Kosovo, a significant segment of the U.S. and
European left has exorcised the ghost of Vietnam and learned to stop
worrying and love a globalist American foreign policy. Many prominent
left-wingers have taken to heart British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
announcement that this was 'the first progressives' war' and have with a
new martial spirit celebrated the conflict against Serbia as the kind of
crusade the West should undertake in the future."
COMMIES FOR PEACE?
But the Right, particularly the generally pro-war
neo-conservative Right, is just as bad, if not worse, and
worst of all is David Horowitz, who recently subjected
viewers of PBS's News Hour to a tirade that basically
outlined the right-wing revisionist view of Vietnam in the
crudest possible terms. As University of California
professor Ruth Rosen, congressman Bobby Rush
(D-Illinois), Rev. James Wallis, editor of Sojourners
magazine, and liberal journalist Haynes Johnson made the
connection between the civil rights movement of the sixties
and the subsequent upsurge in opposition to the war,
Horowitz whose main claim to fame is that he converted
from an unreasoning leftism (as an editor of Ramparts) to
an equally unreflective rightism sat there sneering into the
camera, listening to the other panelists with ill-concealed
disdain. When the host turned finally to him, the visibly
impatient Horowitz had gotten himself so worked up that he
lobbed a verbal hand-grenade:
"Well, there's a false parallelism here. The civil rights
demonstrators in the South were demonstrating against an
undemocratic regime; black people didn't really have the
right to vote, and they didn't have normal channels, you know,
to redress their grievances. The so-called 'antiwar movement' was
led by and organized by people who wanted a totalitarian regime to
establish itself in South Vietnam. That's really what it was about."
REDS UNDER THE BED
Anyone who takes the voluble Horowitz seriously and
I know there aren't many out there, but the rest of you
please bear with me would have to conclude that Senator
J. William Fulbright, Hans Morgenthau and Walter
Lippmann were all "people who wanted a totalitarian regime
to establish itself in South Vietnam." Not to mention
Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, who opposed
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the entire pacifist
movement, personified by the venerable A. J. Muste, and
the Rev. Martin Luther King this last, ironically, one of
Horowitz's heroes. Poor Ruth Rosen didn't know how to
respond, except by conjuring the "red-baiting of the 1950's"
and descrying his remark as "shameful and disgraceful."
Horowitz was ready for her. Of course, he didn't portray everyone
who opposed the war as "a demonic Communist," as Rosen put it.
Horowitz continued:
"I didn't do that at all. I said the movement was led and organized
by people who wanted the Communists to win.
That's why the slogan was 'bring the troops home now' because
that's what we'd accomplish."
A DRIVE-BY SMEAR
In other words: it doesn't matter if they were
Communists, that is, members of the Communist Party or
even consciously sympathetic to the Viet-Cong: objectively,
this is what the actions and program of the antiwar
movement accomplished. This argument resembles those
made by the Communists in the 1930s, and after, who were
always saying that so-and-so was "objectively"
anti-Communist and an enemy of the working class: they
said it in Germany about the Social Democrats, as Hitler
was rising to power, to justify their refusal to engage in a
united front against the Nazis. The Social Democrats, said
the German Communist Party and their puppet-masters in
the Kremlin, are "objectively social fascists" and therefore
worse than Hitler and his legions. This is why Horowitz
never offers an iota of proof for his contention that the
antiwar movement was part of a Communist conspiracy to
install Ho Chi Minh in power, for, by this "objective" standard,
no proof of organizational affiliations is required.
At this point, Rosen, whose stolidly placid face has shown
amazingly little sign of annoyance, finally breaks down and
exclaims "That's not true!" But it is Horowitz's turn, and he
is not about to give up his moment in the spotlight. "Let me
finish," he whines, "let me finish," and the host intercedes
on his behalf. But the drive-by smear technique is not conducive
to any extensive analysis, and Horowitz could only bring himself to
confide the following:
"I have to tell you, you know, having been in the
movement, I know very well what the people who led it, and people like
Ruth Rosen, believed, and that's what they believed."
THE REAL FACE OF THE ANTIWAR
MOVEMENT
In the end, we are told that we have to simply take
Horowitz at his word: I know they were all a bunch of
Commies because I was one of them. While the centrality
of David Horowitz to the antiwar and New Left movements
of the sixties is problematic, at best, there is another far
more serious problem with this thesis: it is complete bullshit.
Communist Party members had little or nothing to do with
organizing the antiwar movement of the sixties and
seventies, let alone leading it. The determinedly
non-Communist anti-Stalinist A. J. Muste was the one
figure who came closest to a leader in that his authority was
recognized by all factions, and it was Muste who arguably
did the most the minimize the influence of Communists and
their sympathizers in the movement. In 1960, when
congressman Thomas Dodd was red-baiting the Committee
for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and conducting a
government investigation into its activities, Muste wrote in
Liberation magazine that standing up to Dodd, instead of
caving, which is what the SANE leadership did,
"might have called forth a tremendous response; might
have put new heart and courage into many people,
especially young people, fed up with conformism and
apathy; and might have led to the development of a more
radical movement against nuclear war and war preparations.
Such a movement would be invulnerable to attempts at Communist
control, if such were made."
INSIDE BASEBALL
This is no fellow-traveler. Horowitz knows perfectly well
that people like Muste, Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) President Carl Oglesby, and even the Trotskyists of
the Socialist Workers Party who provided many of the
foot-soldiers and grassroots organizers of the various
antiwar "mobilization" committees most certainly did not
advocate a victory to the Vietcong or give them political
support. Oglesby argued, in Containment and Change, for
a New Left-Old Right antiwar alliance, and cited right-wing
isolationists of the past (Robert A. Taft) and the sixties
(such as Murray Rothbard) as evidence of a native
American noninterventionist tradition. The Trots were
ideologically opposed to the Vietcong, whom they
denounced as "Stalinists," and explicitly would not give
them political support an issue that was constantly a
source of contention between the SWP and uncritical
supporters of Hanoi. But since most people especially
Horowitz's fellow conservatives do not know the inside
story of internal disputes on the Left, such sweeping
pronouncements as to the loyalties of the antiwar
movement go unchallenged.
MORE INSIDE BASEBALL
Horowitz smears the whole religious tradition of
nonviolent resistance to state authority upheld by the
pacifist movement through two world wars on up to the
present, and this is not the only history that he either
ignores or distorts. The very first demonstrations against
US military intervention in Vietnam were largely organized
by the Student Peace Union (SPU) in the fall of 1963. The
occasion was a tour of the US by Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu,
sister-in-law of President Diem and wife of the head of
South Vietnam's secret police: Mme. Nhu was notorious for
referring to the self-immolation of Buddhist monks
protesting the repressive Diem regime as "barbecues." At
the time, according to the US government, there were
14,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam; the number
was probably more, but the public was not that exercised
about it. Even on the far Left such organizations as the
Communist Party USA, SDS, and the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) did not start organizing around the
issue until the number of American troops in Vietnam
passed the 20,000 mark, in the spring of 1964. At the time,
only the SPU raised the alarm about the dangers of getting
involved in a land war in Asia on behalf of an unpopular and
corrupt dictatorship and they were very far from being apologists
for the Kremlin.
ANTI-COMMUNISM IN THE ANTIWAR
MOVEMENT
For the SPU was controlled by the Young People's
Socialist League, the youth section of Max Shachtman's
International Socialist League (ISL), which hated the
Kremlin and Stalinism as much if not more than the US
State Department. The young Shachtmanites were
virulently anti-Communist, and vigorously pushed an
anti-Communist exclusion rule at all their public events and
in coalitions in which they took part, including at these
demonstrations. Horowitz ignores or chooses not to
remember the key role played by such Shachtman
lieutenants as Bayard Rustin, and others such as Irving
Howe and Michael Harrington. Were they totalitarians of
the Left? For more on the impact of these "Third Camp"
socialists on the antiwar movement, see chapter 2 of
Maurice Isserman's 1987 book, If I Had a Hammer, but the
point is that Horowitz the alleged expert on the ins and
outs of the Left simply does not know what he is talking
about. The crudity of his analysis of the antiwar movement
is exceeded only by his broad-brush approach to the war
itself. In response to Haynes Johnson's observation that
"we involved ourselves in a colonial war and a civil war,
which was against our own traditions and our leaders didn't
understand it and they never explained it to the public,"
Horowitz retorted:
"It wasn't a civil war; it was a war for freedom, and we're
going to win it; the Vietnamese will one day adopt a
market system, private property, and civil liberties; it's
just been prolonged by, you know, people like the people
on this show. I have never seen except in Tom Hayden
actually a single leftist recognize that by forcing the
United States to withdraw from the battlefield in Vietnam
they are responsible for two and a half million deaths of
the peasants in Indochina who were murdered by the
Communists that the so-called "antiwar movement"
supported. I'd like to see a little honesty on this issue. You
know, I just couldn't agree less with Haynes Johnson."
CAPITALISM THROUGH
CARPET-BOMBING
Eh? If we will win the war against Communism in
Vietnam anyway, then why was the war necessary in the
first place? Horowitz seems strangely oblivious to this
rather obvious point. He also claims that the antiwar
movement is responsible for prolonging Vietnam's transition
to a market-based society, but certainly bombing much of
the country back to the Stone Age did nothing to establish
the hegemony of private property relations unless the idea
is to destroy all property and start out with a "level playing field."
SELLING OUT UNCLE HO
The idea that we were defeated on the home front,
instead of militarily, on the battlefield, is a myth that is at
the core of right-wing revisionism on the Vietnam question, and
shows a basic blindness not only to the military problem involved in
fighting a war on the Asian landmass, but also a woeful ignorance
of the history of the conflict.
For it was the United States and its allies during World War
II, and not just the Kremlin, who were the first sponsors of
what was then called the Viet-Minh (League for the
Independence of Vietnam) led by then-nationalist leader
Ho Chi Minh in an insurgency against the Japanese
occupation army and the Vichy French colonial authorities.
When Uncle Ho and his Allied-supplied guerrilla fighters
rode into Hanoi in the summer of 1945, victorious, the
future Communist dictator read the words of the
Declaration of Independence in the public square. But the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam was crushed by British
troops, who returned the south of the country to the
French: Truman's decision to side with Paris was
determined by the exigencies of the cold war: France was a
major bulwark of the NATO alliance, and the protests of a
Vietnamese leader who quoted Thomas Jefferson were
simply ignored.
BACKGROUND TO BETRAYAL
If there was ever a setup for a civil war, in which all the
ingredients of a future conflict were methodically
introduced, then surely it was in the arrangement presided
over by American "observers" at the 1954 Geneva accords.
We handed half the country over to the Vietminh, set up a
more cooperative government in Saigon, and then stood by
the French when they bombed Haiphong harbor. Having set
the Vietminh up in business to begin with, American
diplomats and policy makers then proceeded to alienate Ho
and drive him into the arms of the Kremlin. Which brings
us to the major problem with the Horowitzian brand of
right-wing revisionism not that it is too ideological, too
reflexively right-wing, but that it is not nearly right-wing
enough. . . .
THE TRUTH IN TIME
If we are examining right-wing revisionist accounts of the
Vietnam war, then I much prefer the one proffered by
Robert Welch, the much vilified founder of the John Birch
Society who was once a bogeyman to the liberal elites, in
his excellent pamphlet The Truth in Time. As the war was
tearing the country and the American military apart,
Welch noted that it was the West that created the
conditions (including the Vietminh) for precisely the kind of
war that America could not hope to win. Welch also
maintained that the installation of President Ngo Dinh
Diem, and his subsequent persecution of the Buddhists, had
done more to undermine the noncommunist element in
Vietnam than any action initiated by Ho Chi Minh and his
subordinates. The subsequent US-engineered coup, in
which Diem was killed, led to the seizing of power by a
series of generals who seemed to change by the week and
led Welch to ask: who benefits from the Vietnam war?
GIDDY MINDS
The answer, to Welch, was clearly not the US: having
gotten us into another unwinnable land war in Asia, the US
State Department had done its best to further rig the game by
neutralizing the indigenous anti-Communist element.
The Communists didn't really want us out of Vietnam
they wanted us to stay in so as to underscore and maximize
their nearly inevitable victory. It was a war, Welch wrote,
"run on both sides by the Communists." [American
Opinion, November 1966]. Strong words, but if we judge
the Vietnam war by its results then, in retrospect, Welch's
words are eerily prophetic. The American elites, averred
Welch, are looking for an excuse to strengthen and extend
their control over the economy and every facet of American
life, and war is perfect for their purposes. If it wasn't
Vietnam, then it would have been somewhere else: war is
the great diversion arranged by our rulers to cement their
rule whenever it gets too shaky. At the end of The Truth in
Time, Welch quotes the famous line from Shakespeare that
succinctly sums up the meaning and purpose of our
globalist foreign policy: "Be it thy course to busy giddy
minds with foreign quarrels."
BITTER EXPERIENCE IS THE BEST
TEACHER
Welch knew that the real subverters of our American
Republic were not in Vietnam, or the Kremlin, but right
here in our own country; the main enemy is in Washington,
not Moscow. This is an insight that many on the Right have
now rediscovered, and adopted, in the face of Clintonian
interventionism from Haiti, to Iraq, to Kosovo and, who
knows, maybe he's not done yet. They have learned,
through bitter experience, the uses of foreign intervention as
a diversion, the consequence not of some overseas "crisis"
but of the requirements of domestic American politics. In
looking back on the Vietnam debacle, they rightly sense that
America was betrayed what they need to get clear on is
identifying what was betrayed and by whom.
THE PRICE WE PAY
For the entire half century of the cold war, conservatives
were told that they had to delay their agenda of rolling back
Big Government on the home front in order to fight the war
on Communism overseas. We needed high taxes, bristling
armaments, foreign aid, a national security bureaucracy,
and even curbs on basic civil liberties in order to defeat the
Kremlin's drive for world domination. Well, now that
Communism has imploded, and this alleged threat is wiped
off the face of the earth, what is the excuse for not turning
to the unsettled business of restoring our old republic? Why
do we need a military budget bigger than all the other
military budgets of every nation on earth combined? Why
do we need to intervene everywhere, to combine the roles
of global police and social worker, to "pay any price, bear
any burden": for God's sake, they haven't even gotten rid of
the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe yet indeed,
their budgets have increased! The national security
bureaucracy is here to stay and so is the global empire we
suddenly find ourselves in possession of, with protectorates
from Kuwait to Kosovo, and a dynamic all its own. Apart
from and in contradiction to the specifically national
interests of the US, the interests of the Empire and those
who profit from its expansion predominate in the Imperial
City of Washington, D.C. This is the real price we paid for
the cold war: we "won" that war, but it was a Pyrrhic victory
for we lost our own soul in the process.
-end-
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