Indo-China Forum

Barry Mitcalfe, training college lecturer, and James K. Baxter, poet, addressed a large audience in the main common room last month on New Zealand's involvement in Indo-China.

Mr Mitcalfe said New Zealand should not align itself with United States' policy in Asia. He gave political reasons why not. He emphasised New Zealand's smallness and insularity.

"We are a passive people with a soft underneath majority," he said: "Hitler was the product of the passive majority. We are responsible for the bastardry happening overseas in our name."

This was an issue, he said, not only of war, but an issue of economics and education.

"An urgent priority is adult and public education" and especially the need was "education for people to be people."

This could be done through mass media, he said.

Mr Mitcalfe outlined the specific organisation a protest march must have to be successful. He said "The protest march is only the very beginning of all forms of protest. We need forms of protest that will shape the establishment."

He told of the failure of the Labour Party in New Zealand to act radically in principle. He also stressed the need for thinking people not to be alienated from those they wish to reach with radical ideas.

"To communicate we must look as if we belong," he said.

James Baxter asked such questions as "What right have we to fight communism? I mean with guns?" Historically, reaction against revolutions has ended in genocide, he said. "Why should we who have had our own revolutions and found our lives only a little better for them, interfere in other people's revolutions?" One-sided idealism is always dangerous, he stated. When a war is fought against an ideal, it turns into a crusade and ends in a senseless bloodbath. Mr Baxter said that his church had participated in enough of these in the past to its own shame.

He went on, "I am against the Vietnam war mainly on Christian grounds." In reply to a question on this point, "How do you reconcile your belief in Christ with communist anti-Christ belief?" Mr Baxter quoted in Maori, and translated, "Where love is, there the Lord is." If someone did not believe in the Virgin Mary, he said he was not concerned. 'The Virgin Mary is the belief of the church I believe in. My God is the God of Isaac, Abraham and Jacob. These men were often not tolerant nor merciful in what they did. I believe Mao and Ho Chi Minh are the servants of God." He said that communists have done what we have failed to do; harshly and intolerantly they have succeeded in feeding people.

Mr Baxter says that he is basically "an anti anti communist." He says that he disagrees with intervention in the Vietnamese war, not based on hatred of Americans, or the rich. "Hatred creates its own prison, love means to suffer and participate." He said that evils today come from the hardness of the heart. "The evil within is the hardest to see."

Speaking of his commune and materialism, Mr Baxter said. "I do not want to be rich, I want to make a refuge for the poor." and "It is time to destroy things when things destroy people." On protests. "Frankly I do not think that we are going to stop the war in Vietnam by protesting. Protest is necessary. Without it we are all condemned. But we should be as much concerned with problems at home."