LABOUR'S SHAME
[The following is the text of a speech given at the Labour party conference at Blackpool by Ken Coates, a member of the Notting~ ham delegation, It is taken from The Week, a news analysis for socialists, published at 54 Park Road, Lenton, Nottingham, England.
[The speech was made in seconding a resolution aimed against Wilson's policy of backing the American imperialist aggression in Vietnam. ] ,
Mr. Wilson and Mr. Stewart have set their faces against this resolution, They are maintaining that it is an extremist one. This is not true, It is a moderate resolution; one which is so moderate, that in the face of the terror and misery of the people of Vietnam, I had great difficulty in bringing myself to support it. But I think it must be supported; because it gives every delegate present who has had any regard for libertarian, socialist, humanist values the chance to stand up and be counted.
The essence of the resolution is that it calls upon the government to dissociate itself from American policy. Not to “condem," “defy” or "oppose"; but simply to dissociate. If every delegate understands the nature of the Vietnam war, this elementary request will be carried unanimously. What is this war? It is a national liberation struggle, part of a worldwide fight against old empires, by the hungry peoples of the third world. It has developed, sometimes under one banner, sometimes under another, sometimes under one of the varieties of world Communism, in India, through Asia, Africa, and Latin America, It is the biggest social upheaval of our time.
In Vietnam, this war has been going on for twenty-five years. It began against the Japanese. It continued under the French. Now it is against the Americans. Every village, for all that time, has felt the weight of its terror. In every town square the guillotine was set up to kill suspect malcontents. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, tortured and maimed. As a direct result, the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese people have come round to the side of Ho Chi Minh, a fact which has been witnessed in the past by President Eisenhower and numerous front bench spokesmen of our party, including Mr. Cross-~ man -- I only wish that he had the courage to say today what he said a few years ago, because under the Americans it has become ten times more true than it was then.
Mr, Stewart talks about North and South Vietnam. There are not two Vietnams, any more than there were two Frances when that country was cut in half by Hitler during the second world war. Half of Vietnam has been annexed by the Americans, who installed at the beginning of the year their empteenth puppet, who then said: "My only hero
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is Hitler, We need. four or five Hitlers in Vietnam." Under this regime, eight million peasants, 59% of the population, are herded into concentration camps called 'strategic hamlets,'
There is in Vietnam a very right-wing party, called the Demo= cratic Party, which has as its motto, "For the defeat of Communism everywhere," This right-wing party has testified about these camps. They mean: “a forced labour under the control of 300,000 secret police, The programme is planned for fifteen million people. It is the only conflict on record in which every means is employed to destroy one's own people by a series of barbaric attacks with American arms. These police commit numerous atrocities...."
And again, this right-wing party says: "It is certainly an ironic way to protect the peasant masses from communism...to herd them behind barbed wire walls under police control, to burn their villages. Poor as the Vietnamese are, they are not domestic animals."
Now, as this genocidal war escalates, as the Americans move in more and more troops, the South Vietnamese conscript soldiers themselves are being confined to these camps, to stop them from deserting en masse,
Why can't the most powerful military nation on earth defeat these poor peasants? They fight with the most primitive weapons, they fight without pay, they risk their lives and the lives of their families in a desperate struggle against indiscriminate and total terror...Bombs which slice people into fragments, napalm which burns away its powerless living victim with a fire that cannot be quenched until he sees his flesh in ashes, mass eviscerations, torture as a systematic device. People say that the Vietcong also use terror. So they do: they use limited discriminate terror against the occupiers and their quislings, after repeated warnings, as did the resistance in Europe. American bombs kill everything, poison everyone, char all the life within their range, which is at the limit of scientific fiendishness,
How can men find the will to fight such awful things? They find this will from the same springs which inspired our grandfathers to form unions, and our own fight against fascism. If delegates here were Vietnamese and saw the walls of American outposts, decorated with strings of human ears (the American liberal press reports such scenes every day of the week), if they saw the mutilated women, the butchered children, who can doubt that they would be with the Vietcong? They would have no choice, just as, during the war, we had no choice but to fight, with the Communists, against fascism.
The government's support of this evil American war is the worst shame ever to be inflicted on our Labour movement. [At this point the chairman, Gunter, intervened to silence the speaker.] They say that the bank rate is 6%. But what is the interest which Vietnamese children are paying on the vast loan with which the Americans
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saved the pound? I appeal to the unions; you, too, tomorrow, will be asked to yield your powers to the pound. It is not worth these sacrifices. If you vote against this resolution you are supporting these murders and mutilations. By voting for this very mild resolution, at least you take a step to wipe out our shame. .
1'éditeur). Directeur=-G6rant: