REAL 'FRIENDS' OF VIETNAM
1966The NewsletterMichael Banda Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
HE war of imperialist aggression waged by America against the Vietnamese people is one of the bloodiest and cruellest ever. No one can calculate the immense amount of suffering, grief and misery which the U.S. forces-particularly the air force—has caused in this country.
The imperialist planners have exploited every possible technique of mass murder. The more fiendish the device the better it serves them.
The pilots who fly the B-52s, the Thunderchiels and the Phantoms are not ordinary Americans impressed into a thankless job by the government.
VOLUNTEERS
On the contrary many-the vast majority-of them are volunteers who take immense prıde in watching villages being consumed by napalm and get a big kick out of strafing hapless peasants working their paddies.
It is a special type of war and it requires a special type of animal to conduct it.
So when the North Vietnamese began to talk about putting : U.S. pilots on trial they had every justification to đo so. The judicious hanging of a few U.S. pilots would no doubt have had a sobering MICHAEL BANDA influence on the Pentagon.
Of course, it would have provoked a wild outburst of 'anti-communism' and war hysteria in the U.S. But that is something we have come to expect.
If the American capitalists and their middle-class hangers-on did not have a pretext for going to war they usually invent one anyway.
They have really no cause to complain. S.S. men in the German army when captured by the Russians were summarily executed and they did less damage to civilian life and property than the U.S. pilots.
CHARLATANS
In fact the question of putting the pilots on trial has done more to sort out the real friends of the Vietnamese people from their false allies than any other issue.
Amongst those whose charlatany has been exposed . comWSLETTER
BY BRIA PEAR 2s. pletely are the MPs Frank Allaun, Michael Foot, Fenner Brockway, Joyce Butler and Stan Orme.
These pacifist humbugs and imperialist apologists trying to masquerade as humanitarians have sent a letter (published in the July 22 "Tribune') to President Ho Chi Minh appealing to him not to put the pilots on trial.
These people must really believe that the North Vietnamese are waging war against the USA and that there is no difference between the heroic resistance of the exploited and the brutal aggression of the exploiters.
How else can we explain the filthy insinuation contained their joint letter: