VIETNAMESE?
A rising flood of dollars is being poured into the American imperialist aggression in Vietnam as Johnson continually asks Congress for more money and Congress rubberstamps the requests without the slightest hesitation. Official figures on the cost are issued from time to time; and while a big credibility gap can doubtless be found in them, still they at least give a rough idea of the astronomical sums going into bombs, napalm and still more fiendish instruments of mass slaughter.
. But how much help is going to the Vietnamese fighters, those in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and those in the National Liberation Front? No official figures are available; yet it is absolutely certain that this aid is far below what the United States is spending. .
Obviously the Sino-Soviet conflict has hurt the flow of aid, but the reciprocal charges leveled on this point by the Chinese and Soviet governments do not help matters an iota. :
The London Economist offered in its December 3 issue some interesting estimates on the amount of aid going to the Vietnamese. The estimates no doubt reflect careful pencil work in top circles of the Western imperialist strategists.
"The size of China! s aid to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong cannot be estimated with accuracy," says the London weekly magazine. "It is certainly a small fraction of the $20,000 million that the Americans will have spent on the war this year: China's total military budget is estimated at only about $6,000 million a year. But President Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam is reported to have told a delegation of Japanese communists in September that China was supplying 70 per cent of all military aid Hanoi was receiving against 20 per cent from Russia and 10 per cent from East Europe. Recent reports from Hanoi suggest that Russia and East Europe have pledged to double their aid over next year. The pressure on China to do the same will be strong, despite recent frictions between Peking and Hanoi." [p. 1056.]
The same article also reports a shift in China's buying pattern on the metal market. "China has sharply increased its buying of non-ferrous metals in the world markets over the past year. Dealers on the London Metal Exchange estimate that the Chinese have bought 40,000 tons of copper in Europe already this year, compared with a yearly average of about 20,000 tons over the previous five." This is on the European market only and does not take into account direct purchases in Chile. Zinc purchases have shown a similar sharp increase from an average of 10,000 tons a year to some 20,000 tons in the first nine months of this year. Purchases of the two metals are of interest inasmuch as they are utilized in the manufacture of brass cartridge cases.
The Economist reports that "much of the zinc the Chinese have bought has come from Eastern Europe, though they have given express instructions that they are not willing to buy any Russian metal, nor American or South African metal....Some of the zinc has even come from North Korea which’ presumably prefers to sell via the LME and thus get its hands on hard currency rather than barter with the Chinese."
While the evidence seems to indicate a step up in material aid to the Vietnamese people, the fact remains that they have been fighting with woefully inadequate means against the mightiest military colossus in all history. With the courage and selfsacrifice such as. the Vietnamese have shown, it would seem that Peking and Moscow should be able to find a way to aid them more effectively. than they have. As for the international antiwar movement it*should redouble its efforts to encourage and sustain the Vietnamese and to help them in the most effective way possible -- by advancing the revolutionary socialist cause in their own countries.