VIETNAM: The inspiration hasn't faded
When, on April 30, 1975, a single tank of Vietnam's National Liberation Front (NLF) rolled over the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, it not only ended a decades-long war, it also ended any idea of United States invincibility. The people of Vietnam had stood up against their giant oppressor and knocked it down.
Twenty-five years later, has that message dimmed? Green Left Weekly spoke to four veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement about the significance of those events for today.
The May 2 headline on Direct Action, the newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (now the Democratic Socialist Party — DSP), read, "Saigon liberated: A victory for all humanity".
John Percy, now the national secretary of the DSP, still thinks that was dead right. "Each small victory by workers in one country helps internationally," he told Green Left Weekly. "A mighty victory like that in Vietnam was a tremendous boost, it did set back imperialism, it did help liberation struggles around the world."
Percy was one of the first organisers of the anti-Vietnam War movement in Australia. He remembers being arrested for his part in a demonstration which sat down in the middle of an intersection in Canberra in May 1965; it was the first anti-war demonstration at which police made arrests. From that point, he was involved in nearly all the subsequent rallies, pickets, marches, teach-ins and Moratoriums held in Sydney.
In 1975, Percy was working in New York for the socialist newsweekly Intercontinental Press and was responsible for its Vietnam and Cambodia coverage, a responsibility he calls a "privilege".
Percy argues "the writing was on the wall for the Saigon puppet regime by 1972", by which time the McMahon government in Australia had pulled its ground troops out of Vietnam and the US government was planning to.
By 1972, he says, two aspects had already combined to make the eventual 1975 victory possible: "NLF military strength based on mass support for their just cause and heroic struggle among the population" and "the opposition internationally to the war", particularly in the US itself.
"The speed of the South Vietnamese regime's collapse stunned everyone though", he says. "It really showed just how rotten the regime was, how hollow their support was and how strong that for the NLF was in comparison."
Helen Jarvis, a DSP member now working in Phnom Penh for the Cambodia Genocide Program, was then a student at ANU in Canberra and heavily involved in organising anti-war actions there; she was also involved in the first women's liberation demonstrations.
She believes the victory's immediate significance was "to show that the US could be beaten, despite its overwhelming firepower and brutish barbarism", shown by "such gems" as naming bombing missions into Cambodia "Operation Menu" — "Breakfast", "Lunch", "Snack", "Dinner", "Dessert" and "Supper" — or military boasts that it would bomb Vietnam "back to the Stone Age".
"Without the victory of the Vietnamese people, Rambo would have raged unchecked," she says, even though continuing US hostility and the tragedy of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge have meant Vietnam's victory was "restrained and limited".
Jim McIlroy, then a student at Melbourne University who became a radical when his "birthday marble" was drawn for conscription and now the DSP's Brisbane secretary, points to many countries where liberation struggles were to rise as a result of the Vietnamese example: Nicaragua, Iran, El Salvador. "All these struggles owe a debt to the Vietnamese people for showing both sides it could be done".
He also argues that the liberation of Saigon gave a boost to other forms of social protest and caused many people to question and challenge the imperialist power structure, even in Western countries.
"It cracked the domination of conservative political and social ideology in this country in a big way", he says.
"The anti-Vietnam War movement had been instrumental in changing the face of Australian, and world, politics fundamentally. The radicalisation of youth which accompanied it broke down barriers to the emergence of the modern women's liberation movement, the gay liberation struggle and the environment movement. New rebellious social and sexual attitudes sprang up, challenging the traditional stranglehold of the family, church and state on moral values", he adds.
According to McIlroy, the victory also confirmed the efficacy of the anti-war movement's reliance on tactics of mass mobilisation, "It taught us the strength of mass movements, of people organising in their thousands, in protests in the streets".
Allen Myers also argues that the victory had a huge impact on the revolutionary left and its thinking. Myers recalls his first anti-Vietnam War demonstration in 1964 and he was active in organising the first national anti-war conferences in the US. He was drafted in 1967 and published underground anti-war newsletters while in the army. Today he's a member of the DSP's national executive and writes regularly for Green Left Weekly.
"For those of us in the Trotskyist tradition", he says, "I think it also started to force a rethinking of our attitude towards the Vietnamese revolutionaries, whom we had tended to put in the same box as the Soviet and Chinese Stalinists."
"Later, it also contributed to the DSP's rethink on the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution: according to that theory, it was supposed to be virtually impossible for the Vietnamese to win by conducting the struggle in the way they did".
The liberation of Saigon was a big step in the maturation of revolutionaries in the First World and in many parts of the Third World, Myers believes.
All four argue that the victory in 1975 considerably restricted Washington's ability to intervene as it saw fit and has continued do so up to the present.
McIlroy gives several examples of this. "The lessons of Vietnam have helped make the US wary of an open attack on Cuba. In other cases, such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the US and its allies have been forced to concede to the fall of pro-imperialist regimes.
"The US has been obliged to make concessions to mass-based democratic movements, and allow the collapse of client military regimes, because of the danger of Vietnam-style national liberation movements", he argues.
Percy argues that the US government, and that of Australia, has sought to win back a "free hand to militarily intervene in any corner of the globe" and was able to bomb Iraq and Serbia, but that even those cases themselves demonstrate the constraints it is under.
"Imperialism's wars today are marked by the use of massive aerial and offshore firepower; they're reluctant to commit ground troops and even more so to occupy and enemy country long-term — they fear for the consequences", he says.
Myers believes that the "Vietnam Syndrome" is "not dead, but capitalist politicians have been trying to kill it for 25 years, and they have undoubtedly wounded it".
"The real question though is not how long the general population 'remembers' Vietnam," he argues. "The question is whether the political left has assimilated the lessons of that struggle and knows how to apply them against current and future imperialist attempts to subjugate the Third World".
Jarvis is even more adamant. Asked if the Vietnam Syndrome is dead, she states, "No way, Jose! Governments are no longer believed, as they were in the 1950s and early 1960s — that's a residue of the Vietnam Syndrome.
"The liberation has continued to provide an inspiration, a concrete example, in our own day and time, of the story of David and Goliath — a small force does not have to capitulate just because the odds seem impossible. Last year's victory in East Timor, which began 25 years ago just as Saigon was been liberated, shows just that all over again. That inspiration hasn't faded."
BY SEAN HEALY