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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Peace, Power, Politics

Peace, Power, Politics

Sir: When the American and North Vietnamese representatives have bargained at the conference table – when, some day, a peace treaty carries their signatures – when the South Vietnamese Government, held in power by American support, have been forced to bargain with the Viet Cong by the same ‘advisers’ who originally forced them to go on fighting them – when the troops are withdrawn and peasants work where their relatives fought for years and died in the mud – when these things happen, who will rise up and shout that tactical ‘mistakes’ that cost a million lives are more than ‘mistakes’ – that they are criminal blunders which should never have occurred and should never occur again? It is a barren matter that the ‘Vietniks’ should be proved right and our own politicians proved wrong. But what I fear is that many of our people will miss the lesson and not see that we have blackened our country’s name throughout Asia for no profit at all – military, political or economic. The dead are dead. But who will tell this Government of ours that we will not again be led into genocidal war? Now is the time to do it.

1968 (513)