If This is Peace, Who Needs War?

AFTER ANOTHER MONTH of "reconciliation" like this first month since the treaty was signed in Paris, the Vietnamese might well be in need of an armistice to end the "peace." Canadian truce supervisors complain that the fighting in South Vietnam is still too intense to permit careful "truce" supervision. Fighting continues in Laos, although Pathet Lao and government officials established a formal cease-fire on February 22. In Cambodia, American B52's have continued to bomb in support of that country's military dictatorship. And at the 13-nation peace conference in Paris, haggling over Saigon's refusal to release civilian political prisoners, over satisfactory funding for the reconstruction of Indochina, and over Hanoi's release of American POWs provide more diplomatic evidence that the struggle of Vietnam is far from over.

President Nixon and his spokesmen, by proclaiming a new era of peace, appear to make ludicrous claims for the present. But we should extend them the courtesy of acknowledging how reasonable these claims seem when compared to their nonsensical view of the past. If it appears, as Nixon had the gall to assert in January, that our involvement in the war was "one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations," it is because Hanoi and the PRG have kept the U.S. from stablizing an illegitimate rightist regime in the South. America has gained nothing, while the PRG has gained official recognition as a legitimate administration with a right to maintain armed forces on its territory, the Vietnamese have gained the departure of at least America's ground troops, and Hanoi has entered into a Council of National Reconciliation with the promise of further isolating Nguyen Van Thieu politically.

OF COURSE, NAGGING truths haven't prevented this country from acting as though all is fine and dandy. Tasteless publicity and merchandise premiums awaited the first groups of returning POWs. Republican state committees in the Midwest are already scouring the group for possible political candidates. We should naturally be happy that these men have come home from prison. As Howard Zinn writes, "They are human beings and they deserve to be free."

But this freedom should also allow them to speak independently without "Meet the Press" cramcourses from Nixon's public relations men. The Administration is using the POWs to hide many truths--the dishonor of America's imperialism, the tentative quality of the so-called peace in Indochina, the misery of America's wounded, widowed, and orphaned, cutbacks in support programs for Vietnam veterans, unjustified legal barriers against the return of those who would not assist in U.S. genocide, and, ultimately, the trail of death and of indiscriminate destruction which we have blazed--and still carve--out of Southeast Asia today.

Where does this leave the antiwar movement? It leaves us where it leaves liberation forces in Vietnam, in the midst of a long, often discouraging political and moral struggle within our own country. Our great fortune is that we have not yet been forced to bear Vietnam's burden of destruction.

AS PART OF THAT struggle, it is helpful to see Vietnam's fight in its proper perspective. In 1958, anti-Diem terrorists in the South started to avenge the man-hunts launched against Diem's opponents and the indiscriminate imprisonment of people alleged to be members of anti-government political and religious groups which Diem began in 1957. Hanoi still hoped to reunify Vietnam according to the 1954 Geneva agreements, and, with Moscow's advice, Hanoi protested with diplomatic notes while anti-Diem forces in the South were mobilizing.

The National Liberation Front was able to crystallize together with the Northern activist elements only in 1959 as U.S. aid to Diem made "peaceful coexistence" look untenable to Northern leadership. Guerilla warfare intensified until 1965, when Hanoi escalated--probably not fully appreciating U.S. willingness to pulverize North Vietnam mercilessly as in the carpet-bombing raids last December.

This history has three lessons of equal importance for American leftists. The first is that moral strategies must be discussed in their political contexts. Pacifism is necessary when violence means pointless death; resistance is necessary when passivity means extinction.

Second, just action exacts a heavy price--and that this price may be horrible no matter how just the cause. Because America is not embroiled in civil war, that price for radicals is, at this point, not mass death. But it is sacrifice--the sacrifice entailed in step-by-step, issue-by-issue, agonizingly slow mobilization aimed at achieving justice within our own country.

The third lesson is that people liberate themselves. If January's peace settlement turns out to be a useful political weapon in North Vietnam's and the PRG's hands, it will be their triumph, not ours, no matter how much we helped. In the same way, we are not going to wake up some morning to find a student-worker alliance has developed overnight. First, we must build our student-student alliances as a beginning. Second, like the Vietnamese, the American poor will liberate themselves--with our help, I hope, but with their leadership, I am sure.

OUR PRIMARY TASKS are to understand and to organize. Not to formulate abstract moral principles divorced from historical knowledge, but to understand the specific struggles of the Vietnamese, of America's poor, and of American radicals as a start. Evaluated in this context, the conflicting demands of morality in Vietnam and the U.S. will begin to make sense. We do not need to romanticize either foreign peasants or American workers. Nor should we assume that we can lead either group to liberation single-handedly. Rather, while trying to make ourselves useful to both, we should mobilize the particular resources available to us--painstakingly, conscientiously--toward creating an awareness within our own community of the struggles all oppressed groups face.

What the experience of the last decade should make perfectly clear is that students cannot develop revolutionary consciousness simply by demonstrating for others; it is necessary rather to organize for ourselves. While Harvard's budding antiwar strike crumbled last Spring, it took PALC and Harvard Afro to demonstrate for our benefit the difference between self-indulgence and substantive political action.

Whatever specific programs we adopt, whatever committees we organize, regardless of the people for whom we march, or the prisoners, farm workers, women, minority groups, and so on for whom we demonstrate, let us not fall into power games and into the passion for fictionalizing the past and present which Nixon has turned into an art. The "peace" in Indochina is no less than thinly-veiled war. The American calm is no more than simmering discontent. The truth is clear--our struggles continue.