40 YEARS AGO  

A Lie Spread By The US Aggressors

THE idea that peace cannot return to Vietnam because of Chinese aggressiveness – an idea so sedulously spread by the imperialists and echoed by many including government leaders in our country – has been effectively refuted by a quite respectable gentleman – Dr Malcolm Caldwell, Lecturer in Asian Economic History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

In his article “Luddites and Lemmings in South-East Asia” in the July 1965 issue of the very respectable British quarterly review, International Affairs, he writes:

“The first assumption, that of Chinese aggressiveness, is also in some respects the most puzzling. It is perhaps idle to speculate on its origins. It is not as if Chinese planes have been bombing, at the request of Hanoi, South Vietnamese supply bases in California, Virginia and the District of Columbia. Nor is it the case that hundreds of thousands of American men, women and children have been hideously burned and mutilated by napalm dropped from Chinese planes, or indiscriminately strafed while working, stopping or going to school, or gassed without warning. Chinese airmen have not been testing new ‘sophisticated’ conventional weapons – canisters of razor-shaped fluted steel, for example, capable of killing every living thing within a block – on the innocent citizens of the Mid-west, and announcing the result with undisguised pleasure. American towns have not been casually burned to the ground. There is unquestionably no Chinese equivalent of United States action in the Dominican Republic….And to label Chinese Intervention in Korea is sheer perversion of the truth; China only came into the war after repeated and measured warnings had been ignored by the United States.”

The devastating irony of the above sharply expresses the hypocrisy of the imperialists’ protestations of peace and the almost inconceivable savagery of their war against the people of Vietnam. Dr Caldwell mentions Goldwater’s “prayer” at a press conference in Paris on April 27, 1965, that Peking would offer enough provocation to enable America to launch a nuclear attack on China.

“By all objective standards,” Dr Caldwell observes, “China has exercised phenomenal restraint in the face of blatant and repeated American provocation – in and around Formosa (a part of China: it is as if the Chinese kept the American Communist Party in power in Florida by force), in Laos, in Burma, in Korea, and now in Vietnam.” Dr Caldwell adds: “A study of what information we have about the Chinese forces should dispose of the expansionist myth, for the time being at least. China's forces have essentially a defensive capacity. There is no evidence of any aspiration or intention, far less hard plan, in China to annex any of her neighbours.”

The true nature of US imperialist’ fondness for “unconditional negotiations” has been exposed again and again.

“What the United States understands by ‘unconditional negotiations’, Marshal Chen Yi said in an interview published in the London New Statesman of May 28, 1965, “mean in reality that the American troops obstinately refuse to leave South Vietnam, that the United States persist in not recognising the National Liberation Front as the sole legal representative of the Vietnamese people, that they wish to repudiate from top to bottom the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and the reunification of Vietnam, transforming South Vietnam from a puppet state under American control. In other words, they want to continue their aggression against Vietnam to their last breath. The peace talks concocted by them are aimed solely at gaining at the conference table what they have not been able to get on the battlefield. It is obvious that such peace negotiations would profit only the aggressor….if peace talks were not opened on the basis of conditions drawn up by the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, they would not solve any problem and would serve only to prolong the suffering which the South Vietnamese people endure under American imperialism and impose heavier sacrifices on them.”

--- People's Democracy, December 19, 1965