The "Liberated" Soviet Union

In a letter entitled "A Balanced View" in your April 23 issue, Patrick Mulrennan, in time honoured fashion, graced your pages with a combination of logical inconsistency and blindness to facts.

The letter was directed originally at Leonie Morris, but after the second sentence she somewhat faded from the scene. The rest of the letter was taken up with attacking me. For my own part, I simply wish to put the record straight and discus* some of the points that Patrick has brought up.

If you disregard Patrick's worn out accusations of me being a "cold war McArtbyist" relying on "anti-Soviet prejudice" etc etc, the barrenness of his arguments becomes even more obvious. For a starter, he attempts to defend the actions of the present Vietnamese government and proclaims that Vietnam is a country "whose population has lessened its dependence on imperialism and taken genuine steps along the road to genuine independence".

May I suggest to Patrick, that the only road that Vietnam has taken steps on recently in this regard, has been Number Five Highway to Phnom Penh. The Young Socialists and it's parent organisation the Socialist Action League are the only group in New Zealand that have correctly pointed out Vietnam is occupying Kampuchea with over 100,000 troops and then goes on to defend the invasion. Even the local Moscow stooges, the SUP, didn't dare do that.

As for Vietnam's "genuine independence", Patrick correctly points out that they successfully freed themselves from US imperialism. But because Patrick's way of thinking only acknowledges one type of "genuine imperialism" in the world — that of western imperialism headed by the US. He then goes on to deduce that they are now "on the road to genuine independence" as he so quaintly puts it almost anticipating my objections to his simplistic and objectively pro-Soviet stance.

I don't wish to repeat points raised in the articles I wrote on S E Asia, but in them I tried to show the ways that Vietnam has become neatly nestled in the Soviet sphere of influence. Readers not conversant with them can get hold of them in earlier copies of this year's Salient.

Patrick has not raised any obvious objections to the content of those articles but merely prefers to attempt to knock them down with meaningless rhetoric.

The prize example in his characterisation of the Soviet Union which he states is a "post capitalist country with a conservative and undemocratic government." Sounds like something out of a stage one Political Science text book. It certainly doesn't square with the realities of the world. For one thing, it doesn't explain why Russia has troops in so many other countries and pursues the most consistently aggressive foreign policy in the world today.

In short, I think the letters column would be better served if Patrick stuck to debating about the real world and not the situation thirty years ago.