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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Peace in Vietnam

Peace in Vietnam

Sir: As one of the signatories to the Vietnam petition, and a believing Catholic, I can assure Ian Cross that I am buying no indulgences from the Devil. Why should he assume that his fellow-artists lack the power to make independent judgments with which he must credit himself? I suggest that in the old days, when the Crusaders were burning the cities of the Albigensians to the ground, Mr Cross would have been on the side of the militarist Bishop who cried out – ‘Kill! Kill! The Lord will know his own’ – while the signatories to the Vietnam petition would have been pointing out that the issue was complex and not to be solved by military means. The parallel is very apt, because politics have unfortunately become the religion of our century, and each side seems to believe that the others are possessed by devils.

I can also assure Mr Cross that the violently partisan among those who are opposed to intervention in Vietnam are few in number. There is no common political front. When I spoke recently in Timaru on the Vietnam issue, one or two extreme leftists who were present were much disappointed and assumed that I was anti-Communist because I pointed out the real and practical evils present in most Communist regimes. It is not my practice to shut my eyes to those evils (or to the evils fostered by our own regimes) – but only to oppose strenuously a militarist crusade based on naïve and irrational premises.

I have listened carefully to the reasons that Lyndon Johnson and our own Prime Minister have advanced for the alleged necessity for military intervention. They say we must fight a war against aggression. How many North Vietnamese troops were engaged in the war when the bombing of North Vietnam began? If North Vietnam withdrew all her troops now engaged in the war, would the war stop? I think it is wholly uncandid to speak of aggression. The boot is probably on the other foot. They say also that we must stop the Communists. There are further questions one may suitably raise. When has a Communist revolution ever been successful, or even got under way, in an affluent country? Are we obliged to intervene with all the terrible weapons of modern warfare each time a revolution seems likely to succeed? If (as seems probable) the American economy depends on Asian markets and spheres of influence and perhaps even on a war each decade to keep it going – are we each of us personally committed to defend that economy at the expense of our own lives and the lives of millions of Asian people? Do the leaders who claim unjustly to speak on our behalf intend to commit us to a war of extermination page 115 against the Communist half of the world? Why are they so damnably feeble in their raremovements towards non-military co-existence? Do the lives of other people, Communist or non-Communist, not matter?

The Founder of Christianity did not, to my knowledge, speak against war – or against slavery, or many other vast and endemic social evils. He seems to have left it to us to employ our hearts and heads freely and constructively on these problems. The one clear comment he did make was that those who use the sword will perish by the sword. If and when we do perish by the sword (in our own terms, by nuclear explosion) I trust that neither Mr Cross nor any who share his naïve political views will think that those who have strenuously throughout their lives opposed the use of the sword in fact contributed to that calamity.

1966 (405)