On Christmas Day 1978 the Vietnamese leaders dispatched a dozen divisions of regular troops numbering more than 100,000 men, backed by hundreds of tanks, armoured cars, planes and artillery pieces, in a lightening thrust to overthrow the Kampuchean Government. The main towns and cities and much of the countryside was swiftly occupied. Everywhere they went the Vietnamese invaders sowed death and destruction, laying waste to large tracts of land and killing countless innocent Kampucheans.

To many progressive New Zealanders who have watched with growing alarm the escalation of the conflict in South East Asia, this must have seemed the final straw. Most are confused and distressed by what seems to be a betrayal of revolutionary principles by one side or the other, others have turned their minds away from the problems and, embittered, feel that their committment to liberal causes is at an end.

There is an urgent need to explain the situation in South East Asia. Urgent, not only because of the subjective reaction to it, but because it is a harbinger of the future.