1972: the US lashes out in Vietnam – and fails

In 1972 the US was escalating its attacks on north Vietnam. But it was losing the war, which finally ended three years later with victory for Vietnam. British governments shamefully supported US aggression.

Background

In the 1970s, both Labour and Conservative governments had shamefully continued to support the US wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

In April 1970, the Labour government led by Harold Wilson backed the US invasion of Cambodia. In December 1970, Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath said that bombing North Vietnam would be “justifiable”. On 13 June 1972 Heath praised President Nixon's “unparalleled restraint”; and in December 1972 he backed renewed US bombing of Hanoi.

In 1972, the US escalated the war in Vietnam with intensive attacks on Hanoi and the north of the country. But the war was unpopular at home and US-backed puppet rulers in the south were unable to rule effectively.

However much the US government escalated the war, they could not win. Possibly three million Vietnamese died. Yet by 1975 the heroic Vietnamese people had decisively defeated the self-styled most powerful state in the world.

This is what the lead article from The Worker of 1 June, 1972 had to say:

One War: One Strategy

Protracted War Victorious in Vietnam

The United States, like a wounded beast, lashes out wildly. The bombing of Hanoi, the mining of Haiphong harbour, the new attempts to turn Vietnam into a raging inferno are last desperate lunges of a defeated Titan. Capitalism is a dying force. On its deathbed, with the hopelessness of the damned, it determines to take with it to Hell as many human souls as it can garner. Hence the viciousness of the vanquished.

Vietnam has lost some of its sons and daughters in this war. It goes without saying that without readiness for sacrifice the war could not have been fought. Workers, fighters may die but a working class, a people cannot die. Every last barbarity perpetrated by US imperialism has been recorded and will not go unavenged. Blood debts are being repaid in blood; in April alone the Vietnamese people's forces took a toll from their enemy of 90,000 killed, wounded or captured.

Touchstone

For us it is time to take stock of this world-historic achievement of the Vietnamese. Vietnam is the international touchstone of our age – the contemporary classic of confrontation between exploiter and exploited, as instructive for us as the Paris Commune of a century ago. It has been in essence a third world war – a war in which no-one in the world could remain uninvolved and unmoved. And in this war, how have we the British people performed?

Governments, Labour identical with Tory, have tailed obediently three steps behind their Washington masters, excusing and explaining each new enormity.

The working class, with a few honourable exceptions, have tried to look the other way.

The various “Left” factions in the social democratic circus have acted entirely true to form. The “Left wing” of the Labour Party and the King Street revisionists [see note below], never daring to support the Vietnamese, made little deprecating noises about the bombing of north Vietnam. (The burning alive and bloody murder of people throughout the country was all right – just stop bombing the north).

The Trotskyists were happy to support the Vietnamese as long as they were convinced the Americans would win – at which point they could condemn the “treachery” of the Stalinists (ie Ho Chi Minh). When it became clear even to them that the Vietnamese were not going to lose they made themselves scarce, found other carrion to crow over.

Sacred cause

A whole generation of youth in Britain received their political baptism of fire from the guns of the Mekong Delta. For them Vietnam has been an almost sacred cause, a rock of faith in a shifting, doubtful world. Yet they did not translate their faith into deeds. They did not build for victorious Vietnam a movement to compare with that built by their parents for defeated Spain.

Why? Why have we, the working class of Britain, failed in our internationalist duty? Why have we left it to the Vietnamese people, in the way an earlier generation left it to the Soviet working class, to carry the burden of revolutionary war without our taking the action here that would have complemented their struggle? Can we shake off this social democratic sleeping sickness before it numbs us entirely?

True internationalism

Ho Chi Minh said the only true internationalism is to make revolution in your own country. We rejoice with the Vietnamese people in their victories. We grieve with them in the destruction wrought upon their land. Let us now vow that we the workers of Britain will match their intellect, their heroism and their achievement in the very heartland of the imperialist beast.

Note: “King Street revisionists” is a reference to the now-defunct Communist Party of Great Britain.