Vietnam Protest

Sir: I notice that Senator Robert Kennedy (no Vietnik) has expressed grave perturbation at the fact that the American Government has ignored three feelers towards negotiation from North Vietnam during the past seven months. I too am perturbed. A great many New Zealanders undoubtedly accepted the assurance of our Prime Minister that, while sending aid to the South Vietnamese Government, he would try in all ways to work for a negotiated peace. At that time we were informed that North Vietnam was wholly intractable. It now seems that we were misinformed. Either our Prime Minister was himself gravely misled, or he was consciously misleading us. Had the delegation of New Zealand churchmen of various denominations who approached him, urging a negotiated peace, known that the rights that might lead to that peace were being deliberately ignored – one supposes, inpage 753 favour of an unconditional surrender brought about by many massacres – would they have gone away with the feeling that the situation was being justly handled?

I believe that we live in a century more merciless than that of Genghis Khan. The massacre of Jews, the starvation of kulaks, the extermination of the civilian population of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Cologne – these monumental atrocities must be understood, digested, to establish a decision in each man’s heart that he will never again be more merciless than any beast. May I associate myself with the statement of that Catholic priest who had seen his village, empty of Viet Cong, containing only old people and children, consumed by explosive fire? – ‘I have seen my faithful burnt up by napalm

. . . By God, it is not possible. They must settle their account with God . . .’. To reject possible negotiations in the circumstances of this demonic war is to become, I think, a trifle insane. I pray each day that the mad will be made sane, and hearts of stone turned back into hearts of flesh.

Decorum is part of the problem. How does one explain to polite, reserved, military-minded people that modern war is itself an atrocity – in the Hiroshima panels, a plain full of burnt, flayed, naked, staggering people, whose threatening, asking ghosts are now part of the collective mind of modern man? Do our neighbours remember that children frequently become insane under modern war conditions? Do they have no bad dreams? Have they lost the power to love beyond their own families?

1965 (371)