Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Howard Zinn
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at home, coinciding with such a blatantly cruel war as that in Vietnam (whose victims are largely nonwhite), has lacerated again and again the Negro’s vulnerable loyalty to America.
As one bit of evidence, I would point to the case of Julian Bond, the SNCC worker elected to the Georgia State Legislature. I would guess that the Negro voters in Julian Bond’s Atlanta constituency (a neighborhood in which I and my family lived for seven years), if polled on the Vietnam issue in isolation from other issues, would have reacted along a wide spectrum, from hostility to support, in relation to Lyndon Johnson’s policy. But when Bond was expelled by the Georgia Legislature for refusing to repudiate SNCC’s criticism of the Vietnam war, local backing for him was so overwhelming that no opponent could be found to run against him in the next election. The race mood determines, from moment to moment, the Negro attitude toward Vietnam. In World War II there was such a strong element of anti-racism in the fight against the century’s arch-racist, Adolf Hitler, that Negroes could to a large extent be persuaded to support the war. But in the Vietnam war, the situation is different: The foe is not an Anglo-Saxon racist but a mass of poor, dark-skinned peasants who resemble in many aspects of their lives the Negroes of the American rural South.
From time to time incidents in the war, like one reported on American television March 13, 1966, release the pent-up anger of Negroes against a white society that, with an incredibly innocent obliviousness, makes their everyday life miserable. Vietcong rebels had overrun a Special Forces base, occupied by troops of the government of South Vietnam and some American military. United States helicopters flew in to evacuate the Americans, leaving the Vietnamese behind. South Vietnamese rushed the helicopters in their desperation, and the United States soldiers drove them away with gunfire, shooting thirty or forty of them, with undisclosed casualties. It was a complicated scene, but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that by some deeply imbedded principle guiding American conduct, the lives of white Americans were worth more than the lives of Asiatics—even those “on our side.”
The charge most often flung at the Johnson administration by Negroes in connection with the Vietnam war can be summed up in one word: hypocrisy. If the government is dedicated to the expansion of freedom in far-off parts of the world, then why is it not equally dedicated to freedom for the Negro at home?
The liberal replies: But it is—look at the Civil Rights Acts, the White House Conferences, the speeches by LBJ.
The Negro responds: My real problem is not what it says in the law books, but how much money I have in my pocket. The Negro compares the magnitude of national effort to bring what is claimed to be “freedom” to 13 million people in South Vietnam, with the magnitude of the effort for 15 million Negroes who are poor at home. He compares the $2 billion spent each month on the war with the pitiful sums of money spent on behalf of the Negro. He compares the willingness to commit mass murder in Vietnam, presumably justified by “freedom,” with the unwillingness of the federal government to arrest on the spot a sheriff in Mississippi whom FBI men watch beating a Negro. He compares the 350,000 soldiers sent to Vietnam with the frequent refusal of the federal government to send even a handful of marshals to protect Negroes from violence. He compares all the spurious legalistic argument to explain why the federal government cannot protect civil rights workers in the South with the crass violations in Vietnam of international agreements, to say nothing of one of the most important provisions in the United States Constitution, giving Congress alone the power to declare war.
Mississippi Negroes pleaded with the federal government in early June 1964 for protection in what was obviously going to be a dangerous summer. A busload of black Mississippians traveled 1000 miles to present evidence in Washington on the need for such protection, and constitutional lawyers proved that the federal government had all the legal authority it needed to grant this. But the Mississippi Negroes were met with silence, and thirteen days later Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, who had to travel unprotected into Neshoba County, were murdered. Even after the murders, when once again asked to supply protection, the federal government gave various arguments: it would violate “the federal system”; not enough marshals were available. But when various tottering regimes in South Vietnam pleaded for help, the government sent thousands of troops across the Pacific.
A brief item from The New York Times of June 22, 1966 helps explain the bitterness of Negro militants when the federal government asks support for its massive military effort in Vietnam. It describes a series of acts of violence against Negroes marching into Philadelphia, Mississippi, and goes on to say: “Philadelphia’s ten policemen, including two Negroes, and a group of Neshoba County deputy sheriffs watched most of the violence without moving to stop it. At least two Justice Department lawyers and an undetermined number of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were present as observers.” (My emphasis.)
Bob Moses, the pioneer of the Mississippi civil rights struggle, summed it up: “Our criticism of Vietnam policy does not come from what we know of Vietnam, but from what we know of America.”
The hypocrisy is seen also in United States policy toward those African states where blacks are still controlled by a white minority. If the United States cares enough about “freedom” to make a major military effort in Asia, why has it been so consistently reluctant even to support economic sanctions against the most brutally racist country in the world—South Africa? On June 17, 1965, the Special Committee on Apartheid of the United Nations, calling for “total economic sanctions” against South Africa, according to The New York Times of June 18, 1965, “expressed concern that Britain and the United States continued to oppose Security Council action.”
Similarly, United States softness toward Portugal’s colonialism is contrasted with the hardness in Southeast Asia. On May 2, 1966, professors at the predominantly Negro Lincoln University, in a letter to Senator Fulbright, opposed the nomination of William Tapley Bennett as ambassador to Portugal, pointing out that “in spite of votes by overwhelming majorities within the United Nations General Assembly demanding that Portugal admit the principle of self-determination for its colonies, and despite the persistent refusal of Portugal to act, the United States has consistently voted against United Nations sanctions to induce Portuguese compliance.”
Some Negro civil rights workers compare the American fear of revolutionary change in the world to the white South’s fear of social change. In this analogy, Lyndon Johnson appears as a kind of global Governor Wallace, sending out the troops to quell demonstrations of the aggrieved and refusing to understand that a group which has suffered over the centuries, once aroused, will not simply retire into the shadows by the threat or use of force. The United States no more understands the psychology of the hungry peasants of the world than the white South has understood the thinking of the Negro. It does not understand the mind of the revolutionist, and this has important implications for the “domino theory.” Even a total military victory in Vietnam would not prevent another insurrection from developing the next week in another part of Asia or Latin America, in the presence of deep grievances—just as the beating and killing of Negroes did not stop the marches, the demonstrations, the spread of rebelliousness in the South.
It may offend admirers of the Great Society to hear Lyndon Johnson compared to George Wallace, but consider: to white Alabamans, Wallace has appeared as a kindly, genial statesman, well-meaning and bringing economic progress; they have been mystified by the stubbornness of the Negro revolt and thus have reacted with a violent anger—much as Johnson has reacted in Vietnam.
The analogy can be carried further. The white South, refusing to believe that local Negroes had genuine grievances about which they were disturbed, attributed the demonstrations to “outside agitators.” Similarly, the Johnson administration cannot seem to believe that there were genuine grievances in South Vietnam which led to guerrilla warfare, and so it blames the war on “outside infiltration” from North Vietnam, or outside “instigation” from Communist China. There has been infiltration from North Vietnam, and help from Communist China. But so was there “outside” aid to the Southern Negro from Northern Negroes and Northern whites. In neither case, however, does this fact of outside support obliterate a more fundamental truth, that the insurgent energy was indigenous, supplied by severe local problems, and indeed could not have become a major movement unless these problems existed.
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