Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Howard Zinn

people are not supposed to think or speak. So far, too much of the debate on Vietnam has observed these limits.

      To me this is a surrender of the role of the citizen in a democracy. The citizen’s job, I believe, is to declare firmly what he thinks is right. To compromise with politicians from the very start is to end with a compromise of a compromise. This weakens the moral force of a citizenry which has little enough strength in the shaping of governmental policy. Machiavelli cautioned the Prince not to adopt the ethics of the Citizen. It is appropriate now to suggest to the Citizen that he cannot, without sacrificing both integrity and power, adopt the ethics of the Prince.

       2. The View from Afar: Japan

      BECAUSE 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