Spock in Wellington

Opera House, Wellington.

The foyer is crowded with people come to hear Dr Spock on Vietnam. The same crowd as attends every anti-war meeting. Would-be revolutionaries with ominous dark glasses (Niel Wright) handing out this and that blueprint for the revolution. Would-be revolutionaries without dark glasses (George Fyson) asking the great unwashed to add their names to this and that mailing list for this and that organisation. I am bored. How can this Dr Spock have a valid contribution to make to The New Zealand Anti-War movement? There it is. The ever present Socialist Action bookstall. Damnit all, you can't walk a hundred yards in this godforsaken town without coming across it. I am pleased to see that business is bad for our super-salesman, Keith Locke. Oh Jesus! Conrad Bollinger is here, playing the radical again. When will he learn? Comrade Conrade is a pseudo-intellectual who once spoke on the 'Radical Tradition at Vic' and ever since has fancied himself to be a leading revolutionary. I bet the communist party rejoiced when he resigned, and everyone knows how much they need members.

Better go inside. Place is pretty crowded. The curtain is raised in a most dramatic manner and the house lights are turned off. Jack Shallcrass is chairman and he asks for the lights to be turned on. Someone finds the switch and Mr Shallcrass launches into a tirade of the tritest and sloppiest sayings he knows. This masquerades as an introduction. Sensitive people squirmed with embarrassment and wonder at a person who would stand before a crowded hall and rave so, and in such a melodramatic manner, I can feel my stomach churning, he is making me want to throw up but I grit my teeth and bear it. Serious people must be doubting his intelligence. I have no doubt in that respect; it is plain to me that he has none and so I figure maybe that it is his sanity. As an orator, Shallcrass is way below Holyoake, and you know, that's bad, real bad.

At last Dr Spock is to speak. He begins with a few sentences on how he became involved in the anti-war movement. In 1962 he joined a nuclear disarmament organisation and achieved the position of national co-chairman in 1963 by virtue, he says, of his influence and reputation. He was approached by Democratic Party workers during the 1964 election campaign and was asked to appear on nation-wide T.V. in support of Lyndon Johnson who was running on a peace ticket. This he did and was therefore outraged by L.B.J.'s subsequent escalation of the war. In this way he was plunged into the furor of anti-Vietnam activity and went so far as to sign a pledge in support of draft resistors. The signing of this document proved to be an action of significance since to do so is considered so illegal by the authorities in the U.S., that great vestiage of freedom and democracy, as to merit a maximum penalty of five years' imprisonment and/or a fine of $10,000. And so our Dr Spock found himself in prison serving a two year sentence. He was fortunate enough to win an appeal and was out after only one year. But the damage was done, his feathers were ruffled. Since then he has devoted himself nearly full-time to anti-war activities.

Dr Spock then proceeded to outline in detail the grounds upon which he opposes U.S. participation in Vietnam. I was pleased to notice that we were spared heartrending descriptions of napalmed peasants and tales of poor Americans getting killed for an obscure reason in a foreign land; he confined himself to the moral, legal and historic aspects of the war. For the benefit of the unaware, I shall briefly summarise the relevant historical details. At the end of the war of independence in 1954, with the defeat of the French imminent, a treaty was drawn up which temporarily divided Vietnam into north and south to facilitate French withdrawal and pending nation-wide general elections planned for 1956. The U.S. Government sign a document promising to abide by the terms of the treaty. But Eisenhower had seen to it that a great share of the French war budget had been borne by the U.S. ('not because we like the French because of all that tungsten in that area') and, as such, was reluctant to see all those dollars go to waste. So Messrs Eisenhower and Dulles installed a puppet dictator, Diem, in Saigon. Diem, presumably on U.S. advice, restored to absentee landlords the land distributed to poverty-stricken peasents by Ho Chi Minh, cancelled the general elections, made ridiculously repressive laws and became so paranoid and power-crazed that even the Americans took to disliking him. However this did not stop the Americans from sending 'military advisors' to aid his illegal regime. Matters got so bad after Diem was deposed by the U.S. government and replaced by a more compliant puppet, that eventually Johnson embroiled his country in a full-scale illegal, undeclared war.

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But this, Dr Spock has come to realise is 'merely a particularly repugnant manifestation of U.S. imperialism'. This really is unexpected. I had come anticipating the worst but found that in his easy-going way, Dr Spock had given a straight-forward chronology of the relevant historical details and was proceeding to give a realistic interpretation of these facts. Granted he is a little naive in his extraordinary hope for, and faith in democracy and in his tacit assumption that the president of the U.S. is really in total control of his office, but he is quite prepared to see that it has been economic factors that have dictated U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, unlike most other speakers on this subject he thoroughly backed up his every assertion with parallels from history and the like.

Drawing from his wide experience with the American Anti-War campaign Spock gave a brief outline of his opinion of the effectiveness of various tactics. Demonstrations, he claims, are good and he congratulated New Zealand on what he teamed a 'magnificent' April 30th mobilisation in which, considering the population and the relatively minor role played by New Zealand in the war, he claims a greater percentage of the population were mobilised than in similar U.S. moratoriums. He disapproves of police-baiting in demonstrations since he thinks that it is counter-productive but says that he would hesitate to condemn a person who was driven to such methods by a sense of futility stemming from a lack of progress or from police brutality, predictably he made no mention of gimmicks on demonstrations. But this is the trouble with believers in the greatness of democracy—they tend to prefer that people rationally decide on their stand rather than be tricked somehow into opposing the war. He also dwelt awhile on the effectiveness under U.S. conditions of writing letters to politicians, but in New Zealand where parliamentarians only become sensitive to public opinion once every three years and where most people support the government's stand in Vietnam, I cannot see this to be of great value.

It is important, he says, for us to keep up our efforts, for, although New Zealand's role in the war is numerically nominal, it provides a great moral boost to the U.S. propaganda programme. Lyndon Johnson used to say that not only were Korea and the Phillipines with the U.S. in Vietnam, but also Australia and New Zealand, implying that these two white democratic countries made the U.S. atrocities respectable.

I had arrived at the Opera House firmly convinced that Dr Spock had little, if anything, to contribute of value to the New Zealand anti-war movemnet but his easy delivery, his fresh, undogmatic viewpoint and his ability to concesely cover a wide range of related topics soon persuaded me that he is the best anti-war speaker Wellington has see for some time.