First Published: The Vanguard December 17, 1968
Reprinted: World Revolution [journal of the U.S. Progressive Labor Party] Vol. 2, No. 4, January-March 1969
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Soviet revisionist clique is more and more desperately working at its treacherous plan to betray the Vietnamese people. Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State, has publicly declared his expectation of more Soviet co-operation to “settle” the Vietnam question, i.e., to guarantee the permanence of U.S. presence in Vietnam.
The aim of all this is to suppress and exploit the Vietnamese people and to make Vietnam a part of the aggressive U.S. imperialist-Soviet revisionist clique’s ring around China.
Under the “stop the bombing” fraud, (a stop the bombing which the U.S. imperialists do not ever bother to observe) the Soviet revisionist clique pushes the Vietnamese people towards a further abyss of misery.
For years, the Vietnamese people have valiantly fought and defeated the U.S. imperialists and their puppets. They have won the support and admiration of the oppressed of all the world. They have suffered serious casualties but they have never bowed the knee. All the “might” and “strength” of the U.S. imperialists could not get them to bow the knee. There is no question but that persistence in their struggle would end in victory: abandonment of it halfway would mean giving the hard pressed enemy a respite.
U.S. imperialism has failed to subdue the Vietnamese people. But the Soviet revisionist clique goes about it another way. First it called for “united socialist action” to defend Vietnam. All progressive people rejected that as a fraud. One does not unite with a traitor. The enemy within is always more dangerous than an enemy without.
Now the treachery is becoming clearer. The Soviet revisionist clique concentrated on one point (a point incidental to and product of the U.S. aggression)– i.e., stop the bombing and negotiate. Mark you, this was not action to throw out U.S. imperialism altogether but just stop the bombing and negotiate.
In the middle of all this fraud, the Soviet revisionist clique committed an act of naked aggression against Czechoslovakia with scarcely a murmur from the U.S. imperialists. Certain leaders in North Vietnam were amongst the first to support the Soviet revisionist clique’s aggression against Czechoslovakia.
The fact is there is not a single thing nor a single argument used that differentiates Soviet revisionist aggression against Czechoslovakia from U.S. imperialism’s aggression against Vietnam.
So these Vietnamese leaders are in fact putting themselves in the position of justifying Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and hence of U.S. imperialism’s occupation of the southern part of Vietnam. You cannot have this sort of thing both ways.
Then the Vietnamese delegation at the so-called Paris peace talks fraternizes with the French revisionist clique (who of course condemned Soviet aggression against Czechoslovakia). Unity in the revisionist camp indeed! The French revisionist clique, however, does support “united socialist action,” does support the stop the bombing and peace talks frauds.
At the same time the Australian journalist W. Burchett, who writes for the revisionist press, secures accreditation from a French newspaper to report U.N. proceedings and secures a visa to enter the U.S.A. Mr. Burchett has been one of the chief spokesmen for “negotiations” in Vietnam, stop the bombing, etc., etc. At the very least one can say it is all very strange.
But it is really not at all strange. It is all part and parcel of the Soviet revisionist plot to unite with U.S. imperialism to betray the Vietnamese people.
There is only one way to help the Vietnamese people, that is to support their actual war against U.S. aggression and the Vietnamese puppets, to encourage them to fight to the end, to expose the hoax and fraud of stop the bombing and peace talks, to unite all the forces that can be united against Soviet revisionist-U.S. imperialist aggression. In Australia, it demands more effort in the struggle against Australia’s puppet role to U.S. imperialism, its participation in the war and for complete withdrawal of all Australian soldiers from Vietnam.