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.
|
