First Published: Canadian Worker Vol. 4, No. 3, May 1972
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Bombs are raining down on the people of Indo-China as Nixon steps up his strategy of blackmail and terror. A few years back the US army was being chewed up in a people’s war led by the workers and peasants of South Vietnam. The US rulers bailed themselves out of that predicament by bombing the North. Sellouts in the Hanoi leadership agreed to the Paris talks.
Now Nixon, anxious to gain more, is back to the same old trick. Bluff, grab; bluff and grab again. Blackmail. How does this super-thug get away with such an outrage? We have the irony of a wider war and a smaller opposition. For this Nixon is indebted to Brezhnev and Mao the two great helmsmen of counter-revolution who hide their nationalist schemes behind Marxist rhetoric.
People fighting back against imperialist aggression in Indo-China are repelled by the calculation and cynicism coming from Peking, Moscow, and Hanoi. The recent US airforce moonshot was the occasion for a sample of their dedication to the oppressed, maimed, butchered, and incinerated victims of US bombing raids. After the “lift-off” and Agnew’s speech in praise of Von Braun’s V-2 genius Walter Cronkite interviewed the Moscow fashion plate and versifier Yevtuschenko about the beauties of US-Soviet co¬operation. The scene was rounded out by the sure knowledge that Chinese ping-pong players were lapping it up in their Detroit hotel suite! And bombs for the Vietnamese.
With the renewal of the bombing some Maoites and liberal imperialists were looking for a little thunder out of China. But nary a peep was heard. Instead, Mao like Ferdinand the bull continues to sniff the flowers of peaceful co-existence and hopes to edge out Chou En-lai as “Times” man of the year.
North Vietnamese troops armed with Russian hardware have usurped the struggle of the workers and peasants of the South. What was called the “war of the flea” (guerrilla warfare relying on the masses for support) has become a war of the dogs. Russian tanks cannot liberate Vietnam any more than they “liberated” Czechoslavakia.
At the heart of this debacle are the revisionist Communist parties that push United Fronts with capitalist parties (Pierre Vallieres, Trudeau’s pet rebel, says he is following the example of Ho Chi-minh by joining the P.Q.) The phonies advocate two-stage revolutions which are supposed to go from Independence (1) to Socialism (2), but in ten cases out of ten they go one stage to nationalism (1).
This nationalist bunk in the worker’s movement has to be knocked down. To beat US imperialism and all the other capitalist parasites and hangers-on we must fight to build class conscious movements, particularly strong Communist Parties, which will tolerate no betrayal of workers and peasants anywhere in the world in the name of diplomatic hog-wash.