Agiiprop

by Barry Zigas

Shortly helore, and even during the re-
cent Republican Convention there was much
talk or a surprise peace package to be
announced by the President, The idea was
that Tricky Dick was going to pull some
kind oi SE Asian settlement out 0i his
pocket to really sew up the election.

Fired by this glimpse of excitement in
an otherwise boring Republican gets
together, journalists of all colors ilocked
to their typewriters and pounded out sug-
gestive stories about the “coming peace”,
or “Mr. Nixon’s ultimate feat of statQSr
manship". We peasants clustered around
our tabloids and tried to second-guess the
court magician-rHenry Kissinger»on his
promising peregrinations. Such an odyssey
{or peace‘ We sat in our easy chairs, our
soltly~lit living rooms, andthrilledtoevery
pregnant pronouncement. The commenta-
tors’ optimism was matched only by their
calm surety. President Nixon was simply
bowing to practical politics, We heard. A
negotiated settlement was as good as a
plank in the Republican platform.

And while Henry wandered, while the com»
mentators wrangled with realities and while
we watched the whole spectacle, the peoe
ple oi Vietnam were getting the shit bombed
out of themr

August (ilst’s Des Moines Register noted
on page B that “. . .Air Force, Navy,
and Marine pilots carried out morethanZDO
strikes Tuesday acrossNorthVietnam,...”.
Heavy rains prevented bombing except in
the southern sector, the article goes on to
say. 200 raids a day in a limited section
of the country. And this does not include
the daily desolation 0! the south by
”friendly” attack planes and B»52's.

The point is that Nixon’s “diplomacy”
of the last few weeks has been little more
than a by»play. The real action has been
in Vietnam, as always.

Nixon made it clear in his acceptance
speech that his is not talking about a real»
istic peace proposal. He stressed the need
to preserve America’s honor intact, to
never desert our prisoners of war, and not
to desert our “friends" in South Vietnam.

The truth behind these lofty statements
is that America's honor is presently about
as chimerlcal as the Holy Grail. The
North Vietnamese have for years had a
clear stand on the prisoner issue: a halt
to the bombing ol the North, complete
withdrawal of American forces from Indo'
china, the formation of the NLF, Nixon’s

The Vietnam

Tragedy Goes On

triends in South Vietnam have much to
gain by a continued war-Ablack marketproe
(its, graft, and the narcotics trade, to name
a low. They have everything to lose by
a negotiated settlement ontneNLF’sterms.
While Nixon wept crocodile tears over
Leningrad’s Tanya, mothers all over Vietr
nam were burying theirs oi- whatever re
mained of them. And countless Vietnamese
Tanyas were busy burying the shattered
remains of their families

While you read this tar, roughly twelve
tons of bombs tell on Vietnam.

Another precept of the Nixon Vietnam]—
zation Plan to End the War in Vietnam
is the “withdrawal” oi US combat troops
irom the area. At the convention, Nixon
proudly proclaimed to the nation that while
he had inherited the war from Democrats,
under his Administration the troop level
had dropped to a cosy 39,000. Casualties
are down to a record low, with natural
deaths irorn disease actually leading the
fieldr—among Americans in SE Asia, that
is.

Someone once said that you can’t make an
omelette without breaking eggs. lt is equally
true that you can’t pursue an Asian war
without somebody getting killed. When a lot
ot American boys were getting killed over
there, and when all of us collegetypeswere
threatened by the draft, an Asian war didn’t
sound like too good an idea. ‘
But since the eggs getting broken over
there now are ”theirs" instead of ours,
our indignation has cooled at! to the point
where we discuss the wholesale slaughter
oi thousands or people pretty calmly.

President Nixon has, ironically, been the
one to carry out Lyndon Johnson’s 1964
campaign pledge. The one about not sending
American boys to die for an Asian boy's war.

If this were all, it would be bad enough.
But the present u.s. war effort is some
what different than previous ones, as Nixon
is hasty to point out. The diiterence is
that he has withdrawn the actual men and
replaced them with machines. Former Viet-
nam commander Westmoreland recently
praised what he called the "advances oi
the mechanized battlefield” being made in
Vietnam. This mechanized battlefield lnv
cludcs everything lrom robot planes to

' lasar-guided missles and bombs that ac-

tually steer themselves towards a target.
Which brings us back to the unoomlortahls
reality of the Vietnam war: The myth of
troop withdrawals and disengagement.

While Nixon was bringing home a lot oi
the boys from Vietnam this year, he was
sending a lot at others to Thailand. Ace
cording to the Swedish magazine Kom-
mentor, the number of American troops
there in early May was 34,000. Time
magazine estimates that in July 45,000
were there. Newsweek reported an even
larger lncrease--to 49,000.

From the beginning of May till the end of
June the number of B-EZ’S stationed in
Thailand jumped [mm 450 to 750 planes
For all we know, all of these iigures may
be even higher now,

These troops are overthere forthe express
purpose of killing Vietnamese. From the
air, where Americans aren’t likely to get
shot down and reported as casualties back
home,

The bankruptcy or Nixon’s pow policycan
be easily seen by his concurrent pursual
of a policy which can only lead to an ins
crease in the already swollen list of POW's,
Neither is it hard to understand the North
Vietnamese reluctance to part with their
rows As prime recipients or all the
brutality and barbarism embodied in those
airborne cams packages which the ﬂiers
drop, the Vietnamese have no illusions
as to why the ﬂiers are in prison camps
in the first place. Many Americans seem
to be considerably less perceptive. Nixon’s
cynical manipulation of genuine emotional
issues can only serve to prolong the con
ﬂict.

Whether the Vietnam war is or even ought
to be a political issue in 1972 has heena
frequent topic of discussion this year. But
there really oughtn't be any discussion.
Vietnam is THE major campaign issue.
Each candidate’s stand on the war is really
his political litmus test.

This must go beyond a simple ”I'm against
it”. The cmdidates-»all candidates»must
be made to Clarify themselves on the other
aspects or American Assian policy which
have lead us to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
and Thailand. We should all take the time
to inlorm ourselves about these things and
try to nail the politicians wherever they
show up.

Sound like a lot of trouble? Got a lot of
booking, or parties you don't want to miss?

it you’ve read this far, our tax money has
provided the wherewithal [or American jet
planes to drop about 18 tons or high
explosives on Vietnam since you started
reading.

 

