Читать книгу Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal - Howard Zinn - Страница 8
ОглавлениеBECAUSE I think perspective is so important, I am going to start as far away from the American environment as possible, looking at the Vietnam war from Japan.
A person who is troubled sometimes consults a friendly outsider for an objective appraisal of his behavior. For United States policy in Vietnam, it seems to me Japan is in many ways an ideal consultant. There is much good will there for Americans; Japan is a capitalist nation; she has democratic liberties roughly comparable to those of the United States; and she is a neighbor of Communist China, which plays such a large part in any analysis of the Vietnam situation.
In June 1966, I was invited to Japan, along with Ralph Featherstone, a field secretary with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Our hosts were Japanese intellectuals of varying political beliefs—journalists, novelists, poets, philosophers. We traveled north to south through Japan, from Hokkaido to Hiroshima and Fukuoka, and across the East China Sea to Okinawa. We had long, intense discussions with students and faculty at fourteen universities in nine different cities. We spoke at big meetings and small ones, at tea gatherings and beer sessions, with trade unionists and housewives. We found them virtually unanimous in their belief that United States policy in Vietnam was not just a bit awry, but profoundly wrong.
Again it is a matter of perspective. I once saw an eerie ten-minute motion picture called The Fisherman, in which a happy angler hauls sleek, fat, leaping fish out of the ocean and piles them lifeless on the beach, meanwhile devouring candy bars from his lunchbox. He finally runs out of food. Restless, unhappy, he sees a paper sack nearby with a sandwich in it, bites into the sandwich, and is hooked! He digs his feet frantically into the sand, but he is dragged—twisting, struggling at the end of a line—into the sea. The effect on the viewer is a sudden reversal of role, both horrifying and healthful, in which, for the first time, he sees himself, The Fisherman, from the standpoint of the Fish.
Something like that happens when you spend time in Japan, talking to the Japanese about American policy in Vietnam. The brutality of the war we are waging, no matter how sharply we feel it on occasion, has the quality of fiction as it appears on television screens or in news columns. Always at hand to “explain” the bombing of villages, the death toll of civilians, the crushing of Buddhist dissidents, are earnest liberals (Humphrey and Goldberg), “realistic” experts (Rostow), genial spokesmen for the administration (Rusk and McNamara). We listen with the languor of a people who have never been bombed, who have only been the bombardiers. Our occasional protests somehow end up muted and polite.
The Japanese have had a more intimate association with death, both as killers and as victims. We in America still cling to the romance of war that is not really war, but Terry and the Pirates, Defending the Free World, or LBJ in a Green Beret. For the Japanese, the Kamikaze pilots, and then the turnabout—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—wore off all the sheen. Out of this experience, they have wanted desperately to speak to Americans.
Featherstone and I were in Tokyo, at Meiji University. Ken Kaiko, a novelist, was telling about four months he had spent taking notes on the front lines in Vietnam, mostly with American soldiers: “It used to be said in Vietnam that it is disastrous to be born a man—you are drafted and killed; it is better to be a woman. But in South Vietnam today, a woman has a child at each side and one in her belly, and must still flee the American bombs.” He had seen it himself, he said, that the Americans could not distinguish Vietcong from the air—no matter what the official assurances were—and they simply killed whomever they could, in the target area.
It was Kaiko who in 1965 helped collect money for a full-page ad in The New York Times, a plea to Americans:
Japanese learned a bitter lesson from fifteen years of fighting on the Chinese mainland: weapons alone are of no avail in winning the minds and allegiance of any people. … America’s conduct of the war in Vietnam is alienating the sympathy of the Japanese.
This last point was corroborated over a year later by the Times correspondent in Tokyo, Robert Trumbull, who wrote (September 28, 1966): “Opinion polls have indicated that most Japanese oppose the United States position in Vietnam, although the Sato Government supports it.” A Japanese journalist of long experience with a conservative newspaper said to me: “The polls show 80 percent of the Japanese opposed to United States policy in Vietnam. Emotionally, it is closer to 100 percent.”
We saw this again and again as we moved through Japan. In Kyoto, a pediatrician spoke up from the audience. Our interpreter—a poet and former Fulbright scholar in America—explained that the speaker was Dr. Matsuda and that his books on child care have sold in the millions; he is known as the Benjamin Spock of Japan. Dr. Matsuda said: “What the United States does not understand is that Communism is one of the ways in which underdeveloped countries can become organized. Its reaction to this phenomenon in the world is neurotic.”
Matsuda, a hearty, vigorous man in his fifties, went on: “Perhaps the United States needs …” Our interpreter hesitated over the end of the sentence, translating it first as “a laxative” and then correcting himself: “… a sedative!”
At that meeting in Kyoto, a mountain-rimmed city of temples, shrines, and pagodas, over a thousand people—students, faculty, townspeople—came to talk about Vietnam. A 92-year-old man, dean of the Buddhist priests in this holy city, spoke: “The American concept of freedom violates the principle of self-determination. It is the kind of liberalism that expresses only the purpose of the American state.” And a Zen Buddhist priest, head shaven, in black robes and white scarf, said: “There is a major law in Buddhism: not to kill. Mass killing should not go on; that is the simple slogan that binds Japanese Buddhists with Buddhists in North and South Vietnam. And this message should be brought to America.”
I had slept the night before in a 700-year-old Buddhist temple and in the morning was taken to the altar, with its ornate gold carvings, the dishes of fresh fruit before it, the flowers, the prayer cushions, the little percussion instruments alongside the sutras. Leaning against the altar was an enlarged photo of a Buddhist monk in Saigon, sitting in flames.
It was in Kyoto that a young professor of astronomy spoke up from the audience, with great feeling: “As a child, I was machine-gunned by an American plane. And at that moment there came a shock of realization that it was a human being that pulled the trigger. I wanted so much to have been able to say to him: ‘Please don’t pull the trigger!’ It seems that now, once again, we must say this to the machine-gunners of the world. Please—don’t pull the trigger!”
We took the night train to Hiroshima, along the inland sea touched by mountains and beautiful in the predawn. We talked with students at Hiroshima University and to survivors of that day when, after one long scream, the city died: a professor whose left eye is missing; a fragile girl who spoke halting English in a voice so soft one had to strain to hear: “I was inside my mother when the bomb came.” A professor of politics at Hiroshima University, with thick black hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, came back to Dr. Matsuda’s point about Communism. “It is the idea that Communism is the root of all trouble in the world which has brought the Vietnam war.”
In Japanese universities you find many men who spent time in jail for opposing Japanese aggression in the thirties. At Nagoya, sprawling, smoky—the Detroit of Japan—we were met by Professor Shinmura, who in 1936–37 published a humanist magazine called Sekai Bunka (World Culture) until he was seized by the police. Quiet, gray-haired, a little stooped, Shinmura is a specialist in French literature, and after release from prison he made a living by anonymously translating the writings of Rolland, Diderot, and others.
He took us to a lounge where others of the faculty were waiting for us: several philosophers, a theoretical physicist, a sociologist, a specialist in Oriental history, a professor of Japanese literature, and one Westerner—a tall, young Frenchman just back from the University of Saigon. I asked: how many members of this faculty support American policy in Vietnam? There were 600 on the faculty, including graduate assistants. No one knew any who supported American policy.
I kept asking this question wherever I went. In Osaka, a professor of international affairs replied that he thought perhaps one person on the whole faculty supported American policy. At a large meeting in Osaka I had publicly asked students who were in favor of the American position to speak up. My interpreter, a young chemistry professor with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, said: “You can’t expect anyone here to take a pro-United States position.”
To the Japanese we met, it was so clear that America was in the wrong that they could not understand why anyone could believe President Johnson and his cabinet members. How could the United States be “fighting aggression,” they asked, when the “enemy” consisted entirely of Vietnamese, mostly Southerners, and no Chinese? The official South Vietnamese army had shown little enthusiasm, and so 300,000 American troops, transported across the Pacific, had taken over the war. “No country should be permitted, as the United States is doing, to smuggle counter-revolution to another country,” said a professor of literature at Hosei University in Tokyo.
Two planes, a jolting bus ride, and an auto trip through flooded, fresh-plowed fields, brought us to Sendai in northern Honshu. In rectangles of black mud marked off by willowy grass, women, bent low, their bicycles nearby, were transplanting rice seedlings. The streets were crowded with children in school uniforms, bookbags strapped to their backs, and teen-age girls on bikes wearing fresh aprons. A thousand students had gathered at Tohoku University for four hours of talk, with a long question-and-answer period. When this was over and we returned, tired, to our quarters at the Cooperative, we found fifty students waiting for us in the lobby, eager to continue the discussion. We trooped out in the night to a park, the fellows and girls sat cross-legged on the grass, and we talked into the small hours of the morning. There in the cool darkness of Sendai, I wondered why fifty Japanese kids would stay out after midnight to discuss the war in Vietnam, when Japan was only a minor accessory to American action. At the time the United States was helping the French crush the Algerian revolt, did any group of American students ever gather in the park at midnight to brood over this? Did a thousand ever meet to protest it?
By the end of our trip the answer was becoming clear; it lay in the Japanese people’s intense consciousness of their own recent history. Again and again, at virtually every meeting, there arose the accusation: “You are behaving in Asia as we once did.” There is widespread and vocal recognition of Japan’s own sins, from the Manchurian invasion of 1931 to Pearl Harbor. Japanese scholars have done much research on those years, and they see in American actions in Vietnam many of the same characteristics displayed by Japan in the thirties.
Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese did not abruptly replace parliamentary democracy with authoritarian dictatorship. Rather, there was an almost imperceptible growth of the power of the military within an outwardly parliamentary system. When the Japanese took Manchuria in 1931, then attacked China proper in 1937 and moved into Southeast Asia in 1940, they did not declaim crassly of world conquest as did Hitler, but spoke of a “co-prosperity sphere” which they were creating in Asia for the benefit of all.
I asked Professor Maruyama of Tokyo University, one of Japan’s most distinguished scholars, about this analogy. A political scientist and prolific author, who five years ago was invited to Harvard as a visiting professor, Maruyama is in his forties, smokes a pipe, has a sharp, strong nose and a warm smile. “There are many differences,” he said, “but one crucial element is quite the same: the apologies and justification created by both governments for what is basically an attempt by a strong nation to create a base of power inside a weaker one. Both Japan and the United States had difficulties and made excuses. The United States blames its difficulties in winning the Vietnamese war on China and North Vietnam. Japan attributed her failures not to the stubborn resistance of the Chinese but to the aid given China by Great Britain and the United States. Japan declared that its aim was to emancipate the people of Southeast Asia and to bring them economic development, just as the United States speaks now about economic and social reform while it carries on an essentially military action in Vietnam.”
American commentators have a habit of dismissing Japanese criticism of our foreign policy as the work of Communists or, more vaguely, “leftists.” This is comforting until one reflects that most public opinion in the world, even in countries allied to us, is to the left of ours. The United States has become, since that period when Europe’s monarchs feared we would spread the doctrine of revolution, a conservative nation. Even our “liberals” are conservative by global standards.
For instance, Maruyama had just met with McGeorge Bundy in Tokyo: “Now Mr. Bundy has a new job as head of the Ford Foundation. But psychologically, he is still with the government. He turned on me in a fury when I told him that never has the prestige of the United States been so low abroad, due to Vietnam.”
Our companions and interpreters in Japan were young nonparty intellectuals—two journalists, three novelists, a film producer, a poet, a philosopher—who decided early in 1965 to form a group called Beheiren dedicated to ending the Vietnam war. Their chairman, Oda Makoto, is a wry, 34-year-old novelist, big, tousle-haired, with unpressed coat and trousers, who refuses to wear a tie no matter how formal the occasion. Oda is critical of Communist China, but with no more heat than he is critical of Japan or America. He sees it as a new society with the truculence that new regimes generally show, but he does not see it as a threat to the rest of Asia. Like other Japanese intellectuals, Oda believes the United States is reacting to China with hysteria—and that people in Vietnam are dying unnecessarily because of this.
United States officials keep saying they are acting for the benefit of Asia, but Japan is a prime example of the fact that Asians themselves do not welcome the United States presence. The only countries giving substantial aid to the American military effort (Korea, Thailand) are those which are economically subservient to the United States, under its military occupation, and controlled by elites which can ignore popular will. Veteran correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote from Asia (July 26, 1966) in The New York Times:
It is not only in the Communist world that opinion is aligned almost entirely against the American Vietnam policy. It is almost impossible to find any substantial public Asian support for it except within those nations benefiting directly from the huge United States investment, such as Thailand.
Asian opinion today seems to agree with what Harvard historian Edwin Reischauer wrote in 1954 in Wanted: An Asian Policy, that a policy based largely on stopping Communism is “a dangerous oversimplification of our Asian problem.”
There are American troops in Japan (under the much resented Security Treaty of 1960), and part of Japan’s territory, Okinawa, has been converted by the United States into one of the most powerful military bases in the world. (“Please tell your fellow Americans,” a Tokyo University sociologist said, “that the majority of Japanese do not think these military bases protect Japan’s security—in fact, they think these endanger our security.”) Nonetheless, the government of Premier Sato, while nodding and bowing to the United States State Department, keeps a wary eye on the Japanese public, knowing popular feeling. A high government official told several of us, off the record, that Japan would like to speak its mind on Vietnam to the United States but does not feel independently strong enough to do so.
Japan is something of an embarrassment to the United States government, because it was under America’s postwar tutelage that she put into her new Constitution the statement “… never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.” Article 9 contains a silent reproach to what the United States is doing in Vietnam: “… the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” It is the old human story, the little boy nurtured by his family on the Biblical exhortation Thou Shalt Not Kill, watching his father return, gun still smoking, from a mission of murder.
The Japanese are trying to speak to us, but we will not listen. In a short span of time they have been both Fish and Fisherman. We in the United States have never had to struggle at the end of the hook—and lose. We have no Hiroshima, no city of the blind and maimed, no professors still haggard from long terms in jail. Although on a number of occasions we have been a Fisherman, we have never been forced (as have the Japanese) to recognize our deeds, to bow, to apologize, to promise a life of peace. We have, in other words, never been caught.
Those countries who have been caught are now trying to speak to us. Not only Japan, but other friends and allies whose criticism cannot be easily dismissed as “Communist.” British public opinion, despite Prime Minister Wilson’s cautious approval, has been consistently critical of American policy. Konrad Adenauer, as ardent an anti-Communist as anyone in the American government, said to New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger (reported in his column of August 7, 1966): “I would get out of Vietnam. … This wouldn’t be the first war broken off in the middle. You can’t get out by going more strongly in. If I take a road and find myself going in the wrong direction, I see no purpose in continuing along it. I take another road.”
The European view was bluntly summarized by George Lichtheim, writing in Commentary, July 1966:
… the question (apparently taken seriously by some people in Washington) of why the West Europeans cannot be conscripted into a crusade to help an Oriental cardboard Mussolini in Saigon maintain his comic-opera regime a week or a month longer, has ceased even to be funny. There was a time when thinking people in London or Paris made an earnest attempt to decipher the mental processes of President Johnson and his advisers. That time is past. No one bothers any more to try to understand why the Americans are behaving as they do: it is accepted that they must, and will, learn from bitter experience, as others have done before them.
What Lichtheim says of European opinion is almost exactly what I found among the Japanese through only a brief, intense, impressionistic survey.
Such are some of the views from a distance. Now I want to take a look at another viewpoint, this one right in our midst—the viewpoint of the Negro American.
