A Balanced View

In Leonie Morris' letter to Salient of March 26, she disagrees with the view expressed by Peter Brockway and myself on Indochina. She correctly indicates that the differences between her approach — which is based on 100% support for Chinese actions — and ours, hinge on how we see the relative role of the US and the USSR in the world today.

David Murray, in his two Salient articles on the Indochinese conflicts, also pushes the Chinese view that the Soviet Union is the main threat to peace. The tone that he and Morris assumes is very reminiscent of cold war McArthyism, and in fact the effect of their arguments relies to a large extent on appeals to anti-Soviet prejudice. But Murray does try to present evidence for the "Soviet expansionism" that apparently threatens to eclipse the United States.

Murray says that since 1975 the Soviet Union has succeeded in establishing new spheres of influence in "Angola, South Yemen, Afghanistan and now more obviously, in Vietnam". Now what does each of these countries have in common? In Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Afghanistan and Vietnam, we have seen radical transformations of economic and social life — both in the nationalisation of important industries and financial institutions, and in extensive land reforms. In other words, the Soviet Union, this so-called "imperialist power", is tied to countries whose populations have lessened their dependence on imperialism, and taken important steps along the road to genuine independence.

Furthermore, the Soviet assistance has to some extent helped in the defence of these anti-imperialist measures. In Angola the assistance has helped that country to resist South African and Rhodesian attacks; in Ethiopia a US-backed Somali invasion was repelled; in South Yemen an offensive by North Yemeni feudal elements, backed by the US and Saudi Arabia, is being resisted; and in Afghanistan repeated attacks by feudal remnants, combined with a threatened economic blockade, are being resisted; and in Vietnam the assistance was quite crucial in the defeat of the US-backed Thieu regime.

It does mean, however, that we cannot call the Soviet Union's actions Imperialist (by which I mean that they are not the result of a drive to conquer new mar kets and sources of raw materials, through the irrestible expansion of the internal economy.) They are the actions of a post-capitalist country with a conservative and undemocratic government, which seeks to gain 'spheres of influence' to give it some bargaining power with the genuine imperialist nations, headed by the United States.

None of these regimes are puppets of the USSR. In Afghanistan, for example, the pro-Soviet Parcham faction has been purged from the leadership of the ruling People's Democratic Party. And it is absurd to say, as David Murray does, that the Soviet Union has "turned China into a semi-colony". Since 1977, when China was hailing Vietnam as a great socialist country, the only significant change in the economic structure has been in the South, where 30,000 firms were nationalised — an extremely positive step, which neither China nor its mouthpieces in New Zealand have given any recognition. You can't define a country as a colony, just because it recieves Soviet loans and military assistance.

This doesn't mean that Soviet foreign policy is based on an enthusiastic support for the revolutions warming up in those countries. On the contrary, in all the above countries, save Vietnam, the Soviet Union is backing the middle class regimes, who are actually holding back the full socialist transformation of their countries. These regimes have used quite severe repression to slow down the revolutionary process.

In this, the Soviet Union is no different from China - which tried to gain its own 'sphere of in fluence' in Kampuchea.

The truth is that the Chinese government itself does not believe its own rhetoric about the Soviet Union constituting the main danger. The Chinese felt free to invade Vietnam because they calculated that the Soviet Union would not commit its troops. To quote the "Far Eastern Economic Review": "Twelve days after the launching of the campaign the Soviet reaction was limited to some verbal warnings and the dispatch of a dozen ships to the South China Sea. Sin Wan Pao (a pro-Peking Honk Kong paper - PM) said that Moscow would not intervene because it was not yet ready to fight a nuclear war, while there was not certainty of its victory in a conventional war with China".