BY DOUG LORIMER
With the United States and its allies facing an escalating guerrilla war of resistance to its occupation of Iraq, more and more people are starting to see similarities between the Iraq war and the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s. For anti-war activists today, there are many valuable lessons to be drawn from the movement against the US war in Vietnam, an anti-war movement that succeeded in blocking an imperialist victory in a war against a Third World country.
The US war in Vietnam began in 1946 after the Communist-led Vietminh (the Vietnam League of Independence) established a government in Hanoi in August 1945 and declared Vietnam independent of its former French colonial rulers. Washington funded and armed a 400,000-strong French colonial army, which waged an eight-year war to crush the Vietminh guerrilla movement, beginning in 1946, a war that culminated in the French occupation forces' surrender after a 45-day siege at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
At an international conference in Geneva in 1954, Vietnam was temporarily partitioned, with the Communist-led independence forces withdrawing to the north of the country and the French colonial forces and their Vietnamese collaborators in the south. Nation-wide elections were scheduled to be held in 1956.
However, Washington ignored the Geneva Accords signed by France and the Vietminh and installed a puppet regime in southern Vietnam. Beginning in the late 1950s, this regime — which rested on the support of rich landlords — faced an escalating guerrilla war organised by the Communist-led National Liberation Front (NLF) — termed the "Viet Cong" by the Saigon regime and its US masters.
By February 1965, when the US began a sustained air war against North Vietnam, there were 23,000 US ground troops in South Vietnam. By the end of 1965, the US had 180,000 troops in South Vietnam (the number of US ground troops peaked at 542,000 in early 1969).
The Vietnam Action Campaign
One of the first protest actions against the Vietnam War in Australia to get national headlines after Liberal Prime Minister Bob Menzies' April 1965 announcement that Australia was sending troops to Vietnam, was in Canberra and was organised by delegates to the Australian Student Labor Federation conference in May 1965. The ASLF was the national association of campus Labor clubs.
A sit-down protest by ASLF delegates on a level crossing led to the arrest of a number of delegates, including Bob Gould and John Percy. Gould and Percy were later to help found the Resistance socialist youth organisation in 1967. Today Percy is national secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party, which was founded in 1972.
Following the May 1965 Canberra demonstration, Gould and Percy played a key role in establishing the Vietnam Action Campaign in Sydney. The VAC was the first organisation formed in Australia to campaign against the Vietnam War.
During 1965 and 1966, the VAC organised a series of demonstrations, modest at first. These actions paved the way for the form of action that was to become the hallmark of anti-war activity — mass street marches. Those early demonstrations established the right of people to use the streets for political protest against government policy — something that is taken for granted today.
The VAC campaigned around the central demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Australian and US troops from Vietnam. The immediate withdrawal demand — later abbreviated to the slogan "Troops out now!" — placed responsibility for the war squarely on the US and Australian war machines. It was the most concrete way of supporting the Vietnamese people's right to national self-determination, that is, to decide their own affairs without foreign political interference.
The culminating point of that period was the demonstration in October 1966, when 10,000 demonstrators greeted US President Lyndon Baines Johnson in Sydney. During Johnson's visit to Melbourne, his cavalcade was dowsed with blood-red paint. These protests against LBJ gained widespread international publicity.
Right turn by ALP and CPA
During 1966, the ALP opposed Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. This was a big factor in building support for the anti-war forces. However, in the November 1966 federal election, the ALP suffered an electoral disaster in large part due to the strong anti-war stand of its leader, Arthur Calwell.
Following the election, Calwell was replaced as Labor leader by Gough Whitlam, who in 1967 led a right-wing attack on the ALP's anti-war policy. The Labor Party's previous policy of calling for the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam was watered down to a position of "withdraw to holding areas", which meant accepting continued US and Australian occupation of Vietnamese territory. The new ALP position, which made no commitment to immediately bring Australian troops home, was adopted unanimously by the ALP federal parliamentary caucus.
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which at the time was the largest radical left party in Australia, with at least 5000 members, accommodated to the right-wing turn by the ALP. From 1967 on, the CPA argued for the anti-war movement to drop its original demand for the immediate withdrawal of US and Australian troops from Vietnam. Instead, the CPA argued that the demand, "Stop the bombing, negotiate!", was all that was necessary for the anti-war movement to campaign for.
Almost alone in the anti-war movement, Resistance continued to support the "Troops out now!" demand. It argued that the demand, "Stop the bombing, negotiate!", failed to recognise the Vietnamese people's right to national self-determination — which was the central issue underlying the war.
US and Australian troops had been sent to Indochina to forcibly stop the Vietnamese people from removing the hated landlord-capitalist puppet regime imposed on South Vietnam by the US following the defeat of French colonial rule over Vietnam in 1954.
The radical wing of the movement argued that the US and its allies had no right to be in Vietnam; and that while the Vietnamese resistance forces were perfectly justified in calling for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the beginning of peace negotiations between Hanoi and the NLF on one hand and the US on the other, the duty of anti-war activists in the countries that had troops in Vietnam was to reduce "our" governments' pressure on the Vietnamese by demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and allied military forces from Vietnam.
Moreover, we warned that even if the imperialists stopped bombing North Vietnam, they would still continue the ground war in the south.
Resistance and other pro-"Troops out now!" forces grouped in the VAC continued to build actions called by various anti-war committees that had accepted the CPA's "Stop the bombing, negotiate!" demand, but they also continued to argue for the readoption by the entire anti-war movement of the immediate withdrawal demand. During 1967, protest actions organised by the VAC were drawing up to 7000 participants.
Bombing halt
Then, in early 1968, following the Tet offensive by the Vietnamese resistance forces — in which they temporarily seized control of many of South Vietnam's cities — the CPA won its "Stop the bombing, negotiate!" demand. President Johnson announced he was suspending bombing operations over North Vietnam and was ready to negotiate with the Hanoi government and the NLF. Because this had been the demand of the anti-war movement built by the CPA and its allies in the ALP left, the broader anti-war movement collapsed. From then on, the CPA concentrated almost exclusively on opposition to conscription.
Meanwhile, the imperialists continued the war in South Vietnam. During 1968, the US poured another 100,000 troops into South Vietnam, taking its occupation army to 500,000 troops. And while the US stopped bombing North Vietnam, it escalated its air war over South Vietnam, exploding 2.9 million tonnes of munitions in 1968 alone (from 1965 to 1973, the US unleashed a total of 14 million tonnes of bombs and shells on Vietnam, an explosive force equivalent to more than 700 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs!).
In Sydney, it was left to forces directly influenced by Resistance to rebuild the anti-war movement. In a series of demonstrations, beginning at Sydney University and marching into the city centre, anti-war demands were again raised by Resistance, the Sydney University Labor Club and by High School Students Against the War in Vietnam. This period culminated in a march of 2500 in December 1969 organised by the Vietnam Mobilisation Committee, in which Resistance members were leading activists.
The CPA as a party boycotted the march. Its line at the time was that the march should be built around the central slogan of "Victory to the NLF!". The Stalinist leaders of the CPA knew that actions organised around such a slogan would only mobilise the relatively small forces of the radical left, that is, those who consciously stood for the victory of the Vietnamese resistance fighters and excluded all those who opposed the war for other reasons.
That was why the CPA raised it. It couldn't stand to see anti-Stalinist socialists playing a leading role in the anti-war movement and therefore sought to sabotage any actions called by forces in which Resistance was influential. In order to give their factionally motivated abstentionism political cover, the CPA claimed that the "Troops out now!" demand wasn't "militant" enough.
The fraudulence of their argument became clear, of course, as soon as the question of what stood in the way of an NLF victory in South Vietnam was considered. The answer was rather obvious. As the course of the war after the bulk of US forces were pulled out in 1973 demonstrated, without the direct involvement of hundreds of thousands of US troops, the corrupt and hated Saigon regime could not stand up to the Vietnamese national liberation movement.
The most effective thing supporters of the NLF outside Vietnam could do to assist an NLF victory was to force the US and its allies to get their troops out of Vietnam. And how could this goal be best achieved? By mobilising the largest possible number of people to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and allied military forces from Vietnam.
The Vietnam Moratorium Campaign
Fortunately, the CPA leaders could not impose their views on the anti-war movement in the United States. By late 1969, massive demonstrations there, around the "Out now!" demand, led the CPA to the conclusion that unless they took up anti-war activity they might be confronted by a mass anti-war movement which they did not control. So a call went out from the CPA's Sydney "peace" front, the Association for International Cooperation and Disarmament, for a meeting to establish a big new anti-war committee. However, in the rush they "forgot" to inform the activists in the Vietnam Mobilisation Committee. But we turned up anyway.
The CPA and its AICD allies wanted to set up an anti-war committee that would consist only of delegated representatives from affiliated organisations, that is, one which they could bureaucratically dominate and from which the mass of anti-war activists would be excluded.
However, their proposals were defeated and the new Vietnam Moratorium Campaign (VMC) was established as a non-exclusionary coalition functioning through open mass meetings. Much to the consternation of the CPA, one of the leaders of the VMC, John Percy's brother and fellow Resistance leader Jim Percy, was elected to the organisation's five-member secretariat. Moreover, the VMC adopted "Troops out now!" as its central slogan.
In 1970, the VMC built the biggest anti-war actions ever seen in this country up to that time, through a series of nationally coordinated marches in all the state capitals. The largest of these was on September 18, 1970, when 150,000 people participated in anti-war marches around the country. The biggest turnout was in Melbourne, where 75,000 marched, followed by 20,000 in Sydney.
A major reason for the disparity between the sizes of the mobilisations in Melbourne and Sydney was the role of the ALP in each city.
By late 1969, public opposition to the war had grown to such an extent that the ALP leadership had recognised that opposition to the war could be a vote-winner. Moreover, with significant sections of the Australian ruling class, such as the Murdoch-owned press, desiring an end to Australian involvement in the war because of its domestic political costs — the radicalisation of a whole generation of young people — the ALP leaders knew they wouldn't come in for too much stick from their capitalist masters if they adopted an anti-war position.
In 1970, the Whitlam ALP leadership sought to capitalise on the deepening anti-war sentiment by identifying itself with the anti-war movement. The ALP altered its policy, calling for the withdrawal of Australian troops "within six months". Whitlam and other federal Labor leaders participated in Moratorium marches and the ALP's left-wing began to play an active role in the VMC organising committees.
In Victoria, where the Labor left dominated the ALP, ALP deputy leader Jim Cairns put himself at the head of the VMC. Active support for the VMC by the leaders of the ALP in Victoria helped mobilise large numbers of workers for the Melbourne demonstrations. By contrast, the right-wing ALP leaders in NSW only gave token backing to anti-war mobilisations, thus limiting their size.
Opportunists and ultraleftists
While the ALP's involvement in the anti-war movement had a positive effect as far as boosting the size of the mobilisations in 1970, it also brought negative consequences, which became particularly pronounced following the September 1970 marches.
The right-wing ALP politicians began to take fright at the size of the demonstrations and their radicalising effect on large numbers of people, particularly workers. The ALP left and its friends in the CPA opportunistically adapted to the right's pressure by trying to call off mass marches.
In Melbourne, Cairns and the CPA pushed through a motion that the next Moratorium action, scheduled for April 30, 1971, be focused on "decentralised" actions (small suburban rallies). Resistance was the only group to argue against the motion. While we did not oppose localised actions, we argued that the anti-war movement was most effective when it concentrated its forces, thus impressing upon both the ruling class and the population in general the strength of the movement.
The opportunists justified their turn from centralised mass actions with the argument that people were "tired of marching". The argument against this apolitical claim was succinctly put on the cover of the January 1971 edition of Resistance's monthly paper, Direct Action. Between pictures of anti-war marchers and pictures of marching Vietnamese resistance fighters, we posed the question, "Tired of marching... what if they were?".
The opportunists' opposition to mass actions was also supported by ultraleft groupings like the Maoist Worker-Student Alliance. Frustrated because the war continued despite the mass opposition to it, the ultraleftists sought to find shortcuts through the isolated acts and adventures of small groups of people, and thus to avoid the arduous but necessary path of winning over the majority of people.
The ultraleftists argued that mass marches around the "Out now!" demand were not "anti-imperialist" enough. Instead, they sought to have the anti-war movement centre on slogans like "Smash US imperialism!" and tried to provoke violent confrontations with the police.
The ultraleftists' deliberately confrontationist tactics, when they were able to implement them, only resulted in savage police attacks on demonstrators. The ultraleftists' antics did little to "smash imperialism". They simply provided the cops with an excuse to smash anti-war protests.
The ultraleftists forgot that most of them had become radicalised and became aware of imperialism through mass actions objectively aimed against the imperialist war machines of the US and Australia by demanding that they get out of Vietnam. Indeed, participation in such objectively anti-imperialist actions helped socialists win large numbers of young people to an understanding of the incompatibility of human needs and imperialist capitalism.
The real test of anti-imperialism in a period of war is the ability to mobilise large masses of people in political action against the war policy of their own imperialist rulers. The ultraleftists failed this test completely. Their play-at-revolution tactics completely failed to mobilise even a small percentage of the large numbers of people who opposed the war. They failed to understand that only a mass anti-war movement, acting in objective solidarity with the mass resistance movement of the Vietnamese workers and peasants, could defeat the imperialist rulers' war in Vietnam.
[This is the first of a two-part series. The second part will appear in next week's Green Left Weekly.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 22, 2003.
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