on service de presse Savior sn
Vol’. 5,7 No. 3 January 20, 1967
JOHNSON ESCALATES THE WAR ANOTHER NOTCH
With its decision to escalate the war in Vietnam another notch by opening a drive in the Mekong Delta, the Johnson administration has discarded the last pretense that the U.S. armed forces constitute merely a supporting arm for the Saigon regime. The assault forces in this new area of war consist principally of American troops. They are being deployed in the way imperialist troops have always been deployed in campaigns to conquer a country and convert it into a colony.
The brazen way in which Johnson is now proceeding is due in part to the complete exposure of the lies and duplicity with which he has proceeded up to now. The "credibility gap" became all "gap" and no credibility. Having been utterly exposed, Johnson is now proceeding without bothering about "peace" offensives, wanting to drag Hanoi into "negotiations" and similar malarkey cooked up by public relations experts in the effort
to sell the war to the American people. Johnson is in the position of the gangster caught; in a searchlight but who thinks he still has time to finish the holdup and make a get away if he operates fast-enough.
Johnson's boldness, however, is due primarily to his conviction that he has little to worry about from China, where. the Mao regime is undergoing an acute political crisis, and still less from the Soviet Union, where Khrushchev's heirs give every indication that they do not intend to open any kind of counterescalation that could cause the Pentagon to hesitate, still less to retreat.
The most serious blow to Johnson on the "credibility" front was dealt by Harrison E. Salisbury, an assistant managing editor of The New York Times, who, after eighteen months from the time he applied, was granted permission by the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to visit the country. As the representative of the most powerful and influential single capitalist newspaper in the United States if not the Western world, what he wrote was bound to have great influence among broad circles that have been hesitant about the war in Vietnam but not ready to move into opposition.
Salisbury's eyewitness accounts from Hanoi, verifying the fact that the U.S. has been bombing civilians -- assertions of the White House, State Department, Pentagon, U.S. field command and Saigon puppets to the contrary -- created a sensation in the United States. Washington really had been lying and Hanoi had been telling the truth!
Some of the administration spokesmen pushed the. line that Salisbury could not speak otherwise while. he was in Hanoi and while his dispatches were subject to censorship. They predicted that he would reveal “the truth" upon leaving the country.
Salisbury has now done this. On reaching Hong Kong, he wrote a series of long articles which at this writing (January 15) are still running in the New York Times. They not only confirm everything he reported while in Hanoi, they reinforce his exposures. They in fact constitute a most interesting and valuable account that speaks decidely in favor of the Vietnamese people and their heroic struggle-against the military colossus that has invaded their country and inflicted indescribable horrors and suffering on then.
Besides offering his own tribute to their indomitable spirit, Salisbury cites the reactions of others. Among them, he quotes the observation of a "Communist visitor":
"Imagine! Their pilots get up at 4 A.M. They go out into rice paddies and work for three or four hours standing in cold water up to their hips. Then they come in and fly their planes against the Americans. I have never heard of such people."
With all the attendant publicity in other newspapers and over television and radio, the account provided by Salisbury is certain to be accepted by the great majority of Americans as an authentic account of what the Vietnamese are really like, how they feel and what their aims are. The image is one that is most appealing to the American imagination, a heroic, determined people fighting for their freedom against a monstrous ruthless bully. The result will be to considerably strengthen the antiwar movement in the United States and to win fresh adherents to it in circles that have as yet not moved into action.
A NEW PHASE IN THE POLITICAL