NORTH KOREA SUGGEST VOLUNTEERS TO COUNTER ESCALATION
It was not exactly news. In fact it was exactly what most of the world had expected. On November 3, the day after Johnson returned to Washington, the Pentagon casually announced that its "planners are drafting blueprints for an intensification
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of. ‘the bombing in North Vietnam"
“As reported from ‘Washington by William Beecher in the November 4 New York Times, "The Pentagon expects an affirmative decision by President Johnson for a step-up." The Pentagon even specified what the targets will be: "The focus of the new assault, it was reported, would be railroad junctions and freight yards, power plants and defense factories, particularly in the vicinity of Hanoi."
; ‘For months, again according to the ‘Times, "high military advisers" have urged this course on Johnson. But their "pleas" were were rejected because Johnson wanted to stage the Manila show. Also, he was unwilling to take the next big step in escalating the war before the November elections "lest he alienate voters buoyed by gestures of peace."
The U.S. navy even appeared to be jumping the gun. The U.S. military command in Saigon revealed November 3 that two U.S.Seventh Fleet destroyers had "traded gunfire" with north Vietnamese shore batteries north of the so-called "demilitarized zone." The U.S. military command denied reports that hat the destroyers were part of a task force bombarding military targets on shore.
The American press was virtually unanimous in discounting Johnson's "peace" gestures. The New York Times set the tone in an editorial November 3. "Peace in Vietnam," said the editors, "is certainly no nearer than before he left the country. The prospects are for a long and escalating war." Openly expressing its gloom, the influential newspaper said, "The United States today is more deeply committed than before to a fight to the finish in Vietnam and to what Mr. Johnson called yesterday in Anchorage a firm anti- Communist stand in Asia....The Asian journey has now become history, but the war in Vietnam goes on more dangerously than ever."
In the capitals of the other main capitalist powers, the Manila "peace" confab was Similarly discounted. Even the Japanese government, which is very careful about not saying anything that might give offense to the American conquerors, indicated that its impression was that the conferees were prepared for a prolonged war.
Pete Hamill of the liberal New York Post, one of the crowd of reporters who made the tour with Johnson, continued his graphic description of the obscenities. He noted, for instance, the slogans put up by the Seoul government: "We passed brass bands playing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' and other local favorites, and dozens of posters and drawings of Johnson. The posters must have pleased him. Among the better ones -- 'Welcome the King of Kings,' 'The World Marshal' (with a picture of Johnson with two guns out, wearing a cowboy suit), ‘Leader of the Time, Be Long'; 'Texas Bull -- We Like' and 'We "Like Big Shot of the Worla.'"
As for Johnson's speech referring to the Korean war: "That was all that it meant -- a junkpile of empty platitudes and generality. lyndon Johnson had performed the slickest alchemy: He had transformed the scene of a bitter failure of war into a whistlestop in Iowa. There was something obscene about it. I can think of no other word. It is obscene to go campaigning in a place where brave men once lay with the lice eating their bodies in summer and their feet rotting and blackening over murderous winters. It is obscene to make a glorious legend out of Korea, when the truth was down in the mud, or in the midst of hammering machine guns in the north, or on those forgotten hills where boys waited for the sound of Chinese bugles at dawn. It is obscene to take the Chosen Reservoir and what happened to young men there and turn it into a throw-away phrase in a hackneyed political speech. Korea was the place where something about America died in the midst of human waves, defectors, prison. camps and false promises."
The first answer to Johnson's tour came November 2 in a joint appeal from the governments of Cuba and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to all the socialist countries to send "an international force" to aid the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the freedom fighters. The two countries said they were ready to send volunteers to fight in Vietnam as soon as the Vietnamese people gave the word.
They also advocated "intensification of the revolutionary struggle in face of the escalation of the war of aggression by the Yankee imperialists in Vietnam."
They stressed the need to strengthen "the unity of the Communist world on the basis of the independence of the different parties" and affirmed that they would "fight with determination for the defense of the purity of Marxism-Leninism."
The appeal deserves a resounding response among all the workers states. And it will certainly be cheered by the antiwar movement throughout the world.
THE "NEW" STALINIST VERSION OF "TROTSKYISM"
{In the recent period, there has been a certain rise in attacks against "Trotskyism," extending from Moscow to Tirana and including Havana. The North Korean Communist party utilized its official paper Rodong Shinmoon for such an attack in September. It was sent over the wires by Tass, the Moscow news agency, and faithfully reported in various quarters, including The Worker which speaks for the American Communist party. Zeri_ i Popullit, the newspaper of the Albanian Communist party, dragged in Trotskyism in a pseudoanalysis of the defeat in Indonesia. The article, published last May 11, has been circulated in various languages since then in pamphlet form. The September 16° Pravda carried an article by Doctor of Philosophy 8S. Kovalyov, who managed to mention