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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

A Second Letter to Mr Holyoake

A Second Letter to Mr Holyoake

Dear Mr Holyoake: It may seem too short a time since I last took the liberty of addressing you through the columns of an independent periodical; and indeed I would not now be doing so if you had not stated on the night of October 17, 1967, that New Zealand will increase its military commitment to the Vietnam War by 170 men. As you and I know perfectly well, these men, though their individual lives are of valueto themselvesand their relatives, are of nomilitary value whatever when set alongside the massive military commitment of the UnitedStates of America. They are, asit were, blood sacrifices togivethe international impression that we are at one with the U.S.A. on the Vietnam issue, and share the crusading anti-Communist zeal of a small but (alas) influential group of Americans. There are some public questions I would like to ask you in relation to this very recent pronouncement of yours.

Why do you continue to be uncandid on this issue? If you honestly believe that it is the best possible thing for the country that some of our young men should be sent to fight in Vietnam, why then do you repeatedly say there is no immediate likelihood of our military commitment being increased a few weeks or days before you publicly announce that it will in fact be increased? I do not wish to call you a deliberate liar. Therefore I must assume that there exists in your mind a degree of conflict which is close to the schizophrenic level. Perhaps we are all of us a little schizophrenic; but any degree of mental disorder is more troubling in a national leader than it is in a private citizen. There are so many delicate and dangerous issues involved.

It is possible that unemployment may lead more young men to volunteer for military service, under the delusion that their lot will be happier in a New Zealand barracks, or within visiting distance of an Asian brothel, than it page 460 would be wandering the streets of our cities without work. But not many of our young men are quite as stupid as that. You will have noticed already the extreme unsuccess of local recruiting campaigns. I do not think many of the young are specifically opposed to the Vietnam intervention. It is rather that a healthy instinct is operating among them. They have ceased to be prepared to be involved in international calamities manufactured by their elders.

It is more than possible that in this situation your thoughts may turn to the notion of introducing conscription. It would be wiser to expel that notion from your mind. I do not say that a third of the conscripts would be occupying our jails or roaming in the bush; but still, an uncomfortable number would be doing something of the kind – not because they believe in something specific, but because they do not believe in anything that you would like them to believe in, such as the international Communist conspiracy or the necessity to ward off the Asian hordes. You and I, though on opposite sides of the fence in this regard, belong to an older generation. These young people have lost all liking for the game of follow-the-leader. I cannot find it in my heart to regret it deeply.

Parallels drawn from the Second World War will not be valid. At that time a primarily nihilist and dementedly sadistic regime had taken control in Germany. Their modern equivalent would be perhaps the Algerian Rightists or the racist Smith regime in Rhodesia or the people in the U.S.A. who want to shoot all Negroes, Communists, Jews and Catholics. The austere (and to my mind colourless) bureaucracies of the Communist countries have far more in common with certain monotonously ethical and heavy-handed aspects of our own educational institutions. Our young people have seen films on the TV showing life in Moscow universities. They would see the students there perhaps as fellow sufferers, not as children of an enemy breed. They are well aware that the Communists are not insane at all. Modern mass media have already begun to smash down both the Iron and the Bamboo Curtains. No, Mr Holyoake – if you have any thought now or in the future of introducing conscription in New Zealand to drum up an army against the Communists, I think you had better think again – our people have on the whole lost interest in these large abstract conceptions; and most of all, the young. Though I would be sitting reasonably cheerfully in jail for addressing mass meetings on the subject, the young ones would be addressing no meetings – they would be fighting with the police who tried to arrest them, on no grounds except a wish for native freedom and privacy.

Why do you continually assert that North Vietnam is the aggressor in the present military conflict? It is more of a cant phrase even than it is when applied to the U.S.A. by the other side. There are several aggressors, no doubt – the French, to begin with, who were helped by Marshall Ky in their fight against his countrymen; then Ho Chi Minh and his followers, if you like, aggressors page 461 against the occupying French (and the only one so far successful in military terms); then Diem and his followers, an enclave established (not wholly with justification) in the southern part of Vietnam by some of the Vietnamese who were aggressors against the successful Ho Chi Minh, and who would not have been able to hold their ground without American economic and military support; then the National Liberation Front, who go by the nickname of the Viet Cong, aggressors against Diem and his successors; then the Americans and the Koreans and the Australians and ourselves, aggressors against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam . . . . But in this long pattern of aggression and counter-aggression, the one element that was conspicuously lacking until the U.S.A. entered with real military force into Vietnam was open military aggression by North Vietnam against South Vietnam. Why? They didn’t want a war that would crush their economy which had just begun to develop. The Viet Cong complained from time to time that their support from the North was merely moral and not military to the point where it was any real help. The reason America intervened was because the Viet Cong were winning the day, not because of aggression from North Vietnam. The aggression came later, a further more or less automatic counter-aggression after the bombing began. You may not remember this, Mr Holyoake; I would like you to remember it before your next public speech on the Vietnam issue. Nobody likes it when you give the impression of being a talking doll manipulated by the President of the United States. It hurts our feelings of national independence and identity. We know, of course, that there are two quite other reasons for our intervention – the first military, the second economic.

In the case of aggression by China towards us, will the U.S.A. really be of much help? This is a thousand dollar question. You and I know that the possibility of such aggression is at present wholly theoretical and remote. China is economically underdeveloped and divided by warring political factions. To save her face, she has to talk big. But perhaps in twenty years’ time she will be in a position to project nuclear warheads into the middle of Washington and Wellington? In that case will the U.S.A. really be of much help to us? The one sure way of guaranteeing we will be a target is to have a large American air base in this country, with its attendant social unease? (If this base were in Auckland, from what section of the population would you recruit the necessary prostitutes so that our American allies would feel at ease? Would you start a recruiting campaign in the High Schools?) I do not think an invasion of infantry would be likely at all. The reason the Japanese did not come down here was not because of our beer-drinking and fire-breathing Home Guard, but because it would have stretched their lines of communication far too much. No – if China had a few nuclear warheads to spare, we might receive them. You would be at the bottom of a bombproof shelter. But a number of us would not. And the U.S.A. might well for normal patriotic reasons concentrate rather on the defence of her homeland page 462 than on the defence of her heroic pint-sized ally down there near the South Pole. Remember, Mr Holyoake, the vast majority of people in the world don’t know we exist; it is national megalomania that makes us think otherwise; even in Britain they confuse us with Australia. We might be a lot better off trying to be neutral.

Is the U.S.A. really going to be of much economic help to us? Here we all sympathise with you – both your opponents and your supporters. The delusion of economic security based on wool is a dream it is hard to forget. Like a man in the desert you have a strong wish to believe that mirages are a solid and comforting reality. But in spite of vague promises, does the U.S.A. show any real sign of running the risk of upsetting her own beef producers by opening the gate wide to New Zealand imports? Does she really care whether we sink or swim? If you are selling our soldiers for a better trade balance, the U.S.A. has already got the soldiers, and the promise of more, without having to give anything but words in return. She doesn’t need the soldiers. All she needed was our moral commitment, so that she could say that out of the meagre seven members of the United Nations who are prepared to support her policy in Vietnam, we were also prepared to support her to the point of loss of blood. One dead man would be enough. Her international position is shaky enough for her to need our support, certainly, but once that support is given, why should she reward us economically for a support that we say was given because of our deep sense of the justice of her cause? She has made a cheap bargain. No, Mr Holyoake, those dollars you see in the saddest of your dreams aren’t American ones – they only indicate our own belated shift on to decimal currency.

Are you really in favour of genocide? This is in a way a rhetorical question. I don’t think you or President Johnson are actually in favour of exterminating three hundred million Russians or exterminating five hundred million Chinese. You are not monsters. But the determinedly negative ‘fort’ policy, holding on to slices of Asian territory, so as to have a ring of little highly-armed forts surrounding China, is both enormously expensive (a thing to remember now that the wool buyers are leaving us alone) and has the disadvantage of forcing China to arm herself rapidly and heavily at the expense of her own people’s economic welfare. It can easily lead stage by stage to that explosion we all most fear, which might involve us both on the giving and receiving end of a genocidal war. Why not let that paralysed imagination function? First, we could gently withdraw our troops from Vietnam (we’ve already made the gesture. O.K., leave it at that) and replace them with an enlarged medical unit. This move might even keep your Government in office for a few more elections, Mr Holyoake – it would be so popular with the churches. A better move than that big empty gift of the liquor referendum which people will have page 463 forgotten about in six months. Then we could begin tentatively to establish trade relations indiscriminately with Communist and non-Communist countries, especially those nearest to us. Let’s chuck away that old relic, that myth of white supremacy – it’ll have lost its meaning anyway before the end of the century. And if anyone round us wanted to make war, we could insist on our neutrality. Even the Nazis respected the neutrality of the Swiss, you know; and nobody invaded Ireland after the British had left. Let’s stop being Tom Thumb interfering in the squabbles of the giants. We will never amount to threepence – sorry, three cents, as a military power. But even at this late stage we could regain a touch of moral influence, by standing back and trying a little to help the ones who are being hurt. If you don’t do this, Mr Holyoake, the Labour Government that comes after yours will do it. But why let them have a monopoly of liberal action? They got all the credit for Social Security; and your party had to follow suit tamely. Why not be first this time? You might even consider your personal health. This schizophrenic quality in your public utterances troubles us all. In a way we’ve become used to you. We don’t want you spending a year at Hanmer. We like seeing you round. You are a dinkum Kiwi. So many of the sub-rational factors in our society are exemplified in your policy and your public personality. Keith, give us a break! Let’s see you do one thing on your own without letting President Johnson do your thinking for you. I can’t promise to vote for you – that would be telling lies – but if you did show a modicum of sense in international affairs, I’d promise not to vote against you for one election. What could be fairer than that?

Yours sincerely,

James K. Baxter.

P.S. Have you noticed the slowly growing opposition to the Vietnam War among American Catholic churchmen (traditionally conservative and patriotic) and in the American Senate? If the U.S.A. chooses to withdraw from Vietnam on account of war-weariness and other domestic political considerations, you will be left holding the baby – with the image of New Zealand turned to mud in the eyes of most Asians, after what is perhaps the most atrocious and inconclusive war in history. How will we ever hold up our heads again? Not even God will give you a medal for good intentions, mate – you will be remembered as one of the dunces of history. J.K.B.

1967 (481)