that “in spite of votes by overwhelming majorities within the United Nations General Assembly demanding that Portugal admit the principle of self-determination for its colonies, and despite the persistent refusal of Portugal to act, the United States has consistently voted against United Nations sanctions to induce Portuguese compliance.”
Some Negro civil rights workers compare the American fear of revolutionary change in the world to the white South’s fear of social change. In this analogy, Lyndon Johnson appears as a kind of global Governor Wallace, sending out the troops to quell demonstrations of the aggrieved and refusing to understand that a group which has suffered over the centuries, once aroused, will not simply retire into the shadows by the threat or use of force. The United States no more understands the psychology of the hungry peasants of the world than the white South has understood the thinking of the Negro. It does not understand the mind of the revolutionist, and this has important implications for the “domino theory.” Even a total military victory in Vietnam would not prevent another insurrection from developing the next week in another part of Asia or Latin America, in the presence of deep grievances—just as the beating and killing of Negroes did not stop the marches, the demonstrations, the spread of rebelliousness in the South.
It may offend admirers of the Great Society to hear Lyndon Johnson compared to George Wallace, but consider: to white Alabamans, Wallace has appeared as a kindly, genial statesman, well-meaning and bringing economic progress; they have been mystified by the stubbornness of the Negro revolt and thus have reacted with a violent anger—much as Johnson has reacted in Vietnam.
The analogy can be carried further. The white South, refusing to believe that local Negroes had genuine grievances about which they were disturbed, attributed the demonstrations to “outside agitators.” Similarly, the Johnson administration cannot seem to believe that there were genuine grievances in South Vietnam which led to guerrilla warfare, and so it blames the war on “outside infiltration” from North Vietnam, or outside “instigation” from Communist China. There has been infiltration from North Vietnam, and help from Communist China. But so was there “outside” aid to the Southern Negro from Northern Negroes and Northern whites. In neither case, however, does this fact of outside support obliterate a more fundamental truth, that the insurgent energy was indigenous, supplied by severe local problems, and indeed could not have become a major movement unless these problems existed.
The United States government has drawn a kind of curtain around itself to keep out a barrage of criticism from abroad of our Vietnam policies. This is strikingly like the way Alabamans and Mississippians for many years tuned out of the indignation expressed in other parts of the country, listening only to one another, reaffirming their belief that they were right and everyone else in the world wrong.
Both in the American South and in South Vietnam, there is an oversimplification of issues. This is done by the use of symbolic words to arouse emotions and prevent a rational consideration of the complex problems of human relations. In the South, the standard epithet has always been the word “nigger”—which destroys the individuality of the Negro so that the white man can develop an undifferentiated reaction of hatred and contempt for anyone so designated, whatever his unique qualities of character. In American foreign policy, the epithet is “Communist”—which may begin to describe a situation in the way the term “nigger” begins to describe the person so designated, but which hardly gets to the distinctions that are so crucial in a world where “Communism” has many forms.
Perhaps the crowning hypocrisy is that the national administration, which welcomed with such enthusiasm the adoption of nonviolence by Negroes under direct attack and responded with such alarm when Negroes began only to speak about defending themselves, has used such frightful force in a situation where this nation has not been attacked. Even with all the recent emphasis by Negro militants on the right of self-defense, no leader has suggested that Negroes invade the white community with guns and bombs as a preventive action to forestall possible attacks on them in the future. Yet this is essentially what the United States is doing in Vietnam.
Toward the end of the tense summer of 1964, many of us who were in Mississippi drove into Neshoba County to attend a memorial service for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, whose bullet-shattered bodies had just been found. At that service Bob Moses spoke from a pile of black rubble—all that was left of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose burning the three had gone to investigate. In this quiet, sunny glen, where all thought was directed to Mrs. Chaney, clad in black, mourning her teenage son, Moses surprised everyone by referring to a headline in that morning’s paper which read: “President Johnson Says ‘Shoot to Kill’ in Gulf of Tonkin.” Then he said: “This is what we’re trying to do away with—the idea that whoever disagrees with us must be killed.”
A year later, Moses was one of those arrested demonstrating in front of the Capitol in Washington against our Vietnam policy.
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