Word: indochina
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...MOST REPUGNANT strain of conservative thinking that has surfaced publically at Harvard and elsewhere recently is the "Now let us mourn for Indochina" school of revised history. Norman Podhoretz has made this his new gospel, preaching on The New York Times Op-Ed page and in his latest book, Why We Were in Vietnam. Closer to home, members of the Conservative Club have endorsed the message in their newspaper. The Salient, and in small rallies...
...misery of the region's starving, oppressed masses. Mark A. Sauter '82, managing editor of The Salient and one of Harvard's prominent student right-wingers, put it this way in a recent interview: "I'm willing to say that most people who marched against the war in Indochina were well-intentioned, most, not all...but what lessons have they drawn? Have they drawn the lesson that their actions have affected millions of lives? They are indirectly responsible, but responsible nonetheless, for millions of dead Cambodians and for hundreds of thousands of people in internment camps in Vietnam...
Like Podhoretz, Sauter and his mates have gone to great lengths to prove that conditions in Indochina are worse now than they were during the three decades of war in that region from 1945 to 1975, when a settlement of sorts emerged. The Salient has featured an extensive article by a former North Vietnamese leader who now rails against the failures and lies of communism in his homeland. The campus conservatives have presented similar characters at public demonstrations, and the rhetoric is predictable: The United States precipitated the horrors of communist rule by pulling out. The Cold Warriors could have...
...they were and are dead wrong. The nightmarish "peace" that now exists in Indochina cannot be separated from the war and viewed in isolation as merely a product of communist evil. Vietnam, Cambodia and their neighbors are the legacies of conflict largely propagated by the United States. War, not a particular ideology, traumatized those societies and stripped their politics of all humanity--war the United States encouraged and then escalated...
...they have not lost their fundamentally liberal, reformist skepticism. Simplistic comparisons to the radicalism that developed in the Sixties and exploded at places like Harvard often fail to address the difference in circumstances. Unmitigated Southern racism sparked the New Left in 1960, and the massive American involvement in Indochina pushed the non-violent protest movement toward self-destructive revolutionary tactics in 1967-1968. The causes today--such as apartheid or covert intervention--are not nearly so clear-cut. And yet the students have acted and will probably step up their resistance if issues of concern become more vividly threatening. Says...