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Parent Issue
Day
9
Month
May
Year
1975
OCR Text

For the first time in over 30 years, the people of Vietnam can sleep at night in peace. Children can play without the chill of fear. Young and old can go about their business, build their country, and reshape their land with their own hands. In peace.

As former Vietnam correspondent John Burgess writes in this issue, "just 30 years ago Vietnam was another colony of the French empire. Today it is the world-wide capital of anti-imperialist revolution."

We would do well to ponder this question: How could it be that a small, semi-feudal country, racked by generations of war, could defeat three big imperial powers - Japan, France, and the international gendarme, the United States?

The answer lies in the concept of "people's army/people's war."

Marxist/Leninists believe that people, not technology, firepower or psychological warfare are the determining factor in war, politics and the sculpting of history. The Vietnamese, like the Cubans, North Koreans, Chinese and Russians, have relied in their revolutions on the principle of arming and uniting the whole population, coordinating their massive creative energy toward the war effort.

According to General Giap, Minister of Defense for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Commander-in-Chief of the People's Army, "Our experience in people's war in the course of the last twenty five years has shown that the organization of the armed forces into three categories is the best way to mobilize the whole nation for combat. The people 's militia - guerillas and self-defense squads - make up the large forces of the toiling people at the grass roots, without getting divorced from production work. The re-regional troops form the core of the armed struggle in a given region. The regular troops are the mobile forces which operate everywhere in the country or in certain given strategic areas."

But in order to crate a people's army, it is necessary to have a cause the nation will fight for. Since its founding in 1930 under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnam Workers' Party has rallied people to the cause of national independence, democracy and socialism. Today, party, the entire army, and therefore the entire people, have been victorious in Vietnam.

But the Vietnamese success is bigger than just Vietnam. It fills the whole world, a monument to the prevalence of civilization over brute force. It fulfills the role of the American anti-war movement, without whom the Vietnamese may have been crushed years ago by tactical nuclear weapons as threatened by various US Generals. And it signals a socialist onslaught for economic equality throughout the globe.

Gerald Ford, the ruling Rockefellers, and millions of misinformed Americans, on the other hand, see Vietnam as a terrible, humiliating disaster.

No sooner had Saigon surrendered than Ford and Kissinger could be seen pleading with reports and the people in TV-land to "put Vietnam behind us." Forget about it.

Forget about it so the CIA can begin their disruptive maneuvers elsewhere. Forget about it so we won't hear the clamor for the war-reparations agreed to in the Paris Agreements. Forget about it so we won't hear a din demanding an international tribunal to investigate US war atrocities and anti-personnel bombings. Forget about it so the public will not use the Vietnam debacle to truly discover the roots of American foreign policy.

Forget about it. Ship more arms and ammunition to President "Puppet" Park in "South" Korea. Forget about the 40,000 American GIs stationed there, standing in the way of the peaceful reunification of that country. Ah, Korea, another American cesspool of corruption, decadence and fascism. The US didn't win that war either. It was stalemated by another people's army, this one led by Kim Il Sung.

Forget about the torture still going on in Chile, where US "destabilization" tactics accomplished the overthrow of a democratically elected but socialist government. Forget about corporate imperialism in Africa and Latin America. Forget about possible US troop "protection" of the Middle East oil fields.

Forget about it while we take in 100,000 westernized Vietnamese refugees. Forget about it while there is no unconditional amnesty for thousands of deserters from an illegal war.

If we forget Vietnam, even for a minute, then American will again be responsible for another decades-long bloodbath in some other country struggling for independence and freedom. But if we keep the victory of Vietnam uppermost in our mind we will never again allow this country to carry out such death and destruction in our name.

The victory of Vietnam is a glorious event. All those who stand on the side of the Vietnamese share in that victory. All those opposed can only choke on this one of many upcoming defeats.

-Pun Plamondon for the SUN Collective