A Letter to Mr Holyoake

Dear Mr Holyoake: It may seem strange to you that I address you by way of the pages of a monthly periodical, and not directly. But there are several reasons for this. In the first place, this is not simply a personal letter. If you were not the Prime Minister of New Zealand I would have no occasion to write to you, short of some unlikely accident that brought us face to face outside the sphere of political action. This letter is inevitably concerned with public matters; and so part of its purpose is that it should be read by people other than yourself; though I do not intend for a moment to set aside the fact that you are a person and I am a person, and that our decisions and attitudes are influenced by many incalculable private crises and experiences.

Again, we both know that if I sent you a letter in the ordinary way, it would not be read; or if it were read, by you or one of your secretaries, it would be shelved and set aside as an inevitable expression of a somewhat stereotyped minority opinion. I wish to emphasise, however, that my opinion is not stereotyped. I cannot afford to let it become so; for I am by habit and vocation a writer, and have the unending responsibility to use words truthfully, and for the benefit of others, even if the truths I encounter are uncomfortable for them or for myself.

I would like you to re-examine seriously your apparent commitment to the intervention of our country in the Vietnam War. The issue of our involvement in this war has been thrashed to death from one side of the country to the other, at formal gatherings, in coffee houses, in pubs, at private firesides, until it might seem that little more could be said about it. Indeed at times the subject has wearied me, as it must also have wearied you. Yet the facts of warfare in Vietnam are so terrible, and our involvement – if erroneous – so staggering a miscalculation on the political and economic and personal level, that the subject cannot die until the war itself ceases.

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I regret deeply the tendency of those who are divided in this debate to withdraw into two somewhat insulated camps. It seems that we do not communicate much with each other. Where opposition to the Vietnam War, and our participation in that war, are freely aired, I have often had the impression that the converted are talking to the converted – and I must deplore that a sectarian atmosphere should be engendered where the issues involved are so public, so human, so little sectarian. I imagine you have found the same atmosphere prevailing among those who are strongly or moderately in support of our involvement in this war. I can, however, make one clear observation on this topic. Where groups have gathered together to express their objection to our involvement in this war, those people who have come to protest against the protesters have, in my experience, almost invariably had no coherent arguments to offer. Shouted interjections about the dangers of the Yellow Peril, or accusations that the protesters are themselves Communist – these unhappy, sub-rational voices come from a layer of communal feeling where judgments about the justice of any cause would be impossible. And I feel that you yourself have at times most unfortunately given them an unwitting support by public statements in which you have, no doubt sincerely, expressed the opinion that those who oppose involvement in the Vietnam War are either misguided idealists or committed Leftists. All men have some ideas; and whether these are misguided or not can be a suitable subject of debate. But I trust you will take the word of a man who hates lies, when I tell you that the number of committed Leftists among those who protest against our involvement in this war is very small indeed, and that they are neither predominant nor influential. Whatever partisan quality exists among the protesters has sprung up almost entirely from a reaction of horror against the circumstances of that war itself.

No doubt there are arguments in favour of our involvement in the war. I have occasionally seen such arguments, in the pages of American periodicals, or in statements by the President of America, or your own public statements. My complaint about them is not that they do not exist, but that they are inclined to be very narrow, to assume from the start that military action is the most practical kind of action, and to rest finally on doubtful and mystical premises – an assumption of the existence of a worldwide and effective Communist conspiracy, for example – (an argument which is now empty rhetoric even among the Marxists, and known to be so by most of those who use it) – or an assumption that the ‘democratic way of life’ is an all-buttangible entity which can be given and distributed like bread to those who appear to lack it. There may be arguments that I have never seen. If they exist, I would be glad to see them, at least for the assurance that you and other leaders who favour involvement in the war are not proceeding simply by some kind of obscure and subrational reflex. But I have noticed with a very real disquiet that the ordinary people of this country who are in support of page 427 our involvement in this war seem to be moved either by racist preoccupations – ‘The people with yellow or black skins are barbaric and inferior and are waiting to cut our throats’ – or by a sub-rational form of anti-Communism – ‘We will have to get in first and kill off the Commos before they come down here and kill us off. . . .’ I must apologise for introducing these terrible and anti-human fantasies in the course of a rational statement. But I introduce them so that you may consider from what quarter the strongest support for involvement in the Vietnam War may be coming. If such fantasies were actually to gain possession of the minds of those who have to make political decisions – then indeed there would be no help for us, and we would in a sense deserve to perish in an unimaginably destructive Armageddon. You will understand that many of us, who may not support your political party, nevertheless look to your Government as a bulwark and a guarantee that such fantasies will never take control at the public level. You may not have considered the possibility that they could do so. I would like you to consider it seriously.

The fact that those who actively oppose our participation in the Vietnam War are a minority (5% at most of our population) might mislead you into an assumption that the other 95% are in favour of intervention. I do not think this is the case. In my own experience, there are only another 5% in favour of intervention, and many of these for wholly sub-rational reasons; and the remaining 90% have formed no definite opinion on the matter but will probably follow wherever they are led. This places, I think, a responsibility on the shoulders of your Government to consider most carefully the arguments of that half of the part of the population who have come to some decision and who are not in favour of intervention.

I recognise fully that at this stage of our commitment to the war it would require an all-but-superhuman act of courage and insight and abnegation for you personally to undertake a public change in your opinions or a reversal of previous decisions. I have heard, however – I hope the information was not erroneous – that when the possibility of our involvement in the Vietnam War was first mooted, you were by no means in favour of it, but bowed to a majority opinion among your colleagues. Many of us who are opposed to involvement have noted from time to time with sympathy your unease about the situation. For example, your custom of making a public declaration through the newspapers that no further involvement is intended – we have come to recognise that this is a kind of code signal to the nation that there will very soon be further involvement – and while such a lack of clarity at the level of public communications has seemed to many of us deplorable, others do recognise that you are basically unwilling to send an increasing number of the young men of New Zealand into a singularly atrocious war which we ourselves did not start, nor for that matter can actually hinder or perpetuate. I may have mistaken the customary uncandidness of political life page 428 for the movements of a troubled and delicate conscience. If this is so, I do not apologise, since I would rather attribute to any man the second than the first.

For myself, I must continue to oppose our involvement in this war, since I am a Catholic, and – apart from the obvious humanitarian angle – the hierarchy of the Church to which I belong have recently publicly and explicitly denounced the use by any nation of weapons of atrocity and mass destruction. To limit this solely to the use of nuclear weapons, and exclude the use of napalm and other indiscriminate terror weapons, would be a sophistry. I imagine that the Catholic members of your Government who support involvement in the war had either not adverted to those public statements of the hierarchy – or to the recent speech of Pope Paul to the United Nations Assembly – or else are thinking sub-rationally. My view is not, however, merely negative – this would be the partisan position which I endeavour to avoid. The enormous problems of poverty in Asia (with which I am to some extent personally acquainted) are plainly enough the chief cause of the present war in Vietnam and the chief reason for the rise of Communism in the East. The war will be won when the under-developed nations (with or without our help) are able to sustain a reasonable standard of living. And the kind of Communism that emerges in the East or the West (in many ways, as you do, I deplore its theory and practice) will be harsh or liberal, tyrannical or semi-democratic, friendly or hostile, according to the way that you and other leaders of our time are able to play your cards. I have wondered sometimes whether you or the President of America have seriously considered the worst and most negative alternative, towards which the war in Vietnam may gradually drive us – a series of atrocious and crippling wars, draining our own nations of blood, and accentuating the very problems that give rise to Communism and terrorism – or a genocidal attempt to exterminate all people who explicitly profess to support the Communist economic theory. America of course has her own problems and a high degree of fantasy in the thinking of her public leaders. Do we have to share the aberrations of that country – powerful, in certain respects well-intentioned, but on the international level marked with a deplorable political naïveté? I cannot believe what some have said – that you and your colleagues have committed us to this war in the hope that it will benefit trade. If this were so, you would not deserve to hold office for a day. Rather, I am troubled that men basically well-intentioned should be caught in some kind of historical trap, and seem unable to free themselves or their countrymen by a series of rational decisions.

Yours sincerely,

James K. Baxter.

P.S. One thing has always disturbed me about both you and your colleagues. Have you ever actually known a Communist – worked in the same factory with him, played chess, argued together, joined in social work? – or conceivably page 429 made love to her since not all Communists are men? I have known a good many. They have never seriously tempted me to adopt their philosophy. But I have come to know that Communists are not Martians – they are undeniably human, have virtues and faults, are often illogically humane, when their precepts might point in the opposite direction. If you and your colleagues have had the misfortune never to have known anyone personally who belonged to the Communist Party, it could happen that you adopted a somewhat fantastic view of Communists – such as, for example, many of us had during the Second World War towards our Japanese neighbours. One gets nowhere by fantasies. I do have the advantage of knowing and having known several Communists. Their excessive idealism certainly moves me with dread; but so does the American idealism. People so alike should certainly be able to understand each other. J.K.B.

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