Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City-liberated!
VIETNAM The liberation of the South Vietnamese capital, barely two weeks after the liberation of Phnom Penh, sounds the death knell of imperialist domination in Indochina and brilliantly highlights the fact that the world socialist revolution is on the march. For that is certainly the essential lesson of this victory, which crowns more than thirty long years of revolutionary struggle. The victory is total. The Revolutionary Government, abandoning the adjective "Provisional, " entered Saigon in triumph. The last minute American maneuvers, supported by French diplomacy, in no way permitted imperialism to avert the most complete debacle. The spectacle of the disorderly withdrawal of the last American nationals and their most favored lackeys confirmed the ultimate failure of Washington's
VICTORY! policy. Two ambassadors - Dean and Martin -forced to flee in helicopters with their flag under their arms; the last Gls in Saigon dangling from rope ladders; the helicopters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet being thrown into the sea to make room for refugees; the wildcat pillaging of American goods by a population giving vent to its hatred and contempt; the puppets whose relations with the United States were not sufficiently strong being abandoned to their fate despite the prior promises of their protectors; the unconditional surrender of a regime for whose perpetuation imperialism had invested billions of dollars and sacrificed tens of thousands of American soldiers; those are the images that will give governments pause for thought about the value of American commitments and will awaken many peoples to the possibility of victory. The imperialist defeat in Indochina, which is the
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E FROM THES
E REVOLUTION
SOCIALIST
REVOLUTION!
VIETNAM work of a national liberation struggle, is also the result of a social revolution. It was the agrarian reform that enabled peasants to remain on their land despite the bombing and food for the front. It wa self brutally uprooted by the military and administrative apparatuş on which n had depended, B ular mobilizations nese revolution. The current impact of the revolu*Dismantling of the apparatus of the neocolonial state; *Dissolution of the reactionar of the imperialist pleasure houses; *Placing of public services and means of production under the control of the revolutiondiy governme or of the workers; * Administration of the urban center By military re olutionary committees. Above all, the reunification of South Vietnom with the workers state of the North is nOW- in pe implicit in every day's events, even take some time to con ie process. The DRV dong is becoming the "strong currency" of South Vietnam in place of the many times devalued Suigonese piaster. Cadres, often people of South Viet namese origin who went north in 1954, are returning by the thousands to central and southern Vietnan Machinery, textbooks, and theater rovos are foll gwing weapons Sout victory as it was yesterday in combat, along with the unity of the three peoples of Indochina.
theisocialist transformaThe first natfonal Fiberation struggle to have defeated - the "policeman o the captialist world, " even though the struggle of the Indochinese peoples for all those strusing or socialism throughout the world.
the price in blood thaf was demanded by U.S. imperialism, following in the footsteps of Japanese and French imperialism, before it admitted defeat. We know the terrible suffering endured by the peoples subjected to deportafion, search and destroy operations, massive bombing, borbed-wire enclosures, terrorist assassinations under the Phoenix project, arrest and torture by the hundreds of thousands. We know of the tens of thousands of militants and cadres of the Indochinese revolutionary ergonizations who died in a battle waged in the name of all humanity. We know the terrible tate that has often begi the let of the Vietnamise, inté rhational workers no Leotiar, and cano ian toiler, to whom
Movement ac led aid onl THebe mastyre ples ng resistance to counterrevolution is possible ese peoples in struggle gre tegg ing usath ictory is born of esistance. stea det
Dem. world! TO THE WORLD
Hue, Da Nang, Phnom Penh, and now, Saigon. The scenes of immense defeats not only for the puppets, the Thieus and the Lon Nols, but also for the master, American imperialism, which brought the puppets to power, trained their regimes and their armies, and supported them with all available means. Dien Bien Phu, which marked the defeat of French imperialism in Southeast Asia some twenty years ago, pales before the present debacle of Yankee imperialism. One of the strongest bourgeois armies of Southeast Asia, commanding the fourth-largest air force in the world, has collapsed before an army one-fourth or one-fifth its size, an army that did not even have an air force. This rout is not the result of the military victory at Ban Me Thuot or of Thie's allegedly ill-executed order to retreat. It can be explained only by the totally mercenary character of this "free world" army, which collapsed, throwing down its arms or dissolving into bands of robbers and highwaymen, in face of the resolute determination of the Vietnamese people and the other peoples of Indochina, who have decisively rejected colonialism and its neocolonial surrogates. The "Paris accords" could only have been and still can only be an intermediary stage on the road to the total national and social liberation of the Indochinese peninsula, to an expansion of the workers states. After thirty years of nearly uninterrupted combat, initially against the French and Japanese imperialists, these peoples, small in number, have inflicted a colossal defeat on the greatest capitalist power. The myth of the invincibility of the American giant has been destroyed. That is the unforgettable example that many other peoples aspiring to socialism will emulate.