Reparations For Vietnam

It's too bad that the main impetus to give restorative aid to Vietnam seems to be coming from philanthropic groups and Ivy League profesors now. The efforts of the scientists who said last week they are trying to raise $1 million for books, equipments and medical aid for Vietnam should be matched and surpassed by the federal government, which has a far graver responsiblity to the Vietnamese people.

The government's motive to give aid should be basically the same as the scientists'. Scientists have a special duty to help the Vietnamese because they "developed the napalm, defoliants and antipersonnel bombs which ravaged Vietnam," as one of them said last week, and the government that dropped those bombs and guided those scientists' work should feel that duty even more deeply.

For 20 years the United States government, in the name of help to the Vietnamese people, fed money to a series of unpopular, unprincipled anticommunists who supported America's systematic destruction of their own nation. America's rhetoric looks awfully hollow now, for America's "humanitarian" aid to the Vietnamese stopped at the same time this spring as its political allies were ousted, when Vietnam was at its most chaotic and needy. It seems clear now that all that ever concerned the U.S. government was its own military, political, and economic interests and that those interests were in direct conflict with the welfare of the Vietnamese. It is horrible, almost beyond imagining, that America now feels not the slightest pangs of duty to help patch together the nation it so blindly tore apart.