LONDONERS PROTEST WAR IN VIETNAM
By Brian Gormley
“London
“The call by t the American antiwar movement. for protest demon- .strations March 25-26 against Johnson's escalation of the war in ; Vietnam met with active response in London ‘despite feverish last- . minute electioneering. The Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament organized a march of more than 1,000 participants which wound its way ‘through the West End March 26 chanting slogans against: the war in Vietnam.
. A segment of the marchers attempted to demonstrate in front of the American embassy, but the police were expecting this and at times actually out-numbered the’ protesters. They dispersed the demonstration. _ ° , —_
_ For a. city the size of London, a turnout of 1,000 is not large. ‘However it must be considered in the context of the apathy in England in recent months. despite the escalation of the war in Vietnan. The march is the first sign of an upturn.
The night before the demonstration a meeting was sponsored by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign at the London Welsh Association Hall. The speakers were Robin Blackburn of the New Left Review; Raymond Williams, author of Culture and Society and The ‘Lon Revolution: Ken Coates, who is.associated with The Week and the International Socialist Journal; and Ralph Schoenman of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; who was recently in north Vietnam; The meeting was chared by an American now living in ‘London, David Horowitz, author
of the recently published book Free World Colossus.
Robin Blackburn told about his experiences -in Havana where he attended the Tricontinental Conference as an invited observer for the Russell Foundation. ,
’ He met many of the young fighters of the National Liberation | Front at Havana, he said, and they told him about the fierce nature of their struggle.
Blackburn described the Tricontinental Conference as an exam- . ple of the widespread resistance in the - "third world" to imperialism. What the FLN members told him was a "general picture applicable to Latin America and Africa, a world- wide phenomenon that brings forth ° a world-wide response. "
‘Referring to the resistance movements in many countries: that never receive mention in the Western press, he called for Socialist movements in the imperialist countries GO demonstrate solidarity with them.
The National Liberation Front fighters were of the opinion, he said, that the time might come when it would be necessary to ask for volunteers to help Vietnam, even if only in token numbers. One of the things that might be done*«now, said Blackburn, is to collect names in preparation for such a turn.
Raymond Williams said that the main problem with intellectual thinking in the West is that it does not see the historical necessity for revolution. That is why they fail in their approach to Vietnam. There has been an institutionalizing of brutality in the colonial world, he said, and a considerable lag in liberal understanding of that: brutality.
"There are four ‘common. positions on Vietnam in this country," he continued, "not simply two -- one for and one against the Americans."
On the American side there is the position that the policy of containing Communism is: correct and the variant that while it is correct it is taking place at the wrong time and at the wrong place. This position he labelled as ‘incredibly snart."
On the left, he illustrated the two positions by describing his own experiences in February 1965 when he came down to. London from Cambridge with a group of students after they had collected several thousand Signatures on a petition demanding "negotiations. '
"Then suddenly the Johnson line became the Wilson line! We were left looking silly -- getting down to saying what kind of | negotiations. While we had the right instincts, we were outflanked."
Williams ‘said, uy, now see the call for negotiations was a. trick. While we didn't put forward the position as a trick, but out of the best instincts, it is being used against us."
Ken Coates attacked the position of the Labour party leadership on Vietnam, comparing the statements they made before and after they gained office. He quoted Harold Wilson, showing how he had once opposed the American policy in Vietnam and supported the revolution. This was in the tradition of the Labour movement. "Wilson lies in his teeth," said Coates, "when he useg Nye Bevan to bolster his argument of support for the Americans.’ Bevan resigned from the Shadow cabinet of the Labour party in order to influence policy. _
Commenting on those in the government who have acquiesced to Wilson's capitulation to Johnson on the ground that their hands were tied by the small majority held by Labour, Coates said, "It's a lie, a deception, morally debasing, to believe that pressure can be exerted from seats of power."
He referred specifically to Anthony Greenwood. "How many times we marched behind him on the Easter CND March, when he used to make all those wonderful statements against. the bomb and against war!"
Ralph Schoenman had just come from: Hanoi. He had also been in New York where he had given:evidence on behalf of David H. Mitchell who was on trial on charges of violating the draft laws because he refused’ to report for induction on the legal ground that under the statutes applied at the: Nuremberg war criminal trials,” the United States is now engaging: ‘ina criminal war.
~ In Vietnan, Schoenman talked with men - and women who had suffered torture under techniques practiced by the Nazis and later by. the French imperialists in Algeria. He described the water torture, systematic mutilations, the gas used by the Americans that causes immediate abortions in pregnant women and sometimes blindness and — permanent nervous shock.
"It makes me sick as an American," he said, "to see ana learn of this, to know that Americans are doing it."
He held that "those people who tell the Vietnamese they should negotiate under these circumstances are betrayers." It was a racist outlook, he said, that led people into such a position. "What would the British have said in 1940, when they were being bombed, when London ‘was blitzed every night, if someone had told them to negotiate, or if Mussolini had sent a peace mission?"
He was convinced, ‘he said, that if it were a people with a white skin who were being victimized like the Vietnamese -- for example, the Belgians or some other European nation --: the response of the British people would be much greater.
We © have to. examine: this racism," he said; "we have to see ire in ourselves, before we can do what has to be ‘Gone about Vietnam.