Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Howard Zinn
on the Biblical exhortation Thou Shalt Not Kill, watching his father return, gun still smoking, from a mission of murder.
The Japanese are trying to speak to us, but we will not listen. In a short span of time they have been both Fish and Fisherman. We in the United States have never had to struggle at the end of the hook—and lose. We have no Hiroshima, no city of the blind and maimed, no professors still haggard from long terms in jail. Although on a number of occasions we have been a Fisherman, we have never been forced (as have the Japanese) to recognize our deeds, to bow, to apologize, to promise a life of peace. We have, in other words, never been caught.
Those countries who have been caught are now trying to speak to us. Not only Japan, but other friends and allies whose criticism cannot be easily dismissed as “Communist.” British public opinion, despite Prime Minister Wilson’s cautious approval, has been consistently critical of American policy. Konrad Adenauer, as ardent an anti-Communist as anyone in the American government, said to New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger (reported in his column of August 7, 1966): “I would get out of Vietnam. … This wouldn’t be the first war broken off in the middle. You can’t get out by going more strongly in. If I take a road and find myself going in the wrong direction, I see no purpose in continuing along it. I take another road.”
The European view was bluntly summarized by George Lichtheim, writing in Commentary, July 1966:
… the question (apparently taken seriously by some people in Washington) of why the West Europeans cannot be conscripted into a crusade to help an Oriental cardboard Mussolini in Saigon maintain his comic-opera regime a week or a month longer, has ceased even to be funny. There was a time when thinking people in London or Paris made an earnest attempt to decipher the mental processes of President Johnson and his advisers. That time is past. No one bothers any more to try to understand why the Americans are behaving as they do: it is accepted that they must, and will, learn from bitter experience, as others have done before them.
What Lichtheim says of European opinion is almost exactly what I found among the Japanese through only a brief, intense, impressionistic survey.
Such are some of the views from a distance. Now I want to take a look at another viewpoint, this one right in our midst—the viewpoint of the Negro American.
3. A View from Within: The Negro
THERE IS no one Negro view on Vietnam, any more than there is one white view on Vietnam. But there are such clear signs of hostility to United States policy in Vietnam among important sections of the Negro population that it may be useful for the rest of us to take notice and to inquire: Why?
The signs are unmistakable. They appear quickly, in the press or in personal encounter, then are scattered, gone—and perhaps all I am doing here is pulling some of them together to remind us of what I believe is a significant pattern of opinion.
A Negro field worker for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee told me last year in Mississippi: “You know, I just saw one of those Vietcong guerrillas on TV. He was dark-skinned, ragged, poor, and angry. I swear, he looked just like one of us.”
This was an individual reaction, but the Negro organizations have spoken. Of the five major civil rights groups, three (CORE, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference) have all declared themselves strongly against U.S. policy in Vietnam, and indeed urged that the United States withdraw.
Never before in the history of this country have Negroes expressed such fierce opposition to the government’s foreign policy. And this in spite of the general Negro warmth toward the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society. A columnist for the Amsterdam News, the most important newspaper in Harlem and one of the most influential newspapers in the Negro world, wrote on August 21, 1965:
President Johnson’s Great Society is bursting into full bloom. Never has so much been done for so many in so short a time. … But I, for one, have not said a word, and I know at least twenty others … men and women, white and colored … who have had the same impulse, but have found themselves unable to express words of praise. Because they catch in every throat.
All the accomplishments fade into insignificance. All the progress is shadowed just as all of it can be swiftly undone, by the horror, the spectre, the glaring immorality of Vietnam.
The statements of the more militant civil rights groups (SCLC, CORE, and SNCC) have been even stronger. In January 1966, SNCC said, in its first comment on the war, unanimously approved by its staff of over a hundred field workers:
We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claim of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people both in the United States and in other countries. … Our work in the South and in the North has taught us that the United States government has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed United States citizens and is not prepared to end the rule of terror and suppression within its own borders.
Referring to the murder of Samuel Younge, a Negro student in Tuskegee, SNCC said:
Samuel Younge was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. …
We maintain that our country’s cry of “preserve freedom in the world” is a hypocritical mask behind which it squashes liberation movements which are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of the United States cold war policies. …
We are therefore, in sympathy with and support the men in this country who are unwilling to respond to the military draft and thereby contribute their lives to United States aggression in Vietnam.
Stokely Carmichael of SNCC is unsparing in his criticism of Negroes who fight in Vietnam, calling them “black mercenaries.”
Several months after this, in April 1966, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. King, adopted another strong resolution at a time when the Buddhist revolt was being crushed by the Ky government with the complicity of the United States:
American policy has become imprisoned in the destiny of the military oligarchy. Our men and equipment are revealed to be serving a regime so despised by its own people that, in the midst of conflict, they are seeking its overthrow. Not only the Vietcong but basic institutions of the South Vietnam society, Buddhists, Catholics and students, are expressing contempt for the bankrupt government we have blindly supported and even exalted.
The immorality and tragic absurdity of our position is revealed by the necessity to protect our nationals from the population and army we were told were our cherished allies. …
SCLC, as an organization committed to nonviolence, must condemn this war on the grounds that war is not the way to solve social problems. Mass murder can never lead to constructive and creative government or to the creation of a democratic society in Vietnam.
The staff of CORE, which in the summer of 1965 had pressed for and indeed passed a resolution opposing the government’s policy in Vietnam, but was pressured by James Farmer to withdraw this, became uninhibited in its criticism of the war when Floyd McKissick became its national chairman. McKissick was one of five Americans who visited Cambodia in the summer of 1966 and found in a frontier village the body of a young pregnant woman, shot to death by a strafing American helicopter the day before. This only confirmed his already bitter feelings about United States behavior in the war.
What of the mass of Negroes outside these organizations? Negro opinion on foreign policy is varied and fluid and shifts rapidly—even within the same person—based on that person’s latest mood toward the national government. The Negro has had a strong need (like any minority group) to identify himself with the majority, so that often he appears more patriotic than others. But this patriotism is a very thin membrane which, when punctured by some immediate event revealing American racism, releases a fundamental