THE PEACE TALKS

A peculiarly virulent combination of pretty detail and outright tripe seemed to plague Jim Blum's so-called analysis of the Paris negotiations in The Crimson of January S. Does he really believes that Nixon's resumption of the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haphong "was based on a "misunderstanding in regard to the definition of victory."

The told confusion of Blum's style deserves a letter in itself. What does he mean by scientists like the about or like "the necessary stimulus to activate the traditional process, by which the Vietnamese mediate dispute among themselves?" Does he think that the nations ought to call a tribal council? His inability to place the negotiations in a social and historical context--the imperialistic, thrust of American foreign policy over the past century or two--leads to a bizarre obsession with the trivia of press releases and statements of propaganda, as if the substance of the dispute were no more than etymological confusion.

More disturbing, however, are the premises of Blum's article. Following the example of the rest of the American press, he fails to take a critical view of Nixon's consistent manipulation of the peace talks over the past few years, of which Kissinger's statement of Oct. 20 is the prime example. The Vietnamese have always negotiated "seriously" and have repeatedly stated their willingness to sign the nine-point treaty negotiated last fall. Blum fails to mention the simple fact that it was the U.S. government that suddenly imposed new conditions for settlement and resorted to tactics reminiscent of Guernica and Hiroshima to brutally exact those concessions.

Blum stumbles across the real reason for the continued failure of negotiations when he recognizes the issue of "the United States' right to maintain a controlling interest in Saigon's political and military apparatus." This "misunderstanding" is of course what the war has been about since the beginning U.S. intervention in the early fifties. Nixon has apparently not given up the goal of American hegemony in Indochina. It is the intransigence of him and other members of the U.S. political elite that have scuttled the prospects for peace settlements from 1954 onwards.

Nixon has shown himself willing to obliterate the cities and massacre the population of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (not to mention the destruction of the rest of Indochina) in order to maintain American domination of the Asian periphery. Given the current inactivity of the student and labor movements in this country, only the pressures of foreign governments, the actions of Italian and Australian dockworkers, and the continued bravery, determination, and accurate anti-aircraft fire of the Vietnamese people have forced Nixon to abandon wholesale for retail slaughter.

The negotiations will lead to peace not when both sides "demonstrate a deeper understanding of their cultural and psychological differences" but when the United States abandons its attempts to crush the Vietnamese revolution. Frank Longstretch   David de Leeuw   New American Movement

Note: In the second paragraph of my article, these words--"that they cannot use unfair negotiating tactics to gain a disguised form of victory' ever the United States"--were mistakenly omitted.   Jim Blum