Protest in the Vietnam War Era (Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements) 3030810496, 9783030810498

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Protest in the Vietnam War Era Edited by Alexander Sedlmaier

Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements

Series Editors Stefan Berger, Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany Holger Nehring, Contemporary European History, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet contested, actors in local, national and global politics and civil society, yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the trajectories of their development. This series seeks to promote innovative historical research on the history of social movements in the modern period since around 1750. We bring together conceptually-informed studies that analyse labour movements, new social movements and other forms of protest from early modernity to the present. We conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal organisations and mere protest events. We also offer a home for studies that systematically explore the political, social, economic and cultural conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively with political, social and sociological theories in order to make historically grounded arguments about social movements. This new series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements, while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It hopes to revitalise the conversation between historians and historical sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of contention’. Editorial Board John Chalcraft (London School of Economics, UK) Andreas Eckert (Humboldt-University, Germany) Susan Eckstein (Boston University, USA) Felicia Kornbluh (University of Vermont, USA) Jie-Hyun Lim (Research Institute for Comparative History, Hanyang University Seoul, South Korea) Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands) Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago, USA) Sean Raymond Scalmer (University of Melbourne, Australia) Alexander Sedlmaier (Bangor University, UK)

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14580

Alexander Sedlmaier Editor

Protest in the Vietnam War Era

Editor Alexander Sedlmaier School of History, Law and Social Sciences Bangor University Bangor, UK

ISSN 2634-6559 ISSN 2634-6567 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ISBN 978-3-030-81049-8 ISBN 978-3-030-81050-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

Around the world, social movements have become legitimate, yet contested, actors in local, national and global politics and civil society, yet we still know relatively little about their longer histories and the trajectories of their development. Our series reacts to what can be described as a recent boom in the history of social movements. We can observe a development from the crisis of labour history in the 1980s to the boom in research on social movements in the 2000s. The rise of historical interests in the development of civil society and the role of strong civil societies as well as non-governmental organisations in stabilising democratically constituted polities has strengthened the interest in social movements as a constituent element of civil societies. In different parts of the world, social movements continue to have a strong influence on contemporary politics. In Latin America, trade unions, labour parties and various left-of-centre civil society organisations have succeeded in supporting left-of-centre governments. In Europe, peace movements, ecological movements and alliances intent on campaigning against poverty and racial discrimination and discrimination on the basis of gender and sexual orientation have been able to set important political agendas for decades. In other parts of the world, including Africa, India and South East Asia, social movements have played a significant role in various forms of community building and community politics. The contemporary political relevance of social movements has undoubtedly contributed to a growing historical interest in the topic. v

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Contemporary historians are not only beginning to historicise these relatively recent political developments; they are also trying to relate them to a longer history of social movements, including traditional labour organisations, such as working-class parties and trade unions. In the longue durée, we recognise that social movements are by no means a recent phenomenon and are not even an exclusively modern phenomenon, although we realise that the onset of modernity emanating from Europe and North America across the wider world from the eighteenth century onwards marks an important departure point for the development of civil societies and social movements. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dominance of national history over all other forms of history writing led to a thorough nationalisation of the historical sciences. Hence social movements have been examined traditionally within the framework of the nation state. Only during the last two decades have historians begun to question the validity of such methodological nationalism and to explore the development of social movements in comparative, connective and transnational perspective taking into account processes of transfer, reception and adaptation. Whilst our book series does not preclude work that is still being carried out within national frameworks (for, clearly, there is a place for such studies, given the historical importance of the nation state in history), it hopes to encourage comparative and transnational histories on social movements. At the same time as historians have begun to research the history of those movements, a range of social theorists, from Jürgen Habermas to Pierre Bourdieu and from Slavoj Žižek to Alain Badiou as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to Miguel Abensour, to name but a few, have attempted to provide philosophical-cum-theoretical frameworks in which to place and contextualise the development of social movements. History has arguably been the most empirical of all the social and human sciences, but it will be necessary for historians to explore further to what extent these social theories can be helpful in guiding and framing the empirical work of the historian in making sense of the historical development of social movements. Hence the current series is also hoping to make a contribution to the ongoing dialogue between social theory and the history of social movements. This series seeks to promote innovative historical research on the history of social movements in the modern period since around 1750. We

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

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bring together conceptually informed studies that analyse labour movements, new social movements and other forms of protest from early modernity to the present. With this series, we seek to revive, within the context of historiographical developments since the 1970s, a conversation between historians on the one hand and sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists on the other. Unlike most of the concepts and theories developed by social scientists, we do not see social movements as directly linked, a priori, to processes of social and cultural change and therefore do not adhere to a view that distinguishes between old (labour) and new (middle-class) social movements. Instead, we want to establish the concept ‘social movement’ as a heuristic device that allows historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to investigate social and political protests in novel settings. Our aim is to historicise notions of social and political activism in order to highlight different notions of political and social protest on both left and right. Hence, we conceive of ‘social movements’ in the broadest possible sense, encompassing social formations that lie between formal organisations and mere protest events. But we also include processes of social and cultural change more generally in our understanding of social movements: this goes back to nineteenth-century understandings of ‘social movement’ as processes of social and cultural change more generally. We also offer a home for studies that systematically explore the political, social, economic and cultural conditions in which social movements can emerge. We are especially interested in transnational and global perspectives on the history of social movements, and in studies that engage critically and creatively with political, social and sociological theories in order to make historically grounded arguments about social movements. In short, this series seeks to offer innovative historical work on social movements, while also helping to historicise the concept of ‘social movement’. It also hopes to revitalise the conversation between historians and historical sociologists in analysing what Charles Tilly has called the ‘dynamics of contention’. Alexander Sedlmaier’s edited collection Protest in the Vietnam War Era provides an impressive global coverage of the protest cultures that developed in opposition to the Vietnam war in the long 1960s. This conjuncture appears here as a truly global event in that it managed to bring together a variety of different struggles and contestations—from liberation struggles against colonialism to social movement activities around anti-imperialism and solidarity actions surrounding issues of class, race

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

and gender. The global perspective provided by this volume has the effect of decentring the protest history of the Vietnam war, which to date has been highly focussed on US and western history. Instead the current volume highlights the very different and often intensely local contexts of anti-Vietnam war protest cultures. Under the framework of these local contexts, the opposition against, first French and later American involvement in Vietnam merged with a whole host of emancipatory and progressive issues that were promoted at the same time and in conjunction with anti-Vietnam war protests. The book is thus in many respects a contribution to the history of cross-movement mobilisations. Furthermore, the volume makes a marvellous contribution to the transnational and entangled history of protest cultures across different parts of the globe. International organisations played a vital role in spreading the anti-war activism and connecting it to a whole host of other issues of relevance in different countries of the world. The World Peace Council and the Women’s International Democratic Federation were two of these organisations that excelled in holding international conferences and staging transnational campaigns in protest of the Vietnam war often connecting an anti-war stance with other emancipatory agendas. Sometimes regarded as communist front organisations and mere stooges of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, the current book relativises these assumptions, not the least by pointing to the many fissures and disagreements that went through the communist block during the Cold War vis-a-vis the Vietnam war. The chapters on the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia all demonstrate the lack of unity and underline the diverse positioning with regard to Vietnam war protest cultures. In the capitalist west, by contrast, protests against the Vietnam war allowed activists to seek contact with revolutionary movements in the global south in a spirit of solidarity but also in the hope of finding here the spark for revolution that was missing in the west. Moreover, the Vietnam war raised a whole host of moral questions that were connected above all to US capitalism, but also to issues closer to home related to the Second World War and traditions of anti-fascism among the left. Finally, anti-Vietnam protest cultures allowed for the questioning of the dominant anti-communism in the west. By putting the emphasis on the crimes of capitalism and of capitalism’s lead nation, the protest made communism look more three-dimensional and worked towards the formulation of anti-anticommunist positions.

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This volume is particularly valuable in paying due attention to countries in the global south: China, South Korea, several African countries, Cuba and other Latin American countries. Here the dominant prism through which the Vietnam war was seen was that of anti-imperialism and Third Worldism—positions that received a major boost from the Bandung conference of 1955. Challenging an alleged neocolonialism of the United States, they found in the Vietnam war a blueprint for revolutionary struggles against the hegemon of the western world. Overall, this is a truly innovative and fresh look at the context of Vietnam war protest cultures that, we hope, will serve as an inspiration to others to work more on the global, transnational and entangled history of these protests. Stefan Berger Ruhr-Universität Bochum Holger Nehring University of Stirling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those who were involved in the making of this volume. I am grateful to the contributors of two stimulating international workshops: “‘Two, Three, Many Vietnams’: Protest against the Vietnam War as Part of Other Emancipatory and Revolutionary Struggles”, held at the European Social Science History Conference at Queen’s University Belfast on 6 April 2018 and “The Continuation of Politics with Other Means: War and Protest during the Cold War” at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, 9–10 April 2018. Thanks to the European Commission and the Marie SkłodowskaCurie Individual Fellowship programme for their generous support of my project “The Continuation of Politics with Other Means: War and Protest, 1914−2011”, which made these workshops and this volume possible; special thanks to the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum and Stefan Berger for their warm welcome, for hosting me between 2017 and 2019, and for the continued fruitful and enjoyable cooperation; it is much appreciated. Finally, I would like to express my boundless gratitude and appreciation to Freia Anders who has been a constant source of inspiration and support with this and all other projects. Wiesbaden, Germany March 2021

Alexander Sedlmaier

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Contents

1

Protest in the Era of the Indochina Wars: Upending Centre and Periphery Alexander Sedlmaier

1

Part I Bridging the Worlds: International Organisations 2

3

“To Go Further Than Words Alone”: The World Peace Council and the Global Orchestration of Vietnam War Campaigns During the 1960s Kim Christiaens The Vietnam Activities of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Francisca de Haan

Part II

4

13

51

State Socialism: Second-World Solidarity, Propaganda, and Humanitarianism from Above and from Below

The Soviet Public and the Vietnam War: Political Mobilization, Public Organizations, and Activism, 1965–1973 Julie Hessler

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CONTENTS

5

Between Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Communism: Poland and International Solidarity with Vietnam Idesbald Goddeeris

6

The Engineering of Political Equidistance and Its Consequences: The Vietnam War and Popular Protest in Yugoslavia Sabine Rutar and Radina Vuˇceti´c

Part III

113

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The Capitalist Core: First World Activists Reach Out to Emancipatory and Revolutionary Movements Across the Globe 173

7

Vietnam War Protest and Solidarity in West Germany Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

8

France’s Two Vietnams: Intellectual Protest Politics in Perspective Silja Behre

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The Japanese New Left, the Vietnam War, and Anti-Imperial Protest Alex Finn Macartney

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Part IV 10

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The Global South: Emancipation, Anti-Colonialism, Third Worldism

The Vietnam War, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution: Propaganda and Mobilization in the People’s Republic of China Kazushi Minami The Vietnam War, Protest, and Democratization in South Korea Tae Yang Kwak

12

The Vietnam War in Africa Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre

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Revolutionary Soulmates? Cuba’s Slow Discovery of Vietnam Antoni Kapcia

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293 325

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CONTENTS

14

Singing in Solidarity: The Latin American Protest Song Movement and the Vietnam War Matías Hermosilla

Index

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391

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Notes on Contributors

Freia Anders Lecturer and Research Associate in History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; 2004–2012 Research Fellow at Bielefeld University. Her publications include Public Goods Versus Economic Interests: The History of Squatting in a Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017, co-editor with A. Sedlmaier); Strafjustiz im Sudetengau 1938–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg 2008); Herausforderungen des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols: Recht und politisch motivierte Gewalt am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006, co-editor with I. Gilcher-Holtey). Silja Behre Minerva Institute for German History, Tel Aviv University; Ph.D. 2014 (Bielefeld/EHESS Paris) on contested interpretation of 68 movements and their legacies in Germany and France; postdoc project on intellectual biography of German-Israeli philosopher Jochanan Bloch (1919–1979). Her publications include Bewegte Erinnerung: Deutungskämpfe um “1968” in deutsch-französischer Perspektive (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016); “Simone de Beauvoirs Engagement für das Russell-Tribunal—Die Intellektuelle im Kollektiv?”, in Eingreifende Denkerinnen: Weibliche Intellektuelle im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. I. GilcherHoltey (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 123–135. Kim Christiaens Assistant Professor, KU Leuven, director of KADOC (Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society). His publications include International Solidarity in the Low Countries

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During the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives and Themes (Berlin: De Gruyter 2020, ed. with J. Nieuwenhuys and C. Roemer); “Europe at the Crossroads of Three Worlds: Alternative Histories and Connections of European Solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–1980s”, European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 24, 6 (2017), 932–954; Special Issue Contemporary European History: “Entangled Transitions: Between Eastern and Southern Europe, 1960s–2010s” (2017, ed. with J. Mark and J. Faraldo). Francisca de Haan Professor of Gender Studies and History, Central European University, Vienna, is currently writing a monograph about the WIDF, titled The Women’s International Democratic Federation: A Global Left Feminist History. Her publications include The Rise of Caring Power: Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999, with A. van Drenth); Gender and the Politics of Office Work: The Netherlands 1860–1940 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998); Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013, co-ed. with M. Allen, J. Purvis, and K. Daskalova). Idesbald Goddeeris Associate Professor of History, KU Leuven, works on the Cold War, colonial history, and the history of Poland. His current project examines Communist state governments in India. His publications include Solidarity with Solidarity: Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980–1982 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010, ed.); Spioneren voor het communism: Belgische prominenten en Poolse geheim agenten (Leuven: Lannoo Campus, 2013). Matías Hermosilla Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History Stony Brook University. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in History at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research interests include the history of popular culture in Latin America, specifically, humour and popular music in the Global 1960s. His publications include “La Palmada en la Frente (1970): Political Cartoons, the Global Sixties, and Popular Culture in Chile,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 38 (2020): 22–51. Julie Hessler Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Oregon, is currently writing a book manuscript under the working title Friendship House: Anti-Imperial Solidarity in Soviet Culture, 1955–1985. Her publications include A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953 (Princeton: Princeton

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University Press, 2004); “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1 (2006): 33–63. Dan Hodgkinson Lecturer in African History and Politics, Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He focuses on Southern Africa, specifically Zimbabwe, but has a wider interest in East and Central Africa. His publications include Special Issue “Student activism in an era of decolonization”, Africa 89 (2019, co-ed. with Luke Melchiorre); “Subversive Communities and the ‘Rhodesian Sixties’: An Exploration of Transnational Protests, 1965–1973”, in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018); “The ‘Hardcore’ Student Activist: The Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU), State Violence, and Frustrated Masculinity, 2000–2008”, Journal of Southern African Studies 39, 4 (2013): 863−883. Antoni Kapcia Professor of Latin American History, Nottingham University, specialises in modern Cuba, focusing on political radicalism in the 1920–1950s and the 1959 Revolution. Current project: “Beyond Havana and the nation? Peripheral identities and literary culture”. His publications include Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba (London: Institute of American Studies, 2018, editor); “What’s in a Name? Emigrant Cubans Since 1959 and the Curious Evolution of Discourse,” in Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba: Essays in Memory of Alistair Hennessy (University of London): 204–227; Cuba: Island of Dreams (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Tae Yang Kwak Associate Professor of History, Ramapo College of New Jersey, received his Ph.D. from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations department at Harvard University, specialising in modern and contemporary Korean history. He is currently writing a monograph on South Korean Nation-Building and the Vietnam War. His publications include “Han’guk u˘ i Bet˘unam ch˘onjaeng chaep’˘ongga [Re-evaluating Korean Participation in the Vietnam War],” in Y˘oksa pip’y˘ong [Critical Review of History] (2014); “The Republic of Korea in Southeast Asia: Expanding Influences and Relations,” in Korea’s Changing Roles in Southeast Asia, ed. David I. Steinberg (Singapore: ISEAS, 2009), and “The Nixon Doctrine and the Yusin Reforms: American Foreign Policy, the Vietnam War, and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Korea, 1968–1973,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 12 (2003).

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Alex Finn Macartney Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies and Lecturer in History at Yale University, received his Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University in 2019. His dissertation, “War in the Postwar: Japan and West Germany Protest the Vietnam War and the Global Strategy of Imperialism,” explored the radical politics of 1960s and 1970s West Germany and Japan, with a focus on the legacies of the fascist past, the transnational imagination of the 1960s, and use of political violence. His publications include “Hirohito on the Rhine: Hirohito’s 1971 State Visit and Transnational Japanese-West German Protest Against Imperialism”, Journal of Contemporary History 54 (2019). Luke Melchiorre Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. His research interests include African politics, comparative development, nation-building, and state formation. His doctoral thesis “Building Nations, Making Youth: Institutional Choice, Nation-State Building and the Politics of Youth Activism in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania’ (Ph.D., University of Toronto, 2018) explores the institutional origins and political effects of projects of nationstate building in shaping trajectories of youth activism in Kenya and Tanzania. His publications include Special Issue “Student activism in an era of decolonization”, Africa 89 (2019, ed. with Dan Hodgkinson); “‘A Monster on His Hands’: The National Service Pre-University Training, Student Activism and State Repression at the University of Nairobi, 1978–1990”, Africa 89 (2019). Kazushi Minami Associate Professor, Osaka University, Ph.D. in History University of Texas at Austin, historian of modern US–East Asian relations. He is currently writing a book entitled People’s Diplomacy: Non-State Actors and the Transformation of U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War. His publications include “‘How Could I Not Love You?’: Transnational Feminism and US-Chinese Relations During the Cold War,” Journal of Women’s History 31, 4 (2019): 12–36; “Oil for the Lamps of America? Sino-American Oil Diplomacy, 1973–1979,” Diplomatic History 41, 5 (2017): 959–984; “Re-examining the End of Mao’s Revolution: China’s Changing Statecraft and Sino-American Relations, 1973–1978,” Cold War History (2016).

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Sabine Rutar Researcher, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg. Her current book project is on mining in Nazioccupied Yugoslavia (1941–1945). Her publications include Kultur— Nation—Milieu: Sozialdemokratie in Triest vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2004); The Wars of Yesterday: The Balkan Wars and the Emergence of Modern Military Conflict, 1912–1913 (New York: Berghahn, 2018, ed. with Katrin Boeckh), “Workers’ Protests in the Italo-Yugoslav Border Region: Action, Control, and Questions of Legitimacy”, in Labour in State Socialist Europe After 1945: Contributions to Global Labour History, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest: CEU Press, 2019). Alexander Sedlmaier Reader in Modern History, Bangor University. 2017–2019 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-University Bochum pursuing the project “The Continuation of Politics with Other Means: War and Protest, 1914−2011”. His publications include Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2014); Deutschlandbilder und Deutschlandpolitik: Studien zur Wilson-Administration, 1913–1921 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003); Public Goods vs Economic Interests: Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting (New York: Routledge, 2017, co-editor with F. Anders). Radina Vuˇceti´c Associate Professor, Department for General Contemporary History, University of Belgrade. Current project: Censorship in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s and the Varying Paths of the Intellectual and Artistic Elite. Her publications include Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties (Budapest: CEU Press, 2018); “’We Are With You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia”, Journal of Contemporary History 50, 3 (2015, with James Mark, Peter Apor, and Piotr Os˛eka); “Yugoslavia, Vietnam War and Anti-war Activism”, Tokovi istorije 2 (2013): 165–180.

List of Figures

Illustration 2.1

Illustration 2.2 Illustration 2.3

Illustration 3.1 Illustration 7.1

Illustration 7.2 Illustration 10.1

Illustration 10.2 Illustration 10.3

Ðinh Bá Thi, the head of the South Vietnamese delegation presenting a report on the situation in South Vietnam during the Helsinki conference in July 1965. Isabelle Blume during her travels in Vietnam. WPC president Isabelle Blume became an international icon of solidarity with Vietnam and an important liaison between Vietnam War campaigners in North America and Western Europe and the DRV and NLF. Badge issued by the Soviet Women’s Committee in support of the Hanoi Hospital. HV solidarity event “Help Vietnam!” with two representatives of the North Vietnamese Red Cross and a pastor for the HV informing on the use of donations, Hamburg, 17 February 1969. Poster advertising a rally in Heidelberg (December 1969). “Women in Nanshi District, Shanghai, participate in a protest against the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam.” “If the enemy dares to invade us, he will perish in the boundless ocean of people’s war.” “The struggle of all the people in the world against American imperialism will be victorious!”

23 30

36 78

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LIST OF FIGURES

Illustration 10.4

Illustration 12.1

Illustration 12.2

Illustration 13.1 Illustration 13.2

Illustration 14.1 Illustration 14.2 Illustration 14.3 Illustration 14.4 Illustration 14.5 Illustration 14.6

“Red Guards kill American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, the world strikes down American imperialism and Soviet revisionism.” Zhou Ruizhuang, “Vigorously support the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America” (Shanghai, c. 1964). Malian President, Modibo Keïta, meeting with US President, John F. Kennedy, at the White House in September 1961. Like in Vietnam. Month of Vietnamese women. FLN—South Vietnam’ nine years example of victory, 20 December 1960–1969, Cuban Committee for Solidarity with South Vietnam’ victory. Cover and explanatory texts of the album Encuentro de la canción protesta. Cover and explanatory texts of the album Encuentro de la canción protesta. Front and back covers of Quilapayún’s X Viet-Nam. Front and back covers of Quilapayún’s X Viet-Nam. Front and back covers of the album Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam. Front and back covers of the album Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam.

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CHAPTER 1

Protest in the Era of the Indochina Wars: Upending Centre and Periphery Alexander Sedlmaier

The keyword “solidarity”—and the act of reaching out to others it is aimed at—gained new dimensions in the transnational relations and protest campaigns of the era of the Indochina Wars. These were embedded in processes of internationalisation and global entanglements. Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher who celebrated liberation movements, asserted a global obligation to solidarity and protest in 1966: “In history there is something like guilt, and there is no necessity […] that could justify what is going on in Vietnam: the slaughter of the civilian population, of women and children, the systematic destruction of foodstuffs, carpet bombing […] that is guilt and we must protest against it even if we believe that it is hopeless, simply in order to survive as human beings and perhaps to make a dignified existence possible for others, perhaps only because it could possibly shorten the

A. Sedlmaier (B) School of History, Law and Social Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_1

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A. SEDLMAIER

terror and the horror”.1 A January 1972 article from a Hanoi periodical adds the perspective from the National Liberation front of South Vietnam (NLF) and the Hanoi government who, as part of their successful overall war strategy, had been actively stimulating a “world people’s front in support of Vietnam against U.S. aggression”, which “became more and more involved in all classes throughout the world. The righteous cause of our people became the cause of the progressive people throughout the world”.2 The governments and organisations that supported the US war effort in Indochina, orchestrated by the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations in the name of anti-communism, found it impossible to ignore the widespread dissent. The scholars writing in this volume analyse the dynamic emergence of protest movements during the Vietnam War era, their evolution, and implications. In our view, scholarship has still paid insufficient attention to the relationship between protest explicitly focused on the war and other emancipatory and revolutionary struggles. Thus, except where authors refer to protests explicitly framed as “anti-war”, the term Vietnam War protest is used here as an imperfect shorthand for a myriad of interlinked protest issues and solidarity mobilisations across the globe in the period of the Indochina Wars, which in one way or another referred to the Vietnam conflict. This, for example, helps to avoid blanking out the anti-communist “pro-war” movement. And it also applies to protests that consciously moved away from pacifist “anti-war”3 positions to embrace radical or militant support for one side of belligerents. As a result, the Vietnam War will emerge as a crucial mobilising factor for both, the democratic spirit of citizen protest inaugurated in mass demonstrations and the urban guerrilla movements, with which the former is so often contrasted, thus avoiding the frequently found normative ascription of radicalisation leading away from legitimate

1 Herbert Marcuse, “Vietnam—Analyse eines Exempels”, Neue Kritik 7 (1966), 30–40; English transl. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Chapter6Doc3Intro.pdf. 2 “The Seven-Point Proposal Constantly Forces Nixon Into A More Nervous and Passive State” (November 1971), Engl. transl. in CIA, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts (3 January 1972), K 4. 3 On religious pacifism see David E. Settje, Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Sabine Rousseau, La colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002).

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protest to illegitimate violence. Participants in an array of Vietnam solidarity initiatives and protest movements in the West, East, North, and South were encouraged by activists that they could make a difference by taking a personal stance. This volume attempts to address these issues through a focus on the confluence of movements from the three different geopolitical regions of the world—in the sense of First, Second, and Third Worlds—chiefly during the 1960s and early 1970s but harking back to their antecedents where appropriate. As the Second Indochina War began shortly after the Bandung Conference in 1955, many of the histories told in this volume are intertwined with the post-Bandung spirit in the politics of non-alignment as the various postcolonial progressive nationalisms assembled at Bandung left their mark on the movements that confronted the Vietnam War. Especially the global impact of Maoism is present in many of the individual essays, while Trotskyist groups feature in others. The volume thus offers new perspectives on the history of wartime protest doing justice to both the unprecedented dynamics due to global patterns of cross-movement mobilisation and the corrosive impact on movements resulting from the divisiveness and repression that the Cold War in general and one of its bloodiest hot wars created. Bringing together historians from eleven countries taking up numerous geographical, historiographical, and methodological perspectives, this collection will expose scholars of the Vietnam War, social movements, and international activism to the complex interplay of the three world regions and of different protest agendas that too often remains confined to nation-specific scholarship and to normatively defined “anti-war” activism. The internationalisation and global entanglements of various social movements have lately emerged as a major field of inquiry for scholars interested in both intercultural transfers and cross-national comparisons. The proliferating historiographies of radicalism and protest in the 1960s and 70s, offer many treatments of Vietnam War protests in more partial fashion.4 The 2003 collection edited by Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. 4 Examples include Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003); Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in

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Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach is exceptional in focusing on the international impact of the Vietnam War, but even that volume concentrates on international politics rather than the generative consequences for political mobilisation and radicalisation within the national polities of the time.5 Suggestive is Odd Arne Westad’s longstanding overarching approach to the Cold War, whose globalising impetus and emphasis on Third World agency allow for a focus on the transnational, international, and global cross connections of the synchronous rather than a cumulative history of nations and world regions.6 This trend has also been reshaping understanding of protest movements and miscellaneous New Lefts.7 In the context of the growing literature on the so-called “global sixties”, Victoria Langland has suggested four types of transnational links to think with, namely commemorative, literal, aspirational, and conspiratorial connections, which can be usefully applied to our efforts in “invoking the global scale” of Vietnam War protests while “not losing sight of the complexities and contingencies of the local”.8 The idea is to understand “local change within a transnational framework”,9 while paying attention to new regional approaches to exploring the complexities of the Cold War era.10 For Langland, commemorative connections Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Michael Schmidtke, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den USA (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003); Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 5 Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (eds.), America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017). An emblematic study for this globalising impetus is Young-sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which, however, neither focuses on protest nor on the Vietnam War. 7 Emblematic instances are Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 8 Victoria Langland, “Transnational Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15–26. 9 Eric Zolov, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70,3 (2014): 349–362, 354. 10 See, for instance, Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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point to the “collectively remembered past” in the sense of “amalgamations that did not exist during the period in question”.11 This makes perfect sense for her considerations on the 1960s in Brazil, regarding protest in the era of the Indochina Wars, we think it is entirely within her sense if we also include commemorative connections within the longer period such as the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Conference as global lieux de mémoire. Memories of parallel decolonisation struggles, especially in Algeria, were also important.12 And so were the intellectual and political networks formed in opposition to the Algerian War, which leads to literal connections, the “specific actors, ideas and goods” that crossed borders and functioned “as transnational vectors of exchange”, connecting the theatres of war in Indochina with activists from the three geopolitical regions of the world. This would include, for example, the critical writings of a generation of radical scholars in the Vietnam War era.13 Literal connections went hand in hand with aspirational connections, in which activists imagined themselves to be a part of global communities of protest, of “a much hoped-for global vanguard [that] animated and propelled their decisions and actions”.14 Finally, the contributions to this volume pay attention to the conspiratorial connections that those seeking to control, delegitimise, and fight protest movements constructed. They took protesters’ “references to the Vietnam War or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or to politically radical authors like Herbert Marcuse and Régis Debray” or students shouting “Our example is Vietnam”15 —i.e., both real and imagined literal and aspirational connections—as evidence of illegitimate conspiratorial networks that constituted a threat to national security. Herein lay important roots of both the brutal police action that protesters encountered domestically, frequently accompanied by anti-communist and “pro-war” 11 Langland, “Transnational Connections,” 19 and 25. 12 Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: the Women’s International Democratic

Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944. 13 See, for instance, Sheila Rowbotham, “Vietnam,” in Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 206–220; Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 14 Langland, “Transnational Connections,” 25. 15 Ibid., 21.

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counterdemonstrations, and the transnational constellation of right-wing conservatives that rivalled left-wing internationalism globally.16 The more intricate theoretical understanding of transnational connections signposted by Langland and the accumulating work on which it builds help to upend older notions of centre and periphery. The attempt to do this with respect to protest in the Vietnam War era informs and inspires the contributions to this volume. The existing overview works on “anti-war” protest are all thoroughly focused on US history with only peripheral attention paid to other parts of the world.17 The present volume does not contain a chapter on the United States, but activists from the United States feature as both recipients of and contributors to the internationalisation of Vietnam War-related protest. The following contributions seek to bring better into view both the informal and formal internationalism of protest movements around the world, including specifically the dialectics between transnational cross-movement mobilisation and internal division. Contributions on socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Third World, and on international organisations drawing an important part of their funding and membership from these countries, demonstrate that Vietnam War protests in these contexts cannot be reduced to simple manifestations of state-power and were intricately connected with mobilisations in capitalist countries. The first section of this book focuses on international organisations that explicitly sought to bridge and unite solidarity and protest in the three geopolitical regions of the world. Often dismissed as mere Soviet front organisations, the World Peace Council (Kim Christiaens) and the Women’s International Democratic Federation (Francisca de Haan) were instrumental for the globalisation of Vietnam War activism. Both organisations staged a series of conferences and public campaigns that spanned the globe and involved an international assortment of famous public figures, intellectuals, and artists of the global Left in conjunction with national chapters leaning on broad membership. Being able to count on 16 See Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 17 Simon Hall, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (New York: Routledge, 2012); Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (Wilmington: SR Books, 2002); Walter L. Hixson (ed.), The Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: Garland, 2000); Charles DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

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the experience with campaigns in the context of the First Indochina War, the Korean War, and nuclear armament, they developed an impressive array of activities to denounce the American war in Vietnam. In both institutions, the Soviet Union and its allies played important roles, but they should by no means be reduced to just this influence. This perspective helps to see Vietnam protest and solidarity campaigns in the countries of the not so unified “socialist bloc”—increasingly marred by the Sino-Soviet split and its repercussions—in a new light, as the Second World mounted its own contributions to global protest and solidarity campaigns, both within and beyond their territory. This was characterised by (a) government- and party-endorsed politics, which also sought alliances with protesters in the First World; (b) voluntary and coerced mechanisms that garnered extensive humanitarian and other aid to North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front; and (c) the facilitation of activists’ travel to Vietnam and of protest-related international meetings.18 The rapprochement between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Soviet Union after the demise of Khrushchev was an important backdrop for this constellation.19 The Soviet Union (Julie Hessler), Poland (Idesbald Goddeeris), and Yugoslavia (Sabine Rutar and Radina Vuˇceti´c) are the case studies in this section. The core capitalist countries of the so-called First World experienced a relative dilution of anti-communism ushered in by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism, the subsequent adoption of the concept “peaceful coexistence” and Kennedy’s more fluid leadership style. The United States focused on liberation movements around the globe as threats to its geopolitical position. Individual countries of the First World were to varying degrees tied into alliances with the United States, as recipients of postWorld War II aid, as hosts of US military bases, and as front lines of the Cold War. These alliances came in for criticism aimed at authoritarianism, militarism, and imperialism, and especially complicity in the US war effort in Vietnam. Protest became rife and took a variety of creative 18 Accounts that are focused on US travelers to Vietnam are Mary Hershberger, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Nationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jessica M. Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 19 Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003).

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forms, especially when different social movements converged in framing their protest with reference to Vietnam. On the other hand, increasingly radical challenges to the western Cold-War status quo frequently split or impeded existing social movements of the era. This reflected, in part, the increasing diversification of the political spectrum by gender, age, and ethnicity. To varying degrees, both the state and civil-society institutions tried to repress—or accommodate and contain—war-related protest and the forms of non-parliamentary empowerment that it involved. The appeal of such protests derived from (a) the rebellious search for alternatives to Cold-War anti-communism; (b) the burning moral questions that US warfare in Indochina entailed, especially in the context of traditions of anti-fascism and the memory of World War II and the Holocaust; and (c) the opportunity to reach out to emancipatory and revolutionary movements across the globe, which held the promise of genuine change on a multitude of levels. This section of the book has essays on the West-German left (Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier), intellectual politics in France (Silja Behre), and anti-imperialism in Japan (Alexander Macartney). Activists in the countries of the “global South” that participated in the Bandung Conference (or like Cuba embraced an active internationalist foreign policy, also regarding protest movements by explicitly staging the Cuban and the Vietnamese struggles as parallel victims of US imperialism20 ) were pursuing political self-interest and solidarity under the banners of anti-colonialism and Third Worldism. They challenged various forms of colonialism and neocolonialism that relied on political repression and counterinsurgency measures to check rebellion, often in collusion with the United States. Here, more than elsewhere, Vietnam was not only a country but a cause that proved instrumental to the growth of movements promising revolutionary transformation of the social order. Case studies in this section focus on China (Kazushi Minami), South Korea (Tae Yang Kwak), Africa (Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre), Cuba (Antoni Kapcia), and Latin America (Matías Hermosilla).

20 Teishan Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

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Bibliography Burke, Kyle, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Daum, Andreas W., Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (eds.), America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). DeBenedetti, Charles, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990). Frazier, Jessica M., Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Gaiduk, Ilya V., Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003). Goscha, Christopher and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe 1963–1973 (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003). Hall, Simon, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (New York: Routledge, 2012). Harmer, Tanya, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Hershberger, Mary, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). Hixson, Walter L. (ed.), The Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: Garland, 2000). Hong, Young-sun, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Juchler, Ingo, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996). Klimke, Martin, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Klimke, Martin, and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2008). Langland, Victoria, “Transnational Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15–26. Lanza, Fabio, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Latner, Teishan, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

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Marcuse, Herbert, “Vietnam—Analyse eines Exempels,” Neue Kritik 7 (1966): 30–40; English transl. http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/Cha pter6Doc3Intro.pdf. McGregor, Katharine, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944. Rousseau, Sabine, La colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002). Rowbotham, Sheila, “Vietnam,” in Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 206–220. Schmidtke, Michael, Der Aufbruch der jungen Intelligenz: Die 68er Jahre in der Bundesrepublik und den USA (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003). Settje, David E., Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2011). Slobodian, Quinn (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015). Slobodian, Quinn, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Small, Melvin, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds (Wilmington: SR Books, 2002). Varon, Jeremy, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History (London: Allen Lane, 2017). Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Nationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Zolov, Eric, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70,3 (2014): 349–362.

PART I

Bridging the Worlds: International Organisations

CHAPTER 2

“To Go Further Than Words Alone”: The World Peace Council and the Global Orchestration of Vietnam War Campaigns During the 1960s Kim Christiaens

Historians have turned a sceptical eye towards the plethora of international solidarity campaigns staged by communist states, parties, and movements over international issues such as anti-colonialism, human rights, and peace during the Cold War. Many tend to see these campaigns as hollow “agitprop” that aimed, but in the end failed, to buttress the legitimacy and ideology of the Soviet camp.1 It has been argued that these 1 See for instance Steven L. B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 237–274; Nick Rutter, “Look Left, Drive Right: Internationalisms at the Sofia World Youth Festival of 1968,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 193–212.

K. Christiaens (B) KADOC–Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_2

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campaigns were fatally discredited by their association with the Soviet Union, being mere propaganda tools of communist regimes, which had little to do with the campaigns developing in the West while being met with scepticism in the postcolonial world.2 Inadvertently, campaigns even backfired as they turned into a forum to denounce the Soviet Union and “real existing socialism”.3 This tendency to consider communist campaigns on behalf of what became dubbed the “Third World” as a failure has been reinforced by research that has stressed the contradictions and conflicts in the relations between Eastern European regimes and the Third World.4 Such assumptions also appear in accounts of the international protest movements spawned by the Vietnam War. Many historians have indeed pooh-poohed the involvement of communist states, parties, and peace organisations in what has been considered one of the most globalized causes célèbres for transnational activism by a myriad of actors during the Cold War era. They have argued that communist campaigns against the American war in Vietnam and the solidarity proclaimed by the Soviet camp and its allies on behalf of the “Vietnamese resistance” were merely a ploy. Such accounts have maintained that these campaigns were marked by failures, crippled by competition with China, and stood at odds with the “radical internationalism” of the so-called New Left, for whom the Vietnam War offered an opportunity to develop a twopronged critique of the Cold War international stalemate imposed by both the Soviet Union and the United States.5 In this vein, scholarly views of

2 Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917– 1991 (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 277. 3 April Carter, Peace Movements: International Protest and World Politics Since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 76. 4 See for instance the seminal work by Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: CUP, 2006); Philip. E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva (eds.), Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 5 Niek Pas, Sortir de l’ombre du parti communiste français. Histoire de l’engagement de l’extrême gauche française sur la guerre du Vietnam 1965–1968 (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 1998); Eleanor Davey, Idealism Beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988 (Cambridge: CUP, 2015).

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communist solidarity with Vietnam have remained rather insular. Transnational histories of the mobilization against the US war in Vietnam have pushed the Eastern Bloc to the margins.6 Such storylines have, however, become difficult to sustain. In recent years, a new generation of historians has begun to take a fresh look at the international solidarity cultures developed by and within communist states, parties, and related campaigns.7 They have not only revealed the variety of motivations that inspired communist involvement with the postcolonial world, ranging from anti-imperialist ideology and foreign policy interests to attempts at internal reform and even dissent. They have also underscored how such internationalist campaigns—for instance in the context of the Vietnam War—created and projected alternative “globalizations” during the Cold War, through which ideas and movements travelled between different and even competing actors within the communist and postcolonial world.8 Yet, communist solidarity with Vietnam was not limited to the Eastern bloc, it also included campaigns by communist organizations and networks in the Western and postcolonial worlds. Critically, transnational campaigning on behalf of the “Third World” was often entangled with campaigns that transcended the Cold War divides and stimulated East-West exchanges.9

6 For a wider criticism of this absence of the Eastern Bloc, see James Mark and Tobias Rupprecht, “The Socialist World in Global History: From Absentee to Victim to Coproducer,” in The Practice of Global History: European Perspectives, ed. Matthias Middell (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 81–114. 7 David Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika 1 (2011): 183–211; Tobias Rupprecht, “Die sowjetische Gesellschaft in der Welt des Kalten Kriegs. Neue Forschungsperspektiven” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58,3 (2010): 381–399. For a good overview of recent scholarships, see Artemy Kalinovsky, James Mark and Steffi Marung (eds.), Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020). 8 James Mark and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary 1956–1989,” Journal of Modern History 87 (2015): 852–891; James Mark et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464. 9 On entanglements between North-South and East-West movements, see Kim Christiaens, “Europe at the Crossroads of Three Worlds: Alternative Histories and Connections of European Solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–1980s,” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire 24 (2017): 932–954.

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Inspired by these new approaches to bring communist anti-colonial internationalism into transnational histories of the manifold mobilizations of the Vietnam War era, this chapter looks at one of the most important and at the same time most contested international communist organizations during the Cold War, the World Peace Council (WPC) . Since its establishment as the coordinating body of communist peace movements allied with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, the WPC developed into one of the most important fora for Soviet-sponsored international campaigns for world peace, disarmament, national independence, and anti-colonialism.10 It cooperated with other Soviet-sponsored international bodies such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) or the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) , but also with the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) . Headquartered in Paris, Vienna, and later Helsinki, the WPC made its international reputation through a series of “world conferences” and public campaigns that spanned the globe and involved an international assortment of famous public figures, intellectuals, and artists of the global left. After it had campaigned against US involvement in the Korean War, Apartheid, and the nuclear arms race, the WPC developed from the early 1960s onwards a variety of campaigns to denounce “American imperialism” in Vietnam and support the “heroic struggle” of the “peace loving forces” of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF). Not only in Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe and the Global South, communist parties, and a host of eminent public figures, such as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, lent their support to international campaigns developed by the WPC, which were celebrated in official propaganda as “one mighty torrent of a worldwide movement”.11 While several studies have documented the role of the WPC in campaigns in specific countries revealing the variety of actors and ideas within the movement, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s, we

10 Petra Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 15. 11 “On Vietnam: An International Appeal for Action,” Supplement to the Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 3 (April 1966), 4.

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know relatively little about its role in the international campaigns triggered by the Vietnam War.12 There are historians who have suggested that the WPC was an important forum for the transnational coordination of campaigns during the Vietnam War, but the internal dynamics, transnational connections, and motivations that played a role within the organization as well as its impact on local activism have remained little understood.13 Partly, this can be related to the elusive nature of the organization, which included chapters and members from across the world, received support from various sources, including but not exclusively Eastern Bloc states, and was led by a variety of activists spread across different institutions and countries. Equally prominent, however, remains the assumption that campaigns by the WPC were inefficient propaganda tools of the Soviet camp, paralyzed and discredited by internal conflicts over issues such as the Sino-Soviet split or the plight of dissidents in the Eastern Bloc, while being rejected by the New Left.14 Seeing the WPC as an organization in crisis and decline during the 1960s, the existing literature still gives the impression that the campaigns staged by the WPC had little to do with all the grassroots activism developed by radical leftist groups, which figure so centrally in most accounts and memories of the transnational mobilization in the context of the Vietnam War.15 Adopting a perspective that looks at both the internal dynamics within the organization as well as connections with other organizations 12 See for instance Günter Wernicke, “The Communist-led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and some Attempts to Break them in the Fifties and Early Sixties,” Peace & Change 23,3 (1998): 265–311; Günter Wernicke, “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War and the World, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 299–319; Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Carolien Stolte, “‘The People’s Bandung’: Local Anti-imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage,” Journal of World History 30 (2019): 125–156; Goedde, The Politics of Peace. 13 See for instance Holger Nehring, “Pacifism,” in Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 803–806. 14 Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 171. 15 See for instance Geoffrey Roberts, “Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement 1948–1956,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, ed. Stephen A. Smith (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 322–338; Goedde, The Politics of Peace, 39–40.

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and movements, this chapter aims to rethink the role of the WPC in international Vietnam War campaigns during the 1960s. Highlighting East-West, North-South, and South-South connections as well as a multiplicity of agents, it shows how international campaigns developed by the WPC played, despite their limitations, an important role in transnational activism far beyond the communist world, sometimes at a very local level, and not only in Europe but worldwide. Inversely, this chapter also shows how other Vietnam War campaigns affected the WPC and, in this way, reconsiders the roots and development of communist internationalism during the Cold War. To do so, this chapter will proceed in three steps. The first section zooms in on the WPC as a key site of Vietnamese diplomacy, which not only plunged the organization into a deep crisis but also, paradoxically, became a source of its internal and external legitimacy during the second half of the 1960s. The second section reveals how solidarity with Vietnam became, most notably under the presidency of the Belgian activist Isabelle Blume (1892–1975), a strategic instrument for the globalization of the WPC, as it served policies of expansion in Western Europe and the postcolonial world. The third section analyses some developments after 1968, stressing spill-overs to campaigns on behalf of other Third World issues and the involvement of a broad array of political and social movements in the Western and postcolonial worlds. This chapter is based on a unique combination of archives and sources, which have not so far been brought together. The most important sources are the papers of Blume—coordinating president of the WPC from 1965 to 1969—kept at the Centre des Archives du Communisme en Belgique (CArCoB) in Brussels, the archives of the WPC and its French section at the Departmental Archives Seine-Saint-Denis in Bobigny (DASSD) , the WPC collection at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the archives of the Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace at Amsab-ISG (Ghent), and a variety of other sources, such as Vietnamese publications and archives of local Vietnam committees across Europe.

Moscow, Brussels, and Helsinki: The WPC as a Site of Vietnamese Diplomacy In July 1962, more than 2500 delegates gathered in Moscow to attend the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, staged by the

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WPC in cooperation with a host of international and national organizations.16 The organizers boosted that participants came from more than 100 countries, including hundreds of peace activists from the United States and Western Europe.17 Besides many Catholic parliamentarians and priests from Western Europe, the audience included delegations from a broad range of Third World countries, including 130 activists from India. The conference dealt with a variety of issues—ranging from disarmament to solidarity with the Greek peace movement and the decolonization struggle in Congo. Among the speakers were also delegations of the Vietnam Peace Committee, the WPC’s chapter in the DRV, and the NLF, which had been founded two years earlier to combat the USbacked regime in South Vietnam and achieve the re-unification of the country. In their speeches at the conference, the Vietnamese delegations called for international solidarity with their struggle to end the division of Vietnam, specifically referring to and professing solidarity with the mobilization which had developed internationally on behalf of the Algerian National Liberation Front. The Vietnamese call in Moscow was not the first one, since the DRV’s peace committee and the NLF had issued previous calls for support, but it marked the beginning of a stronger involvement of representatives of the DRV and NLF with the international conferences the WPC organized over the coming years. From 1962 onwards, newly established diplomatic representations of the NLF in Prague and Moscow became centres of what was dubbed “people’s diplomacy” , aimed at garnering international support for the cause of the DRV and the liberation of South Vietnam, both among peace and solidarity movements in Europe and other liberation movements in the Third World.18 From Prague, Moscow, and Paris, Vietnamese diplomats travelled across different countries and started diffusing information 16 World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, Collection WPC (1960), IISH. 17 “Report on the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace” (1962),

Collection WPC (1956–1966), IISH. 18 Robert Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 19–26; Harish C. Mehta, “People’s Diplomacy”: The Diplomatic Front of North Vietnam During the War Against the United States, 1965–1972 (unpubl. PhD diss.: McMaster University, 2009); Harish C. Mehta, People’s Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 1965–1972 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019); Pierre Asselin, “Forgotten Front: The NLF in Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle, 1965–67,” Diplomatic History (2021), https://doi.org/10. 1093/dh/dhaa091.

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about the plight of South Vietnam, for instance through the publication of English and French language publications, internationalizing their struggle following the example of the Algerian NLF.19 Against this backdrop, the international networks and conferences of the WPC were crucial: they allowed access to a broad range of activists and movements not exclusively drawn from communist milieus, including, for instance, Western peace movements and church groups as well as a variety of national liberation movements which had been joining the WPC over the past years.20 The role of the WPC in the organization of massive antinuclear demonstrations in several Western European countries (such as the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Belgium) in the early 1960s as well as the example of the Algerian NLF’s success in internationalizing its struggle were important stimuli for the Vietnamese activities within the international communist peace movement.21 The growing resonance that the Vietnamese endeavours received at the WPC was intimately linked to the crisis that the latter underwent in the first half of the 1960s.22 Large conferences, careful orchestration, and propaganda, funded by the Soviet Union, could not conceal how the organization, led by the scientist John D. Bernal, was struggling with different problems, most notably the conflict between Moscow and Beijing, which split many international communist organizations. International conferences of the WPC were marked by fierce debates—often publicized by Western media—between those, headed by the Ukrainian writer and leading figure of the Soviet Peace Committee Oleksandr Korniychuk, who advocated focusing on peaceful coexistence in Europe, and others, led by Chinese delegations, who prioritized anti-colonialism and armed liberation in the Third World, not only in Vietnam but also in Congo and other countries fighting for independence. A report by a Dutch participant of the WPC conference in Stockholm in December

19 Pierre Journoud, “Diplomatie informelle et réseaux transnationaux: Une contribution française à la fin de la guerre du Vietnam,” Relations internationales 138,2 (2009): 93–109, 101. 20 Rüdiger Schlaga, Die Kommunisten in der Friedensbewegung – erfolglos? Die Politik des Weltfriedensrates im Verhältnis zur Aussenpolitik der Sowjetunion und zu unabhängigen Friedensbewegungen im Westen, 1950–1979 (Münster: Lit, 1991), 220–221. 21 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace 12,7 (May 1965): 4; Luu Van Loi, 50 Years of Vietnamese Diplomacy 1945–1995 (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2000), 209–215. 22 Schlaga, Kommunisten.

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1961, tasked with preparing the 1962 Moscow conference, noted how the organization was in complete chaos, paralyzed by heavy discussions. Next to debates between Indian and Chinese delegations, seemingly endless disputes and battles were fought between what he called a predominantly “white” group of delegates who were loyal to the Soviet focus on disarmament and a “black” group led by China, focusing on armed liberation struggles against imperialism.23 Against this backdrop, support for the NLF quickly became the main flashpoint. This was of huge concern for the leadership of the organization, which was divided and paralyzed at a moment when peace and disarmament movements flourished in Europe, fearing to be excluded from international cooperation between national liberation movements in the Third World, for example, concerning the AAPSO and the planned Tricontinental Conference. The WPC itself remained heavily dependent on financial support from Moscow. Relations between the WPC leadership and its Vietnamese ´ members reached rock bottom in April 1964, when Nguy˜ên V˘an Hiêu, head of the NLF mission in Prague established in 1963, was refused access to the Presidential Committee’s meeting in Budapest because of concerns about the polarizing effect of the presence of the NLF.24 Yet, a few months later, the rapprochement between the DRV and the Soviet Union after the demise of Khrushchev seemed to offer opportunities to solve the Vietnamese problem. In November 1964, the USSR issued a statement containing a firm promise of support to North Vietnam in case of an attack by the United States.25 WPC delegates participated, together with representatives of several Western and Eastern European communist parties, in the International Conference for Solidarity with the People of South Vietnam, held in Hanoi in November 1964. The start of overt US bombing campaigns in Vietnam in early 1965 and the growing mobilization among peace movements globally further stimulated the cooperation. In April 1965, Bernal convened an extraordinary session of the WPC presidency in Stockholm to discuss the situation in 23 “Enkele aspecten van de zitting van de Wereldvredesraad te Stockholm” (16–19

December 1961), Archives Dutch Communist Party, no. 1303, IISH. 24 Günther Wernicke, “The Unity of Peace and Socialism? The World Peace Council on a Cold War Tightrope Between the Peace Struggle and Intrasystemic Communist Conflicts,” Peace & Change 26 (2001): 332–351, 338. 25 Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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Vietnam with representatives of the DRV and NLF.26 At the same time, solidarity with Vietnam became the subject of campaigns by communist internationalist organizations. In the GDR, like in other Eastern Bloc countries, a Vietnam committee was established within the AfroAsian Solidarity Committee in 1965.27 In Western Europe, communist parties started to mobilize protest against the US war in Vietnam as well, although often reluctantly for fear of jeopardizing their cooperation with more moderate groups within the various peace and disarmament movements.28 The Vietnam War became the central agenda point at the international meeting of Western European Communist Parties in 1965. Against this backdrop of expanding mobilization, WPC president Bernal started the organization of a large-scale conference to be held in Helsinki in the summer of 1965, with the aim of searching for a “common language and immediate action needed to put an end to the war in Vietnam”.29 The response to the Helsinki initiative was significant, especially among Western European WPC members, and it spurred mobilization by local activists across Europe. The French WPC chapter, the Mouvement de la Paix, staged a campaign to collect money for sending 50 delegates to the Helsinki conference.30 In April 1965, the Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace, led by Isabelle Blume, hosted about 75 representatives from 35 countries, including a delegation of activists from the United States, at the Brussels Palace of Congress to prepare global campaigns in view of the Helsinki conference.31 Eventually, in July 1965, hundreds of participants travelled to Helsinki, including the French

26 Solidarité avec le Vietnam: Bulletin d’information du bureau de la conférence internationale de solidarité avec le people du Vietnam contre l’agression impérialiste américaine, pour la défense de la paix, no. 5 (10 May 1965), 6–7. 27 Wernicke, “World Peace Council,” 302. 28 Rinascita (1 May 1965); De Rode Vaan (24 April 1965); Jean Defrasne, Le pacifisme

en France (Paris: PUF, 1994), 207–221. 29 Helsinki Congress (10–15 July 1965), Fund of the World Peace Council and the French Peace Movement [WPC], Vietnam 170J 176, ADSSD. 30 Combat pour la Paix, no. 185 (May–June 1965), 23. 31 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 5 (April 1965), 1–2; “The International

Meeting of Pacifist Forces” (4 April 1965), Archives of the Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace [BUVV], 135, Amsab-ISG.

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Illustration 2.1 Ðinh Bá Thi, the head of the South Vietnamese delegation presenting a report on the situation in South Vietnam during the Helsinki conference in July 1965. This conference became an important international meeting point for contacts with representatives of the DRV and NLF. Ðinh Bá Thi became the diplomatic representative of the NLF in Budapest.35

philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.32 The WPC counted 1,470 participants from 99 countries, with delegations from the DRV and NLF as the most prominent guests.33 The conference was opened with a “Vietnam Day” at Hesperia Park and concluded by speeches by the Vietnamese delegations praising the universal solidarity with the struggle of the Vietnamese people (Illustration 2.1).34 In his presentation of the Vietnam Resolution, which was eventually adopted, and which supported the rights of the Vietnamese people to independence and sovereignty and the implementation of the Geneva Accords of 1954, Sartre underlined the aim of the conference to shape

32 “Letter of Yves Cholière to the French Peace Committee” (9 June 1965), WPC, 170J 176, ADSSD. 33 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 10 (August 1965), 1. 34 Ibid., 2; “World Congress for Peace, National Independence, and General Disarma-

ment” (10–15 July 1965), BUVV, 136, Amsab-ISG. 35 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 10 (August 1965), 19.

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one global movement of solidarity in support of the Vietnamese brothers, arguing that “for action to go further than words alone, it must be concerted, orchestrated: each initiative must be supported by all the others”.36 Despite these calls for global unity and the exclusion of a few proChinese solidarity groups,37 the Helsinki conference became, once again, a spectacle of the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese, Albanian, Indonesian, and North Korean delegations refused to support the official declarations, as they rejected the link between the liberation struggles and a possible threat of thermo-nuclear confrontation. They considered peaceful coexistence to be just a foreign policy pursued by the Eastern Bloc countries, which stood apart from the independence struggles of national liberation movements. These disputes were publicized in international media claiming a victory of the “Chinese theses”.38 Chao Yi-Min, head of the Chinese delegation, had indeed fiercely attacked the Soviet Union and its efforts to render the WPC into an instrument of collaboration with American imperialism. Instead, he called for solidarity between the socialist countries and movements struggling with imperialism in Vietnam, Congo, and the Dominican Republic, where the United States had just intervened in the civil war with a military occupation.39 At the Helsinki conference, however, the Vietnam War issue ushered in a severe crisis within the WPC: after the failure to agree on a common campaign and highly polarized discussions, Bernal resigned from the presidential office during the conference, and the Belgian activist Isabelle Blume became the organization’s temporary president.40 To make things worse, the organization was also on the verge of financial bankruptcy. After China and other members stopped the payment of their fees, the organization 36 Vietnam. Documents—Messages—Speeches: World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General Disarmament, Helsinki, 10–15 July 1965, Supplement to the Bulletin of the World Council of Peace 12, no. 8 (June 1965), 5. 37 “Resignation Letter” (from the WPC) by Antoine Allard (13 July 1965), Personal Archives Antoine Allard, Archives du monde catholique, Louvain-la-Neuve; “The Situation of the Belgian Peace Movement” (July 1965), 3, BUVV, 135, Amsab-ISG. 38 See for instance Neue Zürcher Zeitung (12 September 1965). 39 “Intervention of Chao Yi-Min at the Helsinki Congress” (10–15 July 1965), WPC,

170J 176, DASSD. 40 “Une crise au Conseil mondial de la paix (résumé)” (12 September 1965); “Report on the London Office by I.M. to I.B.” (1 October 1965), Isabelle Blume papers (IB), CArCoB.

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became even more dependent on (conditional) Soviet support to cover the costs of the Helsinki adventure. Yet, importantly, the struggles and internecine disputes about the Vietnam War, and the eventual failure to overcome them, should not conceal how the WPC had developed into a key hub for international Vietnam War campaigns in the first half of the 1960s. For the Vietnamese representatives, it had indeed provided an important launching pad for their people’s diplomacy aimed at the international public. Already in April 1965 the WPC had staged an international press conference of the NLF in Helsinki, widely covered by international press agencies.41 Vietnamese contacts via the WPC had become a critical source of inspiration for local activists in Western Europe even before the start of Operation Rolling Thunder and the escalation of the war in Vietnam in early 1965. The Italian politician and journalist Lelio Basso, an icon of Third World solidarity in his country, used his contacts developed at the WPC to start up a solidarity committee in support of the NLF.42 Another telling example of the impact on local activism can be found in Belgium, where the start of the first organized campaigns in support of the NLF was closely linked to the Vietnamese campaigns via the WPC. In December 1964, the Belgian peace activist Antoine Allard initiated a nationwide campaign mobilizing political and material support for the NLF, building on contacts developed with Vietnamese representatives at the WPC and responding to their call to stage political and material support.43 The campaign included the sales of stamps made by the NLF and resulted in the foundation of a first national solidarity committee with the people of South Vietnam in Belgium, which cooperated with the Vietnam Peace Committee in Hanoi.44 This Belgian committee was part of the recently

41 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace 12, no. 7 (May 1965), 4. 42 On Basso see Roberto Colozza, “From Italy to France to Vietnam: The Left as Seen

by Lelio Basso,” Vingtième Siècle 115,3 (2012), 103–114. 43 Bulletin of the World Council of Peace 12, no. 7 (May 1965), 4. 44 Nadine Lubelski-Bernard, “L’opposition à la guerre du Vietnam en Belgique (1963–

1973),” in La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963–1973, ed. Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), 307–326; Kim Christiaens, “Diplomatie, activisme en effectieve solidariteit: Een nieuw perspectief op de mobilisatie voor Vietnam (1960–1975),” Brood en Rozen: Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis van Sociale Bewegingen 18 (2013): 4–27.

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established pro-Chinese Communist Party of Belgium, which used solidarity with Vietnam as an instrument to criticize what it saw as the betrayal of the Third World by the pro-Moscow Communist Party as much as the Atlanticist course of the Belgian government. Also among pro-Moscow communist peace organizations, many campaigns had clear links with and drew inspiration as well as legitimacy from the international contacts via the WPC. Communist peace campaigners especially used the contacts of the WPC to reach out to the protest movement that developed in the United States and to profile their campaigns as part of a truly global movement. The WPC became a bridge to connect the European mobilization against the American War in Vietnam with activism in the United States. Members of the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee collaborated with the WPC to develop joint action against the Johnson Administration.45 These international contacts added further cultural capital and legitimacy to the anti-war campaigns of the WPC, even among groups that were sceptical about the organization, such as the British Committee of 100. The demonstrations that Western European communist parties and the peace movements they supported started to stage from 1965 onwards were planned to coincide with demonstrations in the United States and elsewhere. The global identity of these campaigns was carefully cultivated and orchestrated by the WPC in cooperation with Vietnamese diplomatic offices in Paris, Prague, and Moscow. The ways in which the rather small demonstrations that the Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace staged in Brussels in the spring of 1965 resonated globally illustrates the scale on which information was circulated and shared through the networks of the WPC: the official organ of the North Vietnamese Communist Party, Nhan Dan, as well as various books, brochures, and bulletins produced in Hanoi and distributed across Europe, such as Le Courrier du Vietnam and Solidarité avec le Vietnam, alongside WPC publications all featured the local campaigns in Belgium together with their counterparts in the United States, the Middle East, the Eastern Bloc, and other parts of the world.46

45 “Solidarity Day” (19 November 1965), Archives Jean Terfve; “Vietnam and the WPC” (1965), IB, CArCoB. 46 See for instance “Belgian CP conveys Anti-US Support to DRV,” Nhan Dan (23 February 1965); Solidarité avec le Vietnam, no. 5 (10 October 1965), 4–5; American Use of War Gases and World Public Opinion (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing House,

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The activities of communist peace organizations were not limited to political solidarity but also included “humanitarian aid”.47 In 1965, the WPC launched a campaign that mobilized communist peace activists in various countries to collect medical and sanitary aid for the Vietnamese resistance, again building on close contacts with Vietnamese representatives at the WPC and the Vietnamese diplomatic offices in Prague and Moscow. Once more, there was a connection with Algeria: the campaign was modelled on the example of a similar campaign on behalf of the Algerian NLF, and it was coordinated by Isabelle Blume, a veteran of solidarity with Algeria.48 In the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, medical doctors joined committees that collected flasks of penicillin-streptomycin and other drugs and medical material as requested by the Vietnamese diplomatic delegations. In France, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) together with the Communist Party and the French Peace Movement, endorsed the relief campaign for medical aid, which received ample public attention, for instance in Le Monde.49 In Belgium, more than 100 medical doctors supported the national committee, staging blood donations from more than 1100 people and fundraisings in several cities.50 Tonnes of assorted medical aid were transported from Western Europe to Vietnam with the help of the Soviet Red Cross, in close cooperation with diplomatic offices of the NLF in Moscow and Prague. The latter played a coordinating role in this activism as it was a place from where the WPC chapters drew information, such as pictures and Vietnamese bulletins, necessary for public campaigns, expositions, and fundraising activities “in support of the heroic resistance

1966); Supplement to the Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 3 (1966), 4; Bulletin of the World Council of Peace, no. 3&4 (1965). 47 De Rode Vaan (29 April 1965), 16. 48 On Blume, see José Gotovitch, Isabelle Blume: Entretiens receuillis et présentés par

José Gotovitch (Brussels: Fondation Jacquemotte, 1976); Gotovitch, ‘Grégoire Isabelle’, Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels: Racine, 2006), 289–292; “Isabelle Blume,” in Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 3, (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 375. 49 Le Peuple, no. 733 (1–10 September 1965), 29; Le Monde (25 August 1965), 3; Correspondence with Do-Huu-Chi, First Secretary of the NLF mission in Moscow (1966), Archives Pierre Le Grève, no. 548, Cegesoma, Brussels. 50 De Rode Vaan (14 October 1965), 19; “Documents about the Committee for Medical and Sanitary Aid for Vietnam,” BUVV, 98, Amsab-ISG.

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of the South-Vietnamese people”.51 Significantly, it was Blume, one of the main initiators of this campaign, who, from 1965 onwards, emerged as one of the main driving forces behind attempts to renew the WPC around the issue of the Vietnam War.

Isabelle Blume, Vietnam, and the Globalization of the WPC Through the crisis that followed the Helsinki conference in 1965, the WPC underwent a deep transformation. The leadership of the organization came into the hands of a new presidential committee led by Blume, who became its coordinating president. The composition of the presidential committee elected in Geneva in 1966 reflected the attempted reorientation of the WPC: the list of more than 40 members included familiar names like the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, the East German biophysicist Walter Friedrich (GDR), Raymond Guyot, high-ranking member of the French Communist Party, and the Spanish communist politician and Spanish Civil War veteran Enrique Lister combined with representatives from beyond Europe, including the Egyptian politician Khaled Mohieddin , the South African trade unionist and African National Congress politician J.B. Marks, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, Romesh Chandra, high-ranking member of the Communist Party of ´ head of the diplomatic repreIndia, and, significantly, Nguy˜ên V˘an Hiêu, sentation of the NLF in Czechoslovakia.52 In her work, mainly carried out from her Brussels home but also by a dizzying schedule of travelling across the globe, Blume was mainly assisted by Chandra, who became secretary-general of the WPC in 1966 and eventually, in 1977, its president. Financially and organizationally, Blume relied on the Institute of Peace in Vienna, led by the French communist Yves Cholière, from where she received the financial means to cover the costs of the Brussels secretariat, including a host of telexes, which amounted to thousands of dollars per year.53 Under Blume’s presidency, solidarity with Vietnam became the

51 “Letter from Ðinh Bá Thi to De Waarheid” (24 August 1965), Dutch Communist Party Archives, 1384, IISH. 52 “Report on the Geneva Conference” (1966), WPC, 170J 177, DASSD. 53 “Letter Blume to Kemr” (14 July 1967); “Blume to Annie Handt” (1 June 1967),

IB, CArCoB.

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centre piece in the reorientation of the WPC, and Blume herself a global icon of solidarity with Vietnam.54 The new leadership considered the growing mobilization against the American war in Vietnam an opportunity to bring together the various independence movements of the Global South with “Western style peace movements” (like the CND) with their focus on disarmament and EastWest cooperation. The growing interest of pacifist and neutral peace movements in Vietnam—which the WPC noticed on the occasion of the Saigon visit of the American “pure pacifist” and civil rights leader A.J. Muste—strengthened the conviction that the Vietnam War offered the potential of achieving a simultaneous broadening of the WPC towards both the Western and postcolonial worlds without the conflicts that this balancing act had provoked over the previous years.55 Relations with the NLF and DRV were intensified: their representatives attended the presidential committee’s meetings and were influential in setting out the directions of campaigns. The WPC, now professing “total solidarity” with the Vietnamese people and “total support” for the DRV and NLF, kept close contact with the diplomatic representatives stationed in Paris, Budapest, Prague, and Moscow, but also with Hanoi, most notably with the Vietnamese Committee for World Peace, which Blume visited during her stay in Vietnam in early 1967 (Illustration 2.2).56 The WPC conference in Geneva in June 1966, symbolically staged in the city where the Geneva Accords had been signed 12 years earlier, marked the start of a plethora of new campaigns, which were explicitly designed to be “global”.57 It became quickly apparent that solidarity with Vietnam was a strategic choice that was still rooted in the competition with China. The focus on Vietnam was considered, as admitted by WPC secretary-general Chandra, a toehold to access liberation movements in Africa and the Middle East, which hitherto had few contacts with the WPC, or held a rather sceptical outlook on the organization. Vietnam was supposed to open Africa and the Arab world to the WPC, as it offered an opportunity to stress 54 See for instance Kabul Times (29 October 1967), 1. 55 “Letter Bernal to Blume” (20 April 1966), IB, CArCoB. 56 “Letter Blume to Vietnam Peace Committee, Hanoi” (21 September 1965), IB, CArCoB. 57 See for instance Vrede: Maandelijks Tijdschrift van de Belgische Unie voor de Verdediging van de Vrede (July 1966), 5.

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Illustration 2.2 Isabelle Blume during her travels in Vietnam.58

anti-imperialist ideology and opposition to US imperialism, which was held responsible for the political turmoil in the region. This became visible in one of the earliest initiatives of the new leadership, namely 58 Photo Collection Isabelle Blume, CArCoB.

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the organization of an international Vietnam conference in Cairo in December 1966—marking the first conference the WPC staged in Africa. For Chandra, the Cairo conference, strategically organized in an international hotspot of African and Arab liberation movements that hosted the Permanent Secretariat of the AAPSO, confirmed the potential of solidarity with Vietnam as a means of approaching new members and allies, such as the PLO, the liberation movement of Bahrein, the SWAPO in Namibia, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and not least Nasser’s United Arab Republic itself.59 Blume used this conference to strengthen several political ties: she travelled to Damascus to visit the Ba’ath party as well as Palestinian refugees, drawing comparisons between US imperialism in Vietnam and the Middle East where, she argued, US capital had destroyed the historical “convivence” of Muslims and Jews.60 The conference gave way to the foundation of new Vietnam committees across Africa and the Arab world. Through Mohieddin , who had been a member of the Free Officers Movement, an organizer of the first AAPSO conference in Cairo, and publisher of the daily Al Messa, the WPC had a particularly strong ally in Egypt, which not only faced Israel but at that point also opposed the conservative “Islamic Pact” through which Saudi-Arabia and Iran aimed to counter Nasser’s influence. Government officials, artists, and intellectuals played an important role in the organization of the Cairo conference and the establishment of a national Vietnam committee.61 For the WPC, this step constituted a decisive experience: it gave an important impetus to campaigns against Apartheid and Portuguese colonialism, for instance, through the organization of a conference in Conakry, but also laid the organizational groundwork for its involvement in campaigns on behalf of the PLO and what was dubbed the “Arab peoples” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.62 The WPC did, however, not lose Europe out of sight: its leadership, and especially its Western European members, considered solidarity 59 “Information on Africa and the Arab Countries” (1967), WPC, 170J 181, DASSD. 60 John Nieuwenhuys, “Belgium’s Wider Peace Front? Isabelle Blume, the Peace Move-

ment and the Issue of the Middle East (1950s–1970s), in International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives and Themes, ed. Kim Christiaens, John Nieuwenhuys, and Charel Roemer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 281. 61 “WPC Presidential Meeting in Prague” (25–27 February 1967), WPC, 170J 181, DASSD. 62 “Letter Blume to Damantag Camara” (23 January 1967), IB, CArCoB.

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with Vietnam also to regain ground among peace movements in the West. In the debates that followed the debacle of the Helsinki conference in 1965, the leadership had to admit that the organization had lost the connection with the new peace movements that had emerged since the early 1960s. To address this, the WPC supported, for instance, the organization of a conference on Vietnam in Brussels, which sought to coordinate campaigns in Western Europe by reaching out to other peace and solidarity movements, including Trotskyite groups.63 Strikingly, the most important target of these efforts were Catholic peace movements, including Pax Christi International. Ever since its inception in the early 1950s, the WPC had been able to recruit progressive Catholic peace activists and clerics, such as the previously mentioned devout Belgian baron Antoine Allard, or the Abbé Jean Boulier and the Dominican father Joseph-Marie Perrin from France. The impact of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 however, put restraints on this cooperation. Yet, by the mid-1960s, the context became more favourable, inter alia due to the openness created by the Second Vatican Council towards dialogue with communism, the growing anti-capitalist criticism and antiUS sentiment in progressive Catholic milieus, and the start of a Catholic Ostpolitik.64 This, for instance, inspired the collaboration of progressive priests in Eastern Bloc initiatives such as the Berlin Conference of European Catholics, where the issue of the Vietnam War became conducive to East-West cooperation.65 In line with this—and out of disgust for the anti-communist support for the US war in Vietnam emanating from the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman—Blume vigorously reached out to Pax Christi,66 involving the organization in campaigns against the US war in Vietnam and in solidarity with the NLF, both

63 “Organizing Secretariat of the Conference for Solidarity with the Vietnamese People: Invitation to the International Meeting of 15 May 1966,” Archives Pierre Le Grève, 541, Cegesoma, Brussels. 64 See, for instance Jacopo Cellini, Universalism and Liberation: Italian Catholic

Culture and the Idea of International Community, 1963–1978 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017). 65 Kim Christiaens and Jos Claeys, “Forgotten Friends and Allies: Belgian Social Movements and Communist Europe, 1960s–1990s,” in International Solidarity, ed. Christiaens et al., 159–182. 66 “Presidential Meeting in Prague” (25–27 February 1967), WPC, 170J 181, DASSD.

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in her home country and internationally.67 In Belgium, the National Vietnam Committee, established in response to a call by the WPC for the formation of national Vietnam committees in 1967, included among its most prominent members, next to activists of the Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace, the canons François Houtart and Raymond Goor, the latter a leading member of the Belgian section of Pax Christi and an observer at the Presidential Committee of the WPC.68 Again, the WPC as a unique avenue for direct contact with Vietnamese representatives played a critical role. When explaining his commitment to the WPC to the media, Goor—recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1975—explicitly cited the “previously unexperienced opportunity for close contact with representatives coming from the East, the Middle and Far East, and above all the Third World”.69 Furthermore, approaches towards Catholic peace campaigners benefited from the link that the WPC forged between the Vietnam War and campaigns for peace and security in Europe. When the East German chapter of the WPC, the Friedensrat, hosted international delegations to discuss campaigns for European cooperation and security in East Berlin in 1967, it staged a programme dedicated to solidarity with Vietnam, including a performance of the song “Vietnam, du bist nicht allein” [Vietnam, you are not alone] by the popular musician Heinz Kunert and speeches by Vietnamese representatives.70 The Vietnam War was supposed to showcase the need for peace in Europe. In turn, the newly emphasised connection with Catholic peace movements added to the importance given by the DRV and the NLF to the WPC.71 As was repeatedly stressed by DRV and NLF leaders, Catholic support was seen as an essential strategy to isolate the anti-communist regime 67 Isabelle Boydens, “Un mouvement pour la paix au coeur des tensions nationales et internationals: Pax Christi. Histoire de la branche francophone belge (1953–1975),” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor de Nieuwste Geschiedenis/Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine 25 (1994/95), 481–537. 68 “Recommendations of the World Peace Council” (25–27 February 1967), IB, CArCoB. 69 Aurélie Stocq, “Le Chanoine Raymond Goor (1908–1996). Prix international Lénine

de la Paix: Itinéraire d’un prêtre au service du rapprochement Est-Ouest et de l’amitié entre les peoples” (diss. lic., UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, 2003), 131. 70 “Meeting of Representatives of National Committees for European Peace” (8–10 October 1967), BUVV, 54, Amsab-ISG. 71 “Letter Blume to Vietnamese Committee for the Defence of World Peace” (21 March 1968), IB, CArCoB.

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in South Vietnam and counter its efforts to enhance its support base in the West, among which Catholic NGOs featured prominently.72 From 1967, cooperation with Christian peace movements materialised further in the run-up to the World Conference on Vietnam in Stockholm. Led by Bertil Svahnström of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, the initiative facilitated cooperation between the WPC and a host of international NGOs, including Amnesty International, the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace (ICDP), Pax Christi International, and the Christian Conference for Peace. In July 1967, the Stockholm conference gathered 450 delegates, paying special attention to the role of religious organizations in opposition to the Vietnam War, which convened in a special session.73 On the face of it, the international conferences staged in Geneva, Brussels, Cairo, and Stockholm might appear to be occasional festivities, orchestrated by Soviet propaganda and money. Yet, they reflected, activated, projected, and strengthened the diverse and global networks at work in the WPC. The international conferences of the WPC set in motion a dynamic that mobilized activists at different levels, as historian Charel Roemer has convincingly shown in his study on WPC anti-Apartheid campaigns in the late 1960s.74 In the run-up to the Stockholm Conference in 1967, for instance, the prominent women’s rights activist Olga Poblete and the Chilean Peace Committee recruited a variety of personalities to their newly created Vietnam committee, including Salvador Allende. Different political parties were represented setting in motion new initiatives within Chile.75 This is one of many examples that show how WPC initiatives allowed for a “global orchestration of activism” at different levels. The dynamics of these conferences created a unique space of activism, shaping connections not only with US activists and Vietnamese representatives, but also with and among

72 For this Catholic engagement in South Vietnam, see, for instance, the collection of the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions/World Confederation of Labour kept at KADOC-KU Leuven. 73 Conférence Mondiale sur le Vietnam: Stockholm: 6–9 juillet 1967 (Vienna, 1967), IB, CArCoB. 74 Charel Roemer, “Connecting People, Generating Concern: Early Belgian Solidarity with the Liberation Struggle in South Africa and the Portuguese Colonies,” in International Solidarity, ed. Christiaens et al., 241–273. 75 “Letter Olga Poblete to Blume” (1 June 1967), IB, CArCoB.

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different movements from the East, West, and South. More permanently and beyond the conferences, the WPC acted as a clearing house of information that connected different spaces of activism. This is evidenced in the global correspondence and travels conducted by Blume. From her home in Brussels, she kept regular contact with Vietnamese diplomats in Prague, Hanoi, East Berlin, and Moscow as well as with activists worldwide, ranging from the United States and Chile via Algeria and Egypt to India and Japan. Blume and other members of the presidential committee maintained an intense correspondence with members of the Vietnam Day Committee in Berkeley. American and European activists contacted Blume as liaison with the DRV and NLF.76 Others, such as the internationally active US activist and chairman of the Committee for International Peace Action Carlton Benjamin Goodlett—one of the first prominent African Americans to publicly oppose the American war in Vietnam—relied on financial support from the WPC to travel to international meetings with European activists (Illustration 2.3).77 Access to information and international mobility were important assets and formed the source for a variety of campaigns and propaganda efforts by the WPC. During discussions with representatives of WPC committees, several national members lamented that campaigning against the American war in Vietnam War often suffered from a lack of information and suitable material: they requested the WPC to provide them with material such as pictures, books, and other information. In response to these requests and with the technical and financial support of its Egyptian chapter, the WPC published 5000 copies of its Black Book: On US War Crimes in South Vietnam with a preface by Blume in 1966.78 The same year, the WPC staged a media campaign with a call to stop the US involvement in Vietnam that was to be published in the New York Times and other newspapers. Financial support and signatures were collected among

76 “Telegram

Chandler Davis (International Teach-In Committee, University of Toronto) to Blume” (15 July 1967), ibid. 77 “Letter Carlton Benjamin Goodlett to Walter Diehl” (17 July 1968), ibid. 78 Black Book: On US War Crimes in South Vietnam, ed. Committee for the Denun-

ciation of War Crimes Committed by the US Imperialists and their Henchmen in South Vietnam (Vienna: World Council of Peace, 1966); “Letter Blume to the International Peace Institute, Vienna” (20 December 1966), IB, CArCoB.

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Illustration 2.3 WPC president Isabelle Blume became an international icon of solidarity with Vietnam and an important liaison between Vietnam War campaigners in North America and Western Europe and the DRV and NLF. The American activist and mathematician Chandler Davis asked Blume to intermediate with diplomats of the NLF and DRV to attend activities of the International Teach-in Committee at the University of Toronto, 15 July 1967.79

its member organizations.80 Blume was also involved in the project that eventually became the 1967 movie Loin du Vietnam, a collaborative effort of several accomplished cineasts. Inspired by the initiative of the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, which aimed to publicize testimonies about US war crimes in Vietnam, Blume contacted the Dutch filmmaker and member of 79 “Telegram Davis to Blume,” see Fn. 56. 80 “Letter Esther Brinch (Danish Vietnam Committee) to Blume” (17 September

1966), ibid.

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the Dutch Peace Council Joris Ivens in July 1966, suggesting “a six-part feature-length composite Vietnam film”.81 Subsequently, Chris Marker recruited a collective that included Jean-Luc Godard and William Klein.82 The film was supported and internationally distributed by the WPC, along with other movies such as the 1966 Soviet production Mekong on Fire, which Blume sent personally to Yugoslavia.83 Similarly, the stylishly layouted WPC bulletin Perspectives was not only distributed in Europe but also in ten Arab countries (including Algeria, Syria, and Lebanon) and nineteen African countries (including Tanzania, Congo, and Kenya) providing an important source of information for solidarity campaigns and local activists worldwide.84 In January 1967, for instance, Japanese students from Osaka expressed their appreciation of the bulletin to the WPC, acknowledging that they used the material in their campaigns. They asked Blume for an official message of support.85 The French journalist Jean-Pierre Vittori, editor in chief of Perspectives and a famous activist against French colonialism in Algeria, regularly travelled across the world to report on solidarity activities. Vittori, together with other members of the WPC, participated in the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week in 1967. The Leipzig festival repeatedly featured films and solidarity activism concerning the Vietnam War. In 1967, Loin du Vietnam won the Silver Dove.86 The international networks of the WPC were also important in the circulation of Eastern European and especially East-German initiatives and propaganda material, which found their way to local committees in the

81 Ian Mundell, “Far from Vietnam—Inside Vietnam: The Genesis of the Collective

Film Loin du Vietnam,” Ivens magazine 9 (November 2003), 25–27. 82 “Letter Blume to M. Oltramare” (31 October 1966), IB, CaRCoB; Thomas Waugh, The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1926–1989 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 482. 83 See the chapter by Rutar/Vuˇceti´c in this volume? 84 “Meeting of the WPC Presidency in Prague, February 1967: Information concerning

Africa and the Arab countries,” 6, IB, CArCoB. 85 Letter „Hitoshi Nagano to Heinz Bader“ (9 January 1967), ibid. 86 Günter Jordan, Unbekannter Ivens: Triumph, Verdammnis, Auferstehung (Berlin:

Bertz + Fischer, 2018), 321–322.

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West and lent support to the Russell Tribunal.87 The WPC’s ambitions to coordinate and “orchestrate” a “global movement”, however, remained difficult to achieve due to the divergent interests and varying involvement of national committees and members. Many Eastern European member organizations lacked a close relationship with Blume, whereas others, such as the Friedensrat in the GDR, tended to dominate the discussions as solidarity with Vietnam became a critical instrument to denounce West German imperialism and complicity with the United States.88 Material aid campaigns were mainly organized at a bilateral level, for instance through specific Vietnam committees, which in the Eastern Bloc relied on governmental support and were usually embedded in Afro-Asian solidarity committees.89

Contestation and Reorientation: 1968 and Beyond Throughout the second half of the 1960s, China and its supporters continued their efforts to discredit the WPC as an instrument of Soviet imperialism.90 After China left the AAPSO in 1967, competition and rivalry continued, not only about Vietnam but also concerning the anti-colonial struggles in Southern Africa.91 Pro-Chinese parties and movements in Western Europe undermined efforts by Communist Parties and the related peace movements to position themselves at the lead of “unitary” national Vietnam solidarity committees, which were formed partially in response to campaigns of the WPC. Drawing on their own contacts and networks, for instance with the diplomatic representation of the DRV and NLF in Paris, Maoist groupings set up alternative structures, which openly competed with committees that remained loyal to the WPC. A major difference was that the Maoists remained predominantly locally organized. Next to the continuing rivalry with Beijing 87 Comité Vietnam près le comité de Solidarité afro-asiatique en République Démocratique Allemande, L’engagement ouest-allemand dans l’intervention des Etats-Unis au Vietnam: Une documentation (Berlin, 1967), I. 88 See for instance: ibid., 7. 89 Solidarité avec le Vietnam: Articles. Reportages. Informations, no. 6 (1968), 31–33. 90 “Yves Cholière and Angel Dominguez to the members of the WPC” (31 January

1967), IB, CArCoB. 91 Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

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and its allies, the other obvious issue that would detrimentally affect campaigns by the WPC was the crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. The leadership of the WPC—just like many of its national chapters—emerged deeply divided about the question of how to react to the events in Czechoslovakia. There were national peace councils—such as the French one—that compared the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops to the US violence in Vietnam or the conduct of Israel in the Middle East.92 Moreover, the Prague crisis undermined policies of cooperation with noncommunist groups in joint campaigns and committees, and widened the gap with radical leftist groups, who were also quick to draw parallels between the violence of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague and US bombs over Vietnam. In the months following August 1968, many national campaigns and committees set up by WPC chapters in Western Europe witnessed splits and the birth of alternative Vietnam solidarity committees. Activists now sought to merge solidarity with Vietnam with support for Eastern European dissidents. In the early 1970s, exiled Czechoslovak dissidents organized around the journal Listy and supported by China were keen to make inroads into Vietnam solidarity campaigns.93 Headed by Jiˇrí Pelikán, a former president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and figurehead of communist anti-colonial solidarity, this group proclaimed a common struggle against US and Soviet imperialism among the European new left. Rather than stifling communist interest in Vietnam War campaigns, the Prague crisis underlined their strategic importance to communist peace campaigns. After the summer of 1968, Vietnam initiatives at the level of communist peace organizations and parties intensified, and this was also true of the WPC. In a statement sent out to all WPC members in September 1968, Blume and Chandra regretted that the events in Czechoslovakia divided the movement with the undesirable consequence of legitimizing a continuation of US imperialism in the Third World. They denounced the hypocrisy of the United States and its allies, whom

92 See for instance “Letter of the National Peace Committee in Bulgaria” (5 November 1968), WPC, 170J 152, DASSD; “Letter from H. M. Elamin to the Dutch Peace Council” (24 September 1968), WPC, Vietnam, IISH; also see the divergent reactions in the personal papers of Isabelle Blume. 93 Kim Christiaens, Jos Claeys and Idesbald Goddeeris, “Connecting the East to the South: Eastern European Dissidents and Third World Activism during the 1970s,” Ventunesimo Secolo 46 (2020): 33–57.

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they accused of using solidarity with the victims of the Prague crisis to deflect attention from their imperialist involvement in Vietnam. The WPC called on its members to “redouble solidarity” with the heroic people of Vietnam at a moment when the “Johnson administration is doing everything in its power to divert the attention of the peoples of the world from Vietnam, and thus have a free hand for the deliberate escalation of its aggression”.94 The increased interest within the WPC in Vietnam War campaigns obviously related to attempts at overcoming the negative impact of the crushing of the Prague Spring: they aimed to show how the events in Czechoslovakia paled in comparison with the US violence and repression in Vietnam. Eventually, the WPC, again resorted to solidarity with Vietnam in its attempts to restore unity and legitimacy. The presidential committee, which convened in Lahti (Finland) in November 1968, launched a new programme of solidarity campaigns on behalf of the NLF. In December, commemorations of the eighth anniversary of the foundation of the NLF were launched in conjunction with a campaign calling for the recognition of the NLF at the peace negotiations in Paris.95 As North Vietnamese publications and propaganda were keen to report, WPC members across the world translated these ambitions into a variety of campaigns.96 These campaigns not only focused on protesting the American war in Vietnam, but also on “effective solidarity” to support the DRV and NLF and their position at the four-party negotiations in Paris, for instance by sending messages to the negotiating parties in Paris.97 Vietnamese representatives, e.g. Hoàng Minh Giám, Minister of Culture of the DRV and Nguy˜ên Ðu´,c Vân, representative of the NLF in Romania, featured prominently in these campaigns. Vietnamese diplomatic delegations built on the networks of the WPC to travel across Western European countries to visit governments, solidarity committees, and political parties.98 In November 1968, Yves Farge, 94 “Statement Isabelle Blume and Romesh Chandra” (4 September 1968), WPC 1960, IISH. 95 “Letter Vietnamese Committee for the Defence of World Peace (Hanoi) to the World Peace Council” (15 November 1968), IB, CArCoB. 96 See for instance Solidarité avec le Vietnam, no. 47 (April 1969), 14–15. 97 Presidium of the Stockholm Conference, “Message to the People of North and

South Vietnam” (15 December 1968), IB, CArCoB. 98 “Letter Romesh Chandra, 20th December, anniversary of the NLF” (4 December 1968), ibid.

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member of the presidential committee of the WPC, presided an international meeting with Vietnamese delegates staged in Paris on the occasion of the NLF anniversary followed by a reception at the luxury hotel George V.99 In Belgium, the WPC campaign resulted in a first visit by Vietnamese representatives to the country meeting solidarity committees and political parties.100 From 1968 onwards, most Vietnam War initiatives of the WPC were realized through the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam. WPC support continued mainly through Romesh Chandra, who participated in the coordinating committee established after the first conference in 1967.101 Sessions of the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam—six between July 1967 and November 1970—attracted hundreds of delegations to the Swedish capital in search of information, avenues of solidarity, and international coordination. The organizers of the Stockholm conferences formulated the political demand of a total, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal of US troops, while also seeking to synchronize activism (e.g. with the International Mobilisation Day on 15 November 1969), and the organization of material and humanitarian aid.102 The Stockholm conferences remained an important forum for exchanges between activists worldwide involving a significant number of delegations from the Third World, including representatives from AAPSO as well as from Algeria, Sudan, and Syria.103 The East German writer and member of the Friedensrat Ruth Kraft, for instance, recounted inspiring meetings with activists from France and Chile during the Stockholm Conference in March 1970 and how these activists relied on channels and avenues offered by the GDR for the transport of material support and the circulation of information.104 Information on the Vietnam War in the form of 99 On Farge see Jean Maitron, Claude Pennetier and Gilles Vergnon, “Farge Yves,

Louis, Auguste,” Dictionnaire biographique, mouvement ouvrier, mouvement social, vol. V (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2009), 136–138. 100 Vrede: Tijdschrift voor internationale politiek en vredesproblemen (November 1968), 1–2; also see Christiaens, “Diplomatie”. 101 “Programme of the Stockholm Conference” (26 September 1967), IB, CArCoB. 102 Conférence de Stockholm sur le Vietnam: Lettre d’information 6 (8 December 1969),

7. 103 “List of Participants to the Emergency Action Conference,” Stockholm (May 16–18, 1969), BUVV, 54, Amsab-ISG. 104 Solidarité avec le Vietnam, no. 17 (1970), 10–11.

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pictures, bulletins, and stylish brochures found their way from the WPC and its national chapters to a broad array of groups. Dutch activists, for instance, extensively collected and used material drawn from the Stockholm Conference to illustrate their bulletins. In the first half of the 1970s, the WPC continued to be prominently represented in different initiatives of the Stockholm Conference, such as the World Assembly of Peace and the Independence of the Peoples of Indochina staged in Versailles in February 1972.105 Despite this continuing involvement, the WPC itself—since 1968 headquartered in Helsinki—seemed to prioritize other themes, mainly dealing with the decolonization struggle in Africa, anti-Apartheid, and the Middle East as well as peace and cooperation in Europe. Communist peace organizations and parties remained active in campaigns against the US war in Vietnam, but the networks of the WPC seemed to have lost much of their importance. WPC delegations to international conferences on the Vietnam War were increasingly dominated by representatives from Africa and Asia, with only a limited number of representatives from Eastern European countries, mainly coming from the Soviet Union and the GDR. Various reasons may account for this, such as the growing activity and role of diplomatic representations of the DRV and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, which established direct working relationships with many national peace movements to gain diplomatic recognition and support in Western European countries. Furthermore, the WPC again entered a deep crisis.106 The functioning of the organization at the international level remained complicated by divergent interests and varying commitments of national members. In the late 1960s, WPC campaigns went in different directions, often depending on strategies and interests of its members. As a result of the internal crisis provoked by the Prague crisis, Blume’s presidency came to an end in 1969. She remained active in the WPC until her death in 1975, but reoriented herself towards other issues, such as campaigns on behalf of the plight of Greece under the Colonels’ Regime. Greece after the 105 “Assemblée mondiale de Paris” (11–12 February 1972), Jean Verstappen papers (private collection), Brussels. 106 “World Peace Council Commission on Problems of Structure,” Budapest (12–13 September 1970), WPC, 186J 17, DASSD; “Report of the Secretary-General concerning organization projects and the structure of the WPC [1971], IB, CArCoB; Blume, Le mouvement de la paix: Un témoignage (Brussels: Gamma Press, 1996), 183–185.

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coup of 1967 became seen as “Europe’s Vietnam”, showcasing how US imperialism, exploiting the Cold War, was not only threatening the Third World but also Europe itself; in this way it illustrated the necessity of East-West cooperation to counter US involvement.107 Others, like Romesh Chandra, continued their work mainly with an orientation towards Africa and Asia. However, the East German Friedensrat, through its financial means and alignment with GDR foreign policies, increasingly succeeded in dominating activities of the WPC: together with other European members of the WPC and in accordance with Soviet foreign policies, it succeeded, for instance, in shifting attention to solidarity with the “Arab world” , anti-Apartheid, and, most notably, campaigns for Security and Co-operation in Europe.108 At the same time, the continued involvement of Chandra, Blume, and other members helped to build connections in real and imagined terms between Vietnam War campaigns and other causes in the Third World. For the ANC, PLO, and many other national liberation movements, WPC Vietnam War campaigns had indeed been a crucial place to forge South-South solidarity, which also offered models and inspiration that accounted for continuities and crossmovement mobilization between different campaigns. The initiative of the Stockholm Conference, for instance, to establish an International Commission of Inquiry into the war crimes of the United States in Vietnam in 1970 would three years later give way to a similar commission against Augusto Pinochet’s military junta.

Conclusion The commitment of the WPC to international Vietnam War campaigns was riddled with many problems and hurdles, internally and externally. The rivalry with China in the early 1960s induced by the Sino-Soviet split was followed by a plethora of other problems that undermined and potentially crippled the organization. Even Soviet support was at times uncertain and limited. Blume and Chandra regularly complained about the lack of financial support, as well as the divergent policies followed by its Eastern bloc members who met in separate meetings. Many aspects of 107 Kim Christiaens, “‘Communists are no Beasts’: European Solidarity Campaigns on Behalf of Democracy and Human Rights in Greece and East–West Détente in the 1960s and Early 1970s,” Contemporary European History 26 (2017), 621–646. 108 “L’Union Soviétique et le monde arabe,” Temps Nouveaux 42 (October 1971), 1.

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this history remain unknown, partly due to the limitations of the sources. Yet, nevertheless, the WPC was one of the most important international and even global networks for Vietnam War campaigns during the 1960s. Although this network was at times elusive and to a large extent financially, ideologically, and organizationally dependent on (varying) Soviet support, the organization and its Vietnam War campaigns were led by an international assortment of activists, with a strong involvement of activists from Western Europe and the Third World. These campaigns—together with those developed by other international communist organizations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth or the World Federation of Trade Unions—played a crucial role in interconnecting local activism and campaigns in different regions of the world, not least via bringing activists together in real and imagined terms and widely spread propaganda material, thus creating an enormous space of transnational activism.109 During the second half of the 1960s, Isabelle Blume and Romesh Chandra were “ubiquitous” to some, becoming global icons of solidarity with Vietnam and embodying Soviet support for anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. The role of the WPC and its leadership in international campaigns was to a large extent buttressed by their close contact with Vietnamese diplomacy and their efforts at internationalizing the struggle of the NLF. Despite the apparent lack of a coherent ideological framework, which was probably expedient given the diverse nature of the clientele the WPC sought to orchestrate, the constant underlying focus was on the “global” aspect of the task and on “humanitarian approaches” that sought to keep their distance from calls for armed struggle. Approaching the WPC as a space of solidarity helps to open new perspectives for rethinking the global history of Vietnam War activism and brings into view ideas and actors that have received little attention in mainstream accounts of the mobilization of social movements in the era of the Vietnam War, but which are indispensable for a broader understanding of crucial transnational exchanges. The WPC offers a bridge that connects two fields that have mostly been studied separately, namely the political history of Vietnamese transnational diplomacy and the social 109 On the impact of the World Federation of Democratic Youth on activism in the Netherlands see Rimko van der Maar, “Hooligans without Borders: Transnational Perspectives on the Dutch Anti-Vietnam War Movement (1965–1975),” in International Solidarity, ed. Christiaens et al., 192.

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and cultural history of the protest movements.110 Next to the impact of Vietnamese diplomacy on activism at different levels and in different regions, this chapter has revealed the role of Catholic and Christian peace movements, which the WPC considered a strategic ally throughout the 1960s and whose involvement in Vietnam War campaigns has been overshadowed by attention to more radical leftist groups. Furthermore, this chapter has shown how solidarity with Vietnam cannot be understood without considering East-West interactions over the entire 1960s. The mobilization over the Vietnam War drew on East-West contacts and networks, as became evident in the ways in which Western activists relied on channels and opportunities offered by the WPC. Western activists travelled East to attend international conferences, to access information, and to encounter Vietnamese representatives based in places like East Berlin, Prague, and Moscow. The other way around, the Vietnam War became a source of legitimation for campaigns that advocated peace, security, and cooperation in Europe, and these ideas provided important dimensions of legitimacy to campaigns developed by the WPC and its members. As stated in a 1967 publication on “Europe and Vietnam” by the Czechoslovak WPC chapter, communist solidarity campaigns with Vietnam drew a link between the consolidation of a peaceful Europe able to manage its own affairs by pursuing “total détente” and the liberation of Vietnam and the Third World countries from the chains of US imperialism.111 This belief in the globalization of détente echoed ten years later in a speech delivered by WPC president Romesh Chandra during an international conference on anti-Apartheid and anti-colonialism, in which he linked the “defeat of imperialism” in Vietnam with the signing of the Helsinki agreements in 1975, declaring that both events projected a global mission for a peaceful “new Europe, from which the voice of peace rings out to proclaim solidarity with the struggle of all peoples of the world”.112 Next to this connection with East-West détente and the new light it helps to shine on communist campaigns on behalf of the 110 Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace

in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 111 Informations: L’Europe et le Vietnam (Prague: Czechoslovak Committee of the Partisans of Peace, 1967). 112 World Conference against Apartheid, Racism and Colonialism in Southern Africa, Lisbon, June 16–19 1977 (Lisbon: Portuguese National Committee against Apartheid, Racism and Colonialism in Southern Africa, 1977), 78.

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Third World, this history of the WPC also shows how campaigns involved and relied on a myriad of actors in the Third World, and in this way laid the foundations for important continuities and cross-overs with a variety of other international solidarity movements that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, including the anti-Apartheid struggle, resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship, or campaigns on behalf of Palestine. It was probably here that the global orchestration pursued by the WPC had its most profound and long-lasting impact.

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Maitron, Jean, Claude Pennetier and Gilles Vergnon, “Farge Yves, Louis, Auguste,” Dictionnaire biographique, mouvement ouvrier, mouvement social, vol. V (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2009), 136–138. Mark, James, and Péter Apor, "Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary 1956– 1989,” Journal of Modern History 87 (2015): 852–891. Mark, James, and Tobias Rupprecht, “The Socialist World in Global History: From Absentee to Victim to Co-producer,” in The Practice of Global History: European Perspectives, ed. Matthias Middell (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 81–114. Mark, James, et al., “‘We are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464. Mehta, Harish C., “People’s Diplomacy”: The Diplomatic Front of North Vietnam During the War Against the United States, 1965–1972 (unpubl. PhD diss., McMaster University, 2009). Mehta, Harish C., People’s Diplomacy of Vietnam: Soft Power in the Resistance War, 1965–1972 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019). Muehlenbeck, Philip. E., and Natalia Telepneva (eds.), Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). Mundell, Ian, “Far from Vietnam—Inside Vietnam: The Genesis of the Collective Film Loin du Vietnam,” Ivens Magazine 9 (November 2003), 25–27. Nehring, Holger, “Pacifism,” in Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 803–806. Nguyen, Lien-Hang T., Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Nieuwenhuys, John, “Belgium’s Wider Peace Front? Isabelle Blume, the Peace Movement and the Issue of the Middle East (1950s–1970s),” in International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives and Themes, ed. Kim Christiaens et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). Pas, Niek, Sortir de l’ombre du parti communiste français. Histoire de l’engagement de l’extrême gauche française sur la guerre du Vietnam 1965–1968 (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Politiques, 1998). Pons, Silvio, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917–1991 (Oxford: OUP, 2014). Roberts, Geoffrey, “Averting Armageddon: The Communist Peace Movement, 1948–1956,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism, ed. Stephen A. Smith (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 322–338. Roemer, Charel, “Connecting People, Generating Concern: Early Belgian Solidarity with the Liberation Struggle in South Africa and the Portuguese

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Colonies,” in International Solidarity in the Low Countries during the Twentieth Century. New Perspectives and Themes, ed. Christiaens et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 241–273. Rupprecht, Tobias, “Die sowjetische Gesellschaft in der Welt des Kalten Kriegs. Neue Forschungsperspektiven,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58,3 (2010): 381–399. Rutter, Nick, “Look Left, Drive Right: Internationalisms at the Sofia World Youth Festival of 1968,” in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 193–212. Schlaga, Rüdiger, Die Kommunisten in der Friedensbewegung—erfolglos? Die Politik des Weltfriedensrates im Verhältnis zur Aussenpolitik der Sowjetunion und zu unabhängigen Friedensbewegungen im Westen, 1950–1979 (Münster: Lit, 1991). Stocq, Aurélie, “Le Chanoine Raymond Goor (1908–1996). Prix international Lénine de la Paix: Itinéraire d’un prêtre au service du rapprochement EstOuest et de l’amitié entre les peoples” (diss. lic., UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, 2003). Stolte, Carolien, “’The People’s Bandung’: Local Anti-imperialists on an AfroAsian Stage,” Journal of World History 30 (2019): 125–156. Wernicke, Günter, “The Communist-led World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: The Fetters of Bipolarity and some Attempts to Break them in the Fifties and Early Sixties,” Peace & Change 23,3 (1998): 265–311. Wernicke, Günter, “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War and the World, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 299–319. Wernicke, Günter, “The Unity of Peace and Socialism? The World Peace Council on a Cold War Tightrope Between the Peace Struggle and Intrasystemic Communist Conflicts,” Peace & Change 26 (2001): 332–351. Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: CUP, 2006). Wittner, Lawrence S., One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

CHAPTER 3

The Vietnam Activities of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) Francisca de Haan

The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), established in Paris in late 1945 and with member organizations in all parts of the world, was a hub of international left feminism, anti-colonialism, and peace activism.1 The WIDF supported Vietnamese women in their struggle for independence from French colonial rule—during the First Indochina War, 1946–1954—and in the 1960s took a leading role in 1 I thank Michelle Chase, Suzy Kim, Katharine McGregor, An T. Nguyen and Alexander Sedlmaier for their helpful feedback and suggestions. On the notion of “left feminism” see Ellen C. DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender & History 3,1 (1991): 81–90, 84. On the use of the term left feminists for women on the political left see Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 5.

F. de Haan (B) Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_3

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opposing what the Vietnamese call the “American War”; also known as the Second Indochina War but more generally referred to as the Vietnam War. The first aim of this chapter is to explore and discuss the WIDF’s forms of solidarity with women of Vietnam and opposition against the American War in Vietnam, from 1964 onward. The WIDF’s involvement included the setting up of a WIDF International Vietnam Solidarity Committee in October 1964, the sending of delegations to Vietnam, with subsequent press conferences and other types of reporting their findings (from February 1966), coordinating numerous protest and solidarity actions by its member organizations, and dedicating the opening session of the WIDF’s sixth World Congress of Women in 1969 to “The Women of Viet Nam in the Fight against US Aggression, for National Salvation,” with reports of the Union of Women for the Liberation of South Viet Nam (affiliated with the National Liberation Front) and the Viet Nam Women’s Union, the official representative of women in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Far from emerging overnight—or as a mere consequence of the overt American bombing campaigns in Vietnam that began in 1964—these forms of solidarity were a logical continuation of the contacts and cooperation that had existed since 1945. The second aim of this chapter is to understand this longer history of cooperation, and hence to establish that—since Vietnam experienced almost uninterrupted warfare after its proclamation of independence in September 1945—anti-war connections between Vietnamese women and “women in the West” did not start in 1965, as some scholarly literature suggests, but decades earlier.2 The third aim of this chapter is to examine the WIDF’s engagement with the violence especially directed at women in Vietnam. Beyond the extreme destruction brought upon Vietnam and its population by the US warfare in general, there were ways in which the war affected women in particular. The various WIDF publications about the wars in Vietnam (the French and the American), as well as publications by the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU), affiliated with the WIDF, are clear about the extreme sexual violence committed against Vietnamese women. WIDF

2 The “women in the West” quote is from Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “Hypervisibility and Invisibility: Asian/American Women, Radical Orientalism, and the Revisioning of Global Feminism,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and NationBuilding, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 214, discussed more fully below.

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and VWU representatives were not the only parties to discuss these crimes in public while the American war was going on; so did, for example, US veterans who spoke at “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” 31 January–2 February 1971.3 Nonetheless, this aspect of the war is not emphasized and often entirely ignored in the historiography; nor is it part of the general public’s knowledge or understanding of what happened. Historian Marie Gina Weaver argues that the role rape played in the Vietnam War “has been erased from narratives of that war.”4 In addition to the largescale sexual violence, “women were also victimized by the 1962–1971 US defoliation campaign. Aside from destroying the country’s ecology, the indiscriminate spraying of defoliants caused diseases and birth deformities,” in the concise words of historian An T. Nguyen.5 In 1969, the WIDF decided to finance and build a hospital for women and children in Hanoi. This decision was not only a logical outgrowth of the Federation’s overall focus on women’s rights and the welfare of women and children but also a response to the ways in which the war specifically affected these groups. The chapter will start with a short introduction of the WIDF and an outline of key characteristics of the Anglophone historiography on women and the Vietnam War. Against that background, I will explore the main activities of the WIDF regarding Vietnam from 1945 onward, including the interactions at the WIDF’s international congresses, the WIDF’s activities focused on the wars in Vietnam, and the ways in which the WIDF and its Vietnamese member organizations wrote about Vietnamese women.

3 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975; repr. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 107–112. On “The Winter Soldier Investigation” see Gina Marie Weaver, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), and the documentary film Winter Soldier (Winterfilm Collective, USA 1972). Weaver writes that, although sexual violence was mentioned at the 1967 International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm, the Tribunal “was inattentive to the plight of women”, 49 and 62. 4 Weaver, Ideologies, 1. 5 An Thuy Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement for the Right to Live: A Non-

Communist Opposition Movement to the American War in Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 51 (2019): 75–102, 88, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1542522. See also Merle Ratner, “Agent Orange: The Unmet Responsibility of the United States,” in Vietnam: From National Liberation to 21st Century Socialism, ed. Duncan McFarland, Paul Krehbiel and Harry Targ (New York: Changemaker Publications, 2013), 28–31.

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Importantly, they always conveyed a twofold message, emphasizing Vietnamese women as heroic fighters and as victims of the wars.6 The last part of the chapter briefly focuses on the British WIDF affiliate, the National Assembly of Women (NAW), and its campaign for the Hanoi Hospital. The NAW, together with the Union of Australian Women— Australia was a US ally in the American War in Vietnam—was among the WIDF’s Western member organizations that were deeply involved in its Vietnam activities.7 It is important to note that the WIDF was without a US branch since 1950, when the Congress of American Women (CAW) had been forced to disband under pressure of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the US government, which accused the CAW and the WIDF of being part of the “international Communist movement” whose aim was “world conquest,” and only pretending to work for women’s rights.8 The work of the British NAW serves as an example of the types of action undertaken by a Western WIDF member organization to protest against the US warfare, and collect money for the Hanoi Hospital. This part of the chapter is based on NAW archival materials included in the as yet uncatalogued papers of its long-term leader Connie Seifert (1911–1988) in the Women’s Library in London.9 The NAW sources, all the more precious in light of the absence of a central WIDF archive, not only give us a glimpse into the fundraising activities for the Hanoi Hospital, but also highlight that the WIDF was not an “Eastern European” women’s organization or one of “women in communist countries,” as historians tend to assume, which contributes to the

6 Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944. 7 Barbara Curthoys and Audrey McDonald, More Than a Hat and Glove Brigade: The Story of the Union of Australian Women (Sydney: Bookpress, 1996). 8 Committee on Un-American Activities U.S. House of Representatives, Report on the Congress of American Women (Washington: Unites States Government Printing Office, 1950), original release date 23 October 1949; discussed in Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19,4 (2010): 547–573. 9 Papers of Connie Seifert including papers of National Assembly of Women, Coll. Ref. 5/NAW, Fawcett Library Archives (now The Women’s Library, LSE), hereafter CS papers. I would like to express my thanks to curator Gillian Murphy for her kind help in locating a list of contents and allowing me to see the relevant boxes.

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WIDF’s ongoing exclusion from or misrepresentation in histories of “the global women’s movement,” or, as in this case, the historiography on women’s activism to support Vietnam. A recent example can be found in Jessica Frazier’s book about women’s antiwar diplomacy during the Vietnam War era where she mentions that the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom raised funds for the Hanoi Hospital but not that the Hospital was a WIDF project.10

Introducing the WIDF The Women’s International Democratic Federation was set up in Paris on 29 November 1945, during a week-long “International Congress of Women” attended by some 800 women from 40 countries of all continents. What brought them together was their deep conviction that it was possible to create a better world, on the ruins of the world war they had just lived through, which had taken the lives of an estimated 65 million people. Many of the WIDF leading women had joined communist parties in the 1930s, in the fight against rising fascism. The French Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, WIDF General Secretary from 1945 to 1954, was one of them. As a young photojournalist, in early 1933 she (illegally) took pictures of Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Oranienburg, where communists and other opponents of the Hitler regime were interned. During WWII, she was involved in the Resistance, as had been many congress participants.11 The WIDF founders were aware that fascism and war eliminated women’s rights, rights they regarded as integral to the better world they hoped to create.12 One of the WIDF’s initial six VicePresident seats was for China, where hundreds of thousands of women had joined the Communist Party (CCP) in its revolutionary struggle. “The drive to risk their lives in a perilous revolution was most prominently 10 Jessica M. Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 123. 11 Dominique Durand, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier: une femme engagée, du PCF au procès de Nuremberg (Paris: Balland, 2012), 61; Charlotte Delbo, Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 209–211. Vaillant-Couturier did not participate in the founding congress. 12 Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes, Congrès International des Femmes; Compte Rendu des Travaux du Congrès Qui s’est Tenu à Paris du 26 Novembre au 1er Décembre 1945 (Paris: Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes [1946]), hereafter WIDF, Congrès International des Femmes [1946].

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explained in CCP women’s memoirs and interviews by their experiences of gender oppression from childhood to adulthood.”13 The WIDF’s founding congress in Paris was part of the short postwar moment of optimism about international cooperation and support for progressive politics. Women at the congress expected the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union to continue their wartime cooperation in the so-called Grand Alliance and to build a more just world. This was not to be; it was not long before the relationship between the United States and the USSR changed “from cooperation to conflict.”14 Moreover, new stages of war had already begun or were developing in Indonesia and Vietnam, where the Netherlands and France refused to recognize their former colonies’ recently proclaimed independence.15 In the bi-polar context of the Cold War, which intertwined in complex ways with anti-colonial struggles, the WIDF largely sided with the Soviet Union. But whereas membership in and sympathies for socialist and communist parties were widespread, other views were also present in the Federation, as were tensions and debates about the WIDF’s direction.16 The WIDF continued to unite women’s organizations in what came to be called first-, second- and third-world countries, and its membership grew over time from 40 organizations in 1945 to 131 organizations in 116 countries in 1981.17 One of the resolutions adopted at the 1945 Congress called on “all democratic women’s organizations of all countries to help the women of the colonial and dependent countries in their

13 Wang Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 10–11. 14 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21. 15 For Indonesia see Rémy Limpach, De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016); Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). 16 For an example see Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms and the Yugo-Soviet Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia,” in Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present, ed. Francisca de Haan et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 59–74. 17 Vietnam [Bulletin]—WIDF International Vietnam Solidarity Committee 10 (1972),

1.

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fight for economic and political rights.”18 In the post-WWII years, the WIDF consistently supported women’s anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. From 1947, the WIDF had Consultative Status at the United Nations, which it lost in 1954 as a consequence of Cold War politics (to be regained in 1967). Despite its size and its contributions to women’s rights and the struggles for peace and independence, until recently the WIDF has been largely omitted from the historiography on the international women’s movement as well as that of the political left, a situation which is slowly beginning to change.19

The Historiography of Women’s Roles in the Vietnam War On 2 September 1945, Hô` Chí Minh20 declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which France refused to recognize. In December 1946, war formally broke out, ending with the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. According to the Geneva Accords of July 1954, Vietnam was temporarily divided in two zones. Free elections were to be held within two years for a government for the united country, but these elections never occurred. The United States and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), proclaimed by Ngô Ðình Diê.m in 1955, thwarted them, fearing a victory for communist Hô` Chí Minh. The United States began to provide economic and military aid to the deeply anti-communist Diem regime. Overt US bombardments of North Vietnam began in August 18 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), “Original Resolutions of the Women’s International Democratic Federation at the International Congress of Women,” Paris (November/December 1945), available in the online archive Women and Social Movements, International—1840 to Present (WASI), ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, https://library.ceu.edu/. 19 This includes Melanie Ilic, “Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari AutioSarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 157–174; Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, “Fighting Fascism and Forging New Political Activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52–72; Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs 41,2 (Winter 2016), 305–331; Suzy Kim, “The Origins of Cold War Feminism during the Korean War,” Gender & History 31,2 (2019), 460–479. 20 Peter Neville, Hô` Chí Minh (New York: Routledge, 2019).

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1964, and on 2 March 1965, “Operation Rolling Thunder” began, that is, regular bombing of North Vietnam. In April 1969, US troop strength in Vietnam reached its highest level of the war, 543,400.21 Vietnamese women played a crucial role in all aspects of the anticolonial resistance and for the liberation of their country, including their international “outreach and communications strategy,” some of which I will discuss later.22 They took care of agricultural and industrial production, they kept daily life going, and they participated in the war efforts by hiding guerrilla fighters and feeding them, acting as spies, procuring and transporting weapons, and serving in the militia themselves. Large-scale but disorganized insurgency against the Diem regime in the South was ongoing since 1954, but in late 1959 with the Dong Khoi (Simultaneous Insurrection), a coordinated popular uprising in many rural areas seeking to seize power at the village level, and the formal creation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) in late December 1960 gained momentum. In parallel with military operations, female cadres and sympathizers conducted mass protest demonstrations and tried to persuade soldiers of the South Vietnamese Army to desert. A leading role in the ´ Tre Province was played by Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh (1920– uprising in Bên 1992), who had already participated in rebellions against the French colonial armies in this province.23 Madame Dinh eventually became an army general and Deputy Commander of the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). She was also the head of a permanent military school for women officers in South Vietnam. The women’s militias were known as 21 David L. Anderson, The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 22 Adeline Broussan, “Unexpected Sisters in Arms: Solidarity between Vietnamese and French Leftist Women Fighting Imperialism (1945–1954),” paper presented at the 2019 National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference in San Francisco. 23 Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998), “Chronology”; Karen G. Turner, “‘Vietnam’ as a Women’s War,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 97; Vietnamese Studies, no. 10 (1966), special issue on Vietnamese Women, 255–258; “Glorious South Vietnamese Patriot,” WWW 9/10 (1965): 13; Ho Dieu Anh, “Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh,” in The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (2nd ed., Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2011), 835–836; No Other Road to Take: ´ Huang Nam, trans. Mai V. Elliott ˜ Thi. Ði.nh, recorded by Trân Memoir of Mrs. Nguyên (10th ed., Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2003), which runs up to November 1965.

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“the Long-Haired Army.”24 An estimated 1 million women participated in local self-defense and militia units between 1965 and 1973; after 1969, women could join the regular military forces, and up to 10,000 did.25 One of the most impressive personal documents about the American War in Vietnam is Ð˘a.ng Thùy Trâm’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, published in Vietnamese in 2005 and in English translation in 2007.26 Ð˘a.ng Thùy Trâm was born into an intellectual family from Hanoi, studied medicine, trained as a surgeon, and in 1967 joined the fight against the American occupation. Thùy Trâm worked for three years under extremely difficult circumstances in a field hospital in Quang Ngãi Province (Central Vietnam), a guerrilla stronghold, narrowly escaping death several times. She was shot in 1970 while walking down a trail but left a diary that gives a very personal and lively impression of the dangers and cruelty of the war, but equally of the dedication of the people fighting and working for the cause of national liberation, and the ways in which they cared for each other.27 Thùy Trâm was one of around 70,000 professional women— doctors, engineers, reporters—who worked for the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).28 There is a recently increasing feminist historiography about the American War in Vietnam. Two books published in the late 1990s discuss Vietnamese women’s military contributions: Even the Women Must Fight by Karen G. Turner and Sandra C. Taylor’s Vietnamese Women at War.29 Both studies provide impressive evidence of what their fighting meant ij

24 There was a fair bit of contemporary attention to this in the West, e.g., in the popular 1974 book by Arlene Eisen Bergman, Women of Viet Nam (San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1974), which was translated into French and Spanish. 25 Turner, “‘Vietnam’,” 94–95. The number of people killed in 35 years of war on Vietnamese soil, from WWII through 1975, can only be estimated, but a study in the British Medical Journal of 2008 came to a death toll of 3,812,000 in Vietnam between 1955 and 2002. Ziad Obermeyer, Christopher J. L. Murray and Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: Analysis of Data from World Health Survey Programme,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 336,7659 (2008), 1482–1486. 26 Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (New York: Harmony Books, 2007). 27 The story of how the diary was found and returned to Vietnam is impressive in itself; see the introduction to Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. 28 Turner, “‘Vietnam’,” 94–95. 29 Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Hô` Chí Minh and the

Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).

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in these women’s lives. Heather Stur explores the role gender played in shaping US women’s and men’s experiences of and narratives about the Vietnam War.30 The works by Judy Wu and Jessica Frazier establish a focus on the interactions between North American women and Vietnam.31 The contacts they discuss are those between Vietnamese women, the US group Women Strike for Peace, and the US branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). However, despite the significant role the WIDF played in the events the books by Wu and Frazier examine, the organization remains misrepresented or neglected. The latter is especially clear in the work of Wu, according to whom “[t]he earliest contacts that the VWUs had with women in the West [emphasis added, FdH] were with maternalist peace organizations, such as the US-based Women Strike for Peace (WSP). […] WSP’s contact with the VWUs began in 1965, when two WSP members were among the first Americans to visit Hanoi after the commencement of the US bombing of North Viet Nam.”32 Yet, knowing of the much longer history of Western warfare in Vietnam, the fact that the WIDF, a global women’s organization focusing on peace and women’s rights was founded in 1945 in Paris—the capital of the country that had colonized Vietnam since 1858—and that a Vietnam Women’s Union was first established as early as 1930, it is apparent that contacts between Vietnamese women and their unions and “women in the West” began long before 1965.33

30 Heather Marie Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 31 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and

Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 32 Wu, “Hypervisibility and Invisibility,” 214. Frazier likewise starts her account with events in 1965. 33 A part of this longer history was the resistance of WIDF and Union of French Women (UFF) president Eugénie Cotton against the French war in Vietnam in 1950; mentioned with appreciation in Women of Vietnam, no. 3/4 (1970), 47.

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The WIDF and Vietnam, 1945–1963 The exact starting date of these contacts is yet unknown, but “Madame Duong The Hauh”34 represented the Union of Indochinese Women in Paris (l’Union des Femmes Indochinoises de Paris ) at the WIDF’s founding congress in November 1945. Her talk on behalf of the “women from Indochina residing in France” described the brutal conditions in Indochina after 80 years of French colonial rule and mentioned that the people of Vietnam, including its women, during the last three months (i.e., since August 1945) were fighting for their liberty and independence, against an enemy who had tanks, airplanes, and battleships at its disposal.35 At the next WIDF’s congress, held in Budapest in December 1948, Thái Thi. Liên36 spoke on behalf of the Association of the Women of VietNam for National Salvation. At the end of WWII, she said, the people of Vietnam “had finally liberated themselves from the yoke of French and Japanese colonial domination.”37 When France refused to accept Vietnam’s independence, “and war made its appearance anew in Viet-Nam,” the women of Vietnam had not “hesitated to take up this struggle again.” The women were “conscious of their rights [under the rule of the Democratic Republic and] proud of the contribution they had made to winning these rights.”38 Thái Thi. Liên, after vividly describing the violence used by the French Expeditionary Corps and the racist ideas undergirding that 34 I generally use the names as provided in the WIDF sources. This is often complex because of translation and transliteration issues. According to An T. Nguyen, the name is likely misspelled and probably would have been Duong The Hanh. 35 WIDF, Congrès International des Femmes [1946], 175–177. 36 Thái Thi Liên is a well-known figure in Vietnamese history and society. She is a .

famous pianist. Her older brother, Thai Van Lung, was a prominent Viet Minh leader and her son, Dang Thai Son, is Vietnam’s most proliferate and well-known pianist. 37 “Mme Thái Thi Liên (Viet-Nam),” Second Women’s International Congress (Paris: . Women’s International Democratic Federation, [1949]), 172–176, 172. The section on Vietnam in The Women of Asia and Africa. Documents (Budapest [WIDF], December 1948) by Thái Thi. Liên provides many details on the impact of French colonialism and Japanese fascism. This chapter will not include the big topic of Japanese colonialism and the “comfort women” system of wartime sexual slavery. 38 “Mme Thái Thi Liên,” 173–174. The DRV’s 1946 Constitution had granted women . equal rights, equal pay, and paid maternity leave. Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 726.

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violence, urged French and American women at the Congress to oppose their government’s war efforts—in the case of the United States because it “supplie[d] capital and weapons to the French troops for the continuance of this war of colonial re-conquest.”39 In her closing remarks, Thái Thi. Liên thanked the Congress for having approved affiliation to the WIDF of “the Union of the Women of Viet-Nam, with a member` also spoke about ship of 2 million.”40 Her colleague Pha.m Ngo.c Thuân the impact of French colonialism on women in Vietnam, including the “extreme poverty of the countryside” which “forced young peasant girls into the towns where many of them were obliged to become prostitutes in order to live.” She added that the women of Vietnam “soon understood that their emancipation would not be won in the general state of slavery of the Viet-Nam nation as a whole.”41 Likely one of the most moving presentations of the cause of the women of Vietnam in a WIDF context occurred at its third congress, in Copenhagen in 1953. Not being allowed to travel from Berlin to Copenhagen, the Vietnamese delegation recorded its message, which was transmitted at the congress. When the participants listened to the recorded speech, “the flag of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam was held by the mother of a young French soldier killed in Viet-Nam and the wife of one of the dockers who refused to load arms on ships for Indochina. The French delegation stood to listen to the message.”42 The deadly consequences of war, active resistance to the war efforts, and women’s transnational solidarity across their nations’ politics were thus effectively

39 “Mme Thái Thi Liên,” 175. Her words seem to be confirmed by the Pentagon . Papers: “By the time the Indochina war began in earnest in late 1946, U.S. military equipment had already been used by French forces against the Vietnamese, and the U.S. had arranged credit for France to purchase $160 million worth of vehicles and miscellaneous industrial equipment for use in Indochina. […] the Marshall Plan [of 1948] threw even greater U.S. resources behind France.” Pentagon Papers, [Part I] Vietnam and the U.S., 1940–1950, C-5, National Archives, https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/ arcmedia/research/pentagon-papers/Pentagon-Papers-Part-I.pdf. 40 “Mme Thái Thi Liên,” 175; the list of “Requests for Affiliation presented for the .

ratification of the Congress” mentions the name of “The Association of the Women of Viet-Nam for National Salvation,” 545. 41 Speech by Mme Pham Ngoc Thuân ` (Viet-Nam), Second Women’s International . . Congress, 490–493, 490. 42 As One! For Equality, For Happiness, For Peace. World Congress of Women. Copenhagen June 5–10, 1953 (Berlin: WIDF, 1953), 245 (part of the caption).

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staged. In 1958, at the WIDF’s fourth International Congress of Women held in Vienna, there was no declared war in Vietnam, but there was no peace in the country either. As Nguyen Thi Thap explained on behalf of the Vietnamese Women’s Union: “The North of our country is free [but] American imperialists have turned the South of Vietnam into a war base, acting in contravention to the clauses of the [1954] Geneva agreement, which forbids all war preparations, and contrary to the just hopes of our people who wish our country to be reunified through general and free elections.”43 In 1963, at the WIDF’s fifth International Congress of Women, held in Moscow, the Japanese Fuki Kushida in her keynote on the “Struggle of Women for peace, disarmament and friendship between Peoples,” discussed the US “undeclared war” in South Vietnam to support the dictatorship of Ngô Ðình Diê.m, as well as the use of “toxic materials,”44 and the DRV was represented at the congress.45 In summary, Vietnamese women were represented at all the WIDF’s International Congresses and also at numerous smaller Federation meetings, and this continued in the decades to come.

WIDF and VWU Publications A crucial component of the WIDF’s activism and global outreach were its publications, including Information Bulletins, numerous brochures and reports, and the monthly (from 1966, quarterly) Women of the Whole World (1951–1991).46 Edited at the WIDF International Secretariat— since February 1951 located in Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic—and published in six languages, Women of the Whole World provided information about the WIDF and its activities, its member organizations, and women’s situation and struggles in countries around the world, and encouraged its readers to become involved in political action. Women of the Whole World (WWW) published dozens of articles by and 43 IVth Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Vienna, 1–5 June 1958. Plenary Session (Berlin: WIDF, 1958), 150–151. 44 World Congress of Women. Moscow, June 1963. Convened by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (Berlin: WIDF, 1963), 39, 62. 45 Ibid., 86. 46 For a helpful discussion on bias in historical sources see John Arnold, History: A

Very Short Introduction: Very Short Introductions 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 4.

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about Vietnamese women, the destruction wrought by the French and American Wars in Vietnam, and women’s participation in the resistance; just a few titles to convey the tenor of these publications: “With the Women of Viet Nam” (no. 1, 1953); “My part in the struggle for national liberation,” interview with Mrs. Dien Hong by Vo Thi The (September 1959); “Stop Chemical Warfare in Vietnam” (no. 6, 1963); cover: “Solidarity with the Women of Vietnam” (no. 1, 1968); or “Vietnam After Twelve Years” (no. 3, 1974). Most WIDF national member organizations had their own journal in which they wrote about their work and informed their readers about the WIDF, its campaigns, congresses, and so on. The Vietnamese Women’s Union published Women of Vietnam (in English and French) from 1966, and this, too, is a very informative publication. If we just focus on the two-way interaction between the WIDF and Vietnamese women, the very first issue of Women of Vietnam published the “Resolution on the Vietnam Problem by the Women’s International Democratic Federation’s Council Yearly Meeting in Salzburg (Austria) from October 26th to 29th 1965.” The journal abundantly documents the shared activities, including many visits of VWU representatives to other WIDF affiliates or vice versa, as well as the political importance the WIDF had for the VWU.47 It also published on Vietnamese women’s military contributions, as in a detailed article by Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh in 1968.48

WIDF Activities Focused on Vietnam from 1964 Onward With the US military involvement in Vietnam escalating from August 1964, the WIDF, at its Council Meeting held in Sofia on 26 October 1964, set up its International Vietnam Solidarity Committee (IVSC),

47 An almost complete set of Women of the Whole World is available at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, as is Women of Vietnam for 1966–1982, and incomplete thereafter. 48 Nguy˜ ên Thi. Ði.nh, “Role et capacites des femmes du Sud Viet Nam,” Femmes du Vietnam 3/4 (1968): 14–16.

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intended to stimulate and coordinate the WIDF’s Vietnam work.49 IVSC publications, WWW , WIDF congress reports, and other publications all demonstrate that the WIDF undertook an enormous amount of activities to organize, express, and coordinate “moral, political, and material support” for the cause of the Vietnamese people.50 Already in November 1964, a WIDF delegation traveled to Hanoi to attend the International Conference of Solidarity with the People of South Viet Nam, convened by the World Council of Peace.51 In February 1966, an eight-woman-strong WIDF delegation visited the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for ten days. The women were from Chile, Cambodia, (North) Korea, Cuba, France, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The political importance the DRV attached to the contacts with the WIDF is clear from the fact that the WIDF delegation was received by President Hô` Chí Minh (with a picture of the visit included in the report). On their return, the delegation members gave a shared press conference at the WIDF’s HQ in East Berlin and, beyond contributing to the report, members spoke and wrote about their experiences in their own countries.52 The WIDF-IVSC held an “extraordinary session” in Berlin in February 1967, with a message from WIDF president Eugénie Cotton (who could not attend for reasons of health; she died in June 1967), an introduction by acting WIDF General Secretary Cécile Hugel,53 and detailed reports presented by the delegations of the Union of Women for the Liberation of South Vietnam and that of the Vietnam Women’s Union. The IVSC’s subsequent Appeal emphasized the importance of influencing “world 49 Cécile Hugel, “Report on the Activities of the WIDF,” delivered to the Sixth Congress of the WIDF, Helsinki, 17 June 1969, 4, where she also expressed disappointment that the IVSC had not been able “to include many new individuals and organisations” (report available in WASI). 50 Nguyen T. Binh in WWW, no. 4 (1969). 51 Women’s International Democratic Federation 1945–1965 (Berlin: WIDF, 1965), 68;

WIDF, Documents and Information no. 6 (1969), 23. 52 Une délégation de la Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes en République Démocratique du Vietnam, 14–25 février 1966 (Berlin: WIDF, 1966). 53 Cécile Hugel was a textile worker born in Galfingue (1925), a union activist, communist, UFF member since 1946, PCF Central Committee member 1964–1976, WIDF General Secretary 1966–1992. Françoise Olivier-Utard, “HUGEL Cécile [née HÉGY Cécile, épouse HUGEL, dite],” Le Maitron: Dictionnaire Biographique, Movement Ouvrier, Movement Social 4 (2010), https://maitron.fr/spip.php?article50805.

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public opinion” and listed activities the member organizations could undertake.54 The WIDF also participated in the preparation of the World Conference for Vietnam held in Stockholm (6–9 July 1967), where a member of its four-person delegation delivered a report “in collaboration with other women’s organizations.”55 WIDF Vice-President Freda Brown wrote about the Stockholm Conference in WWW in 1967. Demonstrations were organized before US embassies on July 20, the anniversary of the signing of the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam, and in 1967, postcards were sent to the US President on World Peace Day, September 1.56 In April 1968, the WIDF organized a meeting in Paris “between the women of Viet Nam and of the countries whose governments are involved in the aggression against the Vietnamese people.”57 The Paris Peace negotiations started in November 1968. Nguyen Thi Binh or “Madame Binh,” Vice-President of the South Vietnam Liberation Women’s Union (SVLWU), was the main negotiator for the South Vietnam Liberation Front, as WWW proudly announced.58 The same issue of WWW reported on an international delegation the WIDF had sent to Paris, led by the President of the Union of French Women, to speak to the representatives of the governments of the United States and the DRV. Mr. Harriman, Chief of the US Delegation, was too busy to receive “any delegations,” but they were allowed to hand over a statement. They did get an interview with Mr. Xuan Thuy, Minister of State and Chief of the DRV Delegation.59 On her trip to the DRV in September 1968, Hugel was received by the Prime Minister, Mr. Pha.m

54 “Appeal,” Vietnam [Bulletin]—WIDF International Vietnam Solidarity Committee 2 (1967): 4–5. The WIDF referred to the IVSC’s publication as its Vietnam Bulletin; hereafter Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC. It appeared from 1965 to 1974. 55 WIDF, “1964–1969 Activities Report,” 1–2 on Vietnam (in WASI); Hugel, “Report,” 3–5; WWW , no. 2 (1967), part of “Women Cannot Remain Silent,” WWW , no. 3 (1967), 12. Two leading women represented the WIDF at the Special Conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization in Cairo, 1–3 July 1967, ibid.; the WIDF also participated in that conference in October 1968, Hugel, “Report,” 1. 56 WWW, no. 3 (1967); the 20 July action is mentioned in later years as well. 57 WIDF, “1964–1969 Activities Report,” 1; Women of Vietnam, no. 2 (1968), 27–28. 58 WWW, no. 4 (1968), next to Table of Contents. Women of Vietnam, no. 1 (1969),

22–23, reported on it under the title “Big Event in Paris.” 59 WWW , no. 4 (1968), 45.

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` V˘an Ðông, who asked her to “thank the women of the entire world for us but […] tell them sincerely it is necessary to do even more.”60 At the WIDF’s sixth World Congress of Women, held in Helsinki in June 1969, Nguyen Thi Chon delivered a report on behalf of Nguyen Thi Binh. Madame Phan Thi. An, a member of the VWU Bureau and of the National Assembly of the DRV, also spoke at the Congress’ opening session.61 The Congress adopted a Resolution on Vietnam62 expressing support for the proposals for peace of the South Vietnam Liberation Front and calling for various forms of political action. In the same month, the newly elected Finnish WIDF President Hertta Kuusinen,63 Cécile Hugel, and another WIDF delegate attended the World Peace Council’s “Berlin World Assembly for Peace.”64 These and similar activities of participating in international meetings, sending letters of protest and telegrams to the US president65 and to the United Nations, organizing protests in front of embassies, and numerous forms of creative fundraising in which millions of women were involved, continued for many years.66

60 WWW , no. 1 (1969), 7. 61 Their reports were printed in full in WIDF, Documents and Information, Congress

Special II, 7 (1969), and excerpted in WWW , no. 3 (1969), which also reported that Binh had been appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Viet Nam (21). 62 Printed in WWW , no. 3 (1969). 63 Pirkko Kotila, “Hertta Kuusinen: The ‘Red Lady of Finland’,” Science & Society 70

(2006), 46–73. 64 WWW , no. 4 (1969), and see Günter Wernicke, “The World Peace Council and

the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: CUP 2003), 299–319. 65 An example of a telegram to President Nixon in Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC, no. 6 (1972), 2. 66 Examples in WWW and in Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC.

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“The Politics of Rape in Viet Nam”67 The WIDF regarded documenting and publicizing the violence of colonialism and imperialism in all its forms, and the police and military violence used to suppress uprisings and resistance against these policies, as a vital part of its work.68 This included documenting wartime rape, as in The Women of Asia and Africa (1948) and in the 1951 WIDF Report We Accuse! on the war in Korea.69 For the Vietnamese women’s organizations, it had been crucial to make known to the world the violence of French colonialism. Subsequently, they provided information on the violence used by the US-supported South Vietnamese regime and on what the American War in Vietnam (“defending freedom” or “bringing democracy,” as the GIs and the American public were told) meant, including the sexual violence, which the largely male press corps did not write about.70 In what follows, I will quote a few examples from WIDF and VWU and related publications. The reader be warned about the extreme cruelty described in the following quotes and excerpts. An “Appeal of the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam,” published on April 24, 1961, denounced the “American Imperialists and their lackeys [in South Vietnam who] have opened fire on young women and pregnant women. They have raped and disemboweled little girls of eight and old women of sixty or seventy. The women mourn their fathers, husbands, fiancés, and children, killed by the enemy. Many of them have been crippled for life by the atrocious tortures inflicted on them by the Americans and the traitors.”71 During the visit of the WIDF delegation to North Vietnam in February 1966 mentioned above, several women from the South came to meet them. One of them was Nguyen Thi Tho, who described the sexual 67 Eisen, Women of Viet Nam, title of Chapter 4. Eisen thanked the VWU for “taking time to answer the questions we posed”, 5. 68 McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism,” also discusses this. 69 WIDF Report We Accuse! (1951), 16, 25, 27, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42 (available in

WASI). Michelle Chase in “‘Hands off Korea!’: Women’s Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba,” Journal of Women’s History 32,3 (2020), 64– 88, emphasises, “how important it was that the 1951 WIDF commission raised the issue of sexual violence against women, an issue more commonly attributed to second-wave feminists from the United States” (78); see As One!, 244 about Malaya. 70 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 87. 71 The Appeal is quoted in Vietnamese Studies, no. 10 (1966), 39.

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torture she had endured ten years earlier, during two-and-a-half years of imprisonment in the infamous Poulo Condor and Fu Loi prisons, where political prisoners were frequently held and tortured. In the wording of the 1966 report: “they had inserted snakes and a piece of a broken bottle into her vagina, nails under her finger nails, and they had poured petrol over her hand which had then been put on fire. She also spoke about the suffering of her fellow female prisoners who for four months had been kept completely naked in foul dungeons.”72 At the Session of the WIDF-IVSC in Berlin in February 1967, the Report delivered by the Delegation of the Union of Women for the Liberation of South Vietnam included equally brutal descriptions, complete with names, places, and dates. “Soldiers of the 1st US Marine division and thugs from Pac chung Hy [Park Chung Hee]’s South Korean ‘Blue Dragon’ brigade, went through the area [of the two districts of Son Tinh and Binh Son, Quang Ngãi Province] with fire and sword.” The much longer text mentions that “they took turns raping women until they were dead, among them girls of 11 and 12.”73 The M˜y Lai massacre was the murder of more than five hundred unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by US troops on the morning of May 16, 1968. The revelation a year later of this atrocity shocked the world, and had a profound impact on public opinion in the United States.74 “My Lai” also included gang-rape before the killings, although this may have been given less attention at the time. Under the heading “Hundreds of My Lais,” Women of the Whole World in 1971 published excerpts from a report put together by the VWU. The article described large-scale cases of brutal rape and murder, as well as the torture of women prisoners, and the poisoning by chemicals and gas.75 The last example is an article in the journal Women of Vietnam about “Vietnamese Women’s Plight in Saigon ij

72 Une délégation de la Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes, 17–18 (quote translated by the author). 73 Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC, no. 2 (1967), 16. For more on this topic, see e.g.

Charles K. Armstrong, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 33, 4 (2001): 527–540. 74 See e.g., “Murder in the Name of War—My Lai,” BBC News: World Edition (20 July 1998), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/64344.stm. 75 WWW , no. 4 (1971), 8–9. On My Lai see also Eisen, Women, 60, and Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 104–105.

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Administration’s Prisons,” which described a number of cases of sexual torture.76 Feminist activists and scholars have written about the Vietnam War, including “the politics of rape in Viet-Nam,” since at least the early 1970s. The WIDF and its publications sometimes figure in this work, indicating its presence in this broader left-feminist network. In 1972, the prominent socialist women’s historian Sheila Rowbotham published Women, Resistance and Revolution, whose section on Vietnam first refers to “Vietnamese women at a conference of the Women’s International Democratic Federation”77 and later describes in more detail that same WIDF meeting in October 1970 in Budapest, where “women from America” talked with the Vietnamese delegates.78 Rowbotham paid considerable attention to the sexual violence happening as part of the war, and wrote that “[i]n 1970 a particularly flagrant and horrible case of rape drove a group of women in Saigon, who had not been part of the national liberation struggle, to form a Committee of Women fighting for the right to live and the dignity of Vietnamese women.”79 This Committee was renamed “Women’s Movement for the Right to Live” or WRL in October 1970. Arlene Eisen’s well-known Women of Viet-Nam opened with a quote from WIDF General Secretary Cécile Hugel.80 In her chapter about rape in Vietnam, Eisen describes the founding and work of the WRL, pointing out that they “staged demonstrations, boycotts, strikes in the marketplaces and other mass activities to campaign for their goals.”81 Robin Morgan’s 1984 Sisterhood is Global refers to this Committee as having been “formed in Saigon to protest the rape and torture to which many women were subjected. The Committee, in coalition with the Women’s Union and many Buddhist nuns, led demonstrations demanding Thieu’s resignation.”82 76 Women of Vietnam, no. 1 (1974), 18–19. 77 Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972; repr. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1974), 207. This was, in turn, a quote from Off Our Backs, 14 December 1970. 78 Rowbotham, Women, 218–220, 218, note 20. Rowbotham spoke at a 1978 meeting organized by the NAW; invitation to the event, CS papers, Box 22/1. 79 Rowbotham, Women, 212. 80 Cécile Hugel, “In Vietnam I Felt Proud to be a Woman,” WWW , no. 1 (1969);

Eisen, Women, 5. 81 Eisen, Women, 73–75; Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement,” 2. 82 Morgan, Sisterhood, 727.

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In addition to the many instances that activists and scholars explicitly named rape, often it was suggested in other words (“the American Jack Ketches are [ …] ravishing our women”)83 or otherwise hinted at.84 What I have not emphasized here is the scale of military prostitution as a consequence of the war in South Vietnam, a very big topic in itself. Around 1975, there were 400,000–500,000 women doing sex work in South Vietnam, mainly to serve the GI population. Most of these women had no other way to earn a living for themselves or their families due to the systematic destruction of land and the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people from their villages.85 Arlene Eisen in 1974, Susan Brownmiller in 1975, and Marie Gina Weaver in 2010 understood the violence committed by American GIs as largely induced by the men’s training and indoctrination, producing a “toxic masculinity” in Weaver’s words, and as a practice that the military “encouraged.” They discuss that rape was committed out of feelings of fear, revenge, racism, and hatred of women suspected of fighting for the liberation forces (“Vietcong Whores,”86 “a Commie”87 ). In any case, rape was so common that US soldiers referred to it as “pretty SOP,” standard operating procedure.88 And in other words by two veterans: “These people are aware of what American soldiers do to them, so naturally they tried to hide the young girls” (referring to 1967–1968); “It was just part of the everyday routine, you know” (1968–1969).89

83 The Bomb and the Cradle (Berlin: WIDF, 1973), 6. The brochure was published “in cooperation with Union of Vietnamese Women”. Jack Ketch was an infamous executioner employed by King Charles II of England. His name is proverbially used for death, Satan, and executioner. 84 Nguy˜ ên Thi. Ði.nh, “Vietnam: ‘The Braided Army’,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, 728–730; a longer version in WWW , no. 3 (1981). 85 Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy, 105, mentions “300,000 to 400,000 prostitutes in Saigon primarily serving the GI population”; Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement,” 12–13, note 64; Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC, no. 2 (1967), 17, 20. 86 Eisen, Women, 72. 87 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 109. 88 Eisen, Women, 69; Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 107; Weaver, Ideologies, 57. 89 Quoted in Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 110–111. Weaver, Ideologies, 51: “as early

as 1967, eyewitnesses reported rape as an unofficial military policy”.

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It is clear that the rape of Vietnamese women was acknowledged as a significant part of the violence of French colonialism,90 the French and American Wars in Vietnam and the repression by the RVN army and security police.91 Various scholars discuss that PLAF and North Vietnamese Army soldiers were much less likely to commit this type of violence and explain the ideological, political, and strategic reasons why this was the case.92 As we have seen, Vietnamese women themselves addressed the sexual violence and its consequences in a number of ways, including the many publications they made or helped prepare and the talks they gave at international meetings, through their cooperation in the Women’s Movement for the Right to Live (founded by representatives of seventeen religious, political, and professional women’s organizations in South Vietnam),93 and by actively formulating requests for support from women and their organizations around the world.94 Historian An Nguyen emphasizes that Vietnamese women’s activism went across political boundaries,95 within Vietnam and abroad. The delegation of the SVLWU at the WIDF Council meeting in Varna, Bulgaria in 1972,96 spoke about the charges recently brought against the president of the WRL (the feminist lawyer Ngô Bá Thành) by the Saigon govern-

90 Discussed e.g. by Hô ` Chí Minh in 1922 (quoted in Turner, Even the Women, 28) and 1925 (quoted in Vietnamese Studies, no. 10 (1966), 26); see also Rowbotham, Women, 209, and Ngo Vinh Long, Vietnamese Women in Revolution and Society: The French Colonial Period (Cambridge: Vietnam Resource Center, 1974). 91 In addition to the examples given above, Nguy˜ ên Thi. Ði.nh mentions cases in her memoir No Other Road to Take, 66, 80, 81, 85. 92 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 90–92; Eisen, Women, 67–68; Turner, “‘Vietnam’,” 104–105. Carol Harrington, Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) traces and discusses the variation in international political attention to wartime rape during the twentieth century. 93 Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement,” 2. 94 Vietnamese women’s very active role within the WIDF, as documented throughout

this chapter, is one of the reasons why I disagree with Yulia Gradskova’s argument in “Women’s International Democratic Federation, the ‘Third World’ and the Global Cold War from the late-1950s to the mid-1960s,” Women’s History Review 29,2 (2020), 270– 288. 95 Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement,” 2. 96 For the Bulgarian WIDF affiliate, see Kristen R. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex:

Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

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ment.97 Another important WRL leader, the Buddhist nun Ni Su, Hu`ynh Liên, participated in the WIDF World Congress of Women, held in East Berlin in October 1975.98 This is also to say, then, that the “ideologies of forgetting” that Weaver writes about in her 2010 book, in which she emphasizes the silence that Vietnamese women as a whole keep about their experiences, were established in the postwar and contemporary situation, in which the Vietnamese government also does not want to address this aspect of the war.99 The publications mentioned above, as well as many others, also reported on the impact of the bombings (with napalm, perforating bombs, thermite bombs, cluster bombs, etc.) and chemical weapons. Sheila Rowbotham in 1972 mentioned “the toxic gases which wipe out vegetation, and have caused since 1961 an abnormally high percentage of miscarriages, stillbirths and deformed children, born with large heads and small brains.”100 The Bomb and the Cradle, a 65-page brochure the WIDF published together with the VWU in 1973, besides discussing and showing with dozens of pictures the impact of the US bombing campaigns, also mentioned the impact of the chemical warfare and its disastrous consequences on women and their reproductive abilities.101 According to Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh, speaking in 1974 at the fourth national Congress of the VWU, the United States used more than a million tons of toxic chemicals in Vietnam.102

97 Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVCS, no. 9 (1972), 3; and Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement,” more broadly on the fierce repression against the WRL and the Third Force movement, “an informal coalition of anti-war and neutralist elements in urban South Vietnam” the WRL was part of (2). 98 For more on these two women, Nguyen, “Vietnam Women’s Movement.” Pictures of prominent Congress participants, with captions on the back, CS papers, Box 22, no. 3. 99 Rather, it prioritizes repairing its political and economic ties to the West, thus Weaver, Ideologies, 27. 100 Rowbotham, Women, 212. 101 Bomb and Cradle, 6, 53. 102 Women of Vietnam: special Congress issue (1974), 37.

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The National Assembly of Women (NAW): The Example of the Campaign for the Hanoi Hospital “Friendship of the Women of the World” Providing resources for medical services was an important part of the international humanitarian aid for Vietnam. “Money, medicines, ambulances, clothing, etc., are being collected all over the world,” wrote the WIDF-IVSC in 1967.103 The WIDF publication Documents and Information (no. 8, 1968) listed numerous and creative activities by women around the world against the war and in support of “the heroic women of Vietnam.”104 With its focus on the war’s impact on women, the WIDFIVSC in March 1969, “on the suggestion of the Vietnam Women’s Union,”105 decided to build a Medical Centre for Women and Children in Hanoi, to be named “Friendship of the Women of the World.”106 The plan for the Hanoi Hospital was presented to a broader audience at the WIDF’s Sixth World Congress of Women in Helsinki in 1969. Focused fundraising activities began after a WIDF delegation of specialists had visited Vietnam to prepare more concrete plans, and the various WIDF publications described numerous examples. The Vietnam Bulletin no. 10, 1972, for example, listed protest and solidarity actions in twenty countries (including Bangladesh, Egypt, Israel, and Madagascar), and mentioned significant sums of money collected by women in Finland, the GDR, and Japan for the Hanoi Hospital, also referred to as the “Mother and Child Centre in Hanoi.”107 One of the WIDF member organizations deeply involved in this campaign was the British National Assembly of Women (NAW), which

103 Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC, no. 2 (1967), 12. 104 “Women Throughout the World Support Their Sisters in Viet Nam,” Women of

Vietnam, no. 1 (1974), 20–24, likewise describes actions in dozens of countries. 105 “Resolution of the International Solidarity Committee,” WWW , no. 2 (1969). 106 Hugel, “Report,” 5. The centre was in fact not built from scratch, but they rebuilt,

modernized, and equipped an existing one; see Professor Dinh Van Thang (director of the Institute), “The Hanoi Institute for the Protection of Mother and New-Born Child,” Women of Vietnam, no. 3/4 (1971), 39–43. 107 More countries and donated sums e.g. in “International Solidarity,” Women of Vietnam, no. 3/4 (1970) and no. 2 (1971), 37.

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had been established in 1952.108 NAW Chair Connie Seifert’s archive includes some letters about the preparation of the Hanoi Hospital. In 1971,109 the NAW set up the “International Friendship Hospital for Women and Children in Hanoi – British Appeals Committee” (a long name it abbreviated as IFHWCH British Appeals Committee), whose 37 sponsors, according to its letterhead, included luminaries, many from the world of arts and letters, such as Peggy Ashcroft, Germaine Greer, Dorothy Hodgkin, Glenda Jackson, Dorothy Needham, Vanessa Redgrave, and Mai Zetterling. President was Dame Sybil Thorndike.110 NAW Chair Connie Seifert attended the meeting of the WIDF-IVSC in Varna in April 1972, and for years was very actively involved in the various WIDF Vietnam activities. In November 1973, she visited Vietnam as part of a small delegation of British and US women.111 At the WIDF Council Meeting in Warsaw, 20–23 May 1974, Seifert spoke about the impact of torture, mentioning two women she had spoken to who had been tortured during their imprisonment in Saigon.112 In an undated statement, the IFHWCH British Appeals Committee wrote that it had collected about £ 5000, enough to buy a fully equipped ambulance for the hospital. The campaign had been directed to the wider public because, “as supporters of the [Vietnam] Medical Aid Committee [founded in London in 1965 with Dorothy Hodgkin as Vice-President], we were anxious not to jeopardise their appeals in any way.”113 The campaign ran until the end of 1975.

108 Although British women were involved in setting up the WIDF (see WIDF 1945 Congress Report), it was not until 1952 that the British member organization was established, called the National Assembly of Women. Monica Felton, a member of the WIDF investigative committee to Korea in 1951, was its first president. See Nora Bramley, Sisters in Solidarity: A History of the First 60 Campaigning Years of the NAW 1952–2012 (available at http://sisters.org.uk/nawhistory.pdf), and a 1983 special souvenir issue of its journal Sisters (https://www.sisters.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/1963-sou venir_compressed.pdf). 109 “Five years ago” mentioned in a “Letter to the Editor” (29 June 1976), CS papers, Box 5, Vietnam. 110 CS papers, Box 22, no. 1. 111 Newspaper clippings, statements, and correspondence, CS papers, Box 23, no. 1. 112 Typescript, “Contribution by Connie Seifert, Chairman, National Assembly of

Women, Great Britain,” CS papers, Box 21, no. 2. 113 CS papers, Box 22, no. 1.

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In early June 1976, the IFHWCH British Appeals Committee’s President Dame Sybil Thorndike died. A few weeks later, Jane Segal and Connie Seifert wrote a letter to the Editor of the Morning Star, and to Thorndike’s family, describing how they had succeeded with the IFHWCH British Appeals Committee in getting “the support of many sponsors from women well known in public life, in the academic and cultural world, the trade unions, the co-operative movement, etc. Dame Sybil showed immediate interest … her last major commitment was to Vietnam.”114 Another WIDF-NAW delegation visited Vietnam in March 1976, and it returned with a detailed description of the building materials needed and the progress of the whole project. Their report also mentioned that WIDF national member organizations had been able to make available three-quarters of the sum required to finance the hospital but that they were still about half a million dollars short.115 Although their campaign had ended in 1975, subsequently the British Committee was able to send beds as well, as Connie Seifert wrote in a letter to the President of the VWU in January 1977.116 The IFHWCH British Appeals Committee was folded up in the summer of 1977. While the papers of the British NAW and its IFHWCH British Appeals Committee are incomplete, they do allow us to see some of the broad support for the Hanoi Hospital project, as is clear from the Committee’s letterhead and aptly described in Segal and Seifert’s letter. The WIDF had hoped to open the Hanoi Hospital in 1975, the year the United Nations, at the initiative of the WIDF, had proclaimed International Women’s Year,117 but this proved too ambitious. The opening of the institute, “a modern health centre for gynaecological care and consultations, and for the new-born,” and the “main establishment of this kind in the DRVN,” took place on 21 November 1979. Freda Brown, the

114 CS papers, Box 22/1. 115 “Information on the Visit of a WIDF Delegation to Vietnam,” Attachment 1 to

Circular Letter by Fanny Edelman (26 April 1976), 3, CS papers, Box 22/1. 116 Letter CS (12 January 1977), CS papers, Box 22/1. 117 WIDF General Secretary Fanny Edelman, Preface to The Bomb and the Cradle.

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Australian WIDF President since 1975, attended the inauguration,118 as did Valentina Tereshkova, President of the Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC) and WIDF Vice-President.119 After the opening, the WIDF and its member organizations continued to offer material support for the Hospital. In 1981, the Soviet Women’s Committee, for example, issued a badge “at the disposal of the national organizations affiliated to the WIDF for sale,” the proceeds of which would go to the Friendship Hospital (Illustration 3.1).120

118 Lisa Milner in “‘The Unbreakable Solidarity of Women Throughout the World with Heroic Vietnam’: Freda Brown, Women’s Organisations and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement,” History Australia 15,2 (2018): 255–270, 276, describes the Hanoi Hospital as the “most significant outcome of Freda’s transnational activism, and a major project for WIDF together with UAW and other women’s organisations worldwide,” but does not provide evidence for the claim about Brown’s crucial role. 119 Large-scale activities on behalf of Vietnam took place in the Soviet Union, often coordinated by the SWC; see e.g. Documents and Information, no. 8 (1968), 19, and Vietnam [Bulletin] WIDF-IVSC, no. 10 (1972), 10–11. A 177-page file in the SWC’s archive in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF, fond 7928, op. 3, d. 4866a), “Documents for the construction in Hanoi of the Centre for the Protection of Mother and Child” (contract, statement, lists, contract, references, correspondence), 1973–1979, gives another indication of its involvement (with thanks to Alexandra Talaver). For the broader picture, see the chapter here by Julie Hessler, “The Soviet Public and the Vietnam War: Public Mobilization, Public Organizations, and Activism, 1965–1973”; Pamphlet “Women of the World: Vietnam Its Women and Children Need Our Solidarity,” 3; Women of Vietnam, no. 4 (1979), 29–30; WWW , no. 2 (1980), 10, on the opening; WWW , no. 2 (1981), 56; Duong-Thi-Duyen, “The First Year of the Hanoi Centre”. 120 CS papers on SWC; WWW , no. 2 (1981), picture of the badge. The SWC had issued an earlier badge in their campaign for the Hanoi Hospital; see Women of Vietnam, no. 2 (1971), 37, picture and caption.

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Illustration 3.1 Badge issued by the Soviet Women’s Committee in support of the Hanoi Hospital.

Conclusion As an organization set up to defend peace and fight for women’s rights— two issues it understood to be mutually intertwined—the WIDF played a significant role in the worldwide campaigns for peace and against the wars in Vietnam, participating in and working together with all major leftist or progressive initiatives against the Vietnam War. But unlike most participants in the global protest and solidarity movements, the WIDF principally emphasized how the violence of imperialism, neocolonialism, and warfare, here conducted by first France and then the United States, affected women and children in particular. The WIDF developed and coordinated campaigns for and by women, and from the 1940s supported

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and cooperated with the VWUs. The WIDF, in close collaboration with the latter, highlighted the war’s impact on women. A lasting example of the WIDF’s political and material support for the women in Vietnam was the Friendship Hospital in Hanoi, that opened in 1979. There are several reasons for the ignorance about the WIDF’s role regarding Vietnam. One element is the US-centeredness of the Anglophone literature, which usually limits the story of the “War in Vietnam” to the post-1965 era, the years of the large-scale US bombardments and deployment of ground troops. For the Vietnamese, however, this was but a new phase in a war for independence that had begun in 1945/1946. Another element is broader ignorance about the WIDF— often still dismissed as a mere communist front organization located in “the East” or restricted to a socialist bloc bubble—and its role in actively building transnational coalitions of anti-war, solidarity, and/or left-feminist projects.

Bibliography Anderson, David L., The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Anh, Ho Dieu, “Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh,” in The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (2nd ed., Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2011), 835–836. Armstrong, Elisabeth, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs 41,2 (Winter 2016): 305–331. Armstrong, Charles, “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 33, 4 (2001): 527–540. Arnold, John, History: A Very Short Introduction: Very Short Introductions 16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bonfiglioli, Chiara, “Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms and the YugoSoviet Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia,” in Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present, ed. Francisca de Haan et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 59–74. Bramley, Nora, Sisters in Solidarity: A History of the First 60 Campaigning Years of the NAW 1952–2012, http://sisters.org.uk/nawhistory.pdf. Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975; repr. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993). Chase, Michelle, “‘Hands off Korea!’: Women’s Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba,” Journal of Women’s History 32,3 (2020): 64–88.

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Curthoys, Barbara, and Audrey McDonald, More Than a Hat and Glove Brigade: The Story of the Union of Australian Women (Sydney: Bookpress, 1996). Delbo, Charlotte, Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997). DuBois, Ellen C., “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender & History 3,1 (1991): 81–90. Durand, Dominique, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier: une femme engagée, du PCF au procès de Nuremberg (Paris: Balland, 2012). Eisen Bergman, Arlene, Women of Viet Nam (San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1974). Frazier, Jessica M., Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Ghodsee, Kristen R., Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). Gradskova, Yulia, “Women’s International Democratic Federation, the ‘Third World’ and the Global Cold War from the Late-1950s to the Mid-1960s,” Women’s History Review 29,2 (2020): 270–288. Haan, Francisca de, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19,4 (2010): 547–573. Harrington, Carol, Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Ilic, Melanie, “Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 157–174. Kim, Suzy, “The Origins of Cold War Feminism during the Korean War,” Gender & History 31,2 (2019): 460–479. Kotila, Pirkko, “Hertta Kuusinen: The ‘Red Lady of Finland’,” Science & Society 70 (2006): 46–73. Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram (New York: Harmony Books, 2007). Long, Ngo Vinh, Vietnamese Women in Revolution and Society: The French Colonial Period (Cambridge: Vietnam Resource Center, 1974). McDuffie, Erik S., Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). McGregor, Katharine, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25,6 (2016): 925–944.

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McMahon, Robert J., The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Milner, Lisa, “‘The Unbreakable Solidarity of Women Throughout the World with Heroic Vietnam’: Freda Brown, Women’s Organisations and the AntiVietnam War Movement,” History Australia 15,2 (2018): 255–270. Morgan, Robin, Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). Neville, Peter, Ho Chi Minh (New York: Routledge, 2019). Nguyen, An Thuy, “Vietnam Women’s Movement for the Right to Live: A Non-Communist Opposition Movement to the American War in Vietnam,” Critical Asian Studies 51 (2019): 75–102. ´ No Other Road to Take: Memoir of Mrs. Nguyˆ˜en Thi. Ði.nh, recorded by Trân Huang Nam, trans. Mai V. Elliott, (10th ed., Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2003). Obermeyer, Ziad, Christopher J. L. Murray, and Emmanuela Gakidou, “Fifty Years of Violent War Deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: Analysis of Data from World Health Survey Programme,” BMJ: British Medical Journal 336,7659 (2008): 1482–1486. Pieper Mooney, Jadwiga E., “Fighting Fascism and Forging New Political Activism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2013), 52–72. Ratner, Merle, “Agent Orange: The Unmet Responsibility of the United States,” in Vietnam: From National Liberation to 21st Century Socialism, ed. Duncan McFarland, Paul Krehbiel and Harry Targ (New York: Changemaker Publications, 2013). Rowbotham, Sheila, Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Stur, Heather Marie, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Taylor, Sandra C., Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). Turner, Karen G., “‘Vietnam’ as a Women’s War,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). Turner, Karen G., with Phan Thanh Hao, Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1998). Wang, Zheng, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). Weaver, Gina Marie, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

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Wernicke, Günter, “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), 299–319. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, “Hypervisibility and Invisibility: Asian/American Women, Radical Orientalism, and the Revisioning of Global Feminism,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 211-229. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Young, Marilyn B., The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).

PART II

State Socialism: Second-World Solidarity, Propaganda, and Humanitarianism from Above and from Below

CHAPTER 4

The Soviet Public and the Vietnam War: Political Mobilization, Public Organizations, and Activism, 1965–1973 Julie Hessler

Propaganda against the United States’ war in Vietnam was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and early 1970s and spawned a massive campaign for “moral and material aid” to the USSR’s allies in Vietnam. Coordinated by Soviet public organizations, this campaign staged an impressive number of events, involved tens of millions of Soviet citizens, and made substantial donations to North Vietnam and allied insurgents in the south. It was tied to international initiatives, which partly shaped Soviet solidarity activities and reinforced a morally charged interpretation of the war. Soviet commentators construed the global protest movement as an expression of democracy, pitted against an imperialist cabal of the reigning capitalist powers. The eventual American withdrawal, in

J. Hessler (B) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_4

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this light, demonstrated the capacity of “world public opinion” to exert pressure on international aggressors. Much like Western participants in an array of solidarity initiatives and anti-war movements in the West, Soviet people were encouraged to believe that they could “make a difference” by taking a personal stance against an evil war.1 Soviet ideology was typically produced in an echo chamber, and the official view on Vietnam was no exception. Soviet citizens heard about the war “from the source,” through publicized testimonials of Vietnamese fighters, victims, and communists. These witnesses engaged citizens’ passions in the USSR and elsewhere by drawing attention to American atrocities, many of which have never been formally acknowledged, let alone punished, in the United States, to this day. Valuable as their testimonies were, they represented a narrow range of political views in Vietnam, and in this sense distorted Soviet understanding. Unlike the American activists who forged connections with Vietnamese insurgents or managed to make their way to Hanoi, Soviet citizens had no access to perspectives outside the officially sanctioned voices.2 Similarly, their experience of “world public opinion” was filtered through international organizations that to varying degrees functioned as communist fronts. Yet to ignore these organizations, and the international coalitions that they represented, is to miss a dimension of the solidarity movement that was taken seriously in many parts of the world. As the authors of a recent article on Vietnam protest in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia have noted, the significant differences between socialist-bloc solidarity campaigns and the Western protest movement have led Western scholars to dismiss the former as inauthentic. Unlike protesters in the West, Eastern-bloc citizens were mobilized by a unified array of governmental officials, the press, and officially recognized public organizations.3 1 On religious pacifism in a couple of Western contexts, see David E. Settje, Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Sabine Rousseau, La Colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2002). 2 Mary Hershberger, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); see also Jessica Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 3 James Mark et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50,3 (2015): 439– 464, 440; see also Günther Wernicke, “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar

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The actions they took in the name of solidarity with Vietnam did not generally originate at a grassroots level but were organized and scripted from above. Even so, we cannot assume that Soviet “moral and material aid” to Vietnam was meaningless to participants, or purely a product of coercion. How did Soviet ideology represent the Vietnam War? What actions did Soviet citizens, as members of public organizations, take under the rubric of moral and material aid? What impact did international connections and protest movements have on their activities? What, if any, conclusions can we draw about Soviet public attitudes towards the Vietnam War and the solidarity campaign? Finally, what limits did the Soviet government place on public Vietnam War activism, as evidenced by the fate of two protests, to be discussed in the concluding section, that diverged from the normal Soviet pattern? Answering these questions, this chapter introduces consciousness-raising, protest, and solidarity events in the Soviet Union as distinctive components of the global response to the Vietnam War.

Activism in an Approved Register: The Activities of Public Organizations The United States stationed military advisors in Indochina as early as 1955 and commenced operations against insurgents with the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam in 1961. American bombing of North Vietnamese targets in early 1965 was nonetheless perceived around the world as a new stage in Vietnam’s prolonged struggle.4 Responding to the attack on its ally, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), in March, Soviet newspapers rapidly endorsed solidarity activism on the part of Soviet citizens. Many newspapers coupled their coverage of the war with solidarity resolutions adopted by Soviet public organizations. These resolutions, reproduced under such headlines as “We are with

Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 299–320. 4 This struggle dates back not only to what is sometimes termed the First Indochina War (the struggle for independence from France) but to the terrible World War II experience under Japanese occupation, when at least 400,000 (and possibly as many as two million) Vietnamese died of starvation.

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you, Vietnam!,” conveyed the sense that Soviet citizens could and should take meaningful action on behalf of the “fraternal Vietnamese people.”5 “Meetings of protest” might be convened by any legitimately constituted Soviet collective, from the individual labour brigade, house committee, or study group to mass public organizations with substantial social and financial clout. Literally thousands of these meetings, with participants numbering in the millions, took place in spring, 1965. Incensed by reports of air attacks, civilian casualties, and the American use of defoliants and other chemical weapons in Vietnam, Soviet collectives appear to have issued solidarity resolutions in response to visceral public anger over “America’s dirty war.”6 By April, some government officials had begun to see these meetings and resolutions as an important part of the Soviet posture towards the war and to advocate giving public organizations an official assignment of mobilizing a solidarity campaign.7 Public organizations simultaneously began to direct financial resources towards Vietnam. What kinds of “material aid” they offered and how they organized the collection of funds depended on the organization. In most cases, the recipients of material aid were the North Vietnamese counterparts of the Soviet organization in question, as well as cognate associations under the aegis of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam. Soviet relationships with these organizations predated 1965. During what Soviet commentators routinely termed the DRV’s “decade of peaceful construction” after the 1954 Geneva Accords, Soviet trade unions, women’s organizers, Komsomol officials, and so on regularly corresponded with their North Vietnamese counterparts, and the Soviet organizations also provided modest amounts of financial support.

5 E.g. Literaturnaia gazeta (5 March 1965), 1; Pravda Ukrainy (26 February 1965). 6 Pravda (27 March 1965; 13 March 1966). See also M. I. Isaev and A. S. Cherny-

shev, Sovetsko-v’etnamskie otnosheniia (Moscow, Mysl’, 1975), 191–192; V. N. Shchetka, “Obshchestvennost’ SSSR v dvizhenii solidarnosti s bor’boi v’etnamskogo naroda protiv imperialisticheskikh agressii SShA (1964–1973 g.g.),” in Massovye dvizheniia solidarnosti: traditsii i sovremennost’, ed. A. A. Makarenko (Kiev: Naukovo dumka, 1983), 18–41, 20, 22. 7 See “On the further activization of the protest campaign against U.S. aggression in Vietnam and the presentation of aid to the Vietnamese people,” postanovlenie of the Union of Soviet Friendship Societies (SSOD) executive committee, 3 April 1965, which assigned this task to public organizations, quoted in Shchetka, “Obschestvennost’ SSSR,” 22.

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After the establishment of the NLF in December 1960, Soviet organizations quickly established analogous relations with NLF affiliates. These interactions changed markedly as a result of the 1965 US offensive. While some routine correspondence continued to take place, Soviet organizations now viewed their interactions with Vietnam (North and South) primarily in terms of solidarity with a country that was the victim of international aggression.8 Moral and material aid crescendoed to a climax in 1968–1971 after which the Soviet organizations gradually resumed more routine interactions with their Vietnamese counterparts, especially in the DRV. With normalization, spontaneous gifts of material aid gave way to planned bilateral relations between the two countries, including their respective public organizations. Broadly speaking, the Soviet organizations involved in the solidarity campaign fell into two groups. Some were mass membership organizations, such as trade unions, creative artists’ or writers’ unions, or the Komsomol, while others took the form of a committee of notables: carefully chosen representatives of the cultural, intellectual, and political elite. Mass organizations were the heavyweights of the Soviet public sphere; as membership was practically obligatory, they commanded tremendous financial resources from member dues and frequently benefited from subsidiary commercial operations, such as the Komsomol’s low-budget Sputnik hotels. By contrast, the elite organizations, often called public committees, subsisted on state appropriations, but the prominence of their members lent them cultural authority beyond their relatively modest financial means. Not surprisingly, contributions to the Vietnamese cause reflected the distinctive strengths of the two kinds of organizations. Material aid was mostly the province of the mass organizations. These behemoths not only had funds in reserve, which they could allocate to the Vietnamese cause, but their enormous constituencies gave them an avenue for raising additional funds through direct appeals. It can be difficult to identify the origins of a given revenue stream. A clear example of central allocation was the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), which voted at a plenary session in spring, 1965, to donate

8 On a state-to-state level, this change was also dramatic. According to CIA estimates, between 1954 and 1964, the USSR donated more than five times as much economic aid to the DRV as military aid. From 1965–1967, military aid exceeded economic aid by 2.4–2.5 to one. CIA Intelligence Memorandum S-2659, “Communist Aid to North Vietnam,” (7 March 1968).

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the impressive sum of 800,000 rubles (nearly $900,000, at the official exchange rate) to Vietnam for the purchase of food, medicines, vehicles, and other wartime necessities. A VTsSPS delegation delivered this aid to the Hanoi-based Federation of Trade Unions of Vietnam at the end of May.9 This pattern continued, with large allocations (in the area of 500,000 rubles apiece) to both the Federation of Labour for the Liberation of South Vietnam and the Federation of Trade Unions of Vietnam the following year, and yet again in 1967 and 1968.10 Although the decisions to commit these funds to the Vietnamese labour unions were taken at open plenums of VTsSPS, with general consent, it is difficult to see them as truly public, or participatory, forms of aid. The mass organizations also leaned on their members, though, in ways that required personal civic action. The Komsomol, for example, successfully channelled young people’s idealistic condemnation of the war into volunteer work on behalf of the DRV and NLF. In 1966, several student construction brigades (summer work units formed under the auspices of the Komsomol with the idea of giving back to the society that paid for their education) publicly declared that they would dedicate all their earnings on Vietnam Day (20 July) to the Vietnam Aid Fund (established under the auspices of the Soviet Peace Fund in conjunction with the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee), which netted over 30,000 rubles.11 Schoolchildren were encouraged to collect scrap metal and to donate the proceeds to “fighting Vietnam”; in the later 1960s, they also collected school supplies to send to Vietnamese schoolchildren.12 At factories, Komsomol committees organized a “labour watch” [trudovaia vakhta] to monitor the progress of orders from Vietnam and to ensure their timely fulfilment.

9 Isaev and Chernyshev, Sovetsko-v’etnamskie otnosheniia, 193. 10 Ibid., 217; Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (henceforth GARF) f. 5451,

op. 45, d. 2035, ll. 190, 196; d. 2171, l. 34. 11 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii (henceforth RGASPI) (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 30, d. 338, l. 35. On the student construction brigades, see V. A. Pristupko, Studencheskie otriady: Istoricheskii opyt 1959–1990 godov (Moscow: Iz-vo Moskovskogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 2008); Benjamin Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 181–184. 12 RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 30, d. 405, l. 3.

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The largest Komsomol initiatives for mobilizing young people on behalf of Vietnam were All-Union Youth subbotniki and voskresniki, days of volunteer weekend labour to benefit the Vietnam Fund. These activities boasted truly mass participation, though the respective roles of coercion and voluntarism are impossible to gauge. In 1966, the All-Union subbotnik of October 16 drew an estimated six million participants; by April 27, 1970, the number had doubled to an estimated 12.5 million.13 Komsomol committees publicized the subbotniki with hand-made posters, announcements over factory and school loudspeakers, and, in at least one instance (Frunze, 1970), an air-drop of leaflets calling on all youth in the republic to devote the next day to “heroic Vietnam.” A subbotnik typically opened with a solidarity meeting, at which everyone present supported a resolution against American aggression and pledged to donate the wages of 3–10 hours’ labour to the Vietnam Aid Fund. Factory Komsomol cells aimed at a high enough turnout to ensure the regular functioning of each workshop, while students, schoolchildren, and others cleaned up city squares, built “Vietnam friendship alleys” and gardens, worked on youth-oriented construction projects, and, if they were part of amateur arts collectives, staged benefit concerts and performances.14 Not surprisingly, unless they went directly into the Vietnam Aid Fund as unrestricted donations, funds collected by the Komsomol Central Committee as a result of these actions supplied the needs of youth organizations in the DRV and the youth affiliates of the NLF. Something similar could be said of the Committee of Soviet Women, which mobilized women’s councils in enterprises, collective farms, apartment buildings, and towns around the country to raise money for Vietnam and to put together aid packages of food, clothing, and school supplies, which were then aggregated and forwarded to Vietnamese women’s organizations.15 Material aid was normally tendered in kind; Soviet organizations obtained supplies in the USSR based on requests from their Vietnamese sister organizations, and then shipped them to Vietnam. Donations by public organizations did not include weapon systems, which required state-to-state negotiations and the participation of Soviet military trainers.

13 Ibid., d. 338, l. 33; d. 633, ll. 13–16; and see also the entirety of d. 405. 14 Ibid., d. 388, ll. 36–7; d. 405, whole file; d. 633, 13–16. Which funds actually paid

wages for municipal public works projects to the Vietnam Aid Fund is murky. 15 GARF f. 7928, op. 3, d. 1604, ll. 21–2; d. 2493, l. 8.

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They did, however, reflect the role of nearly all Vietnamese recipient organizations as auxiliaries to combat. The Komsomol sent the Vietnamese youth groups light weapons, binoculars, and backpacks, and brought a group of young Vietnamese parachutists and pilots to the USSR for training; VTsSPS sent parachute silk; and in most consignments of goods from the Soviet organizations, the highest-value items were vehicles— heavy and light trucks, ambulances, buses, motorcycles, bicycles, and even three tugboats—which could be used to support military operations. That said, Soviet public organizations also contributed strictly humanitarian aid in significant quantities, including medicines and medical equipment, food, clothing, and school supplies. By the late 1960s, Soviet massmember organizations were outfitting whole laboratories and hospital wards on behalf of Vietnamese institutions, and their total contributions reached into the millions of rubles per year.16 The mass organizations had a unique capacity to mobilize the public for material aid, but the leading role in “moral aid” fell to highly dedicated, smaller groups. The most important of these were the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee and the Soviet–Vietnamese Friendship Society. Both organizations had an outer circle of institutional members (factories, educational institutions, etc., which signed on to their mission) as well as branches in the Union republics rooted in the republican cultural elite. At the all-Union level, they were effectively run by an inner circle of several dozen individual members, headed by the chairperson, deputy chair, and secretary, as well as a modest salaried staff. Most of the active members were prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, as well as a handful of party and state officials and celebrities from the spheres of science, labour, and sports. The Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee was chaired by the Tajik poet Mirzo Tursun-zade, while the leader of the friendship society was cosmonaut German Titov, the second person to orbit the earth.17 The two organizations had complementary missions. The Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee was intrinsically political; its brief was to support, and serve as a liaison with, national liberation movements 16 Ibid., d. 467, ll. 63–4; GARF f. 5451, op. 45, d. 2035, ll. 1, 15, 190 (for tugboats), 1; d. 2171, l. 34; GARF f. 7928, op. 3, d. 1431, l. 68; d. 2493, ll. 4–16. 17 Titov’s quite warm recollections about his experiences in, and work on behalf of, Vietnam through the mid-1960s can be found in the compendium, Plechom k plechu: Vospominaniia sovetskikh spetsialistov o sovmestnoi rabote s v’etnamskimi druz’iami v DRV i SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1965).

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in Asia and Africa and to represent the USSR at international Afro-Asian solidarity forums and to the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), a left-wing NGO based in Cairo. Friendship societies, by contrast, promoted cultural understanding and exchange with specific foreign countries, including countries from the capitalist world. That said, in the case of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural events often bled into political consciousness-raising, and the two organizations frequently collaborated to put them on. The Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, established in 1958, was one of the first Soviet public organizations to highlight Vietnam and its struggles. Its international partner, AAPSO, maintained a solidarity calendar commemorating various countries’ national liberation struggles, and in 1959, AAPSO designated 20 July Vietnam Day in commemoration of the signing of the Geneva Accords. The Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee celebrated Vietnam Day every year from at least 1960 to draw attention to the plight of this divided country and highlight the malign interference of “American imperialists” in Vietnamese affairs. Vietnam Day events in the early 1960s brought Vietnamese delegations to the Soviet Union, including the first delegations from the NLF, who came to the USSR not on governmental invitations but on invitations from the Solidarity Committee.18 By 1964, Vietnam Day celebrations had ballooned into a week of solidarity with “fighting Vietnam,” and then to three weeks each year as of 1965. In December 1966, after the escalation of the war, a cross-organizational Soviet Committee of Support for Vietnam was established under the aegis of the Solidarity Committee, along with a nation-wide Vietnam Aid Fund.19 In the later 1960s, solidarity weeks were supplemented by a month of Soviet–Vietnamese Friendship.20 During all of these commemorations, Solidarity Committee 18 For details on the Vietnam Day visits of 1962 and 1964, see Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996), 10–11; Kenes Kozhakhmetov, Dvizhenie solidarnosti i v’etnamskaia revoliutsiia (Almaty: Sanat, 1993), 20, 21, 34; A. A. Bregadze and A. N. Zakharikov, Internatsional’naia deiatel’nost’ sovetskikh trudiashchikhsia (1958–1966 gg.) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1967), 42. 19 A. S. Dzhasokhov, Edinstvo i vzaimodeistvie antiimperialisticheskikh natsional’noosvoboditel’nykh sil (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 69–70. Dzhasokhov was a long-time deputy chair of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee as well as a historian of the solidarity movement. 20 Isaev and Chernyshev, Sovetsko-v’etnamskie Dvizhenie solidarnosti, 28, 38–39, 41, 57.

otnosheniia,

192;

Kozhakhmetov,

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and friendship society members worked in concert with schools, factories, trade unions, palaces of culture, and other institutions and organizations to develop a series of mutually reinforcing events that would raise Soviet awareness of the culture, socialist development, and wartime suffering of Vietnam. A list of activities connected to the “Month of Soviet–Vietnamese Friendship and Solidarity with the Struggle of the Vietnamese People against American Aggression,” celebrated 20 July—20 August 1969, can provide a glimpse of the way that “friendship” and cultural ties were intertwined with solidarity in this period. The Soviet–Vietnamese Friendship Society organized more than 20,000 actions during the month, including meetings, assemblies, lectures, cultural exhibits, and film screenings of Soviet and Vietnamese films about Vietnam. It organized letter-writing campaigns with petitions to peace negotiators in Paris and letters of solidarity to the DRV. At every solidarity gathering and cultural event, the friendship society collected donations for the Vietnam Aid Fund; ten days into the month, there was already enough for a shipment of school supplies and equipment, which it sent to its Vietnamese counterpart, the Society for Vietnamese-Soviet Friendship. In Ukraine and Belarus, where the month was observed with particular zeal, nearly every town of any size celebrated “Days of Vietnam” with, at the least, a friendship evening or solidarity meeting.21 Some of these events were co-sponsored by the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, which also put on its own cultural exchange programs, such as staging performances of plays on Vietnamese themes or organizing photographic exhibits on contemporary Vietnam. More typical of the Solidarity Committee were “evenings of solidarity,” large-scale gatherings of the cultural and political elite at which political speeches by Soviet dignitaries, stirring Vietnamese testimonials, professions of the “eternal, unbreakable friendship between the Soviet and Vietnamese peoples,” and the inevitable adoption of an anti-American solidarity resolution were leavened with light entertainment, a banquet, and, frequently, a ballroom dance.22 Although the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee regularly organized meetings at factories, a distinctive feature of this organization’s consciousness-raising efforts was its focus on the

21 GARF f. 9576, op. 5, d. 298, ll. 13–18; Shchetka, “Obshchestvennost’ SSSR,” 27. 22 GARF 9540, op. 1, dd. 168, 169, 261, 301, 322 (all); d. 268, ll. 65–6 (examples

of festive evenings).

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Soviet elite, for which it seems to have facilitated cross-organizational sociability and nomenklatura cohesion, even as its formal purpose was to support revolutionary liberation movements in the Third World. Even so, both organizations, based on voluntary activism of the core members, kept Vietnam firmly in the public eye during the epoch of the Vietnam War.

International Organizational Ties and Soviet Solidarity Activities The Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee’s adherence to the AAPSO calendar is just one example of the way that international associations and campaigns structured the activities of the Soviet public in response to the Vietnam War. The associations in question were, naturally, positioned on the left, and commentators in Western Europe and the United States viewed them, with some justification, as communist fronts.23 In addition to the large number of communist groups among their dues-paying collective members, the associations received direct financial support from the USSR, though China, by this point more rival than friend, pushed its agenda as well.24 For Soviet organizations and activists, membership in such associations as AAPSO, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), the World Peace Council, and many others, was evidence not of the Soviet ability to infiltrate and manipulate global public opinion through sham democratic structures, as hostile Westerners alleged; rather, it proved the unity of Soviet

23 For example, see World Communism: A Handbook, 1918–1965, ed. Witold Sworakowski (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973). 24 For recent treatments of this rivalry, see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Specifically on Chinese-Soviet tensions in the WIDF, see Melanie Ilic, “Soviet women, cultural exchange, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 157–174, 169–170.

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people with the “progressive world public.”25 For the Soviets, it was critically important that the international associations include at least some non-communists and that they receive external validation. Most of them had consultative status with the United Nations and UNESCO, something often highlighted in Soviet publications about these associations, though the WIDF lost its UN status for a thirteen-year period due to US opposition.26 Several associations shared a similar trajectory, having emerged out of the anti-fascist alliance and idealistic hopes for East–West dialogue of the Second World War. The WFTU, WFDY, and WIDF were all established in 1945 in either Paris or London by a founding congress with delegates from a broad range of European and North American organizations. In each case, many non-communist Western European and North American affiliates distanced themselves from the association when the Cold War intensified at the end of the 1940s; and in each case, decolonization augmented the number of representatives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.27 By the mid-1960s, the associations prided themselves on bringing together the “three strands” of progressivism in the 25 Russ.: progressivnaia mirovaia obshchestvennost’ or (alt.) progressivnoe chelovechestvo. A. E. Efremov, Bor’ba za mir i mezhdunarodnoe profsoiuznoe dvizhenie (Moscow: Profizdat, 1978), 7. See also N. Al Kiseleva, Mezhdunarodnoe demokraticheskoe zhenskoe dvizhenie v bor’be za mir, ravnopravie i sotsial’nyi progress (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1982). On the participation of Soviet organizations in affiliated international organizations and conferences, see also V. V. Kravchenko, Obshchestvennye organizatsii SSSR na mezhdunarodnoi arene (Moscow: Mezhdunarodye otnosheniia, 1969), esp. 81–96. 26 Pride in UN status comes through strongly in V. Vasilenko, “Sovetskaia molodezh’ i mezhdunarodnye organizatsii,” Molodoi communist 11 (1969), 85–89, 86. On the WIDF, see Ilic, “Soviet Women,” 162–163; Francisca de Haan’s essay in this volume; idem, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: the Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Women’s History Review 19,4 (2010): 547–573. 27 For an overview, see the articles by Milorad Popov on the WIDF, WFDY, and WFTU in World Communism, ed. Sworakowski, 485–487, 492–495, 498–503. This was not limited to Westerners. Muslim women’s organizations in Indonesia, for example, became wary of participating in a “communist” association; see Katharine MacGregor, “The Cold War, Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-imperialist Movement, 1945– 1965,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31–51, 33. In that same volume, see also Pieper Mooney’s chapter, “Fighting Fascism and Forging New political Activism: the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the Cold War,” 52–72. Ilic comments that “some of the long-established Western’s women’s organizations came to regard WIDF as a ‘red threat’.” Ilic, “Soviet Women,” 160.

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contemporary world: communists from the socialist bloc; the national liberation movement in the Third World; and the progressive movement of the advanced capitalist countries.28 Overtly political, the associations advocated for a broad array of rights of the target group (women, youth, labour, post-colonial peoples, etc.), along with peace, socialism, and “a bright future for all of humanity.” Actions connected to the Vietnam War played an exceptionally prominent role in the activities of these international associations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was partly a result of Soviet influence, as Soviet members of the governing councils of the associations routinely promoted an anti-American line. Soviet interests were far from the only factor, however. The World Federation of Democratic Youth emphasized Vietnam primarily because it viewed the Vietnam campaign as its best recruiting device in Western Europe and the United States. In the later 1960s, the WFDY sought to position itself as the coordinator of all protests, worldwide, by “peace-loving young people” against American aggression in Vietnam. It coordinated protest campaigns on a vast scale, such as the “one thousand demonstrations” month of 1969. It collected 100,000 dollars for the purchase of “solidarity stamps” from the NLF; delivered “solidarity caravans” and “solidarity ships” with material aid from young people around the world; organized bilateral and multilateral youth talks (Vietnamese youth and progressive American youth, 1968; World Solidarity Meeting of Youth and Students with the Heroic Vietnamese People, 1969); and developed a multimedia campaign, “Youth Unmasks Imperialism,” featuring materials from Indochina.29 Equally popular in Havana and Damascus, Paris, Belgrade, and Delhi, these initiatives showed that Vietnam, more than any other cause of the epoch, united the “three strands of progressivism” that made up the youth federation. Something similar could be said of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which established an International Committee of Solidarity with South Vietnam in February 1963 to develop a coordinated 28 V. I. Fedosov, Internatsional’nye sviazi sovetskoi molodezhi (Voronezh: Iz-vo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1967), 4. 29 V. Moshniaga and Iu. Lun’kov, “Shkola internatsional’noi solidarnosti,” Molodoi communist 10 (1969), 83–89, h 86–87; V. P. Moshniaga, Molodezh’ v bor’be za mir i sotsial’nyi progress (Moscow: Mysl’, 1981), 201–202. See also the 1969 WFDY pamphlet With Vietnam to the Final Victory.

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program of moral and material aid.30 In addition to highlighting the Vietnam War at its own World Congress of Women, the WIDF took part in special conferences held by sister international organizations. In 1968 alone, these included the International Women’s Conference on Ending the War in Vietnam, sponsored by the French communist women’s organization and an American women’s peace group; the Emergency Conference on Vietnam organized by the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO); special sessions of the World Peace Council; the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam; and the Montreal Conference of Northern Hemisphere countries for ending the war in Vietnam.31 Soviet delegates from the Committee of Soviet Women participated in these events and contributed to the WIDF campaign in tangible ways. They prepared, upon request, 40,000 copies of a special Vietnam pin for members of the WIDF Solidarity Committee to sell as a fundraiser for “patriots” in South Vietnam.32 They supplied the WIDF with publicity materials on the war and on Soviet women’s solidarity with Vietnamese women. They signed onto every WIDF petition. They introduced a proposal at the World Congress of Women to dedicate International Children’s Day in 1970 to the plight of Vietnamese children. Most significantly in material terms, the Committee of Soviet Women provided funds and technical assistance to the major WIDF initiative of 1969–70, a maternity and paediatrics hospital and study centre to be built in Vietnam based on international donations.33 Cooperation with international public organizations exposed Soviet citizens to foreign—both Western and non-Western—political cultures. Even if participants in the international associations all identified with the Left, they expressed a wider range of viewpoints than Soviet delegates were accustomed to hearing at home. Soviet activists could find themselves on the defensive when Maoists accused the USSR of selling out to the capitalist powers, or alternatively when non-communists criticized Soviet repression, especially after the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. This latter dynamic played out at the Stockholm

30 N.B.: The World Federation of Trade Unions organized an identically-named international committee—see reports in GARF f. 5451, op. 69, d. 398. 31 GARF f. 7928, op. 3, d. 2111, ll. 5–6. 32 Ibid., l. 8; d. 2493, l. 11. 33 Ibid., d. 2493, ll. 1–3, 8.

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Conference on Vietnam, a key international forum for activists of diverse political and religious orientations.34 Bertil Svanström, the secretary of the Stockholm Conference, wrote in consternation to the Soviet Trade Union Council (VTsSPS), “The world situation in relation to Vietnam has considerably changed – and not for the better – through the occupation of Czechoslovakia and through the international repercussions of this action.” But Svanström had no desire to cut off relations with Soviet labour. Rather, seeing the momentum of international protest swing away from Vietnam to protests against the USSR, he urgently requested that VTsSPS send representatives to Stockholm for an emergency meeting: “If we do not meet soon to discuss the current problems, I am afraid the international protest movement will fall into pieces.”35 International associations thus occasionally created friction, but more often they opened up lines of communication with foreign groups, say, Quakers in the United States or Scandinavian trade unions. Once again, the Vietnam War was among the most important catalysts of dialogue and collaboration with “progressive forces” across the East–West divide. These dynamics can be observed through a trip by members of the Committee of Soviet Women to West Germany en route to a session of the WIDF Vietnam Solidarity Committee in March 1968. The Soviet women were invited, along with WIDF representatives from Hungary, Mexico, Japan, France, and the GDR, to speak to a solidarity meeting in Bremen. Before a crowd of 700 people, each of the guest speakers described the movement for solidarity with Vietnam in her own country and demanded the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and adherence to the Geneva Accords (reunification based on countrywide elections). Whereas the East German speaker received catcalls when she characterized the policy of the GDR as “peace-loving,” the audience listened attentively to the Soviet delegates. After they finished, a Catholic priest stood up and spoke out against the war, attributing its continuation to the “pathological fear of communism, the false equation of the American way of life with freedom, and the fear of losing prestige.” According to a women’s activist with the illegal West German Communist Party, this was the first time a Catholic priest had publicly criticized the West 34 On the Stockholm Conference, see Wernicke, “World Peace Council,” 307–308; Proletarskii internatsionalizm i razvitie sotsialisticheskikh stran Azii (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 367. 35 GARF f. 5451, op. 45, d. 2171, l. 41; and see VTsSPS reply, l. 34.

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German government. She ascribed his decision to attend and speak out to the presence of the Soviet women and asked if the Committee of Soviet Women could send a delegation to a similar meeting in Hamburg two months later.36 To sum up, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, participation in international meetings, conferences, protests, letter campaigns, and charitable drives connected to Vietnam helped structure the activities of Soviet public organizations. Usually sponsored by left-wing international associations with which the Soviet organizations were affiliated, these events broadened Soviet public contacts and helped promote Soviet interests abroad, while simultaneously exposing Soviet participants to democratic institutions, norms, and criticisms both from the left and from the right. Recent scholarship on France and Eastern Europe has shown that the Vietnam protest movement could be a school for dissent, providing discourses, images, and techniques that could be turned against domestic power structures.37 In the Soviet Union, by contrast, international associations and their solidarity initiatives seem to have served a legitimizing function. The fact that people were protesting against the Vietnam War not just in Moscow but all around the world, and not just on Communist Party orders but as a matter of individual conscience, helped shore up Soviet ideological positions, at least to activists in these campaigns.

Soviet Ideology, Vietnamese Testimonials, and Public Attitudes What exactly was the Soviet ideological view of the Vietnam War? The standard interpretation congealed early on—arguably well before the massive American bombing campaign and deployment of 1965. If, as Lenin had argued, “imperialism” was the “highest stage of capitalism,” the growing American involvement in Vietnam after the French withdrawal reflected the inexorable logic of history, which dictated that a waning imperialist power must give way to an ascendant, “neoimperial” one. Both were challenged in turn by the emergent force of the subject people. Revolutionized by a socialist party, the oppressed 36 GARF, f. 7928, op. 3, d. 1909, ll. 56–60. 37 Salar Mohandesi, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism,

and May’68,” French Historical Studies 41,2 (2018): 219–251; Mark et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’.”

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working people of Vietnam would necessarily prevail in the long run, but not without a bloody struggle, for the neo-imperialists would never give up their conquests voluntarily. In this rendition, the Vietnam War was fundamentally about national independence, just like Vietnam’s war of independence from France. More specific elements of the Soviet narrative focused on the Geneva Accords and the continuing partition of the country. South Vietnamese President Ngô Ðình Diê.m’s refusal to hold national elections across the north–south partition was ascribed to the Americans, whose neoimperial interests allegedly lay in Vietnam’s division and weakness. The heroic Vietnamese people, by contrast, were striving for unity, independence, socialism, and strength. American military actions against the NLF and against the DRV thus represented aggression against all Vietnamese people. Until the final withdrawal of US forces from Indochina following the January 1973 peace treaty, Soviet commentaries totally obscured the agency of anti-communist Vietnamese. Apart from a few corrupt American “puppets” [marionetki], Vietnamese people, in the Soviet story, were either “patriots” (communists or insurgents) or victims. Naturally, this did little to explain the flight of refugees from the north in the mid1950s, the continuation of the war from 1973 to 1975 after the American withdrawal, or the refugee crisis precipitated by reunification. It was a story, however, that drew heavily on a compelling source: the testimonials of Vietnamese themselves, which were recited at solidarity gatherings, published in media outlets of all kinds, and circulated orally through Soviet public organizations. Testimonials by foreigners were a standard part of the Soviet ideological repertoire from at least the mid-1950s. Newspapers and magazines carried columns with such headings as “around the world” or “among our friends,” and interviews or letters from foreign communists were routinely published under these headings. As a genre, testimonials from foreigners gestured towards authenticity while reinforcing Soviet ideological stereotypes, buttressing the official image of the USSR as a beacon for progressive humanity. During the Vietnam War, testimonials by Vietnamese communists helped Soviet citizens see the war as a morality play, with one side all evil and the other all good. “American imperialists and their lackeys” or “the American aggressors and their puppets” were counterposed against courageous freedom fighters and their true, Soviet friends. Letters from Vietnamese organizational leaders to sister organizations in the USSR (the following quotations are from the Federation

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of Vietnamese Trade Unions to Soviet Labour) highlighted the “barbaric” and “criminal” actions of American “bandits” and “pirates,” as well as their “deceitful” justifications of their “imperialist aggression.” Along with South Vietnam’s 500,000-man “puppet army,” the Americans “feverishly continue to increase their military forces” and used such weapons of mass destruction as chemical weapons and toxic gases to carry out a “scorched earth policy, destroying everything, burning everything, and killing everyone, patriots and the civilian population, including women, children and old people.”38 Similarly, from the Vietnamese Women’s Union to the Committee of Soviet Women came descriptions of crop destruction, bombing, and ruthless search and destroy methods in South Vietnam.39 Another letter told of the plight of women political prisoners in South Vietnam, some of whom were massacred when the “Americans and their puppets opened fire.” The Vietnamese women called on the “good and humane mothers and sisters of the whole world” to “raise their voice” against American aggression.40 These and similar messages were read at meetings and formed the basis of each new resolution and telegram of solidarity from the Soviet organization to its Vietnamese counterpart. Combined with ongoing reports and images of the war in the Soviet press, many of which derived from the same kinds of communiqués, as well as personal witness by Vietnamese students and visitors, Vietnamese testimonials presented a unified and believable account of the conflict. Wartime atrocities—the centrepiece of their portrayal—were, after all, a not-so-distant memory in the Soviet historical experience. These Vietnamese voices rang true, and in many respects, both in their accounts of particular episodes and in the big picture of the Americans’ brutal, destructive, and aggressive war in Indochina, they were true. The problem with them, from an analytical perspective, was that they were one-sided and came disproportionately from communist activists.

38 GARF f. 5451, op. 45, d. 1866, ll. 5–7; d. 2035, ll. 4, 26. Note: the rhetoric here

drew on a phrase popularized by AAPSO as the fundamental U.S. strategy in Vietnam, “kill everything, burn everything, destroy everything.”. 39 GARF f. 7928, op. 3, d. 667, l. 73. 40 Ibid., d. 2744, l. 54. For a comparison of how Vietnamese women’s groups deployed

a rhetoric of maternity in interactions with American women’s organizations, see Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy.

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Designed to mobilize Soviet support, they resonated with the preconceptions and emotions of their listeners. They elided politics, denied agency to anti-communists, and projected a false national unity against an outside threat. They said nothing about Chinese involvement in the war or—it goes without saying—about repression, wartime atrocities, or mass starvation due to communist agricultural policies in the DRV. These were real omissions, though in no way equivalent to the selective perspective driving US policy, and they did as much as the speakers’ melodramatic rhetoric to reduce the war to a simple story of good versus evil. The leaders of Soviet public organizations identified strongly with the version of the Vietnam War promoted by Soviet propaganda and Vietnamese testimonials. Tursun-zade, chair of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, was remembered by friends as “rejoicing” at other countries’ emancipation from colonialism and feeling “angered” by “imperialist” wars in Asia and Africa. His feelings were echoed by Konstantin Simonov, who spearheaded a special committee on Vietnam for the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union.41 How ordinary citizens viewed the war is more difficult to assess. Charitable contributions to the Vietnam Aid Fund were collected at workplaces, schools, and in all the major public organizations, and thus rested on well-oiled mechanisms of social pressure. There is, however, evidence that a considerable number of Soviet people felt personally committed to the Vietnamese struggle. One example comes from 1965–66, when the Soviet leadership mendaciously publicized the USSR’s readiness to send volunteers to fight with the NLF (an offer neither desired by the Vietnamese nor intended seriously by the Soviet side). All the same, thousands of Soviet youths responded to the announcement by writing to volunteer their services and to fight for Vietnamese freedom “as our fathers did in Spain.”42 Likewise, thousands of Soviet women purportedly offered to adopt Vietnamese orphans.43

41 Vozvodiashchii most (Vospominaniia o Mirzo Tursun-zade), ed. Khursheda Atakhanova (Dushanbe: Irfon, 1982); Konstantin Simonov, Segodnia i davno: Stat’i, vospominaniia, literaturnye zametki; O sobstvennoi rabote (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1976), 82–92. 42 On this episode, see Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, 37–38, 62– 64 and less critically Bregadze and Zakharikov, Internatsional’naia deiatel’nost’ sovetskikh trudiashchikhsia, 42. Quote, RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 30, d. 338, l. 2. 43 Kozhakhmetov reports that thousands of letters to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee expressed the desire to adopt a Vietnamese orphan. Kozhakhmetov, Dvizhenie solidarnosti, 41.

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Some donations arrived at the Vietnam Aid Fund from individual citizens, accompanied by what Soviet historian and Solidarity Committee activist A. S. Dzhasokhov described as “touching, agitated letters.”44 Letters highlighting American war crimes and Vietnamese suffering are in fact scattered throughout the archives of Soviet organizations and government agencies. “What is going on with the USA and its so-called Pentagon?” asked one such missive, addressed to Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, on 4 March 1965. “For how long will these ‘masters’ subject various parts of the world to their every whim? I submit that this is what every Soviet person is thinking. I’m an old warrior, a participant in several wars and revolutions, and I can’t watch or hear about bandits without getting riled up. Like an old horse, when I see a battle, I’m ready for the fight.”45 It is impossible to determine exactly how widely this indignation was shared. Soviet public opinion polling was rudimentary in this period, and only a few fragmentary surveys touch on attitudes towards foreign affairs. These are at least suggestive, though. Asked in 1967 which countries posed the greatest threat to world peace, Soviet respondents overwhelmingly named the United States (85% of respondents).46 A survey about the foreign policy of various countries produced even stronger results: 99% of respondents considered US policy militaristic, aimed at creating conditions for military operations, and 99% described American relations with developing countries as “attempting to subordinate these countries to their own interests.”47 Meanwhile, Soviet people held positive views of the North Vietnamese, who, more than any other nationality, were praised for their “patriotism” and came in second only to Cubans for their perceived “love of freedom” and “political activism.”48 These positive views contrasted particularly sharply with Soviet impressions of the Chinese, a fact that suggests the influence of official propaganda on

44 Dzhasokhov, Edinstvo i vzaimodeistvie, 70. 45 GARF f. 5446, op. 99, d. 1607, l. 62 (4 March 1965); cf. f. 7928, op. 3, d. 2493,

ll. 8–9. 46 Boris Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii: Zhizn’ vtoraia. Epokha Brezhneva. Part 2 (Moscow: Progress-Traditsii, 2006), 809. Subsequent notes to this source refer to a study of attitudes toward the world in Taganrog in 1967, with roughly 4700 participants. 47 Ibid., 802. 48 Ibid., 797.

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popular attitudes in this era of Sino-Soviet tension.49 Indeed, the only letter dating before 1968 that questioned Soviet aid to Vietnam that has thus far surfaced did so on the grounds that Vietnam was destined by geography to fall under Chinese domination, and therefore aiding Vietnam actually amounted to aiding the PRC.50 A sceptical attitude towards all foreign aid, which was evidently widespread among intellectuals by the early 1970s, was linked to Vietnam in this letter. The author acknowledged that “It is our international duty to provide technical, cultural, and other aid to developing countries,” but “that aid should not exhaust our material resources.” Vis-à-vis Vietnam, “It is not in the Soviet people’s interests to spend a part of their labour earnings on the war […].”51 The feeling that Soviet developmental aid was siphoning money away from the Soviet economy, and that moreover it was often squandered by corrupt and ungrateful officials in the Third World, figures in the 1970 manifesto by dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, and Valerii Turchin, to take just one example.52 Yet when Sakharov specifically addressed the Vietnam War in his celebrated 1968 essay “Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,” his view of the conflict had much in common with the official interpretation. “In Vietnam, the forces of reaction, lacking hope for an expression of national will in their favor, are using the force of military pressure. They are violating all legal and moral norms and are carrying out flagrant crimes against humanity. An entire people is being sacrificed to the proclaimed goal of stopping the “Communist tide.”53 Sakharov stopped short of denouncing “Yankee imperialists,” and he insisted that the war ran counter to “the true goals of the American 49 Ibid. A Komsomol instructor who was accompanying a group of Vietnamese miners on the “Moscow – Peking” train in 1969 experienced this difference first-hand. When the train stopped in Perm’, Russian thugs surrounded the group, yelled racist, anti-Chinese slogans, and tried to start fistfights with the Vietnamese visitors. The only way that the instructor got them to stop was by persuading them that the delegation was Vietnamese, not Chinese. RGASPI (Komsomol), f. 1, op. 30, d. 467, ll. 5–6. 50 GARF f. 5446, op. 101, d. 1419, ll. 103–8 (letter to Kosygin from self-described “rank-and-file CPSU member” M. Morozov, summer 1967). 51 Ibid., 106. 52 Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev and Valerii Turchin, “Manifesto II,” in Sakharov,

Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, ed. Harrison E. Salisbury, trans. by The New York Times (New York: Norton & Co., 1970), 181–183. 53 Ibid., 38.

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people, which coincide with the universal tasks of bolstering peaceful coexistence.” He also paired the US policy in Vietnam with detrimental Soviet actions in the Middle East. Still, his conclusion that “Nothing undermines the possibilities of peaceful coexistence more than a continuation of the war in Vietnam”54 echoed the anti-war resolutions of virtually every public organization, domestic or international, discussed above.

Conclusion: Vietnam Solidarity and Its Limits In conclusion, Soviet public activities in connection with the Vietnam War were impressive in both scope and scale. The campaign of solidarity with “heroic Vietnam” activated tens of millions of Soviet citizens, who donated money and labour to the cause and vocally supported anti-war resolutions. Through these activities, many of which flowed into a worldwide protest and solidarity movement, Vietnam became a symbol not just of victimhood but also of socialist internationalism. Within the USSR, the Vietnam War reinforced the official representation of the Soviet state as an altruistic, anti-imperial power, but it also accorded a special leadership role to Soviet citizens and public organizations. Though mobilized from above, primarily by the official Soviet public organizations, the Vietnam solidarity movement drew on both transnational discourses and grassroots initiative. This was activism in an approved register, but it was activism all the same. At the same time, though, Vietnam solidarity highlights the narrow parameters of the Soviet public sphere. It was tacitly understood that solidarity activism had to be “organized,” which is to say that it had to grow out of the hierarchical, albeit participatory, structures of Soviet organizations. Soviet citizens were doing many things to show support for the DRV and the NLF and to express their indignation over American actions in Vietnam, but one thing that almost none of them were doing was taking their protest to the streets. The only two unofficial street demonstrations against the war that have yet come to light, one in March 1965 and one in June 1971, were organized by social outsiders, and both were crushed by the Soviet authorities. Marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam War were fine in the West—as a top official of the Central Committee International Department remarked many years

54 Ibid., 38–39.

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later in an interview with an Austrian newspaper, “We highly appreciate the [Western] peace movement as an expression of the people’s will to prevent war”—but at home in the Soviet Union, “We also have a mass peace movement, but it expresses itself in other forms.”55 A brief glance at the two unauthorized demonstrations and their fate makes clear that the form mattered intensely to Soviet officials, rendering even a street protest against US aggression in Vietnam unacceptable by virtue of the fact that it undermined state control over political expression and public space. The 4 March 1965 protest was initiated by international students in Moscow in reaction to American strategic bombing of the DRV. A note on the demonstration in Pravda nine days later treated it as a Chinese provocation,56 but the organizers appear to have been a group of Vietnamese economics students at the Plekhanov Institute. They rallied virtually the entire Vietnamese expatriate community to take part in the demonstration, along with a sizable number of students from China, Cuba, Indonesia, and other parts of the Third World. The protesters marched with anti-war placards to the American embassy, where, to their astonishment, they were met by some two hundred Soviet policemen and soldiers, many of them on horseback, in riot gear, armed with clubs and firearms, and equipped with bulldozers and snowplows for crowd control. When the students nonetheless hurled stones and ink at embassy windows and chanted anti-American slogans, the snowplows were put into gear and the mounted police charged. Dozens of students were pushed to the ground, beaten, and trampled, and were still hospitalized a week later. Eight of the organizers were arrested on the serious criminal charges of hooliganism and banditry. For the demonstrators, this response to a strike against “our common enemy – imperialism, headed by the USA” made a mockery of Soviet professions of solidarity.57 It illustrated the kind of caution that left the USSR vulnerable

55 Interview with Vadim Zagladin, Deputy chief of the CC CPSU International Department, Arbeiter-Zeitung, Vienna (21 May 1982), cited in Soviet Active Measures: The World Peace Council. Foreign Affairs Note, US State Department (April 1985), 3. 56 Pravda (13 March 1965). Beijing certainly approved of the demonstration, later honouring the Chinese students who were involved. Gaiduk, Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, 36. 57 Description compiled from GARF f. 5446, op. 99, d. 1612 (74 pages of letters, many of them translated into Russian from Vietnamese originals); quote l. 1.

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to Chinese allegations that it had sold out revolutionary internationalism to appease the capitalist powers.58 But above all, the use of force against the demonstrators illustrated the Soviet regime’s unwillingness to countenance a freewheeling, confrontational—in a word, “unorganized”—mode of political expression. This limitation remained in force six years later, notwithstanding the substantial increase in the Soviet commitment to Vietnam in the meantime. In June 1971, a group of Soviet hippies planned a demonstration against the Vietnam War in honour of International Children’s Day. Like the Vietnamese students’ demonstration, it was to feature a procession to the US Embassy, starting at a courtyard at Moscow State University (MGU). Banners prepared in advance included slogans from the West, such as “Make Peace, Not War” in English. Juliane Fürst, who has analysed this episode, sees it as a turning point when the Soviet hippie subculture lost its carefree spirit. The demonstration never got to the embassy or indeed beyond MGU. Many participants were arrested, with several interned in psychiatric wards. The MGU courtyard, which had been the hippies’ informal gathering place, was abandoned; university students distanced themselves from the hippies for fear of ruining their careers.59 The similarity in the official response to this demonstration and to the international students’ demonstration of 1965 reinforces the point that what was intolerable to Soviet officials was the street demonstration as a form. Yet it is also striking that a group that defined itself in opposition to Soviet institutions, ideology, and norms of behavior would choose to mobilize on behalf of the most prominent officially endorsed the cause of the epoch, solidarity with Vietnam. The images and reports of a devastating war continued to strike a chord among Soviet people, it would seem, even as other strands of Soviet ideology began to fray.

58 See the excellent discussion by Jeremy Friedman in Shadow Cold War: On Soviet hesitancy to jeopardize “peaceful coexistence” over Vietnam, see also Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1945–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 59 Juliane Fürst, “When you come to Moscow, make sure that you have flowers in your hair (and a bottle of portwine in your pocket): The Soviet hippie ‘Sistema’ and its life in, despite, and with Stagnation,” in Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange, ed. Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 123–146.

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Bibliography Al Kiseleva, N., Mezhdunarodnoe demokraticheskoe zhenskoe dvizhenie v bor’be za mir, ravnopravie i sotsial’nyi progress (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1982). Atakhanova, Khursheda (ed.), Vozvodiashchii most: Vospominaniia o Mirzo Tursun-zade (Dushanbe: Irfon, 1982). Bregadze, A.A. and A. N. Zakharikov, Internatsional’naia deiatel’nost’ sovetskikh trudiashchikhsia (1958–1966 gg.) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1967). Dzhasokhov, A. S., Edinstvo i vzaimodeistvie antiimperialisticheskikh natsional’noosvoboditel’nykh sil (Moscow: Nauka, 1986). Efremov, A. E., Bor’ba za mir i mezhdunarodnoe profsoiuznoe dvizhenie (Moscow: Profizdat, 1978). Fedosov, V. I., Internatsional’nye sviazi sovetskoi molodezhi (Voronezh: Iz-vo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1967). Frazier, Jessica, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Friedman, Jeremy, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Fürst, Juliane, “When you Come to Moscow, Make Sure that You Have Flowers in your Hair (And a Bottle of Portwine in your Pocket): The Soviet hippie ‘Sistema’ and its Life in, Despite, and with Stagnation,” in Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era: Ideology and Exchange, ed. Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 123–146. Gaiduk, Ilya V., Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1945–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Gaiduk, Ilya V., The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996). Grushin, Boris, Chetyre zhizni Rossii: Zhizn’ vtoraia. Epokha Brezhneva. Part 2 (Moscow: Progress-Traditsii, 2006). Haan, Francisca de, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Women’s History Review 19,4 (2010): 547–573. Hershberger, Mary, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). Ilic, Melanie, “Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 157–174. Isaev, M. I. and A. S. Chernyshev, Sovetsko-v’etnamskie otnosheniia (Moscow: Mysl’, 1975). Kozhakhmetov, Kenes, Dvizhenie solidarnosti i v’etnamskaia revoliutsiia (Almaty: Sanat, 1993).

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Kravchenko, V. V., Obshchestvennye organizatsii SSSR na mezhdunarodnoi arene (Moscow: Mezhdunarodye otnosheniia, 1969). Luthi, Lorenz M., The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). MacGregor, Katharine, “The Cold War, Indonesian Women and the Global Antiimperialist Movement, 1945–1965,” in De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change, ed. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31–51. Mark, James et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50,3 (2015): 439–464. Mohandesi, Salar, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism, and May’ 68,” French Historical Studies 41,2 (2018): 219–251. Moshniaga, V., and Iu. Lun’kov, “Shkola internatsional’noi solidarnosti,” Molodoi communist 10 (1969): 83–89. Moshniaga, V. P., Molodezh’ v bor’be za mir i sotsial’nyi progress (Moscow: Mysl’, 1981). Plechom k plechu: Vospominaniia sovetskikh spetsialistov o sovmestnoi rabote s v’etnamskimi druz’iami v DRV i SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1965). Pristupko, V. A., Studencheskie otriady: Istoricheskii opyt 1959–1990 godov (Moscow: Iz-vo Moskovskogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 2008). Rousseau, Sabine, La Colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam, 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2002). Sakharov, Andrei, Roy Medvedev, and Valerii Turchin, “Manifesto II,” in Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, ed. Harrison E. Salisbury, trans. by The New York Times (New York: Norton & Co., 1970), 181–183. Settje, David E., Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: NYU Press, 2012). Shchetka, V. N., “Obshchestvennost’ SSSR v dvizhenii solidarnosti s bor’boi v’etnamskogo naroda protiv imperialisticheskikh agressii SShA (1964–1973 g.g.),” in Massovye dvizheniia solidarnosti: traditsii i sovremennost’, ed. A. A. Makarenko (Kiev: Naukovo dumka, 1983), 18–41. Simonov, Konstantin, Segodnia i davno: Stat’i, vospominaniia, literaturnye zametki; O sobstvennoi rabote (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1976). Sworakowski, Witold (ed.), World Communism: A Handbook, 1918–1965 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1973). Tromly, Benjamin, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Vasilenko, V., “Sovetskaia molodezh’ i mezhdunarodnye organizatsii,” Molodoi communist 11 (1969).

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Wernicke, Günther, “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 299–320.

CHAPTER 5

Between Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Communism: Poland and International Solidarity with Vietnam Idesbald Goddeeris

Scholarly literature tends to minimize Poland’s commitment to Vietnam. Many studies have highlighted other Eastern European countries’ engagement and, accordingly, eclipsed Poland’s position. Bulgaria approved more than twenty secret resolutions for providing aid to North Vietnam,1 1 Jordan Baev, “Bulgarian Military and Humanitarian Aid to Third World Countries: 1955–75,” in Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War, ed. Philip E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 298–325; especially 310; partly based on the PhD diss. written by Krum Zlatkov (Sofia University, 2016).

I would like to thank Piotr Kosicki for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I. Goddeeris (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_5

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the GDR was an important site for international campaigns on behalf of Vietnam,2 and Hungary saw “the largest solidarity movement of the entire communist period” in the years after the intensification of the US bombing of Vietnam in 1965.3 Various researchers who have recently embarked on the Polish case put the Polish role into perspective. Diplomatic historians downplay the country’s role in international politics, while James Mark and his research team, who have focused on Eastern European transnational solidarity with Vietnam, concluded that Polish solidarity was “the most nationally-oriented and least popularly resonant” and “also the least transnational” in comparison with Yugoslavia and Hungary.4 Yet, this does not mean that Vietnam remained a minor issue for Poland. Quite the contrary: so far, scholars have only focused on particular groups working from specific angles. Mark and his team, for instance, concentrated on youth and bottom-up solidarity. Their conclusions are very thought-provoking: they observe several generational conflicts, both among members of the Polish communist party PZPR and within the broader left-wing movement. In their reaction against the previous emphasis on transnational synchronization from above, however, they seem to underestimate the official side. Moreover, they presume that Vietnam solidarity died down in 1968, but have only worked with the party journal Trybuna Ludu for the period 1965–1968 and a dozen interviews with prominent figures in the student protests of 1968,5 and, as a

2 Gerd Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus’ of the Early 1970s,” German Studies Review 36 (2013): 557–578. 3 James Mark and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989,” The Journal of Modern History 87 (2015): 852–891, 870. 4 James Mark et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464, 445–446. Also see the chapter of Sabine Rutar and Radina Vuˇceti´c on Yugoslavia in the present volume. 5 Apart from one archival source from the Central Committee of the PZPR, see Mark

et al., “‘We Are with You’,” note 68. The Polish co-author of Mark’s team, Piotr Os˛eka, is a specialist on March 1968 and author of, among others, Marzec ‘68 [March ‘68] (Warsaw: ISP PAN & Cracow: Znak, 2008) and My, ludzie z Marca. Autoportret pokolenia’68 [We, People from March. A Self-portrait of the ‘68 Generation] (Wołowiec: Czarne & Warsaw: ISP PAN, 2015).

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consequence, have not analysed other groups’ standpoints within Polish society. The intention behind this chapter is to paint a more comprehensive picture of Polish positions towards the Vietnam war and the international solidarity that this triggered. It highlights the official stances, which, different from other countries, have so far hardly been subject to scholarly research.6 In doing so, it will focus on the PKS: the Polish solidarity committee with the Third World, which was affiliated with the PZPR and coordinated all state-led solidarity campaigns within Polish society. In addition, the chapter addresses several segments of the opposition: not only the left-wing student protesters, but also Catholic circles—through their major periodicals—and diaspora groups—namely the most progressive one, the Paris monthly Kultura. In this way, it will complement previous research and analyse the fundamental question that the Polish dissidents faced: how to combine their sympathy with the Western world and, especially, the United States with the global criticism of the Vietnam war. More generally, it will demonstrate that these various circles all adapted the Vietnam war and the international protest against the United States to their own agenda and in this way translated the conflict to their own needs.

Official Solidarity At first sight, Poland was an important actor in South East Asia, being the communist representative—next to Canada for the Western bloc and India for the non-aligned—on the International Control Commission (ICC) that oversaw the implementation of the 1954 Geneva Accords following the First Indochina War. The developments in Vietnam, however, reduced the power of this commission, which was in practice

6 Apart from Operation Marigold, a secret diplomatic initiative for peace negotiations in 1965–1966; see footnote 13. Operation Marigold is the single one Polish topic at a conference with 35 contributions, inter alia on Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union vis-à-vis Vietnam, James Hershberg, “L’initiative polonaise, l’opération ‘Marigold’,” in La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963–1973, ed. Maurice Vaïsse and Christopher E. Goscha (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), and the major topic regarding Poland and Vietnam discussed at China and Eastern Europe, 1960s–1980s: Proceedings of the International Symposium Reviewing the History of Chinese-East European Relations from the 1960s to the 1980s, Beijing, 24–26 March 2004, ed. Xiaojuan Liu and Vojtech Mastny (Zürich: ETH Zurich, 2004), with an extensive testimony by Jan Rowinski, ´ 74–80.

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disbanded after 1964 but on paper continued to exist until 1973. At the Paris Peace Accords of that year, Poland—now with Hungary, Canada, and Indonesia—joined the ICC follow-up organization, the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), which existed until 1975.7 Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz travelled to seven Asian countries in March 1957, including North Vietnam, in order to guarantee that his country remained an ally in spite of the reforms it had started in the previous year. He mainly stuck to old-fashioned language and antipathy towards liberalization.8 In March 1963, Mieczysław Maneli, the head of the Polish delegation to the ICC, met with Ngô Ðình Nhu—the powerful brother of South Vietnamese leader Ngô Ðình Diê.m—in what many considered an attempt to negotiate peace. Newly declassified archives, however, reject this speculation and demonstrate that Warsaw followed a hands-off policy towards Saigon at the time.9 This does not mean that Poland had no role to play at all in the region. North Vietnamese politicians returned Cyrankiewicz’s visit and came to Warsaw: first President Hô` Chí Minh in July 1957,10 later also Presi` dent Pha.m V˘an Ðông (July 1961), Vice-Premier Lê Thanh Nghi. (June 1965, January and October 1966, October 1969, January 1973), Foreign Trade minister Phan Anh (March 1968), Domestic Trade minister Hoàng ´ Thi.nh (June 1971), and Premier Pha.m V˘an Ðông ` Quôc (July 1973). Similarly, delegations of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam

7 Jacek Zygmunt Matuszak, “Relacje polsko-wietnamskie 1915–2015,” in Aleksander Zbigniew Rawski, Polskie ´slady w Wietnamie: Polacy w mi˛edzynarodowych komisjach rozjemczych w latach 1954–1975 (Warsaw: Wojskowe Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej, 2015), 10–11; Mark et al., “‘We Are with You’,” 452. Two scholars still downplay Poland’s impact: Margaret K. Gnoinska, Poland and the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia 1949– 1965 (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2010); Marek W. Rutkowski, “Getting in the Ring with the Big Powers”: India, Canada, Poland and the International Control Commission in Vietnam (1954–1964) (PhD diss., National University of Singapore, 2017). 8 Marek W. Rutkowski, “Reassuring Comrades and Courting the Non-Aligned: Poland, the 1957 Goodwill Tour in Asia and the Post-October Diplomacy,” in Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World, ed. Muehlenbeck/Telepneva, 59. 9 Margaret K. Gnoinska, “Poland and Vietnam, 1963: New Evidence on Secret Communist Diplomacy and the ‘Maneli Affair’,” Cold War International History Project Working Papers Series 45 (2005). 10 Remarkably, this is neglected by Mark et al., who do mention Hô ` Chí Minh’s visit to Yugoslavia and Hungary in that same summer, Mark et al., “‘We Are with You’,” 441.

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(October 1965, October 1969, and December 1973) and of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (September 1971) came to Poland. The other way around, State Council President Aleksander Zawadzki went to Hanoi in October 1959, Health minister Jan Kostrzewski in January 1971, and Vice-Premier Wincenty Kraska in January 1972. These visits led to a series of collaboration agreements in the fields of trade, economy, science, culture, military assistance, and exchange programs for students and refugees. This, in turn, triggered Vietnamese migration to Poland, which is still visible today as one of the largest non-European diaspora groups in Poland.11 Poland and North Vietnam also maintained more informal relations. In 1958, the former shipped French weapons captured by Vietnamese communists in the First Indochina War to the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria.12 In 1965–1966, Polish diplomats acted as secret negotiators in Operation Marigold, an attempt to establish peace between the ´ who worked as United States and North Vietnam.13 Monika Warnenska, a war correspondent in Vietnam for the PZPR official daily Trybuna Ludu from 1964 to 1975, was one of the first journalists to interview American soldiers taken into captivity.14 She also published several popular books on her stays in Vietnam and in this way had a significant impact on Polish

11 Officially, there were 13,404 Vietnamese in Poland in 2013. Matuszak, “Relacje,” 12–17, and Rawski, Polskie ´slady w Wietnamie, 142–143 (“Kalendarium polskowietnamskie”). 12 Gasztold Przemysław, “Lost Illusions: Communist Poland’s Involvements in Africa during the Cold War,” in Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World, ed. Muehlenbeck/Telepneva, 217. 13 Mark et al., “‘We Are with You’,” 451; James G. Hershberg, “Peace Probes and the Bombing Pause: Hungarian and Polish Diplomacy during the Vietnam War, December 1965–January 1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5 (2003): 32–67; Hershberg, Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Washington, DC: Stanford University Press, 2012). 14 U.S. Information Agency Operations. Part I: Survey of the U.S. Information Service December 1972. Part II: Hearings on the U.S. Information Agency before the Subcommittee on State Department Organization and Foreign Operations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. House of Representatives. 91st Congress second session and 92 nd congress first session. July 22, 1970; September 9, 13, October 18 and 19, 1971 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office), 582.

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knowledge of the country.15 The same goes for Lesław Por˛ebski, one of the ICC members.16 Internally, Vietnam was a catalyzer in Poland’s engagement with the Third World. As Mark and his team have observed, Poland joined the international protest concerning the intensification of US military action in February 1965. The authorities mobilized a wide range of social organizations to set up mass demonstrations and local rallies and to initiate other expressions of solidarity with the Vietnamese, such as donation of overtime wages and twinning with sister factories in Vietnam.17 However, the events of the spring of 1965 also inspired Poland to establish an Afro-Asian solidarity committee, just as the Soviet Union had done in 1958 (SKSSAA) and the GDR in 1960 (Solidaritätskomitee der DDR).18 The foundation of the Polish Solidarity Committee (PKS) was part of the Soviet Bloc’s attempt to take control of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). The latter organization had been created in 1958 in Cairo as an off shoot of the World Peace Council. It followed up on Asian and African conferences in India in the late 1940s and the Bandung Conference of 1955, and was a response to the Suez Crisis of 1956. It sought to unite national solidarity committees and mass organizations from African and Asian countries who joined forces in the struggle against colonialism and for cultural and social-economic development. In 1960, it had fourteen African and thirteen Asian members, including communist China and the USSR. From the beginning, the AAPSO was torn by conflicts: in the first years mainly due to Nasser’s anti-communist

15 Monika Warnenska, ´ Bambusy szumia˛ noca˛ (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1970); Niespokojni Amerykanie (Warszawa: Wyd. MON, 1974); Raport z linii ognia (Warszawa: Wyd. MON, 1981). 16 Lesław Por˛ebski, 300 dni w cieniu bambusia (Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna, 1960). 17 Mark et al., “‘We Are with You’,” 442–443 and 450. 18 Some of these committees already existed. Moscow founded its Solidarity Committee

in 1958, the GDR in 1960, in response to the Sharpeville Massacre. See, inter alia, Vladimir Shubin and Marina Traikova, “‘There Is No Threat from the Eastern Bloc’,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 3: International Solidarity (Pretoria: Unisa [South African Democracy Education Trust] Press, 2008), 1022; Hans-Georg Schleicher, “GDR Solidarity: The German Democratic Republic and the South African Liberation Struggle,” ibid., 1092–1094. The GDR committee was initially named Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa; in 1963, it became the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee of the GDR, and in 1973 the name was shortened to Solidarity Committee of the GDR.

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campaign and the Sino-Indian border dispute, and subsequently also because of the Sino-Soviet split. Beijing wanted to remove all non-Asian and non-African elements from the organization. Moscow and its satellites responded by establishing proper solidarity committees and tightening their ties with the AAPSO, its permanent secretary in Cairo, and other member organizations. They boycotted the Fifth AAPSO Conference (which was due to take place in Beijing in 1967 but was cancelled eventually), strengthened their position at a conference on Vietnam in Cairo in 1968 (where they were allowed to participate in commissions for the first time), and were promoted to full membership by the early 1970s.19 The PKS’s full name was Polish Committee of Solidarity with the Nations of Africa and Asia (PKSNAA; in 1980 extended to PKSNAAiAŁ—and Latin America). The organization consisted of a few dozens of members: political parties, social organizations, governmental and scientific institutions, editorial boards, and individuals. It was strongly connected to the Polish-African Friendship Association (TPPA), with which it shared budget, staff, and offices, and to the All-Polish Peace Committee (OKP). Among the PKS’s important members were the Veterans’ Organization ZBoWiD, the trade union CRZZ, cooperatives, women and youth organizations, and other organizations of the Front of National Unity (FJN). The PKS fell under the purview of the Foreign Ministry and was presided over by Eugeniusz Szyr, a communist MP and former (and future) minister who, at the time, functioned as Deputy President of the Council of Ministers (1959–1972) and President of the TPPA.20 The PKS was the pivot of Polish official solidarity with Vietnam, and the AAPSO affected its agenda. In its work plan for 1966 the PKS referred to the agreements of the fourth AAPSO Conference in Winneba, Ghana of 1965 while outlining the Vietnam mobilization. It planned a whole 19 The best introduction to these first years can be found in an untitled document of 27 pages, written around 1969: “Report”, s.d. [handwritten page numbers 11–36], inter alia 14, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Warsaw (AAN) 1627/19, and the “Information paper: Spotlight on the historical role of the AAPSO” (s.d. [1977], 11 pages), AAN 1627/89. See also “Work Plan for 1967,” 1, AAN 1627/19, and “Directory of the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization,” https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIARDP78-02646R000400080001-5.pdf. 20 See its annual reports, inter alia “Report PKS 1987–1990,” 1, AAN 1627/20; “Annual report PKS,” 1984, 1, then numbering 88 members, AAN 1627/41; “Report,” s.d. [handwritten page numbers 11–36], 5, AAN 1627/19.

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series of events tied to particular days: a Week of Solidarity with the Vietnamese Nation Fighting against American Imperialists from 14 to 20 July, culminating in the Day of Vietnam on 20 July (the anniversary of the Geneva Accords), the Day of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September, and the Day of Solidarity with the People of South Vietnam on 20 December (the anniversary of the foundation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam). On such days, the PKS distributed texts for publication in Polish media. For the following year of 1967, it sought to further intensify the collaboration with the social umbrella organization Front of National Unity (FJN) in the coordination of the Vietnam related activities, inter alia by means of a series of activities with the embassy of North Vietnam and the representation of the Viet Cong, and through the publication of a monthly information bulletin of the solidarity activities across the country.21 This came alongside another monthly, Kontynenty, which originated from the TPPA periodical Afryka and in the late 1960s also paid regular attention to Vietnam.22 In this way, Vietnam became one of the prime targets of Polish Third World mobilization in the late 1960s, along with the Arab world following the Six-Day War of June 1967. The PKS in 1967 also aspired to providing “inspiration for Polish movies, press, radio and TV regarding the topic of national liberation struggles in Third World countries, with particular attention to Vietnam [italics mine]”.23 A report from 1969 noted that “from the PKS’s first moment of existence its key point in its activities program has been support of Vietnam, which is to date realized with unceasing energy”; in that year the PKS organized solidarity weeks in March, July, October, and December.24 In the early 1970s, the PKS’s focus shifted to Africa: both in 1970 and 1971, the PKS spent its complete 1 million PLN budget on liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies. Yet, the attention to Vietnam did not completely fade. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the PKS pointed to the situation of political prisoners and mass murders 21 “Work plan for 1966,” 3–4; “Work Plan for 1967,” 3, AAN 1627/19. 22 Afryka was published from 1963 but was transformed into Kontynenty: Azja, Afryka,

Ameryka Łacinska ´ in February 1964. In 1965, it received a new editor-in-chief, Władysław ´ Sliwka-Szczerbic, and lost its subtitle. Kontynenty would be published until 1990. See the catalogue of the Polish National Library, https://www.bn.org.pl/. 23 “Work Plan for 1967,” 4, AAN 1627/19. 24 “Report,” s.d. [handwritten page numbers 11–36], 7, AAN 1627/19.

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in South Vietnam at a number of anniversaries and national holidays.25 Following the victory in 1975, Poland joined the AAPSO’s initiative to build solidarity schools in the country.26 The Sino-Vietnamese War of early 1979 led to a series of public events and media performances. Cambodia, which was invaded by Vietnam in December 1978 (leading to the removal of the Beijing backed Khmer Rouge), received 12 tons of material aid from Poland in the same year.27 In the 1980s, the PKS remained in regular contact with the SRV Solidarity Committee and embassy in Warsaw.28 It is difficult to assess the success of these solidarity campaigns, but one should not overestimate their scope. The PKS in its reports occasionally reflected on its societal impact and then tended to congratulate itself. In 1972, for instance, it noted that it “often receives manifestations of sympathy [from Polish society] and wish to help, which greatly encourages us in our work”.29 Yet, this self-praise does not seem very reliable. More critical notes will be closer to reality. In 1971, the PKS regretted that Polish media mainly wrote about domestic issues and that this led to a general indifference towards or even disrespect of the global South.30 In the same year, it admitted concerning its aid to liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies—which both in 1970 and 1971 received the full annual budget of the PKS—that “the Polish commitment was insignificant in comparison to those of the Soviet Union, GDR, and Bulgaria”.31 In other words, these PKS reports themselves observe Poland’s domestic scope and insignificant commitment, and in this way confirm the conclusions by Mark and his team on Poland’s national orientation and little popular resonance.

25 “Report,” s.d. [handwritten page numbers 23–27], 4–5, AAN 1627/20. 26 “Annual report PKS,” 1975, 8, AAN 1627/20. 27 “Annual report PKS,” 1979, 4–5, AAN 1627/20. 28 “Annual report PKS,” 1981, 3, AAN 1627/20. 29 “Annual report PKS,” 1972–1973, 5, AAN 1627/20. 30 “Annual report PKS,” 1971, 2, AAN 1627/20. 31 Natalia Telepneva, Our Sacred Duty: The Soviet Union, the Liberation Movements in

the Portuguese Colonies, and the Cold War, 1961–1975 (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 2014), 194, http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3081/.

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Non- and Semi-Official Voices Within Poland Apart from the communist party—including the government and officially sponsored social movements—other socio-political groups within Poland also mobilized in the context of the Vietnam war. This section elaborates on the two major ones. It first briefly presents the leftwing intelligentsia, especially students, in the years 1966–1968—already covered in the transnational comparison by James Mark and his team—to move on to a more extensive discussion of the attitude of Polish Catholic intellectuals. The Polish left-wing intelligentsia was in open opposition to the official regime since the mid-1950s. Władysław Gomułka’s assumption of power and announcement of liberalization in 1956 calmed down some concerns, but disappointment and criticism again grew from the mid-1960s onwards. In 1964, 34 intellectuals signed a petition against censorship, and Jacek Kuron´ and Karol Modzelewski denounced the party monopoly in an open letter. The latter, two young historians affiliated with Warsaw University, were sentenced to prison in the following year, but their ideas about a return to original Marxism and management by the proletariat found support among a new generation of students.32 Some, such as economics student Henryk Szlajfer, regularly referred to Vietnam, for instance in appeals to the authorities and demonstrations at the US embassy in 1966 and 1967. At that time, the communist party PZPR did certainly not obstruct such protests. On the contrary: it was eager to give the Polish Vietnam solidarity a bottom-up dimension and was consequently happy to see students contributing. Both official and “revisionist” communists shared a common language about Vietnam, highlighting the anti-imperialist fight and international solidarity. Vietnam was an appropriate case in point: youngsters and peasant and worker revolutionaries were taking up arms together, but, unlike Latin American guerrilleros, they were being coordinated by a strong communist party.33 However, students quickly radicalized in 1966 and 1967. This also affected their discourse about Vietnam, which quite obviously carried undertones of criticism vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and its foreign policy doctrine. The so-called Komandosi—left-wing students and academics 32 Tom Junes, Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 63–122. 33 Mark et al., “‘We Are with You’,” 442, 453 and 456.

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including a new generation of which Adam Michnik became the best-known representative—now emphasized other aspects than antiimperialism, such as the “struggle for the right to carry out a revolution” and “freedom from exploitation, from internal dictatorship and from dictatorship of superpowers over small nations”. Comparing Vietnam to Munich 1938 and Budapest 1956, they called it the “cause of freedom of every small country confronted with a superpower”.34 Vietnam, in other words, now served as an argument to fight not only US imperialism, but also Nazi expansion and Soviet interference. From 1968, this “revisionist” left-wing identification with Vietnam died down. On the one hand, this is due to the crushing of the movement in March of that year, when military police stormed occupied campuses and arrested many protesters, first in Warsaw but soon thereafter also in other Polish university cities. Left opposition as a strong societal force would only revive in the second half of the 1970s, when the Vietnam war was over. On the other hand, as put forward by Mark and his team on the basis of interviews with former student activists, the anti-Soviet connotation of Vietnam solidarity did not really take root and the issue remained dominated by official propaganda and mobilization. There was a fundamental contradiction between the students’ anti-Soviet opposition and their criticism of the US war effort: without the United States, the communists would gain power in Vietnam. Transnational influences on Polish solidarity with Vietnam appear to have played a limited role: some activists explicitly state retrospectively that they had not been aware of the fact that Vietnam War protest was a worldwide phenomenon and not only orchestrated by the communist bloc.35 This explanation is rather strange, since the global protest against the US war effort in Vietnam was covered in the Polish Catholic press, such as the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly) and the monthlies Wi˛ez´ (Bond) and Znak (Sign). Of course, these left-wing activists may not have read these periodicals, which were part of a different outlook, seeking to harmonize Marxism with Catholicism and writing on diverse topics within the themes of religion, culture, society, and (international) politics. With their open attitude towards other religions and philosophical currents, these Catholic circles constituted another form of

34 Ibid., 459. 35 Ibid., 460–461 and 446.

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alternative thinking within communist Poland. Tygodnik Powszechny had been established by the Cracow archbishop in 1945 and was edited by Jerzy Turowicz. Znak was also created in Cracow, one year later and largely by the same people, but was independent from the Church and gave its name to a post-Stalinist movement that included an independent publishing house and between 1957 and 1976 had about five representatives in the Polish Parliament. Wi˛ez´ was also a result of de-Stalinization and appeared in Warsaw from 1958 onwards. Although there were certain tensions between the three periodicals, for instance between generations or between Warsaw and Cracow, they were also intertwined. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in 1989–1991 the first non-communist prime minister, was the editor-in-chief of Wi˛ez´ from 1958 to 1981 and an MP for Znak from 1957 to 1972.36 Stefan Wilkanowicz entered the editorial board of Tygodnik Powszechny in 1956 and directed Znak between 1978 and 1994. Interestingly, Wilkanowicz in 1964 married a Vietnamese woman,37 but this did not lead to a special focus on the country in his contributions. Nevertheless, Tygodnik Powszechny paid regular attention to Vietnam.38 Initially, it did so with explicit approval of the Soviet position. In May 1965, Jerzy Turowicz and Stanisław Stomma—also a Znak MP—wrote an article on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, in which they warned of the deteriorating international situation and the risk of a nuclear conflict. The article hailed the “tranquil attitude” of the Soviet Union that “does not let itself be provoked to steps that threaten peace” and called for a “mobilization of peace forces”, which could not be realized “without the two forces 36 Piotr Kosicki, “The Christian Movement Who Wasn’t: Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the End of Catholic Politics in Poland,” in Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism, ed. Michael Gehler, Piotr H. Kosicki, and Helmut Wohnout (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), 215–231, especially 223–224; Andrzej Friszke, Koło posłów „Znak” w Sejmie PRL, 1957–1976 (Warsaw: wyd. Sejmowe, 2002); Witold Bere´s, Krzysztof Burnetko, and Joanna Podsadecka, Krag ˛ Turowicza: Tygodnik, czasy, ludzie. 1945–1999 (Kraków: ´ Fundacja Swiat Ma Sens, 2012). 37 Bere´s, Burnetko and Podsadecka, Krag ˛ Turowicza, 225 and 317–318; Maria-Teresa Trân Thi Lài-Wilkanowicz, Z Wietnamu do Polski: Opowie´sc´ córki Mandaryna (Kraków: Znak, 2004). She died in 2014, see https://krakow.gosc.pl/doc/2128123.Odeszla-corkamandaryna. 38 During the research for this chapter, the three journals were scrutinized in different ways, depending on the degree of digitisation. Tygodnik Powszechny was manually leafed through for the entire period since 1956; Wi˛ez´ was checked by means of its tables of content; Znak has all its issues online and was searched digitally.

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that today play such an enormous role on a world scale, i.e. socialism and Christianity”.39 Three months later, Jerzy Turowicz reported on the World Peace Conference in Helsinki, which was dominated by Vietnam and issued two resolutions on the war. He emphasized that such meetings were wrongfully seen as exclusively communist meetings, but also credited the speech of the official Polish delegate.40 In 1966, it was especially Ludwik Dembinski ´ who covered Vietnam for Tygodnik Powszechny. A lawyer who from 1961 was teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin, Dembinski ´ had a weekly feature story on international politics—Glob si˛e obraca (The world is turning around)—in which he commented on Vietnam thrice in that year. He acknowledged that the conflict might lead to an escalation to other Asian countries but reacted against simplified explanations and, unlike his editor-in-chief, focused on the United States rather than on the Soviet Union and tried to understand Washington’s motives. Dembinski ´ not only referred to the belief in the liberal economic system and the concern about the prestige of the anti-communist superpower, but also to an American dislike of the French empire and the influence of the Korean War.41 He certainly did not approve of US policy, but also paid attention to critical voices, such as Senator Mike Mansfield, General James M. Gavin, The New York Times commentator James Reston, and Senator James William Fulbright, who all opposed military reinforcement and were looking for ways “to end this hopeless war in an honourable way”.42 In this way, Tygodnik Powszechny shifted from a pro-Soviet standpoint rejecting the Vietnam war to a focus on the United States, which also, albeit more vaguely, condemned the war but at the same time emphasized the complexity of the conflict and the presence of different views within the United States. Other authors writing on Vietnam followed this line. Anna Morawska, a regular contributor, painted a critical portrait of the “Vietniks” (after “beatniks”) in the United States. She highlighted their 39 Stanisław Stomma and Jerzy Turowicz, “Pokój i Trzeci Swiat,” ´ Tygodnik Powszechny 19, no. 21 (852) (23 May 1965). 40 Jerzy Turowicz, “Kongres pokoju w Helsinkach,” Tygodnik Powszechny 19, no. 31 (862) (1 August 1965). 41 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Historia pomyłek,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 3 (886) (1 January 1966). 42 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Niebezpieczne dryfowanie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 7 (890) (2 February 1966); “Religia i polityka,” 20, no. 19 (902) (8 May 1966).

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radical ideologies, illegal actions and low popularity, and even considered them a threat to peace: their extremism demobilized more realistic opinions since they did not have concrete proposals to end the conflict apart from surrender and a communist take-over of Asia. Morawska was also open to other aspects, such as family splits and the loss of human life of conscientious objectors who put themselves on fire.43 Tadeusz D˛ebski, a Tygodnik Powszechny correspondent living in Chicago, discussed US policymakers. According to him, the White House lacked the empathy necessary to understand how Hanoi thought, and the Pentagon favoured violence. Fortunately, he concluded, there were still owls between the hawks and the doves, but due to the emotions and the polarization, such moderates lost their positions.44 Over the following years, the attention to Vietnam diminished. This is largely due to the fact that Ludwik Dembinski ´ served as secretary-general of the Swiss-based international Catholic NGO Pax Romana between 1967 and 1971, suspending his weekly feature stories on international politics.45 In 1972, he resumed his contributions and showed himself more critical of the United States. He held Kennedy responsible for having started the war, blamed Kissinger for limiting the freedom of movement of smaller states by seeking rapprochement among the superpowers, and regretted that the peace process did not start from Vietnam’s unity.46 Krzysztof Kozłowski, deputy editor-in-chief, was even harsher and warned that Washington was just saving its face and would not solve any of South Vietnam’s problems. Despite the great importance that the Americans had ostentatiously accorded to the country, they had never been truly concerned about it.47

43 Anna Morawska, “Protest Wietników,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 12 (895) (20 March 1966). 44 Tadeusz D˛ebski, “Wietnam oczyma Amerykanów,” Tygodnik Powszechny 21, no. 21 (956) (21 May 1967). 45 Piotr H. Kosicki, “Christian Democracy’s Global Cold War,” in Christian Democracy across the Iron Curtain: Europe Redefined, ed. Piotr H. Kosicki and Sławomir Łukasiewicz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 235–236; Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Catholic 1968: Poland, Social Justice, and the Global Cold War,” Slavic Review 77 (2018): 638–660. 46 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Wietnamskie perspektywy,” Tygodnik Powszechny 26, no. 52/53 (1248/49) (24 December 1972). 47 Krzysztof Kozłowski, “Pokój w Wietnamie?,” Tygodnik Powszechny 26, no. 47 (1243) (19 November 1972).

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Tygodnik Powszechny also regularly covered the position of the Vatican. In his review of 1966, Dembinski ´ listed the various papal initiatives and writings in favour of peace.48 A few months later, the weekly published the telegrams that Paul VI sent to President Johnson, General Thieu, and President Hô` Chí Minh.49 And in 1973, it printed an official declaration in which the Polish episcopacy expressed its delight about the Paris Peace Accords.50 Basically, Tygodnik Powszechny voiced the opinion of the Holy See.51 This does not come as a surprise given its affiliation with the official Church. At the same time, it was also open to ecumenical thinking and regularly gave the floor to other religions. In 1965, Turowicz reported on 41 clergymen from different religions—inter alia the Bulgarian patriarch and the Armenian katholikos —attending the World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General Disarmament in Helsinki, and in the corridors drew up a motion for fraternity and peace (which was issued next to the official resolution of the congress, demanding a withdrawal of all US armed forces from Vietnam and recognizing the National Liberation Front (NLF) as the sole representative of South Vietnam).52 Two years later, Tygodnik Powszechny published an appeal by Harvey Cox, Professor of Divinity at Harvard, calling for continuing protest against the US war effort.53 The weekly also translated an open letter in which Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who advocated dialogue with Eastern religions, sought to give a non-political, but human and

48 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Mi˛edzy wojn˛a a pokojem,” Tygodnik Powszechny 21, no. 2 (937) (8 January 1967). 49 “Nowy apel Papieza ˙ o pokój w Wietnamie,” Tygodnik Powszechny 21, no. 8 (943) (19 February 1967). 50 S.W., “Wietnam i reszta s´wiata”, Tygodnik Powszechny 27, no. 5 (1254) (4 February 1973). 51 At least in the field of Vietnam. In other issues, such as the representativeness within the College of Cardinals and the diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the Polish People’s Republic, Tygodnik Powszechny was more critical. In themes such as Pius XII and the Holocaust, the weekly took a pro-Vatican standpoint. See Bere´s, Burnetko and Podsadecka, Krag ˛ Turowicza, 278–282 and 330; and Kosicki, “The Christian Movement,” 226. 52 Turowicz, “Kongres pokoju”. 53 Harvey Cox, “Od Guerniki do Wietnamu czyli o zdolno´sci odczuwania grozy,”

Tygodnik Powszechny 21, no. 30 (965) (23 July 1967).

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personal testimony about Thích Nh´ât Ha.nh.54 The latter, a Vietnamese Thi`ên Buddist monk and peace activist who taught at US universities, was covered more than once: in 1966 Tygodnik Powszechny published his letter to Martin Luther King Jr., in which he urged King to publicly denounce the Vietnam War; and in 1971 a poem was printed as a footnote to a call for prayer issued by the Unified Buddhist Church in Vietnam, led by Nh´ât Ha.nh.55 One may therefore argue that Catholic observers from Poland found an attractive “third way”—neither communist nor imperialist—in the Vietnamese Buddhist ecumenical peace movement. Yet, these articles are the only occasions in which this Polish weekly had space for Vietnamese voices. Dembinski ´ only once wrote about the internal politics of South Vietnam, giving background on the unfolding of the Buddhist Uprising in the spring of 1966 (but later kept silent about the importance of this crisis, which ended the Buddhist movement’s influence on politics).56 Tygodnik Powszechny occasionally put the Vietnam War in the broader context of the Third World. Stomma and Turowicz noted that global injustice and inequality were objective reasons accounting for violence: the Third World increasingly became aware that its underdevelopment, poverty, and famine largely resulted from harmful exploitation, and hunger endangered peace.57 Eight years later, Dembinski ´ deemed European colonialism to have been the source of all the conflicts of those days. They all took place in countries that had recently decolonized but were still facing a low level of social and economic development. Unlike the highly developed countries, they lacked the mechanisms to deal with domestic changes and international tension.58

54 Merton Thomas, “Mój brat Nh´ât Hanh,” Tygodnik Powszechny 20, no. 41 (924) (9 . October 1966). 55 Nh´ât Hanh, “Dlaczego si˛e pal˛a (List do Martin Luther Kinga),” ibid.; “Apel wiet. namskich buddystów,” Tygodnik Powszechny 25, no. 1 (1145) (3 January 1971); Thích Nh´ât Ha.nh, “In Search of the Enemy of Man, Addressed to Martin Luther King (1 June 1965),” African-American Involvement in the Vietnam War, http://www.aavw.org/pro test/king_journey_abstract09.html. 56 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Religia i polityka”. 57 Stomma/Turowicz, “Pokój i Trzeci Swiat”. ´ 58 Ludwik Dembinski, ´ “Wietnamska wojna i pokój,” Tygodnik Powszechny 27, no. 8

(1257) (25 February 1973).

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All in all, however, it is striking how rarely Tygodnik Powszechny and especially Dembinski ´ put the war into Vietnamese and Third World perspectives. In a recent article, Piotr H. Kosicki has convincingly argued that in 1968 in the outlook of the international Catholic networks, “the Global South and the Global East found themselves bound by shared antagonism toward the Global West”, Poles playing a key role in this ´ especially, between 1957 and 1966 made four evolution.59 Dembinski, trips to the decolonizing world in the context of meetings of the international lay Catholic movement Pax Romana, being financed by the CIA-backed Free Europe Committee (FEC). In spite of the fact that one of these trips brought him to Asia and he, along with Jerzy Turowicz, also paid a visit to Saigon,60 Vietnam was not the prime interest. This is equally visible in the two other major Polish Catholic periodicals. The Cracow monthly Znak did not devote a single article to Vietnam in the years between 1964 and 1975.61 The Warsaw-based Wi˛ez´ hardly differed with only two pertinent articles: an interview with Georges Montaron, the editor-in-chief of the French Catholic journal Témoignage chrétien, who was on a visit to Warsaw with five other French editors and called the fight against the US war effort in Vietnam war their first duty,62 and a 59 Kosicki, “The Catholic 1968,” 659. 60 Jerzy Turowicz, “Listy z Azji,” Tygodnik Powszechny 14, no. 9 (579) (28 February

1960). Dembinski ´ and Turowicz attended a Pax Romana conference in Manila; their aircraft, which was chartered by the organization for its participants, stopped in Beirut, Karachi and Bangkok on the way there, and Saigon, Calcutta and Caïro on the way back to Geneva. 61 As becomes clear from a search of the issues 115 (January 1964) to 257/258 (November/December 1975), which are available in ORC format on https://www.mie siecznik.znak.com.pl/archiwum/. Of course, Vietnam is frequently mentioned in articles on other topics, more precisely in 39 of the 120 issues. This was mostly in articles on domestic developments in the US, religion, or was briefly invoked alongside Hiroshima or Nazi concentration camps. This resembles coverage in Tygodnik Powszechny, which also looked at Vietnam through the spectacles of the US and religion. The Znak article that paid most attention to Vietnam was a report on the Third World Congress for the Lay Apostolate, which took place in Rome in 1967 but marginalized Vietnam. Halina Bortnowska, “Rzym 1967: Notatki z Kongresu,” Znak 163/164 (1968): 32–53, especially 47–49. 62 Andrzej Bukowski, “Nowa Lewica – Wietnam – Europa. Rozmowa z Georges Montaronem redaktorem naczelnym ‘Témoignage Chrétien’,” Wi˛ez´ no. 11/12 (1966), 170–174. Fact-finding missions of French Catholics to Poland were quite common in the 1960s; see Kosicki, “The Catholic 1968,” 643–344, who does not mention this visit, though.

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review of a discussion about Vietnam between representatives of different Italian political parties.63 To conclude, the Polish Catholic intellectuals’ position towards Vietnam did not fundamentally differ from the Polish left, with slightly different emphasis. Both communists and Catholics censured the war, but the latter did not voice blunt criticism of the United States and instead tried to understand its position and the different opinions within American society. Moreover, they also paid attention to religious agency, such as the Vatican, Buddhist, and other Church leaders. Occasionally, they framed the Vietnam conflict in the broader picture of decolonization and Third World development, but did not adopt the left-wing discourse of anti-imperialism. Yet, all in all, they did not put Vietnam very high on their agenda.

Polish Exiles Catholic intellectuals already voiced different, and sometimes dissident opinions, but Polish diaspora groups were the ones in real opposition to the Polish communists. Poland had a long tradition of migration, with important waves of exiles, labour migrants, and fortune seekers to Western Europe and the New World from the nineteenth century onwards. After the Second World War, these were joined by displaced persons and refugees, who created important communities in the United States, Canada, London, Paris, etc. Many of them had very reactionary views and, for instance, did not even recognize Poland’s new borders. On the other end of the spectrum, the monthly Kultura, founded in Rome in 1947 and subsequently appearing in Paris, was considered the most seminal and progressive exile periodical.64 It published the crème de la crème of Polish literature, such as Czesław Miłosz and Witold 63 Stefan Bakinowski, “Włoska ksi˛azka ˙ o wojnie wietnamskiej,” Wi˛ez´ no. 11/12 (1966), 190–191. The search of Wi˛ez´ was based on the tables of content. The monthly also had a section of brief, almost chronical mentions of international events (Przeglad ˛ Zagraniczny— Foreign Overview) which is not included in this count because of the lack of analysis in these factual mentions. 64 Włodzimierz Bolecki, “Kultura (1946–2000),” in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009); Bernard Wiaderny, “Schule des polnischen Denkens”: Die polnische Exilzeitschrift “Kultura” im Kampf um die Unabhängigkeit Polens 1947–1991 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018).

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Gombrowicz, and also offered space for political commentary and journalistic reports, inter alia in columns by Juliusz Mieroszewski (from London, hence his pen name Londynczyk, ´ i.e. the Londoner) and, from 1968 onwards, Leopold Unger (who lived in Brussels and signed Brukselczyk).65 Being famous for its independent and alternative political standpoints, Kultura is an interesting case to study Polish exiles’ views on Vietnam. Kultura paid much more attention to Vietnam than the Catholic journals in Poland itself.66 Between 1964 and 1975, Vietnam was treated in fifty issues, often in several articles within one issue.67 This is far more than Znak and Wi˛ez´ and even comes close to Tygodnik Powszechny, which was a weekly. A second important observation is that the Paris monthly framed Vietnam in different contexts: international relations rather than religion, and the Cold War rather than decolonization. Kultura regularly mentioned Vietnam in articles on China, the Soviet Union, and their relations with the United States. This does not come as a surprise: the monthly covered international news more widely than the Catholic periodicals in Poland and, not facing censorship, could freely dwell on the communist bloc. However, the differences are more pronounced than one may expect. Vietnam was not related to the Vatican or the Third World. If there was interest in other players than the superpowers, this was about their position within the Cold War. Mieroszewski stated in 1969 that absolute neutrality no longer existed since Sweden maintained diplomatic contact with North Vietnam, and Unger in 1983 observed that the UN 65 Rafał Habielski (ed.), Listy z Wyspy: ABC polityki “Kultury” (Paryz: ˙ Instytut Literacki Kultura – Kraków-Warszawa: Instytut Ksi˛azki. ˙ Dział Wydawnictw, 2012); Andrzej Stanisław Kowalczyk, Wena do polityki: o Giedroyciu i Mieroszewskim, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Towarzystwo “Wi˛ez´ ”, 2014); Iwona Hofman et al., Publicystyka Leopolda Ungera: W kierunku dziennikarstwa powaz˙ nego (Torun: ´ Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2018); Agaty Fijuth-Dudek, Bez złudzen´ i bez maski: Publicystyka Leopolda Ungera w paryskiej “Kulturze” w latach 1970–2000 (Lublin-Warszawa: Instytut Pami˛eci Narodowej - Komisja ´ Scigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Oddział w Lublinie, 2019). 66 On Kultura’s—and other exile periodicals’—stance towards the Third World in general, see Kim Christiaens, Jos Claeys and Idesbald Goddeeris, “Connecting the East to the South: Eastern European Dissidents’ Attitudes towards Campaigns on Behalf of the Third World during the 1970s,” Ventunesimo Secolo 46 (2) (2020): 33–57. 67 Just as with Znak, all issues of Kultura are online in ORC format and, unlike Znak, are collectively searchable: http://kulturaparyska.com/pl/find/wietnam/Publikacje/Mie si˛ecznik%20Kultura. Our analysis is also based on the 50 other issues—from before 1964 and after 1975—that wrote about Vietnam.

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Security Council had not issued even a single resolution on Afghanistan or Vietnam in 1982, in spite of the fact that the boat people crisis was still unfolding.68 Kultura regularly covered the United States but was far less critical of US policy than the Catholic periodicals in Poland, even regarding Vietnam. In 1965, Mieroszewski defended the US position to maintain Vietnam’s division for the sake of the power balance and opined that the Vietcong had started the war.69 In 1966, he stated that “justness is undoubtedly on the side of Johnson”; in 1967, he wrote that Americanization—also in Vietnam—was about the import of technology and the English language, about welfare and health; and in 1968, he called American policy in South East Asia not imperialism, but cooperation.70 The reason for his sympathy is obvious: Kultura was driven by fierce anti-communism. It often defended the war by blackening the enemy. Mieroszewski called upon readers to see the conflict in a global perspective and warned that a defeat in Vietnam would have catastrophic consequences for the American policy in the whole of Asia. Ryszard Krygier, who had settled in Australia in 1941 and travelled to Vietnam as a journalist, wrote about the “brutal and inhuman terror” of the Vietnamese communists and called Hô` Chí Minh “after Stalin the most blood-thirsty communist satrap that our history knows”. Leopold Unger referred to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who had voiced his criticism of the Vietnam war but was still received with great honour by US President Nixon, reminding his readers that such a situation would never occur in the Soviet Union.71 Just as the Catholic periodicals in Poland itself, Kultura watched the youth movements, counterculture, and New Left in the United States with great attention and much criticism. Mieroszewski found the antiVietnam protest emotional, explained that they addressed Johnson rather 68 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 265 (10 January 1969): 89; Leopold Unger, “Mój anty-raport o stanie wojennem,” Kultura 429 (June 1983): 59. 69 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 215 (September 1965): 83–85. 70 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 222 (April 1966): 57;

Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Polsko-francuskie metamorfozy,” Kultura 241 (November 1967): 3; Mieroszewski, “Imperializm – globalizm – współpraca,” Kultura 247 (May 1968): 59. 71 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Refleksje globalne,” Kultura 236 (June 1967): 5; Ryszard Krygier, “Z notatnika s´piesznego turysty,” Kultura 262/263 (July/August 1969): 13; Brukselczyk, “Widziane z Brukseli,” Kultura 294 (March 1972): 78.

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than Hô` Chí Minh because one could influence the former and not the latter, and also regularly denounced the role of the media.72 Danuta Irena Bienkowska, ´ a poet who had settled in Toronto, wrote a persiflage in which she put herself in the shoes of a professional demonstrator who marches against everybody and everything.73 Zbigniew Byrski, who lived in New York since 1968 and reported so frequently on the United States that his contributions turned into a “Kronika amerykanska” ´ from 1974 onwards, was as frustrated about one-sided news coverage.74 But Kultura also shot at Europeans: they, too, mediatized the war, did not feel any threat from communism and ignored what was going on in the Eastern bloc.75 This does not mean that Polish exiles never disapproved of the US role in Vietnam. Ryszard Krygier, for instance, referred to Wacław Zbyszewski, a Polish journalist working for several radio stations (e.g. The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe) and periodicals (including Kultura) as somebody “for whom the war in Vietnam is completely redundant” and who, thus, accepted the communist rule in the country.76 In 1969, Mieroszewski emphasized several times that “non-democratic anti-communism is as bad as communism” and in this way expressed his criticism of the South Vietnamese government and his skepticism about Nixon’s Vietnamization policy.77 In the early 1970s, such deprecatory comments became more frequent. Leopold Unger was negative about Nixon’s visits to Beijing and Moscow, and Ludwik Mieroszewski continued censuring South Vietnam as a military dictatorship.78 Yet, their

72 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” 57; Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 241 (November 1967): 93; Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Legat lat sze´sc´ dziesi˛atych,” Kultura 268/269 (January/February 1970): 126. 73 Danuta Irena Bienkowska, ´ “Demonstrator,” Kultura 252 (October 1968): 69–71. 74 Zbigniew Byrski, “List do redakcji,” Kultura 297 (June 1972): 159. 75 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Atlantyk – Pacyfik,” Kultura 231/232 (January/February 1967): 109; Tadeusz Nowakowski, “Mi˛edzy ‘Gartenlaube’ a Tupomaros,” Kultura 292/293 (January/February 1972): 51–52. 76 Krygier, “Z notatnika,” 13. 77 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 266 (November 1969): 55; see also

Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Refleksje współczesne (2),” Kultura 259 (April 1969): 60–61. 78 Brukselczyk, “Widziane z Brukseli,” Kultura 298/299 (July/August 1972): 132– 134; Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Amerykanska ´ ‘Ostpolitik’ i wnioski,” Kultura 298/299: 116– 117; Mieroszewski, “Tematy do refleksji,” Kultura 303 (December 1972): 29.

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articles also provoked counter reactions. Zbigniew Byrski, for instance, defended the US policy and condemned Mieroszewski.79 What is also striking is how Kultura, and especially Mieroszewski, time and again drew parallels between Vietnam and Poland. At the beginning of the war, he comforted his readers. There were five, maybe ten times more anti-communists in Poland than in Vietnam, but Warsaw would not turn into a second Saigon because the United States would not protect the Polish borders.80 Later, Mieroszewski used such comparisons to clarify the situation in Vietnam. The communists were much stronger in Vietnam than in Poland,81 Hô` Chí Minh was a greater personality than Wacław Gomułka,82 and the hatred of the enemy was much bigger in Vietnam, inter alia due to its rural economy.83 At other times, Mieroszewski related the events in South East Asia to the future of Eastern Europe. He stated that the Americans should not only defend democracy in Vietnam, but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and feared that they would reduce their military presence in Europe because of Vietnam.84

Conclusion Poles observed the Vietnam War from their own perspectives. These were diverse: Polish communists condemned US imperialism, the “revisionist” left opposed all totalitarian regimes, Catholics were open to but also critical of communists as well as the United States and occasionally also paid attention to the Vatican or to Buddhist stances, and many exiles targeted the communist bloc. In doing so, all these circles highlighted particular aspects and kept silent about the failures of the sides 79 Zbigniew Byrski, “O amerykanskim ´ i sowieckim globali´zmie,” Kultura 304/305

(January/February 1973): 149. 80 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Spotkanie w Torgau,” Kultura 210 (April 1965): 80; Mieroszewski, “Polityczne neurozy,” Kultura 215 (September 1965): 75. 81 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Refleksje globalne,” 6–7. 82 Londynczyk, ´ “Kronika angielska,” Kultura 240 (October 1967): 54. 83 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “Doktryny i lojalno´sci,” Kultura 301 (October 1972): 83–84. 84 Juliusz Mieroszewski, “MBFR Plus CSCE,” Kultura 300 (September 1972): 55;

Mieroszewski, “ABC polityki ‘Kultury’,” Kultura 222 (April 1966): 42; Mieroszewski, “Ani z Rosj˛a ani z Niemcami,” Kultura 239 (September 1967): 83; Mieroszewski, “O banałach i ‘cudach’ w polityce,” Kultura 295 (April 1972): 85.

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they sympathized with: the PZPR obviously did not mention brutalities of the Hô` Chí Minh regime and the exile periodical Kultura neglected the atrocities committed by the Americans. They also framed the war in different ways: Polish communists considered it a vanguard of global communism, Catholics referred to underdevelopment and inequality, and exiles used Vietnam to stir up the Cold War in times of détente. Yet, Vietnam remained far and away. All of these Polish groups had personal contacts with Vietnamese and/or travelled to the country. Nevertheless, Vietnam was an instrumental case for their own agendas rather than a source of genuine commitment. All those different groups also from time to time connected the Vietnam war to the Polish experience in the Second World War. PKS Secretary-General Jerzy Markiewicz stated that the Polish “unchanged engagement […] does not only come from freedom traditions of the Polish nation and the socialist principles of our state, but also from the historical experiences of the Second World War, in which six million Poles lost their lives. […] It is alarming that precisely in our times, so close to the shocking, tragic experiences of the Hitler period, there are still forces and political directions in the world that take an openly racist stance”, referring inter alia to “the barbarism of imperialism in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia”.85 Harvey Cox in Tygodnik Powszechny explained the weak instinct of compassion with Vietnamese victims by pointing to the experiences in the Second World War.86 Kultura made comparisons between the alleged German ignorance about the death camps and the Polish indifference towards Vietnamese concentration camps and boat people, or between the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the Soviet occupation of Poland from 1944: just as Cambodia went from the Khmer Rouge to Vietnamese occupation, Stalin had replaced Hitler in Poland.87 However, such parallels with the Second World War 85 International Solidarity Conference in Solidarity with the People of Angola, Luanda, 2–4 February 1976, Materials to use, 2 [with a reference to the conference being organized by Oslo], AAN 1627/88. There are more examples of such references to the Third Reich. See for instance James Mark and Quinn Slobodian, “Eastern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 7, comparing Poland with Vietnam and Nazi German with US bombings. 86 Cox, “Od Guerniki do Wietnamu”. 87 Maciej Poleski, “Polityka niepodległo´sciowa,” Kultura 381 (June 1979): 59–66,

particularly 60; Zbigniew Byrski, “U progu ósmej dekady,” Kultura 387 (December 1979): 31–44, 32–33.

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were surprisingly rare, certainly given the Polish war experience and the genuine moral outrage in other countries over the war atrocities in Vietnam. Moreover, they mainly popped up in the 1970s. This again demonstrates that Polish identification with Vietnam was limited and that the international events were translated to the domestic context. In the late 1960s, referring to the Second World War was more problematic in view of the anti-Zionist campaigns in Poland. Not only the Vietnam war, but also global solidarity with the Vietnamese and protest against the US war effort were perceived through colored spectacles. The PZPR and its affiliated societal organizations and media highlighted the communist character and geographical scope of the campaigns, even to such an extent that the “revisionist” left did not realize that the solidarity was also widespread in the Western world. Opposition and exile groups did not pay much attention to the official discourse and were either silent (Znak and Wi˛ez´ ), critical (Tygodnik Powszechny), or candidly negative (Kultura) about anti-US activities in the West. As a result, Vietnam did not trigger other movements and did not cross mobilization for other cases. It only played a role as a catalyzer in official Poland’s engagement with the Third World, being the main topic in the first years of existence of the PKS, the official Polish solidarity committee with the Third World. Yet, the PKS itself complained about the country’s domestic scope and insignificant commitment. Several reasons can account for this limited solidarity. Dissidents were reluctant because of ideological reservations: solidarity with Vietnam and protest against the United States could easily be interpreted as sympathy with Moscow, whereas they fought communism on many other fronts. The official Polish People’s Republic did not join the great turn towards the Third World that other communist countries took from the late 1950s, because it did not have urgent reasons to do so, unlike these other countries. Khrushchev responded to the wave of decolonization and aspired to take distance from Stalin, who had focused on the Western world and Japan. Czechoslovakia and to a certain extent Bulgaria assisted Moscow, being among its loyal allies and having many more historical contacts outside Europe than the Soviet Union. The GDR and Hungary gradually caught up and even surpassed them. They used the Third World as a way-out for their international isolation—the former due to West Germany’s Hallstein doctrine, the latter following the criticism of the suppression of the 1956 Uprising. Romania after the Cuban crisis increasingly ran against Moscow’s course, which after the Six-Day War and

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Bucharest’s refusal to break off relations with Israel, came to an open clash. In its independent foreign policy, Bucharest used the Third World as an ally. Poland, in contrast, did not have such motives to strongly identify with Vietnam and other crises in the Third World. As a result, Vietnam was not on the top of its agenda.

Bibliography Baev, Jordan, “Bulgarian Military and Humanitarian Aid to Third World Countries: 1955–75,” in Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War, ed. Philip E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 298–325. Bere´s, Witold, Krzysztof Burnetko, and Joanna Podsadecka, Krag ˛ Turowicza: ´ Tygodnik, czasy, ludzie. 1945–1999 (Kraków: Fundacja Swiat Ma Sens, 2012). Bolecki, Włodzimierz, “Kultura (1946–2000),” in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). Christiaens, Kim, Jos Claeys, and Idesbald Goddeeris, “Connecting the East to the South: Eastern European Dissidents’ Attitudes towards Campaigns on Behalf of the Third World during the 1970s,” Ventunesimo Secolo (2020): 33–57. Fijuth-Dudek, Agaty, Bez złudzen´ i bez maski: Publicystyka Leopolda Ungera w paryskiej “Kulturze” w latach 1970–2000 (Lublin-Warszawa: Instytut Pami˛eci ´ Narodowej - Komisja Scigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Oddział w Lublinie, 2019). Friszke, Andrzej, Koło posłów „Znak” w Sejmie PRL, 1957–1976 (Warsaw: wyd. Sejmowe, 2002). Gnoinska, Margaret K., “Poland and Vietnam, 1963: New Evidence on Secret Communist Diplomacy and the ‘Maneli Affair’,” Cold War International History Project Working Papers Series 45 (2005). Gnoinska, Margaret K., Poland and the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia 1949–1965 (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2010). Habielski, Rafał (ed.), Listy z Wyspy: ABC polityki “Kultury” (Paryz: ˙ Instytut Literacki Kultura – Kraków-Warszawa: Instytut Ksi˛azki. ˙ Dział Wydawnictw, 2012). Hershberg, James, “Peace Probes and the Bombing Pause: Hungarian and Polish Diplomacy during the Vietnam War, December 1965–January 1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5 (2003): 32–67. Hershberg, James, “L’initiative polonaise, l’opération ‘Marigold’,” in La guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963–1973, ed. Maurice Vaïsse and Christopher E. Goscha (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003).

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Hershberg, James, Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam (Washington, DC: Stanford University Press, 2012). Hofman, Iwona et al., Publicystyka Leopolda Ungera: W kierunku dziennikarstwa powaznego ˙ (Torun: ´ Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2018). Horten, Gerd, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus’ of the Early 1970s,” German Studies Review 36 (2013): 557–578. Junes, Tom, Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015). Kosicki, Piotr H., “Christian Democracy’s Global Cold War,” in Christian Democracy across the Iron Curtain: Europe Redefined, ed. Piotr H. Kosicki and Sławomir Łukasiewicz (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Kosicki, Piotr H., “The Catholic 1968: Poland, Social Justice, and the Global Cold War,” Slavic Review 77 (2018): 638–660. Kosicki, Piotr H., “The Christian Movement Who Wasn’t: Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the End of Catholic Politics in Poland,” in Christian Democracy and the Fall of Communism, ed. Michael Gehler, Piotr H. Kosicki and Helmut Wohnout (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), 215–231. Kowalczyk, Andrzej Stanisław, Wena do polityki: o Giedroyciu i Mieroszewskim, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Towarzystwo “Wi˛ez´ ”, 2014). Liu, Xiaojuan, and Vojtech Mastny (eds.), China and Eastern Europe, 1960s– 1980s: Proceedings of the International Symposium Reviewing the History of Chinese-East European Relations from the 1960s to the 1980s, Beijing, 24–26 March 2004 (Zürich: ETH Zurich, 2004). Mark, James, and Péter Apor, “Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956– 1989,” The Journal of Modern History 87 (2015): 852–891. Mark, James, and Quinn Slobodian, “Eastern Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Mark, James et al., “‘We Are with You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464. Matuszak, Jacek Zygmunt, “Relacje polsko-wietnamskie 1915–2015,” in Aleksander Zbigniew Rawski, Polskie s´lady w Wietnamie: Polacy w mi˛edzynarodowych komisjach rozjemczych w latach 1954–1975 (Warsaw: Wojskowe Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej, 2015). Oseka, Piotr, My, ludzie z Marca. Autoportret pokolenia ’68 [We, People from March. A Self-Portrait of the ‘68 Generation] (Wołowiec: Czarne & Warsaw: ISP PAN, 2015). Os˛eka, Piotr, Marzec ‘68 [March ‘68] (Warsaw: ISP PAN & Cracow: Znak, 2008)

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CHAPTER 6

The Engineering of Political Equidistance and Its Consequences: The Vietnam War and Popular Protest in Yugoslavia Sabine Rutar and Radina Vuˇceti´c

Introduction The 1960s were a period of Cold War crisis, civil disobedience, and student riots. All over the world, protesters issued political demands, and often protests triggered a complex dynamic that involved the use of violence on both the protesters’ and the police’s sides. Transnationally, activists were inspired by one another’s protests, visited one another’s conferences, and copied each other’s protest techniques and strategies. In West Germany, Italy, France, and the United States, reports of brutal

S. Rutar (B) Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. Vuˇceti´c Department of History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_6

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police action and images of policemen equipped with guns, clubs, and tear gas filled newspaper columns and television screens. Everywhere, protests framed with reference to the Vietnam War were embedded in cross movement mobilization with protests that focused on domestic issues.1 In Titoist Yugoslavia, these global events resonated not only in various media but also in the streets.2 Here, too, the anti-Vietnam-War framing of protests fanned out to address domestic socio-political contentions. Activists in Yugoslavia were inspired by and copied the modes of protest they observed elsewhere, predominantly in the United States, such as sitins and teach-ins. Eventually, as elsewhere, demonstrations against the US involvement in the Vietnam War came to include violent protest forms. As we show in the following, the Yugoslav anti-Vietnam-War movement was conditioned by Yugoslavia’s specific and pro-active Cold War position, with its President Josip Broz Tito acting as a “mentor in international affairs” to the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the 1960s, the Vietnam War energized the Non-Aligned Movement as much as it hastened decolonization across the Afro-Asian world.3 After the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, Yugoslavia had established strong political, economic, and cultural ties to the West, and its relations with the United States had improved.4 Radio Free Europe, for example, was among the 1 Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds.), 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 2 This chapter relies on sources previously analyzed in Radina Vuˇceti´c, “Violence Against the Antiwar Demonstrations of 1965–1968 in Yugoslavia: Political Balancing between East and West,” in Violence in Late Socialist Public Spheres, ed. Sabine Rutar, special issue European History Quarterly 45 (2015): 255–274; Radina Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia, Vietnam War and Antiwar Activism,” Tokovi Istorije 2 (2013): 165–180. 3 Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 434. Cf. James Mark et al., “‘We Are With You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464, on differences in protest culture between Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries Poland and Hungary. 4 Cf. Rinna Kullaa, Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugoslavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Svetozar Rajak, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the Early Cold War: Reconciliation, Comradeship, Confrontation, 1953–1957 (London: Routledge, 2011); Nataša Miškovi´c, “The Pre-History of the

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US-led institutions that observed the Yugoslav model benevolently. The country was “a friendly state in American eyes”,5 and it was in the United States’ interest that this remain so, in spite of the tensions prompted by Yugoslavia’s renewed rapprochement with the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961.6 However, when the US launched intensified operations in Vietnam in February 1965, the Yugoslav–American relationship was put to a severe test. The aerial bombardment campaign, which was to be followed by ground operations, was soon to develop into the “world’s first ‘television war’, regularly brought into people’s living rooms during nightly news broadcasts. […] People identified with it, were emboldened by it, and mobilized for it. […] The war elicited protests and counter-protests of tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of people on six continents”.7 The following is an account of the Yugoslav variant of such mobilization and feelings of empowerment.

Yugoslav Diplomacy At the beginning of 1965, the Yugoslav party newspapers Borba and Komunist published several articles in which the United States were put on a level with a fascist state, prompting the American ambassador to Yugoslavia, Charles Burke Elbrick, to protest that “the Yugoslav press place all the blame on the US”.8 In August of the same year, the Non-Aligned Movement: India’s First Contacts to Communist Yugoslavia, 1948–1950,” India Quarterly 65 (2009): 185–200. 5 George R. Urban, Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War within the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 133. 6 Jürgen Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics, 1927– 1992 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), chapter “Belgrade 1961: Focal Point of the East–West and North–South Conflicts,” 84–131; Radina Vuˇceti´c, “Die jugoslawische Außenpolitik und die jugoslawisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen in den 1960er Jahren,” in Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: Auf dem Weg zu einem (a)normalen Staat? ed. Hannes Grandits and Holm Sundhaussen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 17–38, 22–29. Cf. Lorraine Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 7 Pierre Asselin, Vietnam’s American War: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2. 8 “Zabeleška o razgovoru Marka Nikezi´ca i ambasadora SAD Elbrika” (19 February 1965), Diplomatski arhiv Saveznog ministarstva za inostrane poslove (DASMIP), Belgrade, Politiˇcka arhiva (PA), Sjedinjene Ameriˇcke Države (SAD), 1965, F-150, 46,484.

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media again resorted to very explicit language in equating American soldiers with Hitler’s troops.9 Incidents such as these led US Secretary of State Dean Rusk—a fervid supporter of his country’s engagement in Vietnam—to issue a warning in February 1966. He threatened the Yugoslav ambassador in Washington, Veljko Mi´cunovi´c, with negative consequences should the Yugoslav position regarding the Vietnam crisis prove to be “entirely anti-American and identical with the viewpoints of other communist countries”.10 Tito sought to act as a mediator. A few weeks into the intensified US military operations, on 3 March 1965, he sent a message to President Lyndon B. Johnson, “urging immediate negotiations on Vietnam without either side imposing conditions”.11 He neither condemned the US military intervention nor did he ask that the American troops withdraw from Vietnam. As part of his diplomatic initiative, Tito organized a non-aligned conference in Belgrade on 15 March 1965. Two days before it started, President Johnson asked him to ensure that not all blame be put on the United States at the upcoming meeting. Despite this American attempt at exercising control, Tito used the conference to harden his position towards the US and asked the participants to “condemn the American aggression”. Most of the attending state representatives, though, were hesitant to issue such clear words, and a compromise was found. On 1 April, 17 non-aligned countries—Afghanistan, Algeria, Cyprus, Ceylon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, India, Iraq, Kenya, Nepal, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Republic (i.e., Egypt), Uganda, Zambia, and Yugoslavia— officially expressed their condemnation of the “foreign interventions in various forms” in Vietnam, urging negotiations to start “as soon as possible, without any preconditions”, thus effectively endorsing Tito’s pledge to the US president a few weeks earlier.12

9 “Telegram, br. 1471” (21 August 1965), DASMIP, PA, SAD, 1965, F-148, 429,368. Cf. Radina Vuˇceti´c, Koka-kola socijalizam: Amerikanizacija jugoslovenske popularne kulture šezdesetih godina XX veka (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012), 69. 10 “Telegram iz ambasade u Vašingtonu” (15 February 1966), DASMIP, PA, SAD,

1966, F-176, 46,495. 11 “Yugoslav Efforts to Achieve a Vietnam Solution” (3 March 1965), Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJL), National Security Files (NSF), Country File Vietnam, Box 197. 12 “Nations’ Non-Aligned Appeal,” LBJL, NSF, Country File Vietnam, Box 197, 17; cf. Dragan Bogeti´c, “Poˇcetak Vijetnamskog rata i jugoslovensko-ameriˇcki odnosi,” Istorija 20. veka (2007): 91–117, 95–98.

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During the second half of 1965, Yugoslavia’s official criticism of US politics went beyond the unequivocal message emanated in the press and was broadened into a more generally and publicly articulated counterposition. This prompted President Johnson’s Ambassador at Large, Averell Harriman, to visit Yugoslavia in July 1965. In January 1966, when Harriman went to Poland to meet first party secretary Władysław Gomułka, he saw it fit to include Yugoslavia once more in his route. Tito insisted on his role as mediator. In this new round of diplomacy things were kept at bay. Johnson thanked Tito for his efforts towards peace on 31 January. In his letter, he made it quite clear, however, that the US was to continue its intervention in Vietnam. The war escalated further. A worsening of Yugoslav–American relations ensued, and the keen exchanges of the previous year involving Tito, Johnson, Harriman, and ambassadors and ministers on both sides did not prove sustainable.13 What followed on Tito’s part was a prolonged attempt to manage Yugoslav policies with regard to the Vietnam War in a way that Yugoslavia’s room for manoeuvre was maintained between its commitments to both superpowers as well as vis-à-vis its allies in the Non-Aligned Movement, including the latter’s aim to promote peaceful coexistence. The diplomatic complications had serious repercussions on the domestic scene, as they prompted the Yugoslav government to violently sanction the very student protests it had helped to stage up to this point.

Public Protests in the Yugoslav Political Culture After World War II, the new, Titoist Yugoslavia worked towards creating the image of a peaceful socialist society. Before the 1960s, the public riots of 1953 during the final agony of the decade-long Trieste crisis were the only occasion of politically motivated public violence.14 In 1954/55, Third Worldism with a strong anticolonial and anti-imperialist agenda started to play an important role in Yugoslav foreign policy, particularly in the context of the meeting of Asian and African states, many of 13 Dragan Bogeti´c, Jugoslovensko-ameriˇcki odnosi 1961–1971 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2012), 209; Bogeti´c, “Poˇcetak Vijetnamskog rata,” 111 and 114. 14 Darko Ciri´ ´ c, Biljana Stani´c and Vladimir Tomi´c, Vreme ulice: Politika na javnim prostorima Beograda u XX veku (Belgrade: Muzej grada Beograda, 2008), 328–329. On the Trieste crisis cf. Bojan Dimitrijevi´c, The Trieste Crisis 1953: The First Cold War Confrontation in Europe (Warwick: Helion and Company, 2019).

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them newly independent, in Bandung, Indonesia, between 18 and 24 April 1955, known as the Bandung Conference.15 Tito’s visits to Third World countries, and visits of Third World leaders to Yugoslavia, became an intrinsic part of the Yugoslav search for a political identity.16 This, too, included Tito and his diplomats taking on the role of mediators, as the Sino-Indian border conflict of 1962 would prove.17 Vietnam played a significant role in this approach to the Third World. President Hô` Chí Minh visited Yugoslavia in August 1957, supporting Tito’s efforts. Yugoslavia’s new “third world policy” saw its first peak in September 1961, when Belgrade hosted the first non-aligned conference.18 At the beginning of the 1960s, the connection between antiimperialism and Third Worldism became more and more politically charged. In Yugoslavia, massive anti-imperialist demonstrations were organized on 14 February 1961, following the assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba.19 These first major public protests in Yugoslavia after World War II were a staged performance, and they were the first to escalate violently after the incidents during the Trieste crisis a scarce decade earlier. In Belgrade, after the official protest by 150,000 people on Marx and Engels Square, several thousand persons continued to demonstrate in front of the embassies and cultural centres of Western countries. A particular target was the embassy of Belgium, which, as became officially known later, had participated in the assassination of its former colony’s first Prime Minister. Belgrade protesters broke through the police lines, burned cars, and sacked the building. 15 Mark Atwood Lawrence, “The Rise and Fall of Non-Alignment,” in The Cold War in the Third World: Reinterpreting History, ed. Robert J. McMahon (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 139–155; Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 16 Kullaa, Non-Alignment; Jeffrey J. Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment,” The International History Review 37 (2015), issue Beyond and Between the Cold War Blocs, 912–932. 17 Jovan Cavoški, ˇ “Saving Non-Alignment: Diplomatic Efforts of Major Non-Aligned Countries and the Sino-Indian Border conflict,” in The Sino-Indian War of 1962: New Perspectives, ed. Amit R. Das Gupta and Lorenz M. Lüthi (New York: Routledge, 2017), 160–178. 18 Dragan Bogeti´c, Nova strategija spoljne politike Jugoslavije 1956–1961 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2006), 363–376. 19 Janvier T. Chando, The Dehumanizing Assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo and the Derailment of the Former Belgian Colony (New York: Tisi Books, 2017).

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The police used water cannons, and the clashes lasted until the evening, leaving more than eighty policemen and protesters injured. A few months later, following the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, a group of students in Belgrade on 18 April 1961 broke the windows of the cultural centre America House (Ameriˇcka cˇitaonica, which literally translates to American Reading Room), provoking an official protest by the US Embassy. During the subsequent Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, anti-imperialist slogans appeared once more on the streets of Belgrade, and the windows of the America House were smashed again.20 The increasing interconnection between Third Worldism and the massive public expression of anti-imperialism during a peak moment of the Cold War considerably strained Yugoslav–American relations. At the first non-aligned summit in Belgrade in September 1961 this deterioration became apparent. A few weeks after the Berlin Wall had gone up, Tito sided with the Soviets in harshly criticizing the American position on Berlin and the Guantanamo Bay base. These Yugoslav–American irritations and the mass protests that accompanied them were to become the blueprint for events in subsequent years. It was with the US involvement in Vietnam, and in particular in the years following the events of 1965 that Yugoslav–American relations would hit rock bottom. In 1961 as after 1965, activists went beyond what the government politically endorsed, and the police used violence to set the limits of what was tolerated. However, after December 1966, when protests first escalated violently in the Vietnam War context, the spreading dissatisfaction was prompted by the war, but increasingly addressed home-grown sociopolitical issues.21 In the following, we address this accelerated dynamic of the Yugoslav protest movements since the mid-1960s.

Protests in the Vietnam War Era When the US launched intensified operations in Vietnam in February 1965, students in Yugoslavia reacted with peaceful protests. When in the course of 1965 and early 1966 international diplomacy failed in halting 20 Ciri´ ´ c et al., Vreme ulice, 344; Didier Ndongala Mumbata, Patrice Lumumba: Ahead of His Time (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source, 2018), 41; Predrag J. Markovi´c, “Najava bure: Studentski nemiri u svetu i Jugoslaviji od Drugog svetskog rata do poˇcetka šezdesetih godina,” Tokovi istorije 3/4 (2000): 51–62, 59. 21 Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 167.

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the fighting, the protests gained momentum and turned more aggressive, warnings from Washington notwithstanding. Public support for the protesters increased, too. When Yugoslavia’s diplomatic efforts to maintain a good relationship with the US were stalled, the Titoist government started to tighten the lid on domestic events. This, however, was only in part directed towards maintaining a friendly face towards the United States. When in November and December 1966, a wave of unrest swept through Yugoslavia’s major cities and several smaller ones, these protests, organized by the state-controlled student and party organizations, were violently supressed by the equally state-controlled police. On 20 December 1966, the Yugoslav Student Association in Zagreb celebrated the sixth anniversary of the founding of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and manifested its continued solidarity with the Vietnamese people. Approximately 10,000 students gathered in front of the Students’ Centre. Their dissatisfaction with the US war policy earned them the support of many more Zagreb citizens, so that in the evening the number of protesters had risen to about 20,000. The demonstrations turned violent when protesters started to attack the American consulate, throwing bricks and stones, breaking windows, pulling down the coat of arms and burning the American flag. The police reacted with violence of equal measure, using clubs, a water cannon and tear gas. The clash was intense and went on for the whole day.22 On the same day in Belgrade, a “gathering to condemn the American aggression and to support the struggle of the Vietnamese people” was peacefully conducted in the area of the student campus Studentski grad (Student City).23 A few days later, however, on 23 December, protesters took to the streets again, and this time the clash with the police escalated into the biggest riots Yugoslavia had seen since World War II. The protest was organized by the University Committee of the

22 “Informacija o demonstracijama u Zagrebu” (23 December 1966), Arhiv Jugoslavije (AJ), Kabinet predsednika republike (KPR), 837, II-4-a. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 261– 262; Boris Kanzleiter, Die “Rote Universität”: Studentenbewegung und Linksopposition in Belgrad 1964–1975 (Hamburg: VSA, 2011), 158–169; Hrvoje Klasi´c, Jugoslavija i svijet 1968 (Zagreb: Ljevak, 2012), 103. 23 “Informacija o demonstracijama u Zagrebu” (23 December 1966), AJ, KPR, 837, II-4-a. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 261–262.

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League of Communists of Serbia, the Association of University Professors, the Writers’ Association, and the Yugoslav Pugwash Group, with the assistance of the Institute for Social Sciences.24 Speakers were prominent Yugoslav university professors and intellectuals, many of them internationally linked. Several of them were critics of the Yugoslav government from the emerging New Left movement. Among the best-known manifestations of that movement were the journal Praxis and its summer school, organized annually between 1964 and 1974 on the island of Korˇcula. Here, Yugoslav intellectuals such as Mihajlo Markovi´c, Gajo Petrovi´c, Milan Kangrga, and Ljubomir Tadi´c exchanged views with a considerable number of international intellectuals, among them eminent figures such as Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Ágnes Heller, Herbert Marcuse, Leszek Kołakowski, Henri Lefebvre and Jürgen Habermas, including also several Americans, sociologist Norman Birnbaum, philosophers Walter Arnold Kaufmann and Albert William Levi, literary critic Steven Marcus and political scientist Robert Tucker among them.25 The idea of the organizers of the Belgrade rally was a peaceful demonstration at the university, after which a letter of protest was to be handed to the American ambassador. The latter plan had to be abandoned because the police prohibited the protesters to continue their initiative outside the university. Inside the building, the atmosphere had been tense, and slogans were uttered such as “We don’t want American grain” and “All Americans out of Yugoslavia”. Eventually, protesters shouted “To the 24 The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs take their name after their founding place in Pugwash, Canada. Established in 1957, they bring together scholars and public figures to work towards reducing the danger of armed conflict. In 1995, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Cf. Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War, ed. Carola Sachse and Alison Kraft (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 25 “Organizovanje mitinga” [no date], Istorijski arhiv Beograda (IAB), UK SKS Beograda, F-84. Cf. Mark et al., “We Are With You, Vietnam,” 449; Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Mihailo Markovi´c and Gajo Petrovi´c (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979). More generally on Praxis and its summer school: Nenad Stefanov, “Praxis: Ideen, Debatten, Handlungsformen kritischer Intellektueller im sozialistischen Jugoslawien,” in Mythos Partisan: (Dis-)Kontinuitäten der jugoslawischen Linken: Geschichte, Erinnerung und Perspektiven, ed. Ðord-e Tomi´c et al. (Hamburg, 2013), 287–301; Boris Kanzleiter, “Yugoslavia: Marxist Humanism, Praxis Group, and Korˇcula Summer School, 1964–1974,” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness et al. (Wiley Online Library, 2009, https:// doi.org/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp1630); Sloboda i nasilje: Razgovor o cˇasopisu Praxis i korˇculanskoj letnjoj školi, ed. Nebojša Popov (Belgrade: Res Publica, 2003).

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[America] House!” and “To the [American] Embassy!”26 When the protesters exited the university building, the police, in an attempt to enforce their ban, assaulted them with several mounted units, using clubs, tear gas, and a water cannon. Policemen beat students in the streets and went so far as to ignore the formal autonomy of the university by entering the building of the Faculty of Philology.27 Alija Hodži´c, a student and president of the Committee of the Faculty of Philosophy Student Association, testified that the police “cursed and swore, insulting the students, and beat them with clubs and fists”.28 Looming even larger than the events in Zagreb a few days earlier, the Belgrade riots too continued into the evening—mostly around Knez Mihailova Street, the main boulevard of the city centre, where the Faculty of Philology, the Faculty of Philosophy, the America House, and the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences were located. A second location was the US embassy, approximately seven kilometres to the south of the centre. By the end of the clash, dozens of students were injured (the precise number is unknown), as were thirty policemen.29 During this period, protesters in other Yugoslav cities clashed with the police, too. The wave of “street democracy” saw them breaking the windows of the America House in Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina.30 In Skopje, Macedonia, government reports described the protests as a “spontaneous outpouring of solidarity with the Vietnamese people and protests against the American aggression”, which had started already in October and came to a head on 20 December, as in Zagreb, with the 26 “Hronologija dogad-aja” [no date], IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 262–263. The America House Program—US cultural centres established in several countries during the Cold War—seems to have been a subject of academic inquiry only in the German context, which in fact was central to the programme’s launching, cf. Reinhild Kreis, Orte für Amerika: Deutsch-Amerikanische Institute und Amerikahäuser in der Bundesrepublik seit den 1960er Jahren (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012); Kathleen Hooper, Designing Democracy: Re-Education and the America Houses (1945–1961): The American Information Centers and their Involvement in Democratic Re-Education in Western Germany and West Berlin from 1945 to 1961 (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2014). 27 “Izjava o upadu milicionera u zgradu Filološkog fakulteta” [no date], IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 28 “Izjave o studentskim demonstracijama održanim” (23 December 1966), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 29 T. Grihovi´c, “Posle mitinga—demonstracije,” Borba (24 December 1966), 2. 30 DASMIP, PA, SAD, 1066, F-176, 444,349. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 169–170.

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attendance of events on the occasion of the Day of Solidarity with the Vietnamese People, whose annual observance had just been introduced.31 In Sarajevo, the demonstrations were led by the University Committee of the League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here, the Dean of the university expressed his solidarity by comparing the struggle of the people of Vietnam with the national liberation struggle of the Yugoslav peoples during the Second World War, thereby, implicitly, putting US soldiers in Vietnam once again on a level with the national socialist and fascist troops that had occupied Yugoslavia.32 The Yugoslav media accompanied the demonstrations with coverage that stoked anti-war sentiments. Their mission was twofold. To the world, including the Americans, they were to emphasize the transnational dimension of the Yugoslav protests, thereby underlining that Yugoslavia’s protesters were, just like people everywhere else, against the war, but not particularly anti-American. To the Yugoslav people, the media were to emphasize the protesters’ anti-imperialist agenda. On 23 December, the day of the Belgrade riots, the party organ Borba, for example, reported on its front page about the “Horrible Vietnam War – 250,000 Children Killed”.33 When protesters aggressively targeted symbols and institutions of American power, such as the Consulate in Zagreb, the Embassy in Belgrade, and the America Houses in several cities, there were clear parallels in protest patterns if compared, for example, with West Germany, where American military, cultural, and political institutions frequently became the burning point of confrontational protest.34 Another peak in Yugoslavia’s policy of addressing the Vietnam War occurred on 6 April 1968, when 300,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade. In what once more was a state-organized protest, participants condemned “the brutal and dirty war that America was leading against the heroic people of Vietnam”. The list of speakers once more included high-ranking members of the party and the state (both on the level of the federal state and the constituent republics), such as Veljko Vlahovi´c, 31 “Informacija o protestnim mitinzima protiv rata u Vijetnamu” (Zagreb, Skopje, Sarajevo), AJ, KPR, 837, II-4-a. 32 Kanzleiter, Die “Rote Universität,” 169. 33 “Strahote vijetnamskog rata - poginulo 250.000 dece,” Borba (23 December 1966).

Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 261. 34 See the chapter by Anders and Sedlmaier in this volume and Martin Klimke, “West Germany,” in 1968 in Europe, Klimke/Scharloth, 97–110, 102; Kreis, Orte für Amerika.

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president of the Belgrade City Conference of the League of Communists, Aleksandar Bakoˇcevi´c, Miloš Mini´c, Stevan Doronjski, and Spasenija Cana Babovi´c. Speeches singled out US President Lyndon B. Johnson “as the organizer of the aggression, responsible for crimes against peace and humanity”. This mass gathering, encouraged by the fiery showmanship of Belgrade’s leading party figures, quickly spread through the streets of the city. Protesters chanted, “the whole world admires you, Vietnam”, “Give Vietnamese children bread rather than bombs”, “Johnson, America needs a president, not a sheriff”, and “America, we do not want a new Hitler”. Now, the police intervention was better prepared, protecting the America House and the American Embassy from any assault. Security measures had been in place since the previous day, enabling the police to prevent serious rioting.35 Protests in the context of the Vietnam War in Yugoslavia between 1966 and 1968 were organized by state organizations while being held in check—or at times suppressed—by state police. The Yugoslav government sought to appease all sides involved: the protesting students, the domestic socio-political organizations that organized the protests, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the partners within the Non-Aligned Movement, and also the United States. On the one hand, it took pains to be part of the transnational anti-war protests, thereby showing solidarity with the Vietnamese cause. On the other hand, it tried to show that it did not tolerate certain protests, thereby signalling to America that it remained its communist ally. However, as we show in the following, there was more to the policing of the demonstrations than the foreign policy aspect.

Transnational Protest Networks The transnational momentum played a significant role in how the Yugoslav government handled the Vietnam War protests, as protests elsewhere became the blueprint of domestic events. The way in which the state-led media reported about protests in the West, the East, and the Third World was structured by foreign policy directives. Before the 35 “Vijetnamci zadužili celo cˇ oveˇcanstvo,” Politika (7 April 1968), 2; “Demonstracije posle mitinga,” Politika (7 April 1968), 2; “Oko 300.000 grad-ana na veliˇcanstvenom mitingu u Beogradu,” Politika (7 April 1968), 1. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, Koka-kola socijalizam, 70–72.

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demonstrations in Zagreb in December 1966, the party organ Borba covered Vietnam War protests in Algeria, Ohio, Japan, Pakistan, and Italy.36 It then reported “Demonstrations all over Yugoslavia”, in Zagreb, Belgrade, Split, Sarajevo, Skopje, Tetovo, Bitola, and, going beyond major cities, the mining town Bor in eastern Serbia. The transnational factor was balanced out between the East, the West, and the non-aligned allies, while the coverage of domestic events made sure to address events in the whole of Yugoslavia. As the Borba framed it, protests were not only geographically spread over the entire country, they also saw people engage belonging to all age groups and social strata. Beyond the more obvious clientele, the students, the paper pointed out participants such as shipyard workers in Split, workers of the Electrode and Ferroalloy Plant (Tvornica elektroda i ferolegura) in Šibenik, miners in Bor, and pupils in Sarajevo.37 In the years following the split with the Soviet Union in 1948, Yugoslavia had not only adjusted its international position, it had also transformed its societal design towards a self-managed society.38 Internationally, its social experiment gained recognition and was observed with considerable interest, perceived as a viable “Third Way” by many, especially by moderate western leftist intellectuals. On the inside, however, “Yugoslavia was—a seeming paradox—in several ways a much more ‘ideologized’ state than other socialist systems in Eastern Europe. Nowhere else society experienced a similarly perpetual, almost manic change of the systemic institutional order, driven by the ideological imperative of the idea of a self-managed society”.39 While President Tito and the party remained on top of everything, Yugoslav society was run by a number of socio-political organizations, whose role was to keep a lid on work relations and indeed social

36 “Protesti u svetu,” Borba (20 December 1966), 2. 37 “Demonstracije širom Jugoslavije,” Borba (21 December 1966), 2. Cf. Vuˇceti´c,

“Violence,” 258. 38 One of the best analyses of the Yugoslav system remains Dejan Jovi´c, Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away (Indiana, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009); for the larger picture of Yugoslav history see Vesna Drapac, Constructing Yugoslavia: A Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 39 Wolfgang Höpken, “‘Durchherrschte Freiheit’: Wie ‘autoritär’ (oder wie ‘liberal’) war Titos Jugoslawien?” in Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren, ed. Grandits/Sundhaussen, 39–65, 54–55.

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relations more broadly, while identifying as proof of Yugoslavia’s democratic—self-managed—setup. Regarding the Vietnam War, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia orchestrated the protests with the help of organizations such as the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Student Association. In the same vein, the Yugoslav Coordinating Committee for Aid to the People of Vietnam was established in February 1966. It oversaw most activities addressing the Vietnam War. Prominently, between 1966 and 1973, it organized Solidarity Weeks with the Struggle of the Vietnamese People. Also beginning in 1966, besides the Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the Vietnamese People, the Anniversary of the Founding of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was observed every year between October and December.40 Establishing this Coordinating Committee was the most important act of institutionalization of the Vietnam War campaign in Yugoslavia. It collected various kinds of material aid, including concentrated food and medical aid such as donations of blood plasma, pharmaceuticals, and even a completely equipped field hospital.41 The Yugoslav Red Cross was to forward the materials to the Red Cross of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.42 The General Secretary of the Coordinating Committee maintained that all its activities were “characterized by continuity and massiveness” and that “assistance to the people of Vietnam has been both political and material”.43 It seemed as if the whole of Yugoslavia took part in the “Solidarity Weeks” in support of the Vietnamese People. According to the reports of the Coordinating Committee, the wish to support Vietnam was quite overwhelming. People readily gave different kinds of aid. During the 1967 “Solidarity Week”, over a million Yugoslavs made donations. Workers donated two percent of their monthly earnings to the “Vietnam Fund”; others renounced their earnings for one or more days. Workers’

40 “Izveštaj Jugoslovenskog nacionalnog odbora za pomo´c narodu Vijetnama” [no date], AJ, 142, F-A470. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 174–175. 41 “Over a Million Yugoslav Donors,” AJ, 142, A470. 42 “Izveštaj Jugoslovenskog koordinacionog odbora za pomo´c narodu Vijetnama od

formiranja 28. februarja 1966. god. do 1. oktobra 1967. god,” AJ, 142, A470. 43 “Over a Million Yugoslav Donors,” AJ, 142, A470.

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organizations donated clothes and footwear. Children sold commemorative stamps in schools to raise money.44 In fact, school children were given a prominent role in these support activities. The Committee organized numerous contests for the best pupils’ literary works and drawings on the topic “The Vietnamese People’s Fight”. During “Solidarity Weeks”, all schools dedicated a lesson to the “heroic fight of the Vietnamese people”, and Yugoslav children addressed letters to their peers in Vietnam.45 On the whole, the impression was enforced that the “whole nation” supported the people of Vietnam—workers, students, academics, artists, intellectuals, even pupils. A Yugoslav delegation took part in the 9th Congress of the International Union of Students in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, between 26 March and 8 April 1967, thereby underlining the transnational dimension of Yugoslavia’s anti-war campaign and aid for Vietnam once more. The Congress issued a resolution that called on all student organizations to protest, to organize meetings, marches, and demonstrations, to send petitions, to raise media attention, to mount exhibitions of photos, paintings, and posters, to screen films such as the Soviet documentary Mekong on Fire and the Vietnamese documentary Our Children Accuse; in short: to do everything to help the Vietnamese people in their “heroic fight”.46 Yugoslav media outlets—the press, radio, and TV—comprehensively addressed the different Vietnam War protest movements all over the world as well as the domestic one in every corner of the country. Their indignation vis-a-vis “American crimes” in Vietnam helped channelling the sentiments and engagement of a considerable part of the Yugoslav public. However, the most intense protest campaign was conducted in the student press.47 The student media reported on demonstrations in the

44 “Informacija o politiˇckoj aktivnosti u SR Srbiji u toku Nedelje solidarnosti sa borbom naroda Vijetnama” (January 1968), AJ, 142–457. 45 “Informacija o nedelji solidarnosti sa borbom naroda Vijetnama održanoj od 13. do 20. decembra 1967,” AJ, 142–457. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, Yugoslavia. 46 “Važnije rezolucije IX Kongresa Med-unarodnog saveza studenata koje su donesene

prilikom održavanja Kongresa u Ulan Batoru,” AJ, 145–12, 1967. 47 On the Yugoslav student press in the late 1960s, cf. Marko Zubak, “Pripremanje terena: Odjek globalnog studentskog bunta 1968. godine u jugoslavenskom omladinskom ˇ i studentskom tisku,” in 1968: Cetrdeset godina posle (Zbornik radova), ed. Radmila Radi´c (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2008), 419–452.

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United States and Europe, the international activities of student movements, the various efforts at negotiating peace, the Vietnamese resistance, and, not least, American war crimes, parallel to what was reported in the party organ Borba. Reports aimed at making things look as grave as possible, however, thereby taking a much less compromising position than the party’s media, which after all were often uncompromising enough.48 Yugoslavia’s involvement and efforts at keeping equidistance with all political players made it easier for young people to sympathize and get in touch with Western cultural influences than elsewhere in state socialist Eastern Europe.49 Unsurprisingly, when it came to Vietnam War protest movements, the Yugoslav youth’s sympathies, and of the Yugoslav public more generally, lay with young people’s initiatives in western countries, the United States included. The Soviet Union was just one country among others in this context. For example, the Slovenian sociologist Rastko Moˇcnik, a student at the time, recalled how each issue of the Ljubljana-based student magazine Tribuna featured articles on the Vietnam War, student movements, and demonstrations “in Prague, Berlin, Athens, Amsterdam, Madrid, Portugal, Egypt, Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Poland, Italy, Iran, Lebanon, France, Algeria and Belgium”.50 It has already been pointed out that the Yugoslav New Left regularly fostered an international debate on the Adriatic island of Korˇcula with

48 Zubak, “Pripremanje terena,” 441–442. 49 Cf. Ljubica Spasovska, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics

and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Reana Senjkovi´c, Svaki dan pobjeda: Kultura omladinskih radnih akcija (Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Srednja Europa, 2016). The literature on youth under socialism has been proliferating, yet for the larger part has focused either on the first or the last socialist generation, cf. for example Andra-Octavia Cioltan-Dr˘aghiciu, “Gut gekämmt ist halb gestutzt”: Jugendliche im sozialistischen Rumänien (Vienna: Lit, 2019); Seth Bernstein, Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017); Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: OUP, 2012); Anna Saunders, Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Karin Taylor, Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria (Vienna, Berlin: Lit, 2006). 50 Rastko Moˇcnik, “1968 in Slovenien—… eine ziemlich erfolgreiche Episode,” in “1968” in Jugoslawien. Studentenproteste und kulturelle Avantgarde zwischen 1960 und 1975: Gespräche und Dokumente, ed. Boris Kanzleiter and Krunoslav Stojakovi´c (Bonn: Dietz, 2008), 79–84, 81.

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renowned leftist intellectuals from many countries West and East. On 25 May 1968, Yugoslavia celebrated, as it did every year, Tito’s birthday with a Dan mladosti (Day of Youth), which involved a “relay of Youth” around the country, at the end of which Tito was ceremonially presented with the baton containing a symbolic message by the young to their leader. On this occasion, the party daily Borba published Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous interview with the “anarchist leader of the student movement, Daniel Cohn-Bendit”.51 Yugoslavia’s policy towards Vietnam was connected to leftist circles in the West, to the non-aligned countries, and to international initiatives such as the Russell Tribunal, organized in November 1966 by British philosopher, lifelong peace activist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate (1950) Bertrand Russell, with the support of Jean-Paul Sartre, Lelio Basso, and several other internationally renowned intellectuals. This International War Crimes Tribunal, as it was also called, was conducted in two sessions, in May 1967 in Stockholm, Sweden, and in November/December in Roskilde, Denmark. It tasked itself with investigating the United States’ military intervention in Vietnam. Representatives of 18 countries participated, many among them recipients of Nobel Prizes or other prestigious awards. The initiative was financed by various sources, among them a large contribution by the North Vietnamese government, after Russell had made an intervention with President Hô` Chí Minh to that end. Yugoslavia played a significant role in this Tribunal. Vladimir Dedijer, historian and former representative of Yugoslavia at the 1946 Paris peace conference and later at the United Nations General Assembly, acted as its president at both meetings. Russell noted in his autobiography how Dedijer had visited him “earlier in Wales, and through his wide knowledge of both the Western and Communist worlds proved a valuable ally”.52 The Tribunal’s meetings in Stockholm and Roskilde concluded that the United States, according to international 51 Borba (25 May 1968). The original interview was published in Le Nouvel Observateur (20 May 1968), cf. “L’imagination au pouvoir,” https://www.nouvelobs.com/ politique/le-congres-du-ps/20081023.OBS7477/l-imagination-au-pouvoir-une-interviewde-daniel-cohn-bendit-par-jean-paul-sartre-1968.html. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 176. On the larger context cf. Miroslav Periši´c, Od Staljina ka Sartru: Formiranje jugoslovenske inteligencije na evropskim univerzitetima, 1945–1958 (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2008). 52 Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 3 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 224.

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law, were guilty of war crimes, the use of illegal weapons, and genocide in Vietnam. Although both Vietnam and the United States officially largely ignored the Tribunal’s findings, its accusations did stir considerable unrest within the US government.53 The League of Students of Yugoslavia harboured good relations with student organizations in western countries, while contacts with analogous organizations in communist countries were fewer by far, heralded by a fair bit of cooperation with the Polish student organization. Several student organizations from the Eastern Bloc and some from Asia, such as China, North Korea, and also North Vietnam, rather manifested an unfriendly stand towards their Yugoslav peers.54 A poll conducted among Belgrade’s students in 1969 showed that Mao Zedong was—alongside Lyndon B. Johnson—among the most unpopular political figures.55 Maoist influences on the protest movement in Yugoslavia were never strong or visible beyond some individual radicals in the student community. This was primarily due to the very bad bilateral relations between the two countries until the late 1960s and the more appealing character of the Yugoslav variant of socialism among different kinds of protesters. What most of the Yugoslav socio-political movement’s adherents were demanding in terms of a reform of Yugoslav socialism went far beyond Mao’s liking.56 The Youth League of Yugoslavia also struggled to maintain friendly relations with its counterpart, the Vietnam Youth Federation, “because of the situation in the international workers’ movement and in the Far East”. In 1968, it declared its contact with the Vietnamese youth organizations to be merely “informal” and taking place in the framework of international gatherings. It underlined how its “aid to Vietnam has nothing to

53 Harish C. Mehta, “North Vietnam’s Informal Diplomacy with Bertrand Russell: Peace Activism and the International War Crimes Tribunal,” Peace and Change 37 (2012): 64–94, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.2011.00732.x. 54 “Plenarne sednice 1966–1968,” AJ, 145–12-31. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 177. 55 “Zastati znaˇci zaostati,” Borba (10 May 1969), 7. The most popular politicians were

John F. Kennedy, Indira Gandhi and Vladimir I. Lenin. Cf. Mark et al., “We Are With You, Vietnam,” 455. 56 I [i.e. R. Vuˇceti´c] owe these insights to Jovan Cavoški. ˇ Cf. his overview on Sinoˇ Yugoslav relations in the post-war decades, Jovan Cavoški, “Between Ideology and Geopolitics: Sino-Yugoslav Relations and the Wider Cold War, 1950–1970,” in New Sources, New Findings: The Relationships between China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. Peter Vamós (Bejing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2014), 387–406.

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do with the Vietnamese policy towards Yugoslavia but is an expression of our internationalist consciousness”.57 By the late 1960s, a Western-inspired anti-Vietnam War mass culture had become part of Yugoslavia’s cultural life. Connections between critical artists and intellectuals were manifest on TV, in theatres, at exhibitions, and could be heard in broadcasts and live concerts of representatives of the internationally growing genre of protest music.58 Foreign proponents of this new genre, such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Donovan, came to Yugoslavia to perform. The Yugoslav press praised Joan Baez as the “Madonna of the Beatniks” and Bob Dylan as the “Homer of Our Century”.59 Baez included Belgrade in her 1966 European tour and was supported in this by the Yugoslav ambassador to the United States, Veljko Mi´cunovi´c.60 She got huge coverage in the media, including the most powerful one—television.61 Her songs influenced Yugoslav musicians, as did Bob Dylan’s. Yugoslav artists started contributing to the transnational counterculture of the time. Croatian singer Ivica Percl, for example, performed a number of anti-war and protest songs, among which the most famous was “1966”.62 Anti-war songs were also part of the most popular Yugoslav TV show dedicated to rock’n’roll, “Koncert za ludi mladi svet”. One of the songs sung in this show was performed jointly by Yugoslav singer Dušan Golumbovski and Congolese Edi Dekeng, who at that time lived in Yugoslavia as a student. The song voiced opposition against the war in Vietnam and against the American soldier “Bobi Smit”

57 “Akcije solidarnosti sa omladinom i narodom Vijetnama u 1968. Godini,” (3 May

1968), AJ, 142–457. 58 Cf. James E. Perone, Music of the Counterculture Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), and the chapter by Matías Hermosilla in this volume. 59 Aleksandar Rakovi´c, Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji 1956–1968: Izazov socijalistiˇckom društvu (Belgrade: Arhipelag, 2011), 535–536. 60 Vuˇceti´c, Koka-kola socializem, 217. 61 Rakovi´c, Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji, 535–536. 62 The song is available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/s11hEStjeko.

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(Bobby Smith), who “kills mothers with their children” (majke sa decom ubijaš ).63 Starting in 1967, famous American avantgarde theatres, such as La MaMa, Living Theatre, and the Bread and Puppet Theatre, staged performances at the annual Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF).64 The anti-war sentiments expressed in their plays influenced the Yugoslav theatre culture. In January 1968, for example, the Student Experimental Theatre in Zagreb staged Viet Rock, the first protest play to address US involvement in the Vietnam War by US avantgarde theatre artist and playwright Megan Terry.65 A culmination of the American anti-war theatre imports was the staging of the musical Hair, which was inspired by Viet Rock, in Belgrade on 19 May 1969, after premieres in New York, London, Paris, and Munich. For the Yugoslav audience, the musical was translated into Serbo-Croatian.66 Yugoslav media extensively covered hippie culture, both international and domestic, with the party organ Borba presenting hippies as fierce freedom fighters.67 Vietnamese culture was not neglected either. In 1968, an anthology of anti-war lyrics was published under the title “Comrade, your house is on fire”.68 Vietnamese poetry “From the 15th Century to Hô` Chí Minh” was translated and adapted by famous Yugoslav poets and writers.69 Numerous Vietnamese songs were available on records in Yugoslavia, in service of fostering solidarity.70

63 Koncert za ludi mladi svet, Televizia Beograd 1967. godina, Dušan Glumbovski and Edi Dekeng, YouTube, https://youtu.be/mz9_UFfJcpQ. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 178; Mark et al., “We Are With You, Vietnam,” 5–6. 64 Cf. Vuˇceti´c, Koka-kola socializem, 268–291. 65 “Zagreb: Vijetnam na pozorišnoj sceni,” Politika (20 January 1968), 8. Cf. Vuˇceti´c,

“Yugoslavia,” 178. 66 Rakovi´c, Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji, 562–564. The Serbocroatian version of the iconic “Let the Sunshine In,” sung by soloists Dušan Prelevi´c and Mira Pei´c, can be found on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1skfQMwPfCw. 67 Vuˇceti´c, Koka-kola socializem, 344–350. 68 Druže, tvoja ku´ca gori. Izbor iz Vijetnamske poezije, ed. Roksanda Njeguš et al.

(Belgrade: Udruženje književnika Srbije, 1968). 69 “Poezija Vijetnama na našem jeziku,” Politika (21 July 1968), 19. 70 “Nedelja solidarnosti sa borbom vijetnamskog naroda, 15–22. novembra 1969,” AJ,

142–465. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Yugoslavia,” 179.

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Due to Yugoslavia’s political-economic dependence on the United States, a central theme in Yugoslav policy was that it was paramount to maintain, or repair, the good relations between the two countries. This meant that only tempered protests directed against the United States could be tolerated, and thus the Vietnam War protests had to be held under a certain lid. Importantly, they had to be framed in the context of the transnational, global movement against the Vietnam War, thus emphasizing that they had nothing to do specifically with Yugoslav– American relations. However, as we show in the following, by 1968, the state-sponsored anti-war demonstrations in Yugoslavia had acquired a new, domestic quality.

The Spillover of the Vietnam War Protests into Domestic Unrest As shown above, both the imagined and real transnationalism of the Vietnam War protest movements had been used in the Yugoslav media as blueprints for reporting on domestic events. This coverage eventually set the scene for more independent courses of action. Protesters began to criticize the limitations of Yugoslavia’s solidarity in the anti-imperialist struggle and to challenge the state’s control of public spaces and institutions. The long-harboured and state-nurtured anti-imperialist feelings finally mobilized citizens to independently initiate mass demonstrations directed as much against imperialism and the US war in Vietnam as against domestic issues, openly displaying non-conformity with the party line. In December 1966, the protests near the American Embassy in Belgrade revealed their idiosyncratic and ambivalent nature. The students sang the Yugoslav anthem “Hej Sloveni” (Hey Slavs), as well as “Druže Tito” (Comrade Tito), and revolutionary songs. They organized an impromptu sit-in (rather, a squat-in, because of the snow) and a moment of silence for the Vietnamese dead. This choreography sought to convey a twofold message. On the one hand, it carried an anti-imperialist and antiVietnam War message. On the other hand, it showed that the students endorsed their socialist state and its discourse. However, when they stopped singing, mounted police attacked them. Conspicuously, the fact that students, after being severely beaten, found the courage to inquire

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about policemen’s badge numbers, suggests a fair amount of trust in the system.71 Given the context of Yugoslav dependence on its good relations with the United States, it is even more striking that the Yugoslav protesters resorted to violence, willing to go far beyond what the state staged in terms of peaceful engagement with the problem the Vietnam War posed on the international scene. The protesters first criticized and then ignored the limitations of official solidarity with the Vietnamese. A whole set of actions that intensified in 1966 revealed that the party tried to direct the sentiments of its citizens triggered by the Vietnam War. Demonstrations were large, organized, and announced well in advance. No effort was made to hide who organized them. The protest gathering of 23 December in Belgrade, for example, was announced in all the leading dailies, including the party’s own Borba. After the riots, however, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia took responsibility neither for organizing the gatherings nor for the consequences. As soon as the question of responsibility was raised, the party organization stated that “communists, students and teachers” had taken part, thus implying that not all participants had been members of the LCY. However, an estimated 80 percent of the protesters were indeed party members, which indicates that a deep dissatisfaction existed with(in) the party lines.72 By way of putting this number into perspective, it might suffice here to point out that the overall portion of adult party members in Yugoslavia during these years amounted to 8,4%.73 The lists of both organizers and participants showed that the protests went beyond earlier student anti-war actions. They constituted a much wider social gathering, which included party members and members of the socio-political organizations, which held a key role in the shaping of Yugoslav society. A significant number among the protesters were New Leftists and critics of the government. Culprits had to be sought out, and the party very rapidly resorted to blaming the lowest ranking 71 “Hronologija dogad-aja” [no date], IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. Cf. Vuˇceti´c,

“Violence,” 263. 72 “Informacija o mitingu i demonstracijama održanim 23. decembra 1966. godine” (Milosav Preli´c), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-49; “Pregled pitanja koja mogu biti znaˇcajna za politiˇcku ocenu a pokrenuta su u toku rada komisije,” ibid., F-84. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 265–268. 73 Höpken, “Durchherrschte Freiheit,” 56.

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initiator of the rally, Aleksandar Kron. He had just completed his PhD in Philosophy and Logic and was secretary of the Faculty Committee at the University Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia. His co-organizers, who were equally singled out, were Jadran Ferluga, secretary of the Association of University Professors and assistant dean, and the above-mentioned student representative Alija Hodži´c.74 In questioning, Kron emphasized that responsibility lay with the state, which had heated up the atmosphere through the press. He maintained that he had the idea to organize a rally when the press started covering the bombing of Hanoi.75 Ferluga similarly testified to the fuelling of a heated atmosphere, saying that the press, radio, and television incessantly mentioned the number of innocent victims of what they called the American “genocide” as well as the ongoing protests around the world.76 As a result of these inquiries and an investigation lasting a few months, Kron was charged with organizing a student revolt, dismissed from his position on the University Committee and expelled from the League of Communists. Jadran Ferluga received a “last warning”.77 When US President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War in 1965, Yugoslavia was in the midst of launching an economic reform that introduced further market mechanisms to the self-managed economy. Yet, unemployment and emigration continued to grow. In addition, the communist party lived through a conflictual moment. In the summer of 1966, Aleksandar Rankovi´c, vice president and head of the secret police, and thus among the top five in the state, was removed from his positions upon charges of abuse of office. The accusation ran that the Service for State Security, Yugoslavia’s intelligence agency, headed by Rankovi´c, had abused its power by wiretapping the offices and residences of high party officials, including Tito himself.78

74 “Hronologija dogad-aja” [no date], IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 75 “Izjave o studentskim demonstracijama 23. decembra 1966. godine” (Aleksandar

Kron), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 76 “Izjave o studentskim demonstracijama 23. decembra 1966. godine” (Jadran Ferluga), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 77 “Izjave o studentskim demonstracijama 23. decembra 1966. godine” (Alija Hodži´c), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 265–266. 78 Svetko Kovaˇc et al., Sluˇcaj Rankovi´c. Iz arhiva KOS-a (Zagreb: Despot Infinitus, 2016).

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Against the backdrop of these events, the leaders of the Student League of Yugoslavia took a critical position vis-à-vis both the social problems and the authoritarian political structures. Dedicated communists, students, and professors alike criticized the party, seeking to redirect Yugoslavia ideologically, culturally, and politically. Mihailo Markovi´c, for example, professor of philosophy and member of the above-mentioned New Leftist Praxis group, criticized the police violence saying that “communists have never been afraid to launch protest if they knew what they were struggling for”.79 He expressed satisfaction with “our youth who, despite the clear and considerable influence from the West, were ready to decisively oppose the politics coming from the ruling circles in the West”.80 This criticism of society in fact manifested itself in forums of the state-supervised socio-political organizations, in panels and lectures, in the press, and also in the streets. The anti-Vietnam War movement was not always necessary as a vehicle for staging protest. In April 1967, for example, students in Ljubljana covered the corridors of their university with slogans: “We demand freedom of speech, press and assembly, the de jure separation of the Socialist Union of Workers from the Communist Party and the release of political prisoners. We disagree with the dictatorial and demagogic leadership of the Communist Party”.81 After the student demonstrations of June 1968 and the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in August of that year, the party stopped organizing large-scale anti-war demonstrations, leaving the task to the smaller socio-political organizations and to the Yugoslav Coordinating Committee for Aid to the People of Vietnam. Yugoslav intellectuals who directed their criticism at the government saw themselves increasingly suppressed. After June 1968, the party reconsolidated its position both rhetorically and in practice. What proved to be a protracted process of political conflict and controversy, which included the so-called Croatian

79 “Pregled pitanja koja mogu biti znaˇcanja za politiˇcku ocenu a pokrenuto su o toku

rada komisije” [no date], IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. 80 “Izjave o studentskim demonstracijama 23. decembra 1966. godine” (Mihailo Markovi´c), IAB, UK SKS Beograda, F-84. Cf. Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 262. 81 “University of Ljubljana” (April 1967), Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary (HU OSA), 300-10-3-66. Cf. Klasi´c, Jugoslavija i svijet 1968, 54; Sarah D. Žabi´c, Praxis, Student Protest, and Purposive Social Action: The Humanist Marxist Critique of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia, 1964–1975 (MA Thesis, Kent State University, 2010), 3.

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Spring and the drafting of an incisive constitutional reform by 1974, received its final blow in 1975, when eight prominent philosophers and sociologists, Mihailo Markovi´c, Svetozar Stojanovi´c, Ljubomir Tadi´c, Dragoljub Mi´cunovi´c, Zagorka Peši´c-Golubovi´c, Miladin Životi´c, Trivo Ind-i´c and Nebojša Popov, known as the “Belgrade Eight”, were dismissed from Belgrade university and charged with dissident activities, which for most of them included participation in the protests of December 1966 and June 1968.82 Yugoslavia’s foreign policy towards the United States in the context of the latter’s involvement in the Vietnam War thus resulted in giving momentum to domestic issues being raised, hailing fundamental changes in the Yugoslav socio-political system.83

Conclusion The transnationally orchestrated sentiments and politics of Vietnam War protest movements provided a language to Yugoslavs in the 1960s that eventually enabled them to express their frustration not only with international, but also with domestic politics. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War started in 1965, and since mid-1966, when Minister of the Interior and Chief of Security Aleksandar Rankovi´c was removed from office, mingled with protests focused on domestic issues calling for a democratic reform of socialism. Like their counterparts elsewhere, Yugoslavs protesters were part of the global student rebellion, while engaging in a clash with their own government. For their taste, there was not enough socialist solidarity with the Vietnamese and not enough antiimperialist criticism of US foreign policy. For the demonstrators, whose number went far beyond those involved with the New Left, the Vietnam War protests had the additional function of an outlet for their frustration with the socio-political system in which they lived. The Yugoslav government’s claim to exert control over the Vietnam solidarity movement and to manage any political expression in the public sphere saw its limits when

82 Vuˇceti´c, “Violence,” 269. For an American contemporary perspective on the events see Gerson Sher, “The Belgrade Eight: Tito Muzzles the Loyal Opposition,” Nation 220 (15 March 1975). 83 Cf. Jovi´c, Yugoslavia; Ante Batovi´c, The Croatian Spring: Nationalism, Repression and Foreign Policy under Tito (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017); Madigan Fichter, “Yugoslav Protest: Student Rebellion in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo in 1968,” Slavic Review 75 (2016): 99–121.

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protesters began to use the Vietnam War campaigns to challenge Yugoslav state politics.

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Mark, James, Péter Apor, Radina Vuˇceti´c, and Piotr Os˛eka, “‘We Are With You, Vietnam’: Transnational Solidarities in Socialist Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia,” Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015): 439–464. Markovi´c, Mihailo, and Gajo Petrovi´c (eds.), Praxis: Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1979). Markovi´c, Predrag J., “Najava bure: Studentski nemiri u svetu i Jugoslaviji od Drugog svetskog rata do poˇcetka šezdesetih godina,” Tokovi istorije 3/4 (2000): 51–62. Mehta, Harish C., “North Vietnam’s Informal Diplomacy with Bertrand Russell: Peace Activism and the International War Crimes Tribunal,” Peace and Change 37 (2012): 64–94. Miškovi´c, Nataša, “The Pre-History of the Non-Aligned Movement: India’s First Contacts to Communist Yugoslavia, 1948–1950,” India Quarterly 65 (2009): 185–200. Moˇcnik, Rastko, “1968 in Slovenien—... eine ziemlich erfolgreiche Episode,” in “1968” in Jugoslawien. Studentenproteste und kulturelle Avantgarde zwischen 1960 und 1975: Gespräche und Dokumente, ed. Boris Kanzleiter and Krunoslav Stojakovi´c (Bonn: Dietz, 2008), 79–84. Mumbata, Didier Ndongala, Patrice Lumumba: Ahead of His Time (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source, 2018). Periši´c, Miroslav, Od Staljina ka Sartru: Formiranje jugoslovenske inteligencije na evropskim univerzitetima, 1945–1958 (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2008). Perone, James E., Music of the Counterculture Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004). Rajak, Svetozar, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the Early Cold War: Reconciliation, Comradeship, Confrontation, 1953–1957 (London: Routledge, 2011). Rakovi´c, Aleksandar, Rokenrol u Jugoslaviji 1956–1968: Izazov socijalistiˇckom društvu (Belgrade: Arhipelag, 2011). Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 3 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). Sachse, Carola, and Alison Kraft (eds.), Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Saunders, Anna, Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Senjkovi´c, Reana, Svaki dan pobjeda: Kultura omladinskih radnih akcija (Zagreb: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Srednja Europa, 2016). Sher, Gerson, “The Belgrade Eight: Tito Muzzles the Loyal Opposition,” Nation 220 (15 March 1975).

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Sloboda i nasilje: Razgovor o cˇasopisu Praxis i korˇculanskoj letnjoj školi, ed. Nebojša Popov (Belgrade: Res Publica, 2003). Spasovska, Ljubica, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Stefanov, Nenad, “Praxis: Ideen, Debatten, Handlungsformen kritischer Intellektueller im sozialistischen Jugoslawien,” in Mythos Partisan: (Dis-) Kontinuitäten der jugoslawischen Linken: Geschichte, Erinnerung und Perspektiven, ed. Ðord-e Tomi´c et al. (Hamburg, 2013), 287–301. Taylor, Karin, Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria (Vienna, Berlin: Lit, 2006). Urban, George R., Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War within the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Vuˇceti´c, Radina, “Die jugoslawische Außenpolitik und die jugoslawischamerikanischen Beziehungen in den 1960er Jahren,” in Jugoslawien in den 1960er Jahren: Auf dem Weg zu einem (a)normalen Staat? ed. Hannes Grandits and Holm Sundhaussen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013), 17–38. Vuˇceti´c, Radina, “Violence Against the Antiwar Demonstrations of 1965–1968 in Yugoslavia: Political Balancing between East and West,” in Violence in Late Socialist Public Spheres, ed. Sabine Rutar, special issue European History Quarterly 45 (2015): 255–274. Vuˇceti´c, Radina, “Yugoslavia, Vietnam War and Antiwar Activism,” Tokovi Istorije 2 (2013): 165–180. Vuˇceti´c, Radina, Koka-kola socijalizam: Amerikanizacija jugoslovenske popularne kulture šezdesetih godina XX veka (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012). Westad, Odd Arne, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2019). Žabi´c, Sarah D., Praxis, Student Protest, and Purposive Social Action: The Humanist Marxist Critique of the League of Communists in Yugoslavia, 1964–1975 (MA Thesis, Kent State University, 2010). Zubak, Marko, “Pripremanje terena: Odjek globalnog studentskog bunta 1968. godine u jugoslavenskom omladinskom i studentskom tisku,” in 1968: ˇ Cetrdeset godina posle (Zbornik radova), ed. Radmila Radi´c (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 2008), 419–452.

PART III

The Capitalist Core: First World Activists Reach Out to Emancipatory and Revolutionary Movements Across the Globe

CHAPTER 7

Vietnam War Protest and Solidarity in West Germany Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

Introduction While international solidarity with the liberation movements of the socalled “Third World” played a central role for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in terms of both foreign and domestic policy, the West German left initially encountered difficulties in drawing attention to the processes of decolonisation under the conditions of the Cold War. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)—a member of NATO—avoided any direct military contribution to the war in Vietnam. It did, however, support the US war effort in material and moral respects. Considering the division of Germany, the idea that combatting communism in Vietnam

F. Anders Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] A. Sedlmaier (B) School of History, Law and Social Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_7

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was a way of defending the freedom of the Western World gained special relevance in terms of legitimising the war. West Germany provided development aid for the South Vietnamese regime since 1955. As part of a complex web of cross-movement mobilisation, the Vietnam War became a central theme of public rallies and protest initiatives during the decade that followed the escalation of the war by the Johnson administration in the second half of 1964. With the overt deployment of US combat troops to Vietnam, groups of activists formed in the FRG and put sympathy for the fate of this far away country high on their agenda. At times, other protest issues—especially the domestic debate over the Emergency Acts (Notstandsgesetze), a constitutional amendment adding emergency clauses to ensure the government’s ability to act in crises such as uprisings or war—surpassed the Vietnam War as mobilising factors that bound individuals to protest campaigns and social movements. Often the two issues went hand in hand, as can be obtained from the cover photo of the present volume. The image depicts street theatre during a rally protesting the Emergency Acts in Bonn in May 1968 against the backdrop of the famous image showing the summary execution of Viê.t Cô.ng fighter Nguy˜ên V˘an Lém by the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, General Nguy˜ên Ngo.c Loan, in Saigon during the Tet Offensive. In both memory politics and historiography, “myth” and “projective identification” have been two favourite catchphrases retrospectively attached to Vietnam War solidarity. Coupled with ex-post self-criticism of some activists and pointers to the undemocratic record of the post1975 Vietnamese regime, they serve to put protest on a level with political escapism, thereby reducing its moral legitimacy.1 The currency of such interpretations is the result of multiple historiographical reductions. Although many activists were neither born in the 1940s nor were they students, Vietnam War protest is chiefly, and often exclusively, associated with revolutionary activists from the “New Left” of the so-called ‘68 generation. As a result, the chronological focus has overwhelmingly been laid on the period 1966–1968 with the widespread assumption that protest petered out with the dissolution of the student movement while, arguably, the highpoint of mobilisation was reached in 1972/73 1 Jörg Wischermann, “Vietnam – der Mythos der Solidarität in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965–75),” in Vietnam: Mythen und Wirklichkeiten, ed. Wischermann and Gerhard Will (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018), 90–120.

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in the run-up to the Paris Peace Accords. Geographically, research has been dominated by transatlantic perspectives with the widespread assumption of a spill over of protest from the United States, while the role of the “Second World” and of international organisations in the generation of protest is marginalised. Methodologically, looking for a separate “anti-Vietnam War movement”—or normatively reducing it to a peace movement—has run into the danger of obscuring the Vietnam War, as reflected in transnational impulses of dissent from the three geopolitical regions of the world, as a major cause of protest via cross-movement mobilisation and—often overlooked—confrontations with pro-US and anti-communist counter demonstrators. Overall, developments are usually inscribed with a normative trajectory of radicalisation leading away from legitimate protest to illegitimate violence.2 Some authors have contributed to transcending such limitations. Quinn Slobodian has shown that the historiography on the “Sixties” in West Germany largely omitted the role of foreign students, which resulted in a retrospective reduction of the third world to a mere “projection screen”.3 Works that have treated Vietnam War protests as part of a wider Third World movement help to overcome the transatlantic fixation by adding the focus on decolonisation and the North–South conflict but generally do not pursue the Vietnam issue beyond the 1960s, considering it mainly as a prehistory of a self-contained Third World movement

2 Jost Dülffer, “Die Anti-Vietnamkriegs-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Frieden stiften: Deeskalations- und Friedenspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Dülffer et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 316–331; Ingo Juchler, Die Studentenbewegungen in den Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland der sechziger Jahre: Eine Untersuchung hinsichtlich ihrer Beeinflussung durch Befreiungsbewegungen und -theorien aus der Dritten Welt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996); Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Among several pertinent publications by Wilfried Mausbach see “Auschwitz and Vietnam: West German Protest against America’s War in the 1960s,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World, ed. Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd Gardner and Mausbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 279–298. 3 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5−12 and 78–100.

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taken to emerge since 1973.4 Focusing on state and civil society humanitarian aid, Michael Vössing examines the Hilfsaktion Vietnam (Vietnam Aid Campaign, HV), a “central humanitarian player [of the] Vietnam War opposition”, providing aid to civilian victims of war in both parts of Vietnam.5 As early as 1975, Frank Werkmeister presented an overview of the West German “protest movement against the Vietnam War” that goes well beyond student circles by highlighting the work of the umbrella organisation Initiative Internationale Vietnam-Solidarität (IIVS) founded in October 1969, based on extensive primary material and his personal experience as an activist of the Campaign for Disarmament (KfA).6 Werkmeister also provides a cursory treatment of Maoist and Trotskyist groups of the early 1970s. Beyond this, the historiography on these circles and the late phase of West German Vietnam protest more generally is still in its infancy.7 Günter Wernicke offers a sketch of Vietnam War protest in both German states, which he describes as part of an international peace movement. In doing so, he refers to their mutual entanglement against the backdrop of the activities of the World Peace Council (WPC) in the bipolar world of the Cold War, which was additionally marked by competing Soviet and Chinese pretensions to hegemony.8 This chapter 4 Werner Balsen and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt, 1986); Claudia Olejniczak, Die Dritte-Welt-Bewegung in Deutschland: Konzeptionelle und organisatorische Strukturmerkmale einer neuen sozialen Bewegung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 1999), 93–107; Dorothee Weitbrecht, Aufbruch in die Dritte Welt: Der Internationalismus der Studentenbewegung von 1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2012); Andreas Eckert, “‘Was geht mich denn Vietnam an’? Internationale Solidarität und ‘Dritte Welt’ in der Bundesrepublik,” in Über Grenzen: Ausländische intellektuelle Einflüsse in der Bundesrepublik der 1950er bis 1980er Jahre, ed. Axel Schildt (Göttingen: Wallstein 2016), 191–210. 5 Michael Vössing, Humanitäre Hilfe und Interessenpolitik: Westdeutsches Engagement für Vietnam in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018), 12 and 381–476. 6 Frank Werkmeister, Die Protestbewegung gegen den Vietnamkrieg in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1965–1973 (PhD diss., Marburg, 1975). 7 Primary source material can be found in Materialien zur Analyse von Opposition (MAO): Vietnam und Vietnamsolidarität, https://www.mao-projekt.de/INT/AS/SO/ Vietnam_Linkliste.shtml. 8 Günter Wernicke, “Solidarität hilft siegen!” Zur Solidaritätsbewegung mit Vietnam in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: Helle Panke, 2011); “The World Peace Council and the Antiwar Movement in East Germany,” in America, ed. Daum/Gardner/Mausbach, 299–320.

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seeks to continue the work of these scholars in highlighting the breadth of the loose alliance of activists that stood behind West German Vietnam War protest.

A Broad Alliance There was a great variety of different Vietnam initiatives and campaigns that facilitated demonstrations, political events, solidarity resolutions and information about delegations travelling to and from Vietnam. To contextualise the destruction resulting from US aggression and the war crimes of the Vietnam War for German audiences, activists showed documentary films and translated texts about the history and culture of Vietnam. The IIVS set up a motion picture service, which offered more than 15 documentary films from North and South Vietnam, the GDR, Hungary, and France to its local branches and other interested organisations.9 Ways of accessing new contacts and materials led some activists via the Vietnamese embassy in East Berlin and the representations of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) in East Berlin, Paris, and Prague. Initially, activists focused primarily on the victims of war, while a minority came to foreground solidarity with the struggle and the military fight of the Vietnamese as embodied in the Maoist strategy of the “people’s war”—the attempt to maintain the support of the population in a war zone—which was heavily used by the NLF, both as a military tactic and as a propaganda slogan. This difference became an issue of contention among West German activists. Despite disagreements in politics and worldview, a loose but broad protest alliance was unified by shared ethical indignation about an unjust war. This alliance had three organisational and historical branches: (a) the pacifist KfA, which emerged from the pacifist Easter March movement, modelled on the Aldermaston Marches in Britain; (b) the increasingly revolutionary and internationalist circles of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Student Union); while (c) the humanitarian HV organised aid for the suffering population of Vietnam. The pacifists of the KfA campaigned against nuclear weapons of every description in both East and West using traditional means of public protest since the early 1960s. The revolutionary SDS resulted from the

9 Vössing, Humanitäre Hilfe, 405; Wernicke, “Solidarität”, 43 and 55.

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Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) expelling its members from the party in 1961. Subsequently, small, theoretically inclined “internationalist” circles emerged, whose constitutive characteristic became the notion of moral solidarity.10 This included the working group “South Vietnam”, which, created in early 1965, organised exhibitions and film screenings and produced one of the first German book-length treatments of the Vietnam conflict, authored by Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng.11 The humanitarian HV, which made its appearance in the summer of 1965, drew its membership from a range of organisations. The major groups were the German Peace Society (dating back to 1892), the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (founded in 1914), the Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner (IdK), which was the West German branch of War Resisters International (WRI), the Quakers, the German section of the World Organization of Mothers of all Nations, the Westdeutsche Frauenfriedensbewegung (West German Women’s Peace Movement, WFFB), the Communist Party of Germany (banned in 1956), parts of the unions, and the KfA. One of the chief initiators of the HV was Martin Niemöller, who in the 1930s had been co-founder of the Confessing Church, a resistance group that had emerged in opposition to the Nazification of Protestantism. After World War II, Niemöller became a vocal opponent of West German rearmament and a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament. In 1961, he became President of the World Council of Churches. A few months before the creation of the HV, Niemöller travelled to Vietnam as part of an international delegation and met Hô` Chí Minh. Although this visit caused an uproar, Niemöller brought the suffering of the Vietnamese people to public attention. The HV procured donations and aid projects from different fractions of the Vietnam War opposition and from the charitable organisations of the churches by liaising with the Red Cross in both parts of Vietnam, including the NLF and Vietnamese diplomatic representations in Paris and East Berlin (Illustration 7.1).12 The beginning of Vietnam War protest in the FRG in the second half of 1964 and early 1965 in response to Johnson’s escalation involved all three 10 Weitbrecht, Aufbruch, 39 and 59–63. 11 Jürgen Horlemann and Peter Gäng, Vietnam: Genesis eines Konflikts

(Berlin:

Suhrkamp, 1966). In 1968, the book already reached a print run of 44,000. 12 Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 38, 43–46; Vössing, Humanitäre Hilfe, 381–387, 404, 408.

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Illustration 7.1 HV solidarity event “Help Vietnam!” with two representatives of the North Vietnamese Red Cross and a pastor for the HV informing on the use of donations, Hamburg, 17 February 1969.13

13 Nadir Plakatarchiv, https://www.plakat.nadir.org/plakat_ausgabe.php3?plakat=:// uke.nadir.org/nadir/plakat/cd/film161/161_10.jpg.

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branches of this loose alliance. One of the first demonstrations protesting the bombing of North Vietnamese targets following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident took place in Munich on 13 August 1964 with around 100 participants “from different political tendencies” conducting a sit-in in front of the US consulate general. Flyers called on the Munich population to imagine the Leopoldstraße being bombarded.14 On 19 December 1964, the KfA sent an open protest letter to the US government criticising the bombing raids.15 In February 1965, IdK, SDS, and WFFB wrote a joint statement demanding an immediate cessation of the air strikes.16 Long before the question of violence became a hot topic for the 1968 movement, small-scale demonstrations against the US intervention in Vietnam ended in an unpeaceful manner. On 27 March 1965—several weeks before the first big Vietnam War protest rally organised by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Washington—around 450 “Easter marchers” staged a demonstration in Frankfurt. The march had been properly registered with the authorities and initially went peacefully but eventually turned into a “pandemonium” with press reports of “the most severe clashes with the police for years”.17 A protest rally in Munich on the occasion of a German–American friendship week in May followed a similar pattern: the crowd of roughly 400 displayed banners that resembled those shown in Frankfurt, highlighting the relevance of the conflict in Vietnam for German affairs. The slogan “Vietnam – bombs and gas today, nuclear bombs tomorrow?” connected the old pacifist protest issue of nuclear armament with the new focus on the threat of escalation in Vietnam. Demonstrators called on Chancellor Ludwig Erhard (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) to deny any moral or financial support for the US war in Vietnam: “No Vietnam in Germany – no Emergency Laws”, and “Mr Erhard, no support for US policy in Vietnam”. When police tried to dissolve the demonstration ahead of schedule, protesters turned 14 Vietnam-Komitee für Frieden und Befreiungskampf, Munich, 10 Jahre VietnamKomitee für Frieden und Befreiungskampf: 10 Jahre Solidaritätsarbeit mit Vietnam (November 1976), 5, https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/BAY/OBB/Muenchen_INT_ 1976_10_Jahre_Vietnam-Komitee.shtml. 15 Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 52. 16 Wernicke, “Solidarität”, 23. 17 Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung (Frankfurt: Rogner und Bernhard, 1998), vol. 1, 217–219.

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to a sit-in, which was ended by a larger contingent of police.18 Less than a year later, at a Frankfurt demonstration co-organised by the trade unions, demonstrators displayed banners with the slogan “Instead of genocide – implementation of the Geneva Accords”. The protest ended in a brawl when the demonstration was attacked by members of the CDU youth organisation.19 The first large-scale and supra-regional manifestation of the budding West German Vietnam War protest was a congress organised by the SDS in Frankfurt. In March 1966, the SDS invited student organisations from Austria, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden to Frankfurt. In May, the resulting “West European Student Committee for Peace in Vietnam” had 26 member organisations. The Frankfurt congress with keynote speaker Herbert Marcuse attracted more than 2000, mostly German participants. Several social democratic organisations had withdrawn following pressure from the SPD party leadership. The event was explicitly directed against the financial and economic support the West German government was giving to South Vietnam and US Vietnam policy,20 becoming the most important not militarily involved donor state by providing to Saigon economic and humanitarian aid averaging approximately 7.5 million dollars annually.21 Noteworthy were the activists’ broad international networks that went well beyond student circles. During a large-scale demonstration in Munich on 28 November 1966, the organisers read out a telegram from the NLF representation in East Berlin thanking the protesters for calling on the US to withdraw their troops from South Vietnam and on the West German government to cease its financial support. The Lambrakis Democratic Youth in Greece conveyed greetings,22 and so did the SDS from the US and a group of “young revolutionary Marxists” from Vienna. 18 Ursula Willke and Martin Rehm, “Polizei rückt gegen Demonstranten aus,” Süddeutsche Zeitung 127 (28 May 1965), http://protest-muenchen.sub-bavaria.de/art ikel/1667. 19 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, 228–229. 20 Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 118–125. 21 Marc Frey, Geschichte des Vietnamkriegs: Die Tragödie in Asien und das Ende des amerikanischen Traums (Munich: Beck, 10th ed., 2016), 183. 22 Grigoris Lambrakis (1912–1963) was a Greek physician and politician, a member of the resistance during World War II and subsequently a prominent peace activist. His assassination by right-wingers after he had delivered the keynote speech at a peace rally in Thessaloniki provoked mass protest and led to a political crisis. As a result, the Lambrakis

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A message was read out from British philosopher Bertrand Russell and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who were preparing the International War Crimes Tribunal, a private investigative body to examine the US military intervention in Vietnam and, in particular, US responsibility for war crimes and genocide.23 In the wake of further demonstrations and information events, a Munich Vietnam Committee for Peace and Liberation Struggle was founded in early 1967. The choice of name was inspired by an attempt to integrate the different branches of the Vietnam War opposition, namely pacifists and anti-imperialists, while heterogeneous local Vietnam Committees were springing up across the country. In his welcoming address at the inaugural meeting, Munich SDS board member Thomas Schmitz-Bender explicitly pointed to existing collaborations with workers and students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.24 With explicit reference to the Nuremberg principles—the guidelines for what constitutes a war crime underlying the Nuremberg Trials— the Munich Vietnam Committee sought to establish 8 May as a “Day against Fascism and Imperialism”. This was with support from the Russell Tribunal, which was meeting simultaneously, and attracted a variety of groups with ties to the churches, bourgeois politics, and the old left, among them the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. A joint call stated: “22 years later, we have to realise that the political development has not yielded the changes for the Federal Republic we had hoped for at the time […]. On 8 May 1967, we find the culprits of the past hand in hand with one of the prosecutors of the time in an operation that corresponds verbatim to the charges made at Nuremberg”, alluding to the controversies that had arisen concerning the Nazi past of both Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and President Heinrich Lübke (both CDU). On the “Anniversary of Liberation from Hitler Fascism”, as the day was officially called in the GDR where it was a public holiday, around 3000 participated in a Munich rally. The keynote speaker was the socialist politician and journalist Walter Fabian. Born in 1902, and a resistance activist and politically exiled during the Nazi years, he had returned to the FRG in 1957 to become editor in chief of the monthly journal of the German

Democratic Youth was founded with Mikis Theodorakis its first president voicing strong opposition to the Vietnam War. 23 10 Jahre Vietnam-Komitee, 7–8. 24 Ibid., 11.

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Trade Union Federation and, in 1965, co-founder and chair of the HV.25 The author Yaak Karsunke—born in 1934 and thereby another example of the many activists who do not exactly conform to the widespread stereotype of youthful student protesters—gave the concluding speech on behalf of the KfA. Karsunke had just published the poetry volume Kilroy & andere describing the generation of war children who had experienced the Americans as liberators and heralds of culture and now experienced that the moral values they had adopted from them lost their validity.26 In 1967, two international events strengthened the networks of West German Vietnam protesters: the sessions of the Russell Tribunal in Sweden and Denmark, and the World Conference on Vietnam in Stockholm. The jury of the former was recruited from internationally renowned intellectuals including the Marburg political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth (b. 1906), the German–Jewish philosopher and anti-nuclear activist Günter Anders (b. 1902),27 and the German–Swedish writer Peter Weiss (b. 1916).28 The psychiatrist Erich Wulff (b. 1926), who as part of a West German team had taught at the medical faculty of the University of Huê´ in South Vietnam, was called as a witness. Wulff had not only collaborated with the NLF since 1964 by facilitating the acquisition of medicines and medical equipment, but also by translating protest appeals by West German intellectuals into Vietnamese for illegal South Vietnamese print media and Vietnamese protest songs and poems into German.29 The German-language publication of the Russell Tribunal’s proceedings in two large-circulation paperbacks provided protesters with additional knowledge and authentic material they could employ and

25 Jörg Wollenberg, “Walter Fabian – Brückenbauer der Linken,” http://www.weltde

rarbeit.de/mobil/lebensbilder1.htm. 26 10 Jahre Vietnam-Komitee, 15–16 and 20–23. 27 Günther Anders, Nürnberg und Vietnam: Synoptisches Mosaik (Berlin: Voltaire, 1967);

Visit beautiful Vietnam: ABC der Aggressionen heute (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968). 28 Peter Weiss, Diskurs über die Vorgeschichte und den Verlauf des lang andauernden Befreiungskrieges in Viet Nam als Beispiel für die Notwendigkeit des bewaffneten Kampfes der Unterdrückten gegen ihre Unterdrücker, sowie über die Versuche der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, die Grundlagen der Revolution zu vernichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). 29 Georg W. Alsheimer [i.e. Erich Wulff], Vietnamesische Lehrjahre: Sechs Jahre als deutscher Arzt in Vietnam 1961–1967 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 331, 464; Eine Reise nach Vietnam (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), 137.

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distribute in their campaigns.30 An iconic example for such use is filmmaker Harun Farocki reading the testimony of an air war victim from one of the paperbacks into the camera in Unlöschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), which links the topics technology, war, and the involvement of scientists and engineers in the military-industrial complex. The Stockholm conference in early July 1967 offered a significant stage for the international coordination of activities with representatives from 63 countries and organisations such as WPC, WRI, the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Numerous West German activists, among them Niemöller and Gäng, attended and approved the resulting international action plan with subsequent annual meetings, which lasted until 1973.31 Responding to initiatives from the US National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a result of the Stockholm conference was the call for an international day of Vietnam War protest for 21 October 1967, which in the US led to the “March on the Pentagon”, while more than 10,000 demonstrated in West Berlin. The International Vietnam Congress in West Berlin was held on 17– 18 February 1968 with roughly 5000 delegates from 14 countries, and a powerful closing rally was organised by the SDS in conjunction with several other national and international left-wing student organisations. The most visible organisers were Rudi Dutschke, the SDS’s most prominent spokesperson, his close friend Gaston Salvatore from Chile, who was a postgraduate student at FU Berlin, and the official SDS co-chair Karl Dietrich Wolff. The Congress not only demanded peace in Vietnam but also “victory for the Vietnamese revolution”.32 Mobilising for the Berlin congress, Dutschke and Salvatore translated Che Guevara’s “Message to

30 Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, Das Vietnam-Tribunal oder Amerika vor Gericht, 2 vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1968); Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 63–67. 31 Wernicke, “Solidarität”, 11 and 20; Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 67–82; on the WPC’s role in the subsequent Stockholm conferences, see the chapter by Christiaens in this volume. 32 “Schlußerklärung der Internationalen Vietnam-Konferenz,” in Der Kampf des vietnamesischen Volkes und die Globalstrategie des Imperialismus: Internationaler VietnamKongreß-Westberlin, (Berlin: SDS Westberlin and Internationales Nachrichten- und Forschungs-Institut, 1968), 158–160. Also see Juchler, Studentenbewegungen, 257–268.

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the Tricontinental”, in which he called on revolutionaries to “make two, three, many Vietnams”, into German and wrote an introduction.33 Roughly two weeks before the Berlin Vietnam Congress, Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, head of the Frankfurt SDS, had conducted a teach-in at Frankfurt University using the slogan “Weapons for the Vietcong!” After this event, between 2000 and 3000 demonstrators with a big NLF flag moved towards the US consulate general, the Amerikahaus, and the American trade centre, where efforts to blockade these institutions led to “street battles”.34 Speaking at the congress, Krahl declared that one would not stop at mere declamations, a campaign “should emerge from this congress: ‘Smash NATO’. […] In the metropoles, the struggle can certainly not be an uncritical transfer of the guerrilla strategy. […] The steps from protest to political resistance can only be implemented if […] we make an effort to organise a large, united campaign for the Wehrkraftzersetzung [subversion of the war effort as used in a Nazi anti-sedition decree] of the NATO armies in Western Europe”.35 The final rally of the Berlin Vietnam Congress drew at least 12,000 participants (with other sources estimating up to 30,000). Initially, West Berlin’s government had prohibited the rally, but an administrative court set aside this executive order on condition that the demonstration should keep away from the US barracks, which the organisers had originally picked as the rally’s end point. Following an alternative route, the event remained largely peaceful, although there were angry citizens who wrested banners from protesters or drove their cars into the crowd resulting in a few minor injuries.36 In response to the SDS’s Vietnam Congress, West Berlin’s government organised a rally under the heading “Berlin Stands for Peace and Freedom” on 21 February 1968. The organisers claimed 150,000 participants, among them many public employees who had been granted a 33 Ernesto Che Guevara, Schaffen wir zwei, drei, viele Vietnam: Brief an das Exekutivsekretariat von OSPAAL (Berlin: Oberbaumpresse, 1967). 34 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, 294–296. Also see Flyer SDS Tübingen, “Waffen für den Vietcong!”, https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/BW/TUE/Tuebingen_VDS_Univer sitaet_1968_03.shtml. 35 Der Kampf des vietnamesischen Volkes, 141–146. 36 Klimke, The Other Alliance, 174–177; Thomas P. Becker and Ute Schröder, Die

Studentenproteste der 60er Jahre: Archivführer – Chronik – Bibliographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 175; “30 000 demonstrierten für Frieden und Freiheit des vietnamesischen Volkes,” Die Wahrheit (19 February 1968), 1.

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day off to attend. Reporting on the event, the magazine Der Spiegel commented: “On 18 February, 12,000 demonstrated in West Berlin who, according to conventional wisdom, are revolutionaries, bullies, and weirdos. They supported the Vietcong and maintained discipline. On 21 February, 150,000 (considerably overestimated by police) demonstrated in West Berlin who, according to conventional wisdom, are orderly citizens and democrats through and through. They supported peace and liberty and went into hysterics. […] Berlin citizens, democracy on their lips […], have begun to beat up those of other opinions. ‘Lynch him, hang him’, they shouted when they saw someone who looked like Rudi Dutschke. […] The police counted 23 injured victims of the government demonstration and 34 persons who had to be taken into custody to protect them from the fury of the people”. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit referred to an “atmosphere of pogroms”.37 The US Mission Berlin applauded the government rally as an “opportunity to let off steam”, and it showed “all concerned – students, senate, and populace – that a danger of violence is not far below the surface”.38 Although orchestrated from above, the pro-US and anti-communist opposition to left-wing Vietnam solidarity took the form of a social movement of its own, a counter social movement as it were. This dimension of protest in the Vietnam War era—with different protest agendas confronting each other—is often overlooked due to the dominant research focus on left-wing anti-war protesters opposing their governments.39 The intensification of confrontation did not immediately preclude the persistence of a broader alliance of Vietnam War protesters. A Frankfurt rally of 6000, organised by the pacifist branch of this alliance, featured a speech by Niemöller calling for “An End to the War in Vietnam”. When it became known during the rally that Dutschke, who was also scheduled to speak, had just been arrested “preventively” at Frankfurt airport, around

37 “Berlin / Demonstrationen: Sei es mit Gewalt,” Der Spiegel 9 (26 February 1968), 23–26. Also see Balsen/Rössel, Solidarität, 206–210. 38 As quoted in Klimke, The Other Alliance, 176. 39 See Sandra Scanlon, The Pro-War Movement : Domestic Support for the Vietnam War

and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). The notion of anti-communism as a counter social movement is inspired by Hajimu Masuda, Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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1500 SDS supporters moved towards the police headquarters. Faced with the crowd, mayor Willi Brundert (SPD) obtained Dutschke’s release.40

Supporting Deserters Organisations that were traditionally concerned with draft resistance— IdK and Verband der Kriegsdienstverweigerer (Association of Conscientious Objectors, VK)—were focusing on Vietnam since 1965 when IdK chair Helmut-Michael Vogel (b. 1922) toured the country with a slide show on the origins of the Vietnam War.41 Demanding a politically negotiated settlement that included the NLF, both associations avoided discussions over the question of armed violence on the part of NLF and North Vietnam. Beginning in 1966, they participated in the WRI campaign to support the desertion of GIs.42 The VK observed a strong increase in applications for conscientious objector status since the mid-1960s, which it attributed to the impact of the Vietnam War in particular,43 even though this was only one among several political motives that those unwilling to do military service brought up in the mandatory “examination of conscience”. The Campaign against the Emergency Acts also endorsed conscientious objection. The number of objectors doubled in 1968 and continued to increase rapidly during the 1970s.44 From early on, many SDS members joined their local VK chapter, especially in the Frankfurt Rhine-Main area. The Frankfurt VK chapter began to mobilise West German conscripts under the slogan “Our Vietnam is the Bundeswehr”, which was eventually adopted nationwide. A survey conducted by the Ministry of Defence reported 90 leafletting campaigns and 24 demonstrations throughout West Germany in 1968. Activists 40 Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule, 298–300. 41 Guido Grünewald, Zwischen Kriegsdienstverweigerergewerkschaft

und politischer Friedensorganisation: Der Verband der Kriegsdienstverweigerer 1958–1966 (Hamburg: Friedenspolitische Studiengesellschaft, 1977), 161 and 183. 42 Wernicke, “Solidarität”, 26. 43 Angelika Dörfler-Dierken, Die Bedeutung der Jahre 1968 und 1981 für die

Bundeswehr (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010), 115–116. 44 Patrick Bernhardt, Zivildienst zwischen Reform und Revolte: Eine bundesdeutsche Institution im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, 1961–1982 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 53, 115 and 200.

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were, however, often subjected to substantial abuse and threats by the soldiers they sought to agitate.45 Flyers expressed solidarity with GIs and provided contact addresses for those contemplating desertion and seeking support, listing local offices of VK, IdK, KfA, and SDS as well as contacts in Sweden, France, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—potential safe havens for US deserters.46 An important organisation in this respect was RITA (Resistance Inside the Army), founded in Paris in 1967 with connections to prominent opponents of the Vietnam War: Sartre, who lend his postal address to the organisation, and the actress Jane Fonda, who would embark on the FTA tour, a Vietnam War protest road show for GIs. An early RITA member established the organisation at Heidelberg: Max Watts (an alias for Thomas Schwaetzer) was born into a Viennese Jewish family in 1922 and became naturalised in the US during the 1940s. To avoid being drafted into the Korean War he moved to France, from where he was expelled in 1970, when the Pompidou government became less tolerant towards deserters. He became “the driving force behind the GI movement in Germany” conducting his activities out of a political bookstore, where he edited and largely wrote Graffiti, an underground newspaper for GIs, and liaised with the Lawyers Military Defense Committee, a non-profit legal organisation offering civilian counsel to members of the US military in disciplinary procedures and courts-martial, initially in Saigon and, from 1972 to 1976, in Heidelberg.47 In November 1969, KD Wolff and others founded a Solidarity Committee for the Black Panther Party, dedicating itself to agitation among GIs stationed in West Germany. The slogan “Support GI resistance” became popular and was also supposed to make it clear “that the Vietnam campaign was not anti-American, but anti-imperialist”.48

45 Ibid., 129, 133–134 and 201. 46 Diverse flyers, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam, “Neue

Linke, APO in Deutschland,” Arch 02,181, K. 95 and Brünn-Harris-Watts Collection, Coll00045. 47 Alexander Vazansky, An Army in Crisis: Social Conflict and the U.S. Army in Germany, 1968–1975 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 116–117 and 138– 146; Max Watts, US-Army—Europe: Von der Desertion zum Widerstand in der Kaserne oder wie die U-Bahn zur RITA fuhr (Berlin: Harald Kater Verlag, 1989). 48 “Unterstützt den GI-Widerstand,” agit 883 44 (11 December 1969), 9; Dario Azzellini, “Die ausländischen Genossen können unschätzbare Dienste leisten: Mit dem

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Resistance within the US armed forces remained limited in scale because soldiers faced significant obstacles and penalties when engaging in protest activities, but these included stalling, sabotage, the creation and distribution of illicit newspapers, and desertion. Especially for the latter two, cooperation with civilian activists was essential, who, for example, contributed the presses on which flyers and pamphlets were printed that called upon fellow soldiers to join the protest (Illustration 7.2).49 The controversial case of the so-called “Ramstein 2” triggered mass attention and solidarity protest with the causes of African Americans. On 19 November 1970, a small group of Black Panthers, some of whom had completed their military service in Germany, apparently tried to distribute propaganda material at Ramstein Air Base. This was part of a larger solidarity campaign for two imprisoned US activists: Bobby Seale and Angela Davis. Davis was a popular figure in both parts of divided Germany: she had studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and completed a doctorate at Humboldt University in East Berlin. She was close to the German SDS and participated in Vietnam War protest. When she was arrested in the US for her alleged involvement in a kidnapping and shootout in California, a large-scale international campaign worked to free Davis from prison.50 Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale was one of the Chicago Eight defendants charged with inciting a riot in the context of the Vietnam War protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The attempt to mobilise GIs at Ramstein ended in a shootout with a German guard who was wounded in the fire. Two of the Panthers, William Burrell and Larry Jackson, were detained shortly thereafter. They turned out to belong to the editorial staff of the GI newspaper Voice of the Lumpen, published by KD Wolff’s publishing company Roter Stern (Red Star). The resulting trial for attempted murder triggered a lively protest campaign in the provincial Palatinate including confrontations with police and brawls with the local population.51

Internationalismus rund um den Globus,” in agit 883: Bewegung, Revolte, Underground in Westberlin 1969–1972, ed. rotaprint 25 (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2006), 185–199. 49 Vazansky, An Army in Crisis, 114–155. 50 Klimke, The Other Alliance, 134–142. 51 “Prozesse: Schwarze hinne,” Der Spiegel 28 (21 June 1971), 73–74; AK Heimatgeschichte, “Der Prozess gegen die ‘Ramstein 2’ in Zweibrücken und Frankenthal 1971/72,” in Das Prinzip Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Roten Hilfe in der BRD, ed. Bambule (Hamburg: Laika, 2013), vol. 2, 193–216; Maria Höhn, “The Black Panther

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Illustration 7.2 Poster advertising a rally in Heidelberg (December 1969).52

An event with Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver in Frankfurt, planned for late November 1970, which the defendants had originally tried to advertise, could not take place because Cleaver was refused entry Solidarity Committee and the Trial of the Ramstein 2,” in Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Belinda Davis et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 215–239; Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs and Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 143–170. 52 Nadir Plakatarchiv, http://uke.nadir.org/nadir/plakat/cd/film285/285_01.jpg.

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into the FRG by the West German authorities after she had been part of the “U.S. People’s Anti Imperialist Delegation” led by her husband Eldridge Cleaver, which toured North Korea, North Vietnam, and China in the summer of 1970.53 In July 1971, Kathleen Cleaver managed to speak in Frankfurt and Heidelberg after illegally entering the FRG via Zurich with the help of Swiss Jewish intellectuals who had experience in smuggling people over the border since the Second World War.54 Back in the Palatinate, Burrell was eventually acquitted but fined for breach of regulations concerning foreigners, while Jackson was sentenced to four years imprisonment. David Jenkins, who was also involved in the Ramstein incident but managed to escape, was secretly taken to East Germany in the boot of a car driven by Helmut Schauer. The Stasi facilitated Jenkins’ flight to Algeria, where the exiled Cleavers had established a Black Panther outpost.55 Schauer’s involvement highlights the heterogeneous roots and longer continuities of Vietnam War protest and solidarity activities. Before he became SDS chair between 1964 and 1966, and then increasingly fell out with his more revolutionary successors, Schauer had been secretary and co-founder of the VK in 1958. In the same year, he was part of a small group of activists who gained publicity by displaying a flag of the Algerian National Liberation Front during a state visit of Charles de Gaulle to call attention to the French colonial war in Algeria.56

The Early 1970s: Protest Continues The desertion campaign demonstrates that protesting the US war in Vietnam did not end with the student revolt and the dissolution of the SDS in March 1970. Newly founded small-scale communist parties and 53 See Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 107–189; Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). 54 “Kathleen Cleaver über Widerstand,” interview with Jonathan Fischer, Süddeutsche Zeitung (26 June 2015), https://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/kathleen-cleaver-ueber-wid erstand-1.2537109. 55 Jochen Staadt, “Die Flucht des Schwarzen Panthers: Im Kofferraum von Frankfurt via GÜST-Marienborn nach Afrika,” Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat 24 (2008), 86–95. 56 Claus Leggewie, Kofferträger: Das Algerienprojekt der Linken im AdenauerDeutschland (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1984), 112.

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Spontis (groups of political activists that sought to continue the traditions of “1968” by invoking the spontaneity of the masses) as well as groups that turned towards underground armed struggle, like the Red Army Faction (RAF),57 continued the endeavour to interpret, utilise, and influence the course of the war in Indochina between 1970 and 1975. In more than 200 cities, offshoots of the IIVS—which emerged from an alliance between KfA and various smaller organisations including some with close ties to the Eastern-bloc inspired German Communist Party (DKP)—competed with the Vietnam committees and aid groups that paid allegiance to Maoism. For the fragmented left, protesting the Vietnam War, which the US expanded by invading and bombing Cambodia and Laos, continued to contain an important integrative moment. On 9 May 1970, a march of several thousand against the Cambodian Invasion and the Kent State shootings ended after the smashing of a few display windows and under chants of “USA – SA – SS” in front of the West Berlin Amerikahaus, which was defended by several thousand police, water cannon, barbed wire, and helicopters. In the resulting skirmishes, a plainclothes police officer fired live ammunition into the crowd, wounding at least one unarmed person. Several hundred injuries on both sides had to be treated in hospitals. Given the parallels with the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg by a plainclothes police officer in 1967—and to a lesser degree with the Kent State shootings—it is remarkable how little public attention the use of live ammunition against protesters triggered. The main reason is probably that no one was killed; the two wounded police horses that had to be put down received more coverage.58

57 Martin Klimke and Wilfried Mausbach, “Auf der äußeren Linie der Befreiungskriege: Die RAF und der Vietnamkonflikt,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus, ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), vol. 1, 620–643. 58 “Erbitterte Kritik an Präsident Nixon: Welle von Demonstrationen gegen die amerikanische Indochina-Politik,” Die Zeit (15 May 1970); “Berlin/Baader: Macht kaputt,” Der Spiegel 21 (18 May 1970), 100; “Schiesserei,” agit 883 60 (14 May 1970), 11; “Proteste vor Amerikahäusern in der BRD,” https://www.mao-projekt.de/ INT/NA/USA/USA_Amerikahaus.shtml; Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen, Pop, Politk und Propaganda: Das Amerika Haus Berlin im Wandel der Zeit (Berlin: Hatje-Cantz, 2015), 116–123. The Amerikahäuser and other US institutions had become frequent targets of militant protest; other small-scale arson attacks took place in Frankfurt (January 1969), Berlin (December 1969), and Munich (January 1971); see Reinhild Kreis, Orte für Amerika: Deutsch-Amerikanische Institute und Amerikahäuser in der Bundesrepublik seit den 1960er Jahren (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012), 337–380.

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In Frankfurt, activists belonging to the “spontaneist spectrum”, among them the group Rote Panther—mainly working-class youth admiring the Black Panthers—and the Union of Iranian Students organised a teachin and a demonstration against the Cambodian Invasion drawing an estimated 3000–6000 participants.59 Among the Frankfurt radical left, some lamented that the demonstration had been “lame and like an Easter March”, while others emphasised that what was needed was not the window smashing type of solidarity with the struggles of the Third World.60 After the annual military parade of the allied forces in West Berlin on 25 May, massive clashes occurred between demonstrators and the police; the latter responded in kind and threw paving stones at the protesters. Police followed student protesters into their halls of residence and studios, walking around with drawn pistols, breaking open doors, and using tear gas.61 Demonstrators understood the state reaction to protests through the imminent enactment of a West Berlin variation of the Emergency Acts, which explicitly allowed the police the use of hand grenades and machine guns—earning it the nickname “hand grenade law” among critics. The tougher approach by the authorities vis-à-vis protest against the Cambodian Invasion gave Rote Hilfe (Red Aid)—far-left prisoner support groups which had emerged in the late 1960s—a new field of activity: they collected testimonies on the shootings during the 9 May demonstration and mobilised solidarity with three pre-trial detainees who had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the Amerikahaus five days earlier.62 Vietnam War protest continued to be embedded in a wider agenda of anti-colonial liberation struggles, for example, at the so-called McNamara demonstration in Heidelberg in June 1970. On the occasion of a development aid conference with World Bank president and former US secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Heidelberg SDS chapter mobilised

59 Monika Steffen, “Beiträge zum Kambodscha Teach-In,” Socialistische Correspondenz 48/49 (1970), 25–28; Meino Büning, “Organisation und Gewalt,” ibid., 32–36. 60 Ibid., 36. 61 Karoll Stein, “Kunst der Handgranate: Wie in Berlin die ’Juryfreie’ gesäubert wurde,”

Die Zeit (5 June 1970); “Polizei/Berlin: Vorwärts, Männer!,” Der Spiegel (8 June 1970), 78–79. 62 Rote Hilfe, “Imperialismus, Sozialdemokratie, Terror, Militanz: Zur Konterrevolution in Westberlin” (June 1970), https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/BER/INT/Berlin_INT_ Kambodschasolidaritaet.shtml.

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against the involvement of five German companies in the building of the large-scale hydroelectric generating station at Cahora Bassa in Portuguese Mozambique. The protesters assumed that the main purpose of the project was to consolidate Portuguese colonial rule.63 According to SDSHeidelberg, the main provocation was the participation of a “war criminal and chief organiser of the Vietnam War”. The violent skirmishes between police and demonstrators that occurred served the authorities as a reason to ban the Heidelberg SDS unit.64 Their defence lawyer Otto Schily announced that he intended to summon McNamara to the witness stand: after all the public peace had not been broken by the students but by the appearance of a “mass murderer of McNamara’s calibre”.65 In May 1972, around 100,000 throughout West Germany took part in demonstrations against the re-escalation of the Vietnam War. At least numerically, this was no lesser mobilisation than in the days of the Vietnam Congress of 1968. Shortly thereafter, demonstrations were overshadowed by the events of 11 May when, as part of their major offensive, the RAF bombed the headquarters of the V Corps of the US Army—located at the IG Farben Building in Frankfurt and informally called the Pentagon of Europe—wounding 13 and killing US officer Paul Bloomquist, who had served extensively in the Vietnam War. Three days prior to this attack, President Nixon had announced that the US would lay mines timed to become active in 72 hours in North Vietnam’s harbours to stop the supply of weapons. Simultaneously, the first continuous bombing effort conducted against North Vietnam since November 1968 was to slow the transportation of materials for the Easter Offensive, the invasion of the Republic of South Vietnam that the People’s Army of Vietnam had launched on 30 March 1972. According to Nixon, the sole purpose was “to protect the lives of 60,000 Americans who would be gravely endangered in the event that the Communist offensive continues 63 Freia Anders, “Juristische ‘Gegenöffentlichkeit’ zwischen Standespolitik, linksradikaler Bewegung und Repression: Die Rote Robe (1970–1976),” sozial.geschichte 8 (2012): 9–46, http://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=29053; also see Katja Nagel, Die Provinz in Bewegung: Studentenunruhen in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: verlag regionalkultur, 2009); “Materialien zur Studentenbewegung und Hochschulpolitik in Heidelberg,” https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/BW/KAR/Heidelberg_004/Heidel berg_VDS_Universitaet_1970_06.shtml. 64 Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 266. 65 Nagel, Provinz, 305.

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to roll forward and to prevent the imposition of a Communist government by brutal aggression upon 17 million people”, which the American president associated with “a long night of terror”.66 Unbeknownst to the RAF, Nixon had exclaimed at the beginning of the Easter Offensive: “the bastards have never been bombed like they are going to be bombed this time”.67 The RAF wrote in its claim of responsibility: “For the strategists of extermination in Vietnam, West germany [sic] and West berlin [sic] should no longer be a secure hinterland. They must know that with their crimes against the Vietnamese people they have created new bitter enemies for themselves; that there will be no place in the world where they can be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerrilla units.” The statement closed with Guevara’s rallying call, “Create two, three, many Vietnams!”.68 In a sense, the RAF’s bombings of the US Army continued a way of thinking that had already been articulated when Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were sentenced to three years in prison for firebombing two Frankfurt department stores in April 1968. A vision of opening an additional front against a US-led imperialist system of aggression and manipulation stood at the beginning of their turn to militancy.69 At the time, the court dealt with the idea of a right to resist according to natural law, to which Baader had referred, invoking Marcuse. The judges rejected this reasoning “for lack of effectiveness” because “influencing the war in Vietnam by means of domestic terror against domestic property” was unrealistic. Ironically, this seemed to suggest that a strike against the US

66 “Transcript of President Nixon’s Address to Nation on His Policy in Vietnam,” The New York Times (9 May 1972), https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/09/archives/transc ript-of-president-nixons-address-to-nation-on-his-policy-in.html. 67 Nixon quoted in Carolyn Eisenberg, “Remembering Nixon’s War,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 271. 68 “Anschlag auf das Hauptquartier der US-Army in Frankfurt/Main” (14 May 1972), in Rote Armee Fraktion: Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF , ed. ID-Archiv (Berlin: ID Verlag, 1997), 145. 69 On the April 1968 Frankfurt department store arsons see Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence, 42–58.

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Army might be covered by natural law—a line of reasoning that the RAF eventually followed.70 A Frankfurt demonstration scheduled for the day after the RAF attack on the Frankfurt headquarter of the US Army was disallowed, but still went ahead drawing a crowd of roughly 2000. One’s position vis-à-vis the RAF became the crucial question and subsequently showed internal divisions on the left. The entire spectrum from the Young Socialists in the SPD via the DKP to various Maoist groups criticised the demonstration as a “senseless action” by the “spontaneist” Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle, RK). According to these critics, the RAF and their sympathisers “totally misjudged the real situation and […] the consciousness of the masses […] when seeing their field of activity in militant action against the police”, thus benefitting only the “most reactionary forces of the right”.71 Six days later, Frankfurt city council conducted an act of remembrance for Bloomquist, while outside 3000 demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. Mayor Rudi Arndt (SPD) drew a dividing-line between peaceful demonstrators and those who turned to violence.72 The RAF committed another bomb attack on 24 May against the Heidelberg headquarters of the Seventh US Army, killing soldiers Clyde R. Bonner, Ronald A. Woodward, and Charles L. Peck. The building destroyed by the blast housed computer logistics used in calculating supplies for aerial bombardments. The claim of responsibility stated, “The American air force has dropped more bombs over Vietnam during the past 7 weeks than during the Second World War over Germany and Japan together. There is talk of further millions of explosives that the Pentagon wants to deploy to stop the North Vietnamese offensive. This is genocide […]”.73 This was a variation of the often-quoted fact that US pilots dropped more than three times the amount of the total US bomb tonnage 70 Ibid., 51. 71 “Kampf gegen Opportunismus und Sektierertum in der antiimperialistischen Bewe-

gung!,” Kommunistische Hochschulpresse Extra (25 May 1972), 1, https://www.mao-pro jekt.de/BRD/HES/DA/Frankfurt_VDS_KBW_KHP/Frankfurt_VDS_KBW_Kommunist ische_Hochschulpresse_1972_03a.shtml. 72 Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt, “Stadtchronik” (18 May 1972), http://www. stadtgeschichte-ffm.de/de/info-und-service/frankfurter-geschichte/stadtchronik/1972. 73 “Bombenanschlag auf das Hauptquartier der US-Army in Europa in Heidelberg”

(25 May 1972), in Rote Armee Fraktion, ed. ID-Archiv, 147−148.

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dropped during the Second World War. Indeed, the most intense and unrestricted bombardments of the entire Vietnam War happened during 1972. Overshadowed by the militant events, Vietnamese students in the FRG—between 1200 and 1500 individuals—started to assert their own political agency. The politicisation of South Vietnamese students in the FRG was an inevitable result of the Vietnam War and the activities of the South Vietnamese student movement. Any form of political communication or activity, however, was decidedly unwanted by the South Vietnamese embassy. Activism could bring concrete reprisals, including the withholding of passports, difficulties with money transfers and bureaucratic formalities, or drafting into the military, which ultimately threatened persons concerned, who were inevitably defamed as communists, with deportation. In May 1971, the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Vietnamese in the FRG, chaired by Du,o,ng Ðinh Quý, was founded in Heidelberg. A year later, a group of Vietnamese students in Aachen aroused the anger of their embassy by joining demonstrations and putting forth a resolution that harshly criticised the US war effort. German authorities repeatedly became the subject of criticism for threatening Vietnamese students with deportation on behalf of the South Vietnamese embassy. German activists and numerous other foreign student associations disseminated solidarity resolutions for Vietnamese students who had run into trouble with the authorities. Apparently, protest campaigns were quite successful in preventing the actual implementation of any deportations.74 In the run-up to the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, which were supposed to regulate the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, all currents of the broad coalition again mobilised their clientele throughout West Germany, although collective efforts failed. On 14 January, the Maoist groups and the spontaneist wing demonstrated with roughly 26,000 participants in Bonn demanding “Immediate signature and implementation of the 9-points agreement!”75 The call of the IIVS for a major demonstration in Dortmund making the same demands six days later was 74 “Dokumente über das Verhältnis zwischen der Botschaft der Republik Vietnam und den vietnamesischen Studenten” (March 1972), IISH, Arch 02,181, K. 95; Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 158–175. 75 Diverse flyers calling for demonstrations, https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/NRW/ KOE/Bonn_Vietnamdemo_1973.shtml.

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attended by a similar number of people, many of whom had already taken part in Bonn.76 Vietnam solidarity not only helped to bridge political and ideological tensions within the broader coalition, but it was also a factor in the not always straightforward rapprochement between German and migrant political groups in the social struggles of the early 1970s. The Italian tenants’ union Unione Inquilini (UI), for example, which was represented in German cities with a high proportion of Italian migrants, issued a call for a Vietnam demonstration in January 1973, simultaneously announcing further rent strikes and squatting: “If the Vietnamese peasants are able to defeat the flying fortresses, […] we foreign workers […], together with the local proletarians, should be able to finally defeat the capitalists of Frankfurt”.77 UI was not the only migrant organisation, which, in alliance with German activists, combined its social struggle with Vietnam War protest. Calls for demonstrations, both on a local and on a national level, were frequently undersigned by communist and socialist organisations of migrant workers, not only from Italy but also from the dictatorships in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and by student unions from other countries. In early 1973, the Frankfurt RK advertised a Vietnam rally with a “representative of the Vietnamese people” throughout the Rhein-Main region. The event was supposed to follow another demonstration organised by the SPD. The RK’s propaganda effort concentrated on the OPEL car plant in Rüsselsheim, where from November 1970 they engaged in factory agitation seeking to rekindle the major strikes that had occurred in Turin and Paris during the previous years. At the demonstration, stones were thrown at US “targets” such as IBM branch offices, which, according to the RK, were protected by an “orgy of cop batons”. The RK linked their encounter with police violence to the experience of Frankfurt squatters, another field of their agitation: “Here in Frankfurt, those who report exorbitant rents to the police are threatened; the cops come to

76 Werkmeister, Protestbewegung, 209. 77 Unione Inquilini flyer (January 1973), IISH, Archiv des Frankfurter Häuserrats im

ID-Archiv, K. 9. Also see Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier, “‘Squatting means to destroy the capitalist plan in the urban quarters’: Spontis, Autonomists and the struggles over public commodities (1970–1983),” in Cities Contested: Urban Politics, Heritage, and Social Movements in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s, ed. Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo and Dieter Schott (Frankfurt: Campus, 2017), 195–211.

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arrest the people who fight back against the same interest of profit that bombs Vietnam and destroys entire neighbourhoods over here”.78 After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and the withdrawal of most American troops by April 1973, South Vietnamese president Nguy˜ên V˘an Thiê.u travelled to the US and to Europe. While the Netherlands and Sweden refused Thiê.u’s request for a government reception, it was granted in Great Britain, Italy, and West Germany. On the occasion of his state visit to Bonn on 10 April 1973, he discussed the state of prisoner of war release with Federal President Gustav Heinemann, while 4000 demonstrated against the visit in the Market Square of Bonn.79 A group of protesters succeeded in entering Bonn city hall where they sprayed graffiti such as “Thieu murderer − Brandt accomplice”.80 The next day, Bonn’s chief of police spoke of the “toughest police deployment” in the history of Bonn.81 Horlemann and Christian Semler, members of the Central Committee of the Maoist KPD, claimed in a TV interview that their party was responsible for this instance of what they called “action of the masses”.82 The campaign continued a tradition of momentous protest triggered by controversial state visits: Moïse Tshombe in 1964, Reza Pahlavi in 1967, and the Japanese Emperor Hirohito in 1971, which were the results of transnational cooperation between activists and part of a renunciation of a Eurocentric perspective onto global power relations. Key organisers of the West German protest campaign against the Hirohito state visit were a group of Japanese exchange students in conjunction with the Maoist Liga gegen den Imperialismus (League against Imperialism), co-founded by Semler, who had also attended a 1969 international Vietnam Conference in Tokyo. The German–Japanese alliance of critics

78 Flyer, Revolutionärer Kampf/Sozialistische Hochschulinitiative (January 1973); also see “Vietnam: Völkermord für’s Kapital,” Revolutionärer Kampf 3 (January 1973), https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/HES/DA/Ruesselsheim_Opel_Revolutionaerer_ Kampf/Ruesselsheim_Opel_Revolutionaerer_Kampf_19730108.shtml. 79 “Gespräch des Bundespräsidenten Gustav Heinemann mit Präsident Nguyen Van Thieu” (10 April 1973), in Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1973), ed. Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 493–498. 80 “Teurer Thieu,” Der Spiegel 16 (16 April 1973), 33–34. 81 Svea Koischwitz, Der Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft in den Jahren 1970–1976: Ein

Interessenverband zwischen Studentenbewegung und Hochschulreform (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 383. 82 “Kommunisten: Besetzt, Feierabend,” Der Spiegel 17 (23 April 1973), 83–85.

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argued that, “Indochina was the true vehicle for Japanese imperial regeneration – both in terms of facilitating the US war efforts and as a target of the new Japanese empire”.83 In response to the clashes at the Thiê.u state visit in 1973, the authorities resorted to a ban on demonstrations for May Day and to 200 cases of criminal charges, which led to several proceedings that dragged on for years.84 The first of these was against KPD member Uli Kranzusch. The prosecution accused him of attempted homicide—he had resisted his arrest with an iron bar—and demanded a prison sentence of 18 months.85 Kranzusch was remanded in custody at Cologne Ossendorf prison—as was RAF member Ulrike Meinhof at the time—and his proceedings were transferred under special safety precautions to the Ministry of Justice. The charged atmosphere was attributable to two factors: while the Ministry of the Interior considered banning the KPD, which had been active in protesting rental and public transport fare increases, the Chief Federal Prosecutor subjected the case to an investigation under section 129 of the Criminal Code (Forming criminal organisations).86 The “solidarity movement for Uli Kranzusch”, consisting of circa 30 committees, scandalised the proceedings.87 Kranzusch used the court proceedings to draw attention to the torture of political prisoners in South Vietnamese internment camps such as the infamous “tiger cages” of Côn Ðao Prison, even after the Paris Peace Accords; his lawyer called David and Jane Barton, two American doctors ij

83 Alex F. Macartney, “Hirohitler on the Rhine: Transnational Protest Against the Japanese Emperor’s 1971 West German State Visit,” Journal of Contemporary History 55,3 (2020), 635; also see the same author’s chapter in the present volume. 84 “Die Demonstration gegen die Demonstrationsverbote am 18. Mai 1973 in Dortmund,” https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/NRW/ARN/Dortmund_Demonstratio nsverbote_18_Mai_1973.shtml. 85 Michael Csaszkócy, “Maoistische Rechtsbrecher: Die K-Gruppen und die Repression,” in Solidarität, ed. Bambule, vol. 1, 161–181 and 172–175. 86 “Kleine Anfrage an die Bundesregierung,” https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/ ORG/AO/IS/Liga_IS_1973_19.shtml. 87 Komitee Hände weg von der KPD, Freiheit für Uli Kranzusch (August 1973), https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/ORG/AO/Komitee_Haende_weg_von_der_ KPD_1973_Freiheit_fuer_Uli_Kranzusch.shtml.

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who had worked in these camps, to the witness stand.88 Ultimately, the West German authorities were unable to prevent that the warfare in Vietnam, and violations of international law by the US were made the subject of discussion, e.g., during the so-called Cologne Vietnam trial in 197589 —harking back to demonstrators throwing cobblestones at an unauthorised Vietnam rally in December 1972—and the trial against the leading cadres of the RAF beginning in Stuttgart-Stammheim in 1975, where defence lawyer Schily wanted to summon Nixon to the witness stand. The proceedings at Bonn district court concerning the occupation and damaging of Bonn city hall dragged on until 1978.90

Conclusion For decentralised West German activist groups, Vietnam was more than a myth of resistance. Vietnam war critics and protesters showed less fear of contact with communist ideologies and countries—and with international movements and organisations that included the former—than the dominant political discourse in Cold War West Germany allowed for. In some respects, this legacy still dominates the historiography. For mainstream society, the protests were a provocation, which caused— sometimes violent—backlashes and state repression. The emergence of Third-World solidarity and anti-imperialism proved a major challenge to a more pacifist interpretation of protest. Despite disagreements concerning political questions and militant methods, the Vietnam issue’s tendency to polarise society as a whole had an integrative function for the loose alliance between pacifist, revolutionary, and humanitarian protesters, which included elderly church people and intellectuals from bourgeois backgrounds as well as student radicals. The latter undoubtedly played an important role in the period 1966–1968, but other parts of the coalition 88 “In den Tigerkäfigen von Poulo Condor werden immer noch tausende Patrioten gefangen gehalten,” in Uli Kranzusch klagt an: Nixon Mörder, Thieu Henker, Brandt Komplize! (Dortmund: Rote Hilfe, 1973), 29–30, https://www.mao-projekt.de/ BRD/NRW/KOE/Bonn_RHeV_Infobuero_1973_Kranzusch_klagt_an.shtml; “Weg mit der Bestie Thieu!,” Internationale Solidarität 2,19 (November 1973), 13. Barton also reported that the Bonn demonstration and the occupation of the city hall had been noted in Vietnam. 89 KPD, KSV, Liga gegen den Imperialismus, Rote Hilfe, Dokumentation zum Kölner Vietnamprozess (Cologne, 1972). 90 “Rathaus-Stürmer: Offenbar Angst,” Der Spiegel (1 May 1978), 75–77.

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were at least as important for the beginnings and the continuity into the first half of the 1970s. Only the interaction between overlapping networks of longstanding organisations and innovative ways of protest enabled protesters to contribute to increased media attention and an enhanced analysis of world affairs. This went beyond a perspective dominated by and reduced to West German and US interests in the East–West conflict by foregrounding the North–South conflict and an exemplary case of liberation and decolonisation struggles. In West Germany, opposition to the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam and solidarity with the victims of war in Indochina arguably did not frame a social movement of its own. Nevertheless, during the period between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, the Vietnam War provided the most substantial framework for protest campaigns whose activists were part of social movements, such as the student movement, the workers’ movement, or the emerging Third-World movement. It connected a loose coalition of different movements as part of the broader extra-parliamentary opposition of the late 1960s with its counterparts around the world and remained an integrative moment favouring crossmovement mobilisation both among the “old” and the “new” social movements of the fragmented left of the 1970s.

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Martin Baumeister, Bruno Bonomo, and Dieter Schott (Frankfurt: Campus, 2017), 195–211. Anders, Günther, Nürnberg und Vietnam: Synoptisches Mosaik (Berlin: Voltaire, 1967). Anders, Günther, Visit beautiful Vietnam: ABC der Aggressionen heute (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1968). Azzellini, Dario, “Die ausländischen Genossen können unschätzbare Dienste leisten: Mit dem Internationalismus rund um den Globus,” in agit 883: Bewegung, Revolte, Underground in Westberlin 1969–1972, ed. rotaprint 25 (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2006), 185–199. Balsen, Werner, and Karl Rössel, Hoch die internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt, 1986). Becker, Thomas P., and Ute Schröder, Die Studentenproteste der 60er Jahre: Archivführer – Chronik – Bibliographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000). Bernhardt, Patrick, Zivildienst zwischen Reform und Revolte: Eine bundesdeutsche Institution im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, 1961–1982 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005). Dörfler-Dierken, Angelika, Die Bedeutung der Jahre 1968 und 1981 für die Bundeswehr (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010). Dülffer, Jost, “Die Anti-Vietnamkriegs-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Frieden stiften: Deeskalations- und Friedenspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Dülffer et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), 316–331. Eisenberg, Carolyn, “Remembering Nixon’s War,” in A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 260–282. Frey, Marc, Geschichte des Vietnamkriegs: Die Tragödie in Asien und das Ende des amerikanischen Traums (Munich: Beck, 10th ed., 2016). Grünewald, Guido, Zwischen Kriegsdienstverweigerergewerkschaft und politischer Friedensorganisation: Der Verband der Kriegsdienstverweigerer 1958–1966 (Hamburg: Friedenspolitische Studiengesellschaft, 1977). Guevara, Ernesto Che, Schaffen wir zwei, drei, viele Vietnam: Brief an das Exekutivsekretariat von OSPAAL (Berlin: Oberbaumpresse, 1967). Hiller von Gaertringen, Hans Georg, Pop, Politk und Propaganda: Das Amerika Haus Berlin im Wandel der Zeit (Berlin: Hatje-Cantz, 2015). Höhn, Maria, “The Black Panther Solidarity Committee and the Trial of the Ramstein 2,” in Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Belinda Davis et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 215–239. Höhn, Maria, and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs and Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 143–170.

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Scanlon, Sandra, The Pro-War Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). SDS Westberlin and Internationales Nachrichten- und Forschungs-Institut (eds.), Der Kampf des vietnamesischen Volkes und die Globalstrategie des Imperialismus: Internationaler Vietnam-Kongreß-Westberlin (Berlin: INFI, 1968). Sedlmaier, Alexander, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). Slobodian, Quinn, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Staadt, Jochen, “Die Flucht des Schwarzen Panthers: Im Kofferraum von Frankfurt via GÜST-Marienborn nach Afrika,” Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat 24 (2008): 86–95. Vazansky, Alexander, An Army in Crisis: Social Conflict and the U.S. Army in Germany, 1968–1975 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Vössing, Michael, Humanitäre Hilfe und Interessenpolitik: Westdeutsches Engagement für Vietnam in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Watts, Max, US-Army—Europe: Von der Desertion zum Widerstand in der Kaserne oder wie die U-Bahn zur RITA fuhr (Berlin: Harald Kater Verlag, 1989). Weiss, Peter, Diskurs über die Vorgeschichte und den Verlauf des lang andauernden Befreiungskrieges in Viet Nam als Beispiel für die Notwendigkeit des bewaffneten Kampfes der Unterdrückten gegen ihre Unterdrücker sowie über die Versuche der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, die Grundlagen der Revolution zu vernichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). Weitbrecht, Dorothee, Aufbruch in die Dritte Welt: Der Internationalismus der Studentenbewegung von 1968 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2012). Werkmeister, Frank, Die Protestbewegung gegen den Vietnamkrieg in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1965–1973 (PhD diss. Marburg, 1975). Wernicke, Günter, “Solidarität hilft siegen!” Zur Solidaritätsbewegung mit Vietnam in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: Helle Panke, 2011). Wischermann, Jörg, “Vietnam – der Mythos der Solidarität in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1965–75),” in Vietnam: Mythen und Wirklichkeiten, ed. Wischermann and Gerhard Will (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018), 90–120. Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

CHAPTER 8

France’s Two Vietnams: Intellectual Protest Politics in Perspective Silja Behre

Introduction In France, the protests directed against the American War in Vietnam are commonly seen as one of the founding events of the génération 68 whose emergence evolved around the revolutionary hopes that rose and fell with the Vietnamese cause.1 In this story, France’s own Vietnam War, the First Indochina War is generally missing. While the Second Indochina War, the American War in Vietnam, has been canonized by an entry in the Dictionnaire des intellectuels français for its protest mobilizing capacity, the opposition against the earlier French War in Indochina is either played

1 I would like to thank Alexander Sedlmaier and Freia Anders for their helpful advice and constructive criticism.

S. Behre (B) Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_8

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down as being less significant in terms of extent or reduced to a few wellknown protest agents and public debates.2 The Indochina War appears to be a war vanishing behind World War II and the Algerian War, which is interpreted as France’s own Vietnam war for various reasons.3 In a similar way, the protests concerning the Indochina War are generally overshadowed by the opposition against the Algerian War. For many May 68 activists, the opposition against the Algerian War marked their political initiation, and throughout the build-up of the génération 68, the end of the Algerian War in 1962 was promoted as the departing point of the long Sixties—les années 68—ending with the election of François Mitterrand in 1981. Furthermore, the intellectual and political networks formed in opposition to the Algerian War continued to function subsequently when the focus shifted to the American War in Vietnam.4 This chapter, however, evolves around the intriguing perspective that France experienced significant protests related to war events in Vietnam twice. “Vietnam” shaped public protests and intellectual interventions in France for almost four decades: from the times of the “guerre d’Indochine”, the Henri Martin Affair, and the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to protesting the American “guerre de Vietnam”, and finally the humanitarian initiative “Un bateau pour le Vietnam” (1979). The latter was founded to provide aid to the so-called “boat-people”, refugees fleeing Vietnam following the end of the Vietnam War. Their rescue was publicly supported by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, whose contrasting positions had been decisively shaping intellectual politics since the First Indochina War. When the former opponents were finally shaking hands over the boat-people’s cause, their newfound alliance was interpreted in France as an end to longstanding frictions in the intellectual

2 Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock (eds.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français: les personnes, les lieux, les moments (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 1409–1410; Alain Ruscio, “L’opinion française et la guerre d’Indochine (1945–1954): Sondages et témoignages,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 29 (1991): 35–46. The present text refers to the First Vietnam War (1946–54) and to the Second Vietnam War (1955–75) with a focus on the period after 1964. 3 M. Kathryn Edwards, Contesting Indochina: French Remembrance between Decolonization and Cold War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 1. 4 Exemplary: Philippe Artières and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (eds.), 68—Une histoire collective, 1962–1982 (Paris: La Découverte, 2018); Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand et al. (eds.), Les années 68: Le temps de la contestation (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2000).

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field due to the wreckage of utopian beliefs that had been linked to North Vietnam’s revolutionary ambitions. This “happy end” serves as a starting point for this chapter, which looks at the protests that emerged in the context of the “second” Vietnam War through the lens of the Indochina War protests, pursuing a trajectory from the Communist-dominated First Indochina War protests to the New Left-inspired activism against the American War in Vietnam, from anticolonial protests to anti-imperialism, and finally from anti-imperialism to human rights.5 While Vietnam’s impact on the French intellectual field is mostly described in terms of development towards “1968”, this chapter seeks to break up these linearities by questioning established patterns of interpretation regarding two aspects: the role of Sartre and time perceptions. In a first step, the focus will be on Sartre—who embodies the personnel continuity between the protests in the context of the two wars—on two of his intellectual interventions, which are usually only mentioned briefly rather than being analyzed in their own right: his book on the Henri Martin affair published in 1953 and his role in the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal (1967). The former cannot simply be subsumed under his period of being a “compagnon de route”, a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party (PCF), while the latter significantly augmented the history of French post-war tiersmondisme and the legal history of citizen trials.6 Both initiatives are specific instances of intellectual engagement that will be discussed against the background of Pierre Bourdieu’s vision of the “collective intellectual” and as forms of “mobilizing and […] making mobilized people work together”.7 5 Laurent Jalabert, “Aux origines de la génération 1968: les étudiants français et la guerre du Vietnam,” Vingtième siècle 55 (1997): 69–81; Salar Mohandesi, From AntiImperialism to Human Rights: The Vietnam War and Radical Internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017), https://repository.upenn. edu/edissertations/2478. 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’affaire Henri Martin (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); on the role of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in French post-war intellectual history see Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: CUP, 2016), 167–175; Arthur J. Klinghoffer and Judith A. Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 7 Pierre Bourdieu, Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 (London: Verso, 2002), 21. Gisèle Sapiro differentiates the activities of the collective intellectual from other forms of interventions as being characterized by joint action based on teamwork, the collection of information, and on scholarly or scientific research to provide means

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In a second step, rather than detailing the various ideological groups and networks involved in protests during both conflicts, this chapter concentrates on retracing the relation between time perception and war protests.8 From the onset of the First Indochina War, time politics were central to the intellectual politics regarding Vietnam. The impact of Vietnam on the French intellectual field is a matter of competing temporalities and time perceptions rather than a teleological story of the rise and fall of utopian thinking. Historian Ludivine Bantigny has highlighted the role of time perception in the mobilizing process against the American War in Vietnam. This chapter understands time as a highly politicized factor throughout the period of the Indochina Wars, as the questions of time perception and of temporality will not only serve as a basis to link the protests during both Vietnam wars, but also to locate them within their transnational French–Vietnamese context.9 Especially the Second Vietnam War protests took place within a “vast wave of global contestation” whose activists perceived themselves as part of an internationally led anti-imperialist struggle on the side of the Vietnamese people.10 Internationalism was a “decisive political motor”, as Bantigny has argued, of the French Vietnam War protests and the following May 68 events.11 Within the transnational context of the 68 movements, the “boundary-transgressing diffusion” of ideas and protest practices resulted in “a synchronization of perception” of the Vietnam War, as Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey put it.12 This atmosphere of simultaneity is

of social critique to protest movements and the public. Sapiro, “Modèles d’intervention politique des intellectuels,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 176/177 (2009): 8–31. 8 On the various groups and networks opposing the Second Vietnam War from a generational perspective see Nicolas Pas, “‘Six heures pour le Vietnam’: Histoire des Comités Vietnam français 1965–1968,” Revue Historique 302 (2000): 157–185; Jalabert, “Aux origins,” 69–81. 9 Ludivine Bantigny, “Le temps politisé: Quelques enjeux politiques de la conscience historique en Mai-Juin 68,” Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 117,1 (2013): 215–229. 10 Salar Mohandesi, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism,

and May 68,” French Historical Studies 41 (2018): 219–251, 221. 11 Ludivine Bantigny, “Hors frontières: Quelques expériences d’internationalisme en France, 1966–1968,” Monde(s) 11 (2017): 139–160, 141. 12 Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, “France,” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977 , ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 111–124, 120.

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best illustrated at the beginning of the calendar year 1968, when the Tet Offensive gave a strong signal to the international protest movements by creating the feeling of being in sync with an international revolutionary struggle led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) against a military superpower.

Collective Interventions Beyond the Manifesto: Jean-Paul Sartre at the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal (1967) and His Book on the Henri Martin Affair (1953) The period of the great influence exerted by “Vietnam” on the French intellectual field coincides with Sartre’s rise as the central intellectual figure of post-war France.13 His journal Les Temps Modernes , founded in 1946, has been considered the most important forum for the intellectual articulation of anti-colonial struggle throughout the Indochina, Algerian, and Vietnam Wars.14 However, surveys of French intellectual history usually only briefly mention Sartre’s role as executive president of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal (1966/67) and his book on the Henri Martin Affair (1953).15 By going beyond more traditional forms of joint actions, such as manifestos, conferences, and demonstrations, and by seeking a juridical framework for intellectual politics, the collective character of these projects challenged the often cultivated singularity of the intellectual. At the same time, Sartre’s individual prestige came to dominate both projects, thus pointing to the crucial role of individual symbolic power and the limits of collective intellectual enterprises. The Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, initiated by Bertrand Russell in 1966/67 to investigate whether the US war actions in Vietnam were violating international law, was closely linked to the Vietnam War protest activities of French social movements, and their anti-imperialist stance reflected Sartre’s own tiersmondiste preoccupations. In his role as executive president of the Tribunal, he influenced public perception not only

13 Michel Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 487. 14 David Drake, “Les Temps Modernes and the French War in Indochina,” European

Studies 38 (1998): 25–41. 15 For instance, Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels; David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

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by lending his name but by providing the “basic legal and ethical framework”, as Arthur and Judith Klinghoffer put it.16 Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir immediately confirmed their participation when contacted by the Russell Foundation. They were assuming that the Tribunal would be held—as initially planned—in Paris, and would thus not demand more work than signing a manifesto, as Beauvoir recalled.17 Russell’s secretary Ralph Schoenman had assured them that they would not have to attend all the hearings as they would be provided with the transcripts.18 Although Charles de Gaulle had officially criticized the US military effort in Vietnam while reorienting his country’s decolonization politics, he rejected the Tribunal’s plan to meet in Paris, and the sessions finally took place in Stockholm and Roskilde near Copenhagen.19 Contrary to what they expected, it demanded not only travelling but also a lot of reading and discussion, which eventually led Sartre and Beauvoir to reflect on the intellectual practice resulting from the Tribunal’s specific structure. A closer reading of the Tribunal’s proceedings illustrates that its structure left only limited scope for individual intellectual interventions. In contrast, the collection, presentation, and treatment of the information provided by the Tribunal’s various witnesses and contributors on chemical weapons, the nutritional situation of Vietnamese civilians, or the situation of women and children—to name just a few examples—was crucial for the Tribunal’s hearings during which various experts, historians, lawyers, physicians, and scientists presented their evidence to the jury, among them the Tribunal’s co-chair, the Yugoslav dissident Vladimir Dedijer, the Tunisian-French lawyer Gisèle Halimi, the French mathematician Laurent Schwartz, the

16 Klinghoffer/Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals, 124. 17 Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (New York: Touchstone, 1990), 520;

Silja Behre, “Simone de Beauvoirs Engagement für das Russell-Tribunal: Die Intellektuelle im Kollektiv?” in Eingreifende Denkerinnen: Weibliche Intellektuelle im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 123–136. 18 Klinghoffer/Klinghoffer, Citizens’ Tribunals, 112. 19 On de Gaulle’s Vietnam policy see Max P. Friedman, Rethinking Anti-Americanism:

The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 157–189; Pierre Journoud, De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969: La réconciliation (Paris: Tallandier, 2011); Christopher Goscha, “1er septembre 1966: Le discours de Phnom Penh,” in L’histoire de France vue d’ailleurs, ed. Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Jeanne Guérout (Paris: Les Arènes, 2016), 556–569; for the correspondence between Sartre and de Gaulle regarding the Tribunal see Sartre, Situations VIII: Autour de 1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 43–45.

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German–Austrian philosopher Günther Anders, the Polish–British historian Isaac Deutscher, and the German–Swedish writer Peter Weiss. By emphasizing the role of witnesses and documentation, the Tribunal’s juridical setting was part of a development in which travelling to Vietnam to see and to become an eyewitness became a common practice.20 At the same time, the Tribunal gave a voice to Vietnamese war victims in Europe. The jury’s actual work began after the hearings, when they met behind closed doors to discuss the information presented by experts and witnesses. In retrospect, de Beauvoir highlighted the experience of a “daily, conscientious work as a team”. The atmosphere reminded her of a “religious retreat” demanding “a work far removed from my own life”. She “felt totally committed”.21 At the end of the Tribunal’s second session in Denmark, the members worked for hours on their “definite phrasing”, as they diverged on Sartre’s interpretation of the US war strategy in Vietnam as “genocide” , before they finally compromised at dawn.22 Behind the scenes, the Tribunal’s work was difficult due to the frictions among its members, mainly regarding the unapproved solo runs by Russell’s Trotskyist assistant Ralph Schoenman, but also between the London and Paris fractions of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation with the former seeking to embed the Tribunal in their anti-imperialist and revolutionary aspirations, while the French members pursued a more legalistic strategy based on international law.23 The “utterly absorbing” work, which de Beauvoir described as exhausting and boring at times, was nevertheless experienced as a collective learning process, as “our presumptions became certainties” while everything that “had been known beforehand took on a fresh value by forming part of the picture as a whole”.24 The incessant process of listening to reports, witnesses, and victims, of asking questions, analyzing documents, looking at pictures, 20 For instance, Madeleine Riffaud, Dans le maquis “Vietcong” (Paris: Julliard, 1965); Au Nord-Vietnam: écrit sous les bombes (Paris: Julliard, 1967). Also see her documentary film Dans le maquis du Sud-Vietnam (1965). 21 Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 351. 22 Ibid., 362–363. 23 Klinghoffer/Klinghoffer, Citizens’ Tribunals, 129–130; Anna Pollmann “Sartres’ Eröffnungsrede zur ersten Sitzung des Vietnam-Tribunals (1967),” Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte (2017), https://www.geschichte-menschenrechte.de/sar tres-eroeffnungsrede-zur-ersten-sitzung-des-vietnam-tribunals-1967/?type=98765. 24 Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 350.

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and watching movies over several days led, as Sartre argued, to the emergence of an “objectivity” that transgressed the Tribunal members’ mutual distrust and their diverging subjectivities. According to Sartre, rather than the juridical setting or the jury members’ opinions, the facts were legitimizing the Tribunal’s mission. Seeking to transcend the “realm of emotions”, he highlighted the Tribunal’s approach to study “all the existing documentation on the war in Vietnam”, rather than “condemning anybody to any penalty whatever”.25 Together with Dedijer, he insisted on “focusing on facts”, and made efforts “to keep out personal opinions of the witnesses”.26 Defending the Tribunal’s approach as a rational, fact-based initiative that appealed to international law, he aimed to counter the criticism of partiality in view of the Tribunal’s personnel composition and its juridically inspired structures.27 Frequent contemporary criticism indeed pointed at the entanglement of law and politics, especially the Tribunal’s anti-imperialistic leanings, which were suspected to prevent a neutral judgment from the outset.28 For historian Eleanor Davey, the Tribunal’s “radical political goals” and rights-based language are characteristic of the wider tiersmondist movement that developed from the end of the First Indochina War in 1954 onward.29 The juridically inspired approach to intellectual politics was, however, not only crucial for the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, but had already been characteristic for Sartre’s 1953 book on the Henri Martin Affair. The latter had emerged from the initiative of a counter-trial to prove the victimization of the 23-year-old former resistance fighter against the German occupation Henri Martin who had been sentenced to five years of imprisonment for distributing leaflets against France’s colonial war in Indochina in 1950. When serving in Indochina and witnessing the French military’s actions against the civilian population, Martin had repeatedly submitted his resignation, which was refused, but he was eventually repatriated in

25 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Imperialist Morality,” in Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Perry Anderson et al. (London: Seagull Books, 2006), 100. 26 Klinghoffer/Klinghoffer, Citizens’ Tribunals, 126. 27 Sartre, “De Nuremberg à Stockholm,” in Sartre, Situations VIII , 79. 28 Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise

of Humanitarianism (Cambridge: CUP, 2015), 87–88. 29 Ibid., 82.

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1947. Returned to Toulon, he came into contact with local communists and engaged in propaganda activities at the navy base. Simultaneously, the French Army was confronted with a series of sabotage acts protesting the nation’s war politics. Based on the law of 11 March 1950, hastily adopted to sanction intended acts of sabotage and demoralization, Martin, who had already been arrested in early March, was tried by two military tribunals, and found not guilty of sabotage but nevertheless received a five-years prison sentence for distributing pamphlets in opposition to the war in Indochina. In view of this sentence, which many considered blatantly disproportionate, the PCF launched a vast campaign for which it recruited public figures like Pablo Picasso and several other prestigious intellectuals to speak out for Henri Martin’s release and to mobilize the public for its anti-war campaign.30 The years of the Henri Martin Affair—between the sailor’s arrest in 1950 and his early release in 1953—coincided with a rising peace movement against the backdrop of both the Indochina War and the Korean War, in which the PCF played a major role. It was also the time of Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF.31 In this context, he gave the opening address to the Vienna congress of the World Peace Council in December 1952.32 While the French government refused to pardon Martin lest it appear open to blackmail by the PCF, Sartre followed the Communist lead in his own way.33 He gathered intellectuals and experts for his book project, among them Jean-Marie Domenach, Michel Leiris, and Vercors, intending to establish a counter-trial by providing the public with a thoroughly researched documentation of biographical, juridical, academic, and literary sources.34 Pierre Campion, one of the rare authors to consider the book’s collective

30 See Alain Ruscio, Les communistes français et la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985). 31 For his reasoning on his relations with the Communist Party see Sartre, The Communists and Peace (New York: George Braziller, 1968 [1952–54]); Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, 77–82. 32 On the WPC see the chapter by Christiaens in this volume. 33 Pierre Campion, “Les enfances Henri Martin selon Sartre,” Les Temps Modernes

674/675 (2013): 157–172, 158. 34 In total, fifteen authors contributed to the book; in addition to those mentioned above: Hervé Bazin, Marc Beigbeder, Francis Jeanson, Jacques Madaule, Marcel Ner, Jean Painlevé, Roger Pinto, Jacques Prévert, Roland de Pury, Jean-Henri Roy, and Louis de Villefosse. Ibid., 159.

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and law-oriented character, interprets it as “a virtual law court to avenge Henri Martin”.35 The book sought to investigate the facts and to question a case, which, as the first chapter concluded, had been artificially constructed to apply the newly released law against sabotage.36 To refute the judgement as illegitimate, the book reversed the relation between prosecutor and accused: the actual wreckers were not the alleged “saboteurs du Dixmude”,37 as the French public was led to believe, but “les saboteurs du Palais Bourbon”, that is parliament as representative of the French people, in whose name the judgement was pronounced. When it was published a few weeks after Martin’s early release for good conduct, it continued to serve a purpose as the release did not touch the judgement in its core, as Sartre argued in his preface: “Yesterday, this book had the purpose of obtaining Martin’s amnesty. Now it has another: to re-examine all the facts and to reopen the trial”.38 By turning the case of a dissident sailor’s rehabilitation into a matter of morality regarding France’s colonial rule, the strategy of revealing by assembling other intellectuals’ and experts’ reports and opinions is evocative of Voltaire’s writings on the Calas Affair.39 Voltaire’s effort to rehabilitate the publicly executed Protestant merchant Jean Calas, who had falsely been accused of murder in 1762, reveals, like the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and the case of Henri Martin, the entanglement between law and protest as a crucial part of the history of French intellectual politics.40 These juridical approaches implicitly challenged the intellectual’s singularity by promoting the voices of experts and witnesses. Although Sartre acted as the editor of the book, which was published with Gallimard, his contribution went beyond the editor’s role in a

35 Ibid., 171. 36 Sartre, Henri Martin, 160. 37 The Dixmude was an aircraft carrier of the French Navy in service during the First

Indochina War, on which the sabotage acts that Henri Martin was initially accused of were carried out. 38 Sartre, Henri Martin, 8. 39 Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1: A

Bibliographical Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 280. 40 See Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die Affäre Calas: Über die Toleranz (Berlin: Insel, 2011), 259–280.

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narrow sense, his reflections and comments—italicized but not referenced—were interspersed among the other authors’ text. At the same time, the book’s collective concept set limits to Sartre as an individual intellectual, and unlike the other contributors, he did not explicitly appear as one of the authors. Henri Martin’s letters, written from Indochina and reproduced in the book, reveal his anti-colonial reasoning as a result of his experiences in the Résistance. By drawing an analogy between the French troops in Indochina and the German Wehrmacht, Martin formulated the basis of the French war critics’ politics of memory, which they mobilized against the Indochina War.

Controlling Time, Imploring Time, Anticipating Time---Perception of Wars, Revolutions, and the “Other” Who is the legitimate heir of the Résistance? This question, and the French recent past more generally, became a powerful instrument of domestic politics in post-war France, publicly mobilized by both Gaullists and Communists. To underline France’s pretensions to power after 1944/45, based on the country’s pre-war colonial might, the French political elite formulated a master narrative that tended to omit the country’s collaboration with Nazi Germany and highlighted the role of the Résistance, its heroes and martyrs.41 During the First Vietnam War, the war critics also claimed France’s Résistance past, thus making it the decisive lens for discussing the country’s Indochina politics.42 In this context, Les Temps Modernes assumed the “dominant role in countering the paucity and inaccuracy of information on Indochina, in attempting to raise public awareness”.43 The journal, which had just been founded by Sartre, understood its protest against the French war in the colony of Indochina as “the deeper sense of the Résistance”, as argued in its famous editorial “Et bourreaux, et victimes” (Both torturers and victims) written

41 Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World, 128–129. 42 See Hee Ko, “Trespass of Memory: The French-Indochina War as World War II,”

in Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 98–111. 43 Drake, “Les Temps Modernes and the French War in Indochina,” 28.

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by Jean Pouillon and published in December 1946.44 But the editorial went further: it held up a mirror to French society by establishing an analogy between the French troops in Indochina and the German occupation troops in France between 1940 and 1944: “It is unimaginable that after four years of occupation, the French do not recognize the face that is theirs today in Indochina”.45 The recent past of the Second World War also served as a reference on the battlegrounds in Indochina. The French troops of the First Vietnam War consisted partially of legionnaires, among them former German soldiers, some of whom switched sides and joined the Viê.t Minh troops. Within the ranks of his own troops, a French soldier reporting on his experience in Indochina in the pages of Les Temps Modernes in 1949 observed a certain type of behaviour associated with the German occupiers: “Maolen! Maolen!” shouted by French soldiers at Vietnamese workers reminded him of the German “Schnell, Schnell”.46 The French troops as revenants of the German occupiers was an impression also taken up by the intellectual magazine Esprit where Bertrand d’Astorg rhetorically asked: “And if tomorrow we are the ‘winners’, would we undertake the difficult but necessary business of collaboration with a ‘defeated’ people?” He added: “Doesn’t this vocabulary remind you of something?”47 D’Astorg judged the French authorities to be incapable of reacting appropriately to a chain reaction of events. In his view, the French government’s imperial and retrograde politics unsuccessfully tried to undo a leap in time that the Viê.t Minh had achieved in Indochina.48 For France not letting go and holding on to its colonial empire of Indochina was, first and foremost, a way to overcome the country’s own recent past, the “black years” between 1940 and 1944. According to historian Martin

44 Jean Pouillon, “Et bourreaux, et victimes…,” Les Temps Modernes 15 (1946): 23–24. 45 Ibid., 24. 46 Patrick P. Michaël, “Deux ans d’Indochine: souvenirs d’un engagé volontaire,” Les

Temps Modernes 4 (1949): 505–524, 516. 47 Bertrand d’Astorg, “Pour un Lyautey socialiste,” Esprit 130 (1947): 193–202, 195. Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) was a French Army general and colonial administrator who served in Indochina, Madagascar, and Morocco and came to personify the French empire builder. 48 Ibid., 197.

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Thomas, the “colonial consensus” was an “emotive refusal to contemplate imperial withdrawal”.49 However, the “postcolonial moment” of the First Vietnam War was also a time of diverging and competing perceptions of time, as historian Mark Philip Bradley has pointed out. While the Vietnamese who were followers of the Viê.t Minh were embracing the “unleashing of historical time” for their purpose of national independence, the other parties of the conflict—France, Britain, and the United States—were trying, as Bradley argues, to retard or even arrest the “time rushing forward” to better control the events.50 These divergent temporal perceptions were widespread. There was a dichotomy between, on the one hand, French politicians and war critics imploring the country’s resistance tradition and, on the other, the Viê.t Minh’s belief in shaping their own future through a revolutionary war, perceived by the French side as an “acceleration”.51 A similar asynchronicity also applies to divergent concepts of the future within the French post-war intellectual Left outside the PCF. Twenty years before the Parisian Boulevard Saint Michel would be renamed “Boulevard du Vietnam héroïque” by French protest activists who embraced the atmosphere of making history emanated by the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle, Vietnamese revolutionary politics were already at stake in the French intellectual field, where the question was asked, in how far the Vietnamese revolutionary struggle could serve as a model for revolutionary politics in France and elsewhere. In the pages of Les Temps Modernes , the philosopher Claude Lefort doubted whether the Viê.t Minh’s revolutionary project would be successful.52 Written in 1947 and based on Trotsky’s concept of the “permanent revolution”, Lefort’s article denied the Viê.t Minh the capacity to carry out a revolution in Indochina as the country’s colonial structure lacked both revolutionary conditions and agents. With this statement, 49 Martin Thomas, “French Imperial Reconstruction and the Development of the Indochina War 1945–1950,” in The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, ed. Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 130–151, 132. 50 Mark Philip Bradley, “Making Sense of the French War: The Postcolonial

Moment and the First Vietnam War, 1945–1954,” in The First Vietnam War, ed. Lawrence/Logevall, 16–40. 51 See Sabine Rousseau, La colombe et le napalm: Des chrétiens français contre les guerres d’Indochine et du Vietnam 1945–1975 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2002), 21. 52 Claude Lefort, “Les pays coloniaux: Analyse structurelle et strategie revolutionnaire,” Les Temps Modernes 19 (1947): 1068–1094.

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` Ðu´,c Thao,53 who had he challenged the Vietnamese philosopher Trân received his education at the École Normale Supérieure, where he—just like his critic Lefort—became a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Thao defended the Viê.t Minh’s political project.54 His activism against the French War in Indochina preceded that of other intellectuals. Already in the autumn of 1945, he was incarcerated in the Parisian prison La Santé for distributing leaflets against French politics in Indochina.55 An article that he wrote during his imprisonment became the first text on the Indochinese colonial question in Les Temps Modernes .56 Thao had thus already been introduced to the Sartrean intellectual circles, when he countered Lefort’s position by questioning its Trotskyist framework, especially its applicability to “all the current revolutions”57 in the colonized countries. According to Thao, the theory of the “permanent revolution” had been developed on the example of the Russian Revolution, which had taken place under different circumstances. In the absence of a global revolutionary situation, the Vietnamese revolutionary movement could only evolve within the national framework, concentrating its democratic tasks on its anti-imperialistic struggle for independence. According to Thao, who did not hide his admiration for Hô` Chí Minh, this effort was only possible thanks to the national unity established and successfully reinforced by the Vietnamese leader. Finally, Thao underlines the Vietnamese struggle’s temporality of anticipation, which evades the conventional “laws” of revolutionary processes by the decision to suspend the class struggle in favour of the anti-imperialist struggle. Thao drew a new line, arguing that Lefort’s analysis of the Viê.t Minh’s revolutionary struggle pretended solidarity with the Indochinese liberation project, but ij

ij

ij

ij

ij

ij

ij

53 Trân ` Ðu´,c Thaij o, “Sur l’interprétation trotzkyste [sic] des événements d’Indochine,” Les Temps Modernes 21 (1947): 1699–1705. 54 Alexandre Féron, “Qui est Trân ` Ðu´,c Thaij o? Vie et œuvre d’un philosophe vietnamien,” Contretemps: Revue de critique communiste (2014), https://www. contretemps.eu/qui-est-tran-duc-thao-vie-et-oeuvre-dun-philosophe-vietnamien/; also see Shawn McHale, “Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: ` Ðu´,c Thaij o, 1946–1993,” Journal of Asian Studies 61,1 (2002): 7–31. Trân 55 Jérôme Melançon, “Anticolonialisme et dissidence: Trân ` Ðu´,c Thaij o et Les Temps ` Ðu´,c Thaij o: Phénoménologie et transferts culturels, ed. modernes,” in L’itinéraire de Trân Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 201–215. 56 Trân ` Ðu´,c Thaij o, “Sur l’Indochine,” Les Temps Modernes 5 (1946): 878–900. 57 Thaij o, “Sur l’interprétation trotzkyste,” 1702.

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played into the hands of imperialism. In the pages of Les Temps Modernes , the discussion was closed for the time being. Thao’s criticism narrowly preceded Lefort’s own alienation from Trotskyism. Only a few months after Thao’s reply, Lefort founded the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) together with the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. This marked their break with Trotskyism and the beginning of an intellectual revision of Marxist premises that would eventually lead to the formation of an intellectual New Left that sought to go beyond the Communist and Social-democratic Old Left. Both Thao, theoretically inspired by phenomenology and practically backed by Viê.t Minh revolutionary strategy, and the dissident intellectuals of Socialisme ou Barbarie aimed to revise Marxist premises.58 With his explicit support of the Viê.t Minh revolutionary struggle in conjunction with challenging the theoretical premises of Marxist thinkers, Thao anticipated an action strategy which in France would only be fully realized twenty years later during the protests against the American War in Vietnam. Moreover, the debate between Lefort and Thao in 1947 illustrates different ways of perceiving the Vietnamese “other”. While the Viê.t Minh, driven by the will to liberate their people from colonial rule, perceived themselves as agents of their own fate, the French war critics who supported their struggle mostly kept a paternalistic view on them as being “our protégés”.59 This image of the colonized people as a vulnerable group is reminiscent of Christian missionary rhetoric. French Christians who publicly opposed the war found themselves in a dilemma between their loyalty towards the French government’s Résistance myth and their solidarity with the Christian “brothers” in Indochina.60 In Esprit , d’Astorg criticized the rupture between the colonizers and the colonized by using a hierarchical—and potentially racist—perspective when speaking about the “yellow peoples” fighting for their independence.61 The political Left was not immune to hierarchical perceptions ij

ij

ij

ij

ij

58 John Mowitt, introduction to Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), vi–xxiii, xv. 59 “Regards sur notre action politique en Indochine,” Les Temps Modernes 18 (1947): 1133–1149, 1138. 60 On the Christian opposition regarding both Vietnam Wars see Rousseau, La colombe et le napalm. 61 Astorg, “Pour un Lyautey socialiste,” 199.

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either. Lefort, for instance, criticized some members of the French Socialist Party who were pleading for peace so as not to lose “our colonies”. His Trotskyist position that ostentatiously supports the Vietnamese struggle while questioning its revolutionary legitimacy and potential smacks of theoretical self-assurance assuming an attitude of superiority. Thao’s reply not only countered the Trotskyist perspective, but also questioned Lefort’s speaker position, his entitlement to interpret the Vietnamese situation from a distance: “It is inappropriate to condemn from Paris an action taking place on the other end of Asia”.62 This touches upon a central question that besets transnational advocacy protest: how can one legitimately speak about the situation in a faraway country given a systematic lack of information? Film director Jean-Luc ` Ðu´,c Thao’s objecGodard took up this question twenty years after Trân tion against Lefort’s analysis. While being part of the collective film project on the Vietnam War that eventually yielded the anthology film Far from Vietnam (1967), Godard was seeking a way to protest the war by purely artistic means. Unlike his colleagues Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, who pursued methods of documentary film to express their solidarity with the Vietnamese people, Godard did not find a form to speak about the war events. His official request to pursue his film project in Vietnam had been rejected by the North Vietnamese authorities. In his eventual contribution, which was literally recorded “far from Vietnam”, he described a feeling of “shame” for not finding appropriate images for something he had not seen, a “shame” that he also connected to the act of signing peace manifestos. In consequence, he reversed the perspective: Vietnam is here, Vietnam is in France, Vietnam is in us. As Godard argues, Vietnam had become a symbol for resistance in the broader sense. He linked the 1966 strike movements in French factories directly to the Vietnamese cause: a worker of the Rhodiacéta chemical fibres factory in France can draw lessons from the battles in Vietnam for his own conflict with the trade unions. Godard established a spatiotemporal dynamic that reflected the Vietnamese struggle’s impact on the way the activists in France perceived their own political horizon, before and especially during the May 68 events: the acceleration of time, the urgency to act immediately, the feeling of being a historical agent making history was characteristic for the “temps politisé”, the politicized time, as described by Bantigny for ij

ij

62 Thaij o, “Sur l’interprétation trotzkyste,” 1703.

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the May 68 events.63 Godard’s reflection on Vietnam echoes yet another important change in perception. The Vietnamese people were no longer perceived exclusively as vulnerable victims, but as historical agents and guiding examples. In this vein, “Vietnam” could be frequently found on activist groups’ meeting schedules. At the Université de Nanterre near Paris, the activists were studying the situation in Vietnam by reading texts published by the NLF.64 The “Five points of the NLF”, declared on 22 March 1965, and the “Four points” of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam served as guidelines for the political profiles of numerous groups founded to support the Vietnamese struggle, like the Comité Vietnam Nanterre. Although the “five points” did not give any guidance on specific political actions, they outlined the NLF’s “resistance struggle against the aggression of the American imperialists”.65 They reflected the determination and decisiveness to free Vietnam through the “guerre patriotique” (patriotic war), while also openly calling for other countries to send young people to fight against the “common enemy”.66 But who should fight, and how?

In Sync? Vietnamese Guerrilla Warfare and the French War Critics’ Political Strategies In both the First and the Second Vietnam War, highly developed nation states with technologically advanced armies were bogged down by guerrilla warfare. The technological imbalance was highlighted by the wars’ critics as one of the reasons for their opposition. Russell, for instance, pointed out that the War Crimes Tribunal’s aim was to understand, “why a small agrarian people have endured for more than twelve years the assault of the largest industrial power on earth, possessing the most developed and cruel military capacity”.67 Despite its technological inferiority,

63 Bantigny, “Le temps politisé.” 64 See Jean–Pierre Duteuil, Nanterre 1965–1968: Vers le mouvement du 22 mars (Paris:

Les éditions Acratie, 1988), 26; Ben Mercer, Student Revolt in 1968: France, Italy, and West Germany (Cambridge: CUP, 2020), 230–253. 65 Duteuil, Nanterre, 39–40. 66 Ibid., 40. 67 Russell, speech to the first meeting of members of the War Crimes Tribunal, London (13 November 1966), as quoted in his Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1998), 720.

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the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare brought the French (and later the American) military power to its knees, and the outcome of the First Vietnam War served as a “triumphant justification” of the guerrilla strategy.68 Under the theoretical influence of the Chinese Communist Party, the Vietnamese leaders, especially Hô` Chí Minh and general Võ Nguyên Giáp, elaborated a successful military strategy, which proved “decisive” for the outcome of the First Vietnam War.69 Chinese support was both theoretical and practical with Chinese military staff training Vietnamese fighters in guerrilla war tactics.70 At the same time, the Vietnamese military leaders did not just copy the Chinese model, but their guerrilla strategy’s military success also relied on their capability to adapt theoretical models to their country’s conditions. The Viê.t Minh’s war strategy illustrated how “techniques of psychological warfare could supplement revolutionary violence in countering the military advantages of a more powerful adversary”, as William J. Duiker has argued.71 What were the repercussions of this among French war critics? Scholars have suggested—albeit in conflicting ways—that the character of the guerrilla indeed had an impact on the scope of protest. Alain Ruscio explains the French public’s general lack of interest in the First Vietnam War with reference to the long series of small clashes, which was characteristic for guerrilla warfare and less spectacular and more difficult to follow than the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu.72 A contrasting view has interpreted the David and Goliath situation as one of the main reasons for the vast international protest movement triggered by the Second Vietnam

68 See Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Routledge, 2017), 267. 69 Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London: The Bodley Head, 2019), 234;

on the adaptation of Chinese military theory by Hô` Chí Minh see William J. Duiker, “Hô` Chí Minh and the Strategy of People’s War,” in The First Vietnam War, ed. Lawrence/Logevall, 152–174. 70 Lovell, Maoism, 229, also see Li Xiaobing, Building Ho’s Army: Chinese Military Assistance to North Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Kazushi Minami’s chapter in the present volume. 71 Duiker, “Hô ` Chí Minh,” 173. 72 Ruscio, “L’opinion française et la guerre d’Indochine,” 36–37.

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War.73 Rather than focusing on the guerrilla war’s impact on the scope of Second Vietnam War protest, other authors have highlighted the war’s impact on the forms of protest. The Second Vietnam War, as Kristin Ross has put it, brought protest action and violence to the streets of Paris, and is taken to be one of the main reasons of the May 68 events.74 However, the guerrilla warfare of both wars generated temporal analogies which shaped the French war protesters’ self-perception, their critique, and their protest strategies. For the French soldiers of the First Vietnam War, the guerrilla character of the conflict, especially the blurring between the military and the civilian spheres, was an important point in the rare testimonies they gave about their experience. They mostly referred to the sudden attacks by the Viê.t Minh guerrilla and to the demoralizing, tiring, and endless search for the “rebels”.75 They analyzed their own troops’ weak points by highlighting the advantages of guerrilla tactics for the control of the territory, and they reported on torture used by the French military forces against Vietnamese civilians accused of helping the fighters. The Viê.t Minh guerrilla tactics as described by French soldiers contributed to the analogy between the Vietnamese fighters and the French Résistants during World War II, and were thus at the root of the growing opinion that the Indochina War was a “sale guerre”, a dirty war, as Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of Le Monde, called it in January 1948.76 The sabotage acts of the Vietnamese fighters, however, not only evoked those of the French Résistance against the German occupation, they also had similarities with the sabotage acts against military institutions and ways of transportation committed by French war critics that were close to the Communist Party, of whom Raymonde Dien became the most famous after being tried in court for blockading armaments transports by lying

73 For instance, Sabine Rousseau, “Boulevard du Vietnam héroïque,” in Artières/Zancarini-Fournel, 68, 110–116, 111–112; Pas, “’Six heures pour le Vietnam’,” 169. 74 Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives, 90–91. 75 Michaël, “Deux ans d’Indochine,” 504–505. 76 Beuve-Méry quoted in Alain Ruscio, “La fin de la guerre d’Indochine (1953–54) vue par L’Humanité,” Cahiers d’Histoire 92 (2003), 92.

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down on train tracks in February 1950.77 Although these sabotage acts were backed by PCF, they were not part of the party’s official programme, and most of the intellectuals opposed to the French War in Vietnam did not perceive the Viê.t Minh guerrilla strategy as an action strategy for their own political ends. Globally, the Maoist influence, already at work in South East Asia during the First Vietnam War, was only at its beginnings, but would gain importance among the war critics of the Second Vietnam War twenty years later. Only a combination of factors allowed for a change of perception in which the Vietnamese appeared as a practical example for the war critics’ own political activism: the PCF increasingly losing its intellectual credit, the formation of the intellectual New Left—arguably in an embryonic state during the First Vietnam War—and the legitimation of revolutionary violence as a liberating force in anti-colonial struggles, as in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which was prefaced by Sartre. In the context of the Second Vietnam War, the Vietnam activists’ interpretation of Vietnamese guerrilla warfare created an atmosphere increasingly characterized by recourse to direct political action, provocation, and theories of revolutionary violence, which became palpable during the International Vietnam Congress held in West Berlin a few weeks after the beginning of the Tet Offensive in February 1968. Among the many international participants were the French delegates Daniel Bensaïd and Alain Krivine from the Trotskyist Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (Communist Revolutionary Youth, JCR) and Daniel Cohn-Bendit representing the Liaison d’étudiants anarchistes (Union of Anarchist Students). They felt inspired by the strategy of limited and performative rule breaking (“begrenzte Regelverletzung”) pursued by the antiauthoritarian fraction of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) around Rudi Dutschke.78 Back in Paris, the young Trotskyists called this “provocative escalation strategy”.79 The action-oriented and provocative anti-imperialism best embodied by the Movement of 22

77 Alain Ruscio, La C.G.T. et la guerre d’Indochine, 1945–1954 (Montreuil: Institut C.G.T. d’histoire sociale, 1984). On sabotage as a political practice in France see Sébastien Albertelli, Histoire du Sabotage de la CGT à la Résistance (Paris: Perrin, 2016). 78 Gilcher-Holtey, “France,” 111–124. 79 Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 1968: Eine Zeitreise (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 25.

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March, founded by Cohn-Bendit and others after a Vietnam Demonstration in Paris in 1968, had the capacity of temporarily unifying the various political groups—Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarchists—challenging the PCF in “Indochinese” protest matters.80 At the same time, the internationalist orientation of the Movement of 22 March, symbolized by Vietnam, functioned as a means of distinction when it came to the question of how to oppose the war in Vietnam in practice. Although the Trotskyists received a “Berlin training” and were determined to end the well-behaved demonstrations that kept to walking speed, they generally did not stick to the acceleration of actions, but mainly kept their traditional organizational structure and well-planned protest strategies. When Maoist activists of the Comités Vietnam de base (Vietnam Base Committees) planned to demonstrate on the ChampsÉlysées and managed to raise the NLF-flag on the embassy of South Vietnam in Paris, they were harshly criticized by their Trotskyist counterparts as “adventurist”.81 In return, the Maoists defended their action against the “revisionist” Trotskyists, accusing them of being “parasites” upon the PCF.82 Twenty years after the dispute between Lefort and Thao, rather than referring to the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare as a revolutionary role model, the Trotzkyists were still hostile to Hô` Chí Minh’s government.83 Nevertheless, the JCR defined Vietnam as a main factor of their mobilization strategy, seeing it as an opportunity to extend their networks.84 Initiated by Laurent Schwartz, who had already been involved in protest activities during the First Vietnam War, the Trotskyist Comité Vietnam national (CVN) became the largest protest network. It comprised both well-known intellectuals like Sartre and members of the JCR. With its ij

80 Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, “Le mouvement du 22 mars: Entretien avec Daniel Cohn-Bendit,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 11–13 (1988): 124–129, 125. 81 Duteuil, Nanterre, 132. 82 Ibid., 20. 83 The roots of this hostility go back to the September 1945 Saigon uprising against the restoration of the French when Vietnamese Trotzkyists were systematically eliminated by both the Communist-front Viê.t Minh and the French police. See Ngo Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (London: AK Press, 2010); Simon Pirani, “Vietnam & Trotzkyism” (1987), Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.mar xists.org/history/etol/document/vietnam/pirani/index.htm. 84 On the JCR’s politics see Bantigny, “Hors frontières,” 150–158.

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older members, it constituted personnel continuity between protests during the First and Second Vietnam Wars.85 More than the protest initiatives during the First Vietnam War, which had been predominantly a French affair, from 1966 onward, CVN activists pursued an intensive networking policy building close contacts with American anti-war activists in Paris and the United States, playing an important role in the activities of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal. In contrast, the Maoist groups lacked these established networks. They were a relatively new political player in the field. For them, referring to the First Vietnam War was a historical legitimization strategy which reached beyond their actual formation in France. When Maoist groups were involved in violent street fighting with far-right political groups in the spring of 1968, they carried a banner warning the paratroopers they faced: “you may have escaped Dien Bien Phu but you won’t escape Nanterre”, thus putting themselves in the place of the Viê.t Minh.86 After the May 68 events, the Maoists of the newly founded party Gauche prolétarienne (GP) claimed the role of the Résistance by calling their military wing Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (New People’s Resistance, NRP). They established a tradition line that reached from the Second World War via the Viê.t Minh to themselves: “All militants know that the ideas they had in their heads during the May combats came for the most part form the practice of the Vietnamese people”, as the GP press organ La Cause du peuple put it in 1969.87 While most protest activists did not tend to directly refer to the Vietnamese guerrilla warfare as a role model for their own political strategy during the period between 1965 and 1968, the explicit references to guerrilla warfare as a political strategy came into play through the Maoist groups’ efforts to legitimize their political theory after the May 68 events. In January 1971, the GP outlined an “original politico-military practice, an original guerrilla war”, which they called a “violent partisan struggle”, resulting from their reception of Mao Zedong’s war theory.88 They developed a plan to widen the resistance against the bourgeois state through 85 Pas, “‘Six heures pour le Vietnam’,” 169. 86 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution,

and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd ed. 2018), 84. 87 Ross, May 68, 91. 88 “Illégalisme et guerre,” in Alain Geismar, L’engrenage terroriste (Paris: Fayard, 1981),

161–179, 161, first published in Cahiers prolétaires 1 (January 1971).

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a “symbolical” struggle that included the use of weapons without aiming to physically destroy the enemy.89 While the Maoist intellectual influence in France was at its peak, the activists referred to a militant strategy—i.e., protracted guerrilla war—from which the North Vietnamese increasingly distanced themselves after entering a new phase of the war with the Tet Offensive and simultaneously experiencing a widening rift in their relations with “their historically aggressive big northern neighbor”.90 After the self-dissolution of the GP in 1973, the reasoning of prominent former members concerning the role of revolutionary violence resulted in a host of texts chiefly characterized by a disillusioned tone of lost revolutionary hopes.91 Besides the Maoists regretting their beliefs, some, mostly Trotskyist, activists continued their Vietnam activism until the mid-1970s, and there is still room for further research on the way the Vietnam War continued to define their politics.92 In general, the rejection of revolutionary politics contributed to an increased return of references to the past. The Holocaust became the “leitmotif” of French Humanitarianism which evolved around the “boat-people” fleeing the Communist Regime in Vietnam and arriving in France at the end of the 1970s.93 Since the times of the First Vietnam War, historical analogies and references to World War II were at the heart of French intellectual politics regarding Vietnam. French Vietnam activists not only recognized their own political battlefields in “Vietnam” during the 1960s, but they also saw themselves as the Résistants they had been—or that they wished to have been—identifying themselves with the Viê.t Minh’s guerrilla attacks on the French troops in Indochina between 1946 and 1954. Some twenty years later, the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal would accommodate Sartre’s reasoning on genocide and unanimously found the “United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam”.94

89 “Illégalisme et guerre,” 164. 90 Perry Johansson, “China, Vietnam, and the European 1968: A Note on Chronology

and World Revolution,” Monde(s) 11 (2017): 79–94, 92. 91 See Isabelle Sommier, La violence révolutionnaire et son deuil: l’après-68 en France et en Italie (Rennes: Presses universitaires, 2008). 92 Mohandesi, “Bringing Vietnam Home,” 245–246. 93 Davey, Idealism, 166. 94 John Duffett (ed.), Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (New York: O’Hare Books, 1968), 650; Jean-Paul Sartre and

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At the same time, the Vietnamese war for independence as a revolutionary war challenged established perceptions of political time and action strategies by generating a feeling of accelerated time. The roots of this transformation—even if marginal at the beginning went back as far as ` Ðu´,c Thao’s reply to Claude Lefort in 1947. Rather than estabTrân lishing a straight line of continuity between the two Vietnam wars, the protests they triggered, and the generational appropriation of both, these considerations allow us to go beyond the year 1954 with its landmark events at Dien Bien Phu and Geneva. The latter are generally considered as the point of departure for French tiersmondisme and as the beginning of the “rise of humanitarianism”.95 Reducing the First Vietnam War to its outcome runs the danger of overlooking its significance for subsequent French time politics. ij

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Jalabert, Laurent, “Aux origines de la génération 1968: les étudiants français et la guerre du Vietnam,” Vingtième siècle 55 (1997): 69–81. Johansson, Perry, “China, Vietnam, and the European 1968: A Note on Chronology and World Revolution,” Monde(s) 11 (2017): 79–94. Journoud, Pierre, De Gaulle et le Vietnam, 1945–1969: La réconciliation (Paris: Tallandier, 2011). Julliard, Jacques, and Michel Winock (eds.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français: les personnes, les lieux, les moments (Paris: Seuil, 2002). Kalter, Christoph, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950–1976 (Cambridge: CUP, 2016). Klinghoffer, Arthur J., and Judith A. Klinghoffer, International Citizens’ Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Ko, Hee, “Trespass of Memory: The French-Indochina War as World War II,” in Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 98–111. Laqueur, Walter, Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Routledge, 2017). Li, Xiaobing, Building Ho’s Army: Chinese Military Assistance to North Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019). Lovell, Julia, Maoism: A Global History (London: The Bodley Head, 2019). McHale, Shawn, “Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: Tran Duc Thao, 1946–1993,” Journal of Asian Studies 61,1 (2002): 7–31. Melançon, Jérôme: “Anticolonialisme et dissidence: Tran Duc Thao et Les Temps modernes,” in L’itinéraire de Tran Duc Thao: Phénoménologie et transferts culturels, ed. Jocelyn Benoist and Michel Espagne (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 201–215. Mercer, Ben, Student Revolt in 1968: France, Italy, and West Germany (Cambridge: CUP, 2020). Mohandesi, Salar, “Bringing Vietnam Home: The Vietnam War, Internationalism, and May 68,” French Historical Studies 41 (2018): 219–251. Mohandesi, Salar, From Anti-Imperialism to Human Rights: The Vietnam War and Radical Internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017). Mowitt, John, Introduction to Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), vi–xxiii. Ngo, Van, In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (London: AK Press, 2010). Pas, Nicolas, “’Six heures pour le Vietnam’: Histoire des Comités Vietnam français 1965–1968,” Revue Historique 302 (2000): 157–185.

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CHAPTER 9

The Japanese New Left, the Vietnam War, and Anti-Imperial Protest Alex Finn Macartney

At 7:30 am on 31 March 1970, just as Japan Airlines flight 351 was cruising over the south face of Mt. Fuji on its way from Tokyo to Fukuoka, Tamiya Takamaro, a 27-year-old leader of a radical offshoot of Japan’s student movement, Sekigun-ha (Red Army Faction) stood up and announced to the flight’s passengers: “We are the Red Army Faction! We are going to North Korea!”1 Wielding a replica gun and a few short swords, Tamiya and his fellow urban guerrillas successfully took control of the aircraft (nicknamed the Yodog¯ o by the crew), first landing in Fukuoka before attempting to enter North Korean airspace. After eighty-four hours on the tarmac in Seoul, the hijackers and the Japanese government reached a deal to exchange the remaining hostages 1 See K¯ oji Takazawa, Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodog¯ o Exiles, ed. Patricia Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 2, n. 1; quote 16. Following Japanese custom, names in this chapter will be presented with surname first.

A. F. Macartney (B) Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_9

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aboard JAL 351 for Japan’s Minister of Transport and safe passage to North Korea.2 The Yodog¯ o hijacking made for front page news for days internationally. To most in the West, the hijacking—a tactic that was still uncommon early in the 1970s—was an inexplicable crime.3 Few, if any, looked for an ideological motivation for the hijacking and some even used the race of the hijackers as an explanation.4 Without examining the ideas of the self-professed ultra-radical group, the event has been portrayed by later historians as at best a victory in terms of spectacle and at worst a farce.5 Sekigun-ha were not “kamikazes” nor were they nihilistic gangsters; rather, they were anti-imperialists acting out a praxis from theory developed over much debate and conflict through the 1960s. In a manifesto explaining the hijacking, Tamiya presented the action as a way to continue the fighting example of the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the Middle East.6 In the literature on Japan’s postwar history, the hopeful, democratic spirit of citizen protest inaugurated in mass demonstrations in 1960 is typically contrasted with urban guerrilla movements who chose violence to oppose the state. In many accounts, the brutal self-destruction of Reng¯ o Sekigun (United Red Army, URA) a later offshoot of Red Army,

2 Takazawa, Destiny, 14–21. 3 See Annette Vowinckel, “Skyjacking: Cultural Memory and the Movies,” in Baader-

Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 251. For international media coverage, see “Hijacked Jet Still in Seoul; Ruse Fails: Appeal to Release Passengers Rejected,” New York Times (1 April 1970), 1; Guntram Müller-Jänsch, “Kamikaze-Kämpfer der ‘Roten Armee’,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (2 April 1970), 3. 4 The orientalization of Japanese anti-imperial violence suggests similar “defense mechanisms” employed by the press as Ruth Glynn has identified in Italian newspaper descriptions of female terrorism in the 1970s. Just as the international media fixated on the “Japaneseness” of Sekigun-ha violence, so too did the Italian media fixate on the “femininity” of female terrorists to remove that violence’s social critique. See Ruth Glynn, Women, Terrorism and Trauma in Italian Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 42. 5 See William Andrews, Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture, from 1945 to Fukushima (London: Hurst & Company, 2016), 127–130; Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” The Journal of Asian Studies 48 (1989), 732. 6 Tamiya Takamaro “Shuppatsu sengen” [Declaration of Departure], “Sekigun” dokyumento [“Sekigun” Documents] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1975), 98.

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inaugurated a period of “despair” and decline for Japan’s left.7 Sekigun-ha was a radical response to the war in Indochina, but it was deeply tied to the wider reaction to the Vietnam War and “imperialism” among Japan’s New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. In a founding manifesto published about six months before the hijacking in September 1969, Sekigun-ha issued the following challenge to the world’s bourgeoisie: “If you have the right to indiscriminately kill our Vietnamese comrades, we have the right to kill you indiscriminately. If you have the right to kill the Black Panthers and crush the ghettos with tanks, we have the right to kill Nixon, Sato, Kiesinger, and de Gaulle, to blow up the Pentagon, Self Defense Force Headquarters, and your homes.”8 Beyond declaring solidarity with the struggling people of the so-called “Third World,” how did this small band of militants connect at all to wider protest against the Vietnam War? This chapter introduces how the Vietnam War influenced major events, groups, and ideas in Japan’s 1960s.9 It focuses on the development and articulation of a set of anti-imperialist ideas intimately tied to the US war in Indochina and Japan’s role in that war. Anti-imperialism was a politics particular to the 1960s and 1970s, focused on identifying local and global structures of domination and violence, and, ultimately, resisting them. Whereas an “anti-war” stance—one that opposed armed conflict— most often called for peace between the US and its enemies in South East Asia. “Anti-imperialists” took a much broader view about the US war in Vietnam entailed, seeing it as not just another violent war or decolonization struggle, but as the deciding battle against a global structure of social 7 Ando Takemasa, Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 2014), 25. 8 “Sens¯ o sengen” [Declaration of War] (3 September 1969), in “Sekigun” dokyumento,

60. 9 This builds on work done by historians who have recently identified the 1960s in Japan as a field. See Till Knaudt, Von Revolution zu Befreiung: Studentenbewegung, Antiimperialismus und Terrorismus in Japan (1968–1975) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2016). In Japanese, histories of “1968” and personal accounts of the conflict of these years are common and the most important of these works is the multi-volume history of the period by a former participant in the events. See Oguma Eiji, 1968 (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2009). A major thrust of this literature in English is to situate women within the movements of the 1960s. See Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and Chelsea Szendi Shieder, “Left Out: Writing Women Back into Japan’s 1968,” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest, and Counter Culture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney (New York: Routledge, 2018), 140–155.

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oppression. These groups did not just call for “peace” in Southeast Asia or even for the Viet Cong to be victorious against the US military; rather, they sought the dismantling of a much broader system of capitalism, profiteering, and colonization around the globe. Developed over the course of the 1960s but especially radicalizing around 1968, the Vietnam War directly affected how these activists understood their world, and the operation of imperial power therein. The groups discussed here were a broad spectrum of self-described “Shimin” (citizens), students, workers, and urban guerrillas. What differed dramatically between the groups were the tactics each chose to employ in that resistance. Though not all of the groups would have identified themselves explicitly as “anti-imperialists,” many of the most radical and more “moderate” groups shared a similar critique of the post-1945 world order that the US had organized around global capitalism. This chapter also situates Japan in the growing literature of the socalled “Global 1960s” by examining the interactions between local and global effects of the American war in Vietnam. Recent attempts to situate Japan in this context, such as Naoko Koda’s work on transpacific exchanges among anti-war networks, have privileged the United States as the main exporter of people and ideas. Transnational studies of Western Europe in the 1960s have also tended in this way, supplemented only in the past decade by more diverse approaches.10 For Japanese protesters in particular, the US war in Vietnam, simultaneously evoked a larger, global context and affected local issues. The Japanese activists discussed here were participating in a global discourse of protest, a kind of “transnational imagination” that allowed groups from all over the world to take the Vietnam War and apply it to their local circumstances.11 At the same time, they were also close to the battlefield and the US troops waging the war—especially compared to global protest movements they often saw as their peers. In part, the war reminded many of their own past imperialism in Asia—both in terms of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War, when Japan occupied French Indochina from 10 For a rare exception among 1960s narratives that includes Japan, see Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und Globaler Protest (München: dtv, 2008). See also Naoko Koda, “Challenging the Empires from Within: The Transpacific Anti-Vietnam War Movement in Japan,” The Sixties 2 (2017): 182–195. 11 Jeremy Prestholdt, “Resurrecting Che: Radicalism, the Transnational Imagination, and the Politics of Heroes,” Journal of Global History 7 (2012), 509.

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1940 to 1945.12 The war in Vietnam also exacerbated tensions over the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 and the long-term US military presence even after formal occupation had ended. Unlike in many other states that also saw Vietnam War protests, Japan was directly involved in the war in Southeast Asia due to the massive US base system in the Japanese archipelago. This chapter traces a set of politics and ideas about the Vietnam War beginning in earnest in 1965 and reaching a peak in the early 1970s that motivated many on the Japanese left not only to protest the US involvement in Southeast Asia, but also their own state’s involvement in that war and a larger concept of imperialism subjugating the globe.

Opposing the War 1965–1966 The American War in Vietnam overlapped with key moments in a cycle of postwar protest and dissent in Japan, yet the conflict itself became a touchstone for protesters precisely because of the deep entanglements between Japan and the US military. Japan’s mainland hosted around 35,000 to 40,000 US troops—half belonging to the air force, a fourth in the army, and the rest in the navy—spread out over 148 installations. Fifty thousand more troops were stationed in Okinawa and on nearby islands in 88 installations, and it was the “jumping off point” for ground troops to be sent to Vietnam in 1965.13 Standard narratives of Japanese post1945 history highlight protests against US–Japan security treaty (called ANPO in Japanese) in 1960 as the high-water mark for Japanese social movements and the largest ever public protests in Japanese history. ANPO was initially signed in 1952 at the end of the US occupation and slated to be renewed again in 1970.14 The events surrounding these protests including images of massive zig-zagging protesters performing a “snake

12 See The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945, ed. Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 13 Thomas Havens, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 85–87. 14 Avenell argues that it was precisely the defeat of the ANPO struggle that prompted a bifurcation of the concept of citizen protest, especially the “conscious reaction to socalled conservative domination” found in later anti-Vietnam War protests. Simon Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 65.

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dance” marching formation to avoid arrests became potent images of Japan’s Left. These protest methods would prove to be a model for later student protests against the Vietnam War and even influenced groups as far as the US and Western Europe, though, as will be discussed, the radical student protests of the late 1960s proved just as important. The symbolism of ANPO carried a far-reaching legacy, embodied in the case of Kanba Michiko, a female student protester who became a martyr for the left after she was killed in protests on 15 June 1960. In the end, Japan signed the treaty, but not before protesters drove Prime Minister Kishi Nobuske from office. Historians have mainly understood the ANPO demonstrations in terms of the Cold War binary or as an internal debate over postwar Japanese democracy.15 Precisely because the US–Japanese cooperation continued despite the ANPO protests, the steep escalation in 1965 in US involvement in South Vietnam produced a corresponding increase in the urgency of Japanese activism. Labour unions and student protesters, so influential in the ANPO protests, continued “anti-war” protests through the early 1960s. At the same time, these were mainly focused on Japan’s place as a potential frontline in the Cold War and against the proliferation and testing of nuclear weapons. In 1963, a delegation of New Left students even travelled to the USSR and around Europe protesting nuclear proliferation and Soviet and American policies alike.16 In the years after 1945, peace and pacifism were official and popular stances.17 The shift from ANPO in 1960 and the early 1960s anti-war protest to the anti-imperial politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s was deeply tied to the American war. Although the conflict in Vietnam was certainly not contained to the period of American intervention, the Japanese public response to the conflict saw a notable spike in early 1965, especially represented in

15 See George Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Wesley Makoto Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 16 See Ossip K. Flechtheim, “Neue Kritik-Interview mit Zengakuren,” Neue Kritik, 14 (January 1963): 11–13. 17 James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).

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an explosion of mass media coverage.18 Major journals, like the leftleaning Sekai and intellectuals like the Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi all published widely in this year, showing an increase in attention towards the war.19 It was two events, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” the US campaign of bombing North Vietnam, and the commitment of US ground troops, both in 1965, that helped to turn the Japanese public against the war. Both incursions came from US bases on Japanese soil, further inflaming public opinion. Late in 1965, the press reported that the Japanese government had allowed a squadron of B-52 bombers lost in a storm to land on Okinawa on their way back from bombing Vietnam. In March of 1965, the US sent a contingent of Marines to the Mekong delta to begin the direct involvement of American combat units. In response to these developments, the war’s public unpopularity rose, even as the Sat¯o Eisaku government sought to accommodate their American allies.20 The emergence of single-issue protest movements specifically against US intervention in the Indochina peninsula decidedly focused Japan’s protest movements and political dissent on the US war in Vietnam. In early 1965, philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke and political scientist Takabatake Michitoshi founded Betonamu ni Heiwa o Shimin Reng¯ o (Citizen’s League for Peace in Vietnam, or Beheiren). The group was a ubiquitous presence at demonstrations against the war but was best known for the impassioned speeches and writings of novelist and spokesperson Oda Makoto. Beheiren followed an intentionally decentralized structure: anyone could set up a chapter, provided they were against the war in Vietnam. As such, there were hundreds of chapters throughout Japan, often making it difficult to pin down a clear and consistent ideological stance. Though Beheiren avoided doctrinaire revolutionary Marxist language and presented itself consciously as a non-aligned peace movement, their ideas were not so disconnected from the self-identified anti-imperialists, especially those in the student movement. Through both spontaneous and planned mass action, the group became a model 18 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 35–42. 19 See especially the special extra edition: “Vetonamu senso to nihon no shuch¯ o” [The

Vietnam War and the Importance of Japan], Sekai, 234 (April 1965); Inoue Kiyoshi, “Betonamu sens¯o hantai no imisuru mono” [What it Means to Oppose the Vietnam War], Bungei, Special Issue (September 1965): 33–37. 20 K. V. Kesavan, “The Vietnam War as an Issue in Japan’s Relations with the United States,” International Studies 16,4 (1977): 516.

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for how citizen protest movements in postwar Japan should be organized, even if some of Beheiren’s more problematic ideas—such as a pan-Asian nationalism—are not part of the collective memory of the 1960s.21 Nevertheless, Beheiren was not a homogenous organization, and there were more radical factions within the group who focused on the connections between capitalism and war, expressly using imperialism as a framework. 1965 also marked the formation of new anti-war organizations, Hansen Seinen Iinkai (Anti-war Youth Committees, or Hansen). That June, Japan and South Korea completed almost fourteen years of diplomatic discussions intended to normalize relations between the two states. Japan’s history of colonial rule in Korea and testy relations following the end of the Second World War complicated this diplomacy. For Hansen, the Japan–South Korea treaty, which included reparations in the form of grants and loans for industrial development, appeared not as an end to a legacy of empire, but simply a new chapter in the Japanese economic exploitation of East Asia. In their minds, Japan had instead found a way to open the market to cheap South Korean labour—in effect undercutting Japanese workers and re-colonizing the Korean peninsula.22 Hansen distinguished themselves from Japan’s largest confederation of labour movements, S¯ ohy¯ o , in both focus and tactics throughout the 1960s. Conflict between the state and labour about the war were not confined to the “New” Left, however. On 21 October 1966, a coalition of groups inaugurated a general strike against American intervention in Southeast Asia of nearly two million workers, organized by S¯ ohy¯ o . 21 October became an annual day of protest for most groups against the war, coming to a head with particularly contentious and violent protest in 1968, when thousands of student protesters attempted to storm Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF) headquarters and burned down a local police box.23

21 Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens, 107. 22 “Kankoku—haneda—sasebo—betonamu nansen—kara 70 nendai Anpo no tatakai”

[From Korea—Haneda—Sasebo—Anti-Vietnam War to the 70 AMPO Fight], Hansen Seinen Iinkai Hen. Hansen seinen iinkai: tatakai no kiroku to k¯ od¯ o no genri [Anti-War Youth Committee: Fighting Documents and Movement Principles] (Tokyo: Hansen Seinen Iinkai, 1968), 9. 23 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 115.

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“1968,” Global Imperialism, and International Contact The years 1967 and 1968 saw a steep escalation in both the intensity of protest and the increasing radicalism of some groups opposed to the Vietnam War and a more defined conception of Japan’s place in global imperialism. The most recognizable image of Japan in the 1960s was the student protester, a street fighter clashing with police while holding a stave and wearing a helmet. The Japanese left-wing student movement, Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai S¯ o Reng¯ o (or Zengakuren) had emerged in 1948 as college and university attendance dramatically increased in the postwar period. Initially affiliated with Japan’s Communist Party, the organization split with the “Old” Left in 1958. By the early 1960s, the members of Zengakuren had split even further into ideologically battling factions.24 Before 1965, the war in Vietnam was only one of many issues that concerned students—who also conflated the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the American military with the danger of nuclear conflict between the US and USSR.25 On 8 October 1967, however, the Vietnam War and Japan’s role in the conflict took centre stage. That day, a group of two thousand student protesters approached the Benten Bridge to the reclaimed island that houses Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Japanese Prime Minister Sat¯ o had planned to visit South Vietnam later that month in an attempt to burnish the Japanese state’s foreign and economic policies. They represented a coalition of three major student factions calling themselves Sanpa Zengakuren, or “Three-Faction Zengakuren.” Even among the radicals in the student movement committed to tactics of “direct action,” Sanpa had chosen a particularly aggressive path of confrontation with the state. Unable to cross the bridge to reach the man-made island where the airfield sits, Sanpa instead engaged in a heated battle with police. A

24 See Patricia G. Steinhoff, “Japan: Student Activism in an Emerging Democracy,” in Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness, ed. Meredith L. Weiss and Edward Aspinall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Stuart Dowsey (ed.), Zengakuren: Japan’s Revolutionary Students (Berkeley: The Ishi Press, 1970). 25 See Mori Shige, “Minami vetonamu jy¯ osei no kigi to kakumeiteki hansens¯o no gendankai” [The Crisis in South Vietnam and the Current State of the Revolutionary Anti-War Struggle], Tatakau Zengakuren 7 (March 1965): 200–203.

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three-hour struggle against police resulted in over 300 arrests.26 A 19year-old student from Kyoto University, Yamazaki Hiroaki, was killed in the fighting—either beaten to death by police, as protesters claimed, or crushed by a hijacked police vehicle driven by fellow students. While the media reaction to student violence was almost universally negative in fall 1967, in later recollections, many activists saw the victimization of protesters by police and especially the death of Yamazaki as a key moment in their political lives.27 The so-called Haneda Incident—the first in series of clashes at the airport from 1967 to 1968—was a formative moment for radicals protesting the Vietnam War and for the international image of Japanese protest. In pamphlets sent out to other New Left movements, Sanpa portrayed their attempts to prevent Sat¯o’s plane from taking off as a “life and death struggle” against US and Japanese imperialism.28 Haneda was a watershed event, sparking a series of interconnected protests against Japan’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the relationship between the government and US strategy in East Asia more generally. At the same time, the students at Haneda had come to battle the police wearing construction helmets and carrying long staves. This uniform became the internationally recognized image of Japanese student protest. In West Germany activists praised the “hardness” of Japanese students doing what one student called the “Tokyo step,” and prominent thinkers in the European Left encouraged West German protesters to get their own helmets for fights with police.29 For Beheiren, the desertion of four US navy men on 17 October 1967 marked their own key turning point in the group’s tactics. Beheiren activists aided the “Intrepid Four,” as the four American sailors were 26 Havens details the Haneda Incident(s) largely in terms of politics and the government. Marotti has helped to place the event in terms of protest and society, by showing how the media and public treated the events. See Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 130–135; William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 103–110. 27 Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 103–106; Patricia Steinhoff, “Memories of New Left

Protest,” Contemporary Japan 25,2 (2013): 134–140. 28 “Zengakuren: Struggle of Japanese Students Summer 1967,” International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam [hereafter IISG], 6. 29 Michael Glaser, “Zengakuren: Blausäure und Polizisten,” Konkret 5 (February 1969), 44; Ernest Mandel, “Rede auf dem Vietnam-Kongreß Berlin 18.2.1968,” Neue Kritik 47 (April 1968): 60–68.

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known, to abandon their ship, the USS Intrepid, docked in Tokyo harbour. From Japan, activists aided the four in travelling through the Soviet Union and into Sweden, a neutral country that would not extradite. Beheiren announced the desertion on 13 November, just as Prime Minister Sat¯o returned from a trip to Washington.30 The Intrepid Four became internationally recognized spokespeople and symbols for anti-war agitprop aimed at both GIs and the American public more generally. In a 1968 flier “Message to American Soldiers,” Beheiren quoted statements from the Four condemning the Vietnam War. They also directly connected the current war in Southeast Asia with their own imperial past: “In 1931, our Government launched an undeclared war against China […] Few people realized then that it was the beginning of the Second World War. Now in 1966, we feel that another undeclared war going on in Asia may turn out to be the beginning of World War III.” Immediately following this statement, Beheiren detailed options for GIs to desert with the aid of Japanese activists.31 After the Intrepid Four, a deserter recalled that Beheiren changed their messaging to GIs from the general “GI go home” to “GI let us help you go home.”32 This action helped create a faction of Beheiren with the stated mission of aiding desertion and facilitating GI protests through the group Hansen Beihei Enjo Nihon Gijutsu Iinkai (Japan Technical Committee to Aid Anti-war GIs, or JATEC) . Yoshikawa Yuichi, a Beheiren activist and active GI agitator, described the strategic shift for JATEC in an early 1970s interview, which brought the group out of the underground and renewed focus on publishing GI newspapers and coordinating with anti-war GIs.33 During the preparations for the 1970 renewal of ANPO, JATEC pivoted from aiding desertion to promoting direct action to help “destroy from the inside” the US military. The guiding principle behind JATEC was that American soldiers were subject to punishments for crimes like desertion under guidelines set forth by the US–Japan Security treaty, rather than Japanese law. This meant civilians could help GIs avoid military police 30 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 141–142. 31 “Message from Japan to American Soldiers,” in Shiryo Beheiren Und¯ o, vol. I (Tokyo:

Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1974), 181. 32 “DAVIDSON no ess¯ e” [Davidson’s Essay], Rikky¯o University Center for Cooperative Civil Societies [hereafter CCCS], R02-C-4-3 (2–3). 33 “AMPO interviews Yoshikawa Yuichi on G.I. Resistance,” AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 2 (1970): 4, 11.

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and help soldiers go into hiding, which they reportedly did dozens of times between 1968 and 1969.34 The events of 1967 marked a turn from agitation against the Vietnam War to a more radical stance of direct action meant to disrupt both the American military in Japan and the Japanese government’s ability cooperate with its US ally. In the following years, these groups would also reassess their views on the war and on the global structures that allowed and facilitated the conflict in Indochina. 1968, often a stand-in for the entire decade of worldwide conflict, was also a key moment in the internationalization of the Japanese protest against the war and a crystallization of the anti-imperial politics surrounding Vietnam. In many places around the globe in the late 1960s, international conferences helped spread ideas transnationally. A February 1968 conference against the Vietnam War in West Berlin attended by thousands of students from the First and Third Worlds, for example, is widely considered the supposed highpoint of West Germany’s student movement.35 Similarly, in Japan, 1968 brought two major international conferences for the Ky¯ osanshugisha d¯ omei (Communist League, or Bund) student faction and Beheiren. Bund held the 8–3 Kokusai Hansen Kaigi (3 August International Anti-War Conference) at the Chuo University auditorium in Tokyo on 3 August 1968. Bund intended the 8–3 conference as an internationalization of the struggle against the Vietnam War and the alliance between US and Japanese imperialisms. Almost one thousand people attended the meeting, including members of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the French Revolutionary Communist Youth League.36 At the conference, Kyoto University dropout and future leader of Sekigunha, Shiomi Takaya, introduced a sweeping and radical blueprint of global anti-imperialism and revolution: creating a global political party, fighting

34 “GI Join Us,” AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 9/10 (1971): 67; “Dass¯o Beihei Denisu ha doko he Kieta?” [Where Has Deserted US Soldier Denis Disappeared To?], Sh¯ ukan Anpo (June 1969): 4–8. 35 Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003). 36 “8–3 Kokusai hansen kaigi no und¯ o, soshiki ronteki s¯okatsu” [Activities of the 8– 3 International Anti-War Conference, Organizational Argumentative Synthesis], Riron Sensen 7 (October 1968): 129.

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a global revolutionary war, and founding a global Red Army to fight that war.37 The radicals in Bund argued that revolution in one’s own state was not enough. Shiomi proposed theory of a “world transition,” which mandated a concerted and international effort to strike down imperialism, much as Che Guevara had argued in a famous speech in 1967.38 Shiomi and the ultra-radical Kansai Bund faction called for moving from an antiwar struggle to “permanent revolution” in the Third World and pushed groups to follow the Vietnamese example and lead proletarian revolutions in their own metropoles. ANPO in Japan and NATO in Europe were the military wings of an “international counterrevolutionary system,” the Kansai Bund claimed, opposing revolutionaries in both the First and Third Worlds. Not all participants at the 8–3 Conference agreed with Shiomi’s radical anti-imperial stance, still Bund called on all parties to help “defeat the various imperialist great powers at the same time.”39 This was the basis on which the Yodog¯ o hijackers would predicate their operation as furthering the domestic Japanese revolutionary movement and as part of an international movement against imperialism. That same month, between 11 and 13 August, Beheiren hosted their own meeting in Kyoto: the “International People’s Conference against the War and for Fundamental Social Change.” The conference served two goals: to continue and expand international cooperation and to refocus the movement against the Vietnam War with the coming conflict over ANPO in 1970. The organizers proposed to move from a purely “anti-war” stance towards a broader concept of transforming society itself through protesting the war. Beheiren structured the conference around a need for “shakai henkaku” (social change), arguing that the global situation had changed dramatically and that the war was a mirror with which to examine “deep contradictions” within a society that would wage such a war.40 Yoshioka Shinobu, a Waseda University student, claimed in the 37 “Int’l Antiwar Rally Attended by 1,000,” The Japan Times (4 August 1968): 3; “8–3 Kokusai Hansen Kaigi no Und¯ o, Soshiki Ronteki S¯okatsu,” 3: 129–130. 38 “Sekai d¯ oji kakumei o kirihiraku tame ni (8) [For the Opening of the Simultaneous Global Revolution (8)], Senki (8 August 1969), 2. 39 “8–3 Kokusai hansen kaigi no und¯ o, soshiki ronteki s¯okatsu,” 4, 129–133. 40 “70 nendai no watashitachi no undo ni mukete… Hansen to henkaku ni kansuru:

kokusai kaigi” [Orienting Our Movement Toward the 1970s… Concerning Anti-War and Change: International Meeting], Beheiren Ny¯ usu 35 (1 August 1968): 1.

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monthly paper Beheiren Ny¯ uzu that the movement had already moved “beyond” simply opposing the war. For Yoshioka, Vietnam represented “highest development of American society, namely, from the structure of American capitalism” but similarly cautioned that “equally it was brought about by the natural process of postwar Japanese capitalism.”41 AlthoughYoshioka and others spoke in terms of capital, the organizers of the conference explicitly avoided the term “kakumei,” (revolution) in an attempt to distance themselves from an overt Marxist alignment.42 In their own way, however, Beheiren was calling for a kind of revolutionary shift into changing the core of both American and Japanese society as a way to end Vietnam. Beheiren had been internationally focused and particularly fascinated by the US Civil Rights movement since its inception. In 1966, the group hosted Howard Zinn and John Lewis of SNCC to speak about the war.43 The 1968 meeting in Kyoto sought to build on these connections and brought together 34 international participants from Europe and the United States. Notably, the conference was the first trip abroad for a newly internationally focused Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Earl Anthony, a Panther representative addressing the conference, complicated the other presenters’ desire for a united front against the war by repeatedly insisting race was the only category through which to understand the conflict.44 Similarly, the organizers, who were almost entirely men, gave a female speaker, Kobayashi Masami, only five minutes to speak.Yet, the Japanese hosts ultimately adopted many of the ideas of the US black liberation struggle, including many ideas about imperialism.45 At the core of both of these gatherings was an agreement that ending the war was

41 Yoshioka Shinobu, “Kangaeyo, soshite te kakari o” [Think, Therefore Clues], Beheiren Ny¯ usu 35 (1 August 1968): 1. 42 “‘Hansen’ kara ‘henkaku’” [“Anti-War” to “Change”], Asahi J¯ anaru 10,36 (September 1968): 8–9. 43 “Sendai betonamu heiwa k¯ oenkai: amerika hansen heiwa und¯oka nihon k¯ oen”

[Sendai Vietnam Peace Lecture Meeting: American Anti-War, Peace Movement Member’s Speeches in Japan], CCCS, S-01, Folder 0015 [23]. 44 Anthony was later revealed to be an FBI informant. Sean Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 115–117. 45 Koda, “Challenging the Empires,” 186–187.

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not just about securing peace, but actually a larger issue of social change around the globe. The most widely remembered events of Japan’s 1960s happened in almost overlapping succession in late 1968 and spilling into 1969, both of which were entangled with the issue of Vietnam and Japan’s place in the imperial order. In 1967, the American government informed the Sat¯ o administration that the USS Enterprise would be docking in Sasebo, on the southern island of Kyushu on 19 January 1968. Before the ship even arrived, tens of thousands of people took to the streets. Widely broadcast images of student protesters and bystanders being badly beaten by police brought public sympathy for demonstrators contrasting the First Haneda Incident.46 Beheiren also arrived in force to protest the Enterprise, often bringing together many of the key elements of Japan’s global and local 1960s. Activists played recordings of nuclear powered turbines, F-105 jets dropping napalm, and a nuclear blast, tying together US global imperial strategy through Japanese bases, the Vietnam War, and the nuclear victimization of the past.47 In this same period, a wave of campus occupations at over seventy universities all over Japan gripped the nation. Initially sparked as a complaint about student fees by medical students at the elite Tokyo University, the conflict quickly expanded. Students in some areas erected barricades and engaged in street fights between the newly formed Zenky¯ ot¯ o (Joint Struggle Committees, an alliance of Zengakuren factions), and administration officials and police. This concluded with a protracted siege of Tokyo University’s Yasuda Auditorium and the famous campus clock tower in January 1969, which was covered on television live for almost 21 hours.48 While historians have noted the campus occupations and Zenky¯ ot¯ o as an important moment of domestic turmoil, there were also clear connections made between the production of knowledge at the university and production for capitalism and science for “imperialist warfare.” As the events on campuses and the docking of the Enterprise overlapped, these issues were sometimes conflated.49 46 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 145–150; Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 112–128. 47 “Beheiren Ry¯ oshy¯usho Hagaki” [Beheiren Formal Postcard], 1967, in Beheiren,

Shiryo Beheiren Undo, vol. I (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1974), 185. 48 Takemasa, Japan’s New Left Movements, 70–72. 49 “Bei genshiryoku k¯ ubo ent¯apuraizu no kik¯o ni taisuru ketsugi” [A Resolution

Concerning the American Nuclear Aircraft Carrier Enterprise Porting] (18 January 1968),

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Between 1967 and very early 1969, the movement against the US war in Vietnam in Japan tended towards radicalization in ideas and tactics and towards internationalization. An increasingly strong-armed police response to students and workers protesting in the street only helped to solidify ideas of “counter-violence” against the state’s own violence. The Japanese state had increased riot police dramatically from 1967, almost doubling the number to 9700 in 1969, a year in which the police made 14,728 arrests—85 percent of them students.50 It was in this period that many more radical factions made the transition from protesting the US military presence to actively attempting to sabotage it. Beheiren in particular had attempted international cooperation since its conception, but this period saw Japanese groups looking to reach out to their counterparts around the world. Groups like Beheiren, Sanpa, and Bund all produced English language materials for foreign consumption detailing events like Haneda or the campus occupations and to invite other groups to publish about Japan’s New Left.51 1968 was a moment of crystalizing a particular theory of how imperialism operated globally, which would inform much of Japanese anti-imperialism and Vietnam War protest going forward.

Smash ANPO! 1969–1970 Debates over the ANPO treaty in both the Diet and on the streets bracketed Japan’s 1960s, yet the protest movements against ANPO in 1970 were also influenced by half a decade of increasingly radicalized protest against the Vietnam War. Writing in the summer of 1969, the editorial board of the Bund affiliated journal Jy¯ oky¯ o published an article calling for an ideological synthesis among Japanese New Left groups. The article also cut a stark divide between the ANPO protests of 1960 and 1970. The groups in 1960 that supposedly spoke of “peace and democracy” were dismissed by the editorial staff as a mere preservation of “bourgeois parliamentarianism.” By contrast, the groups protesting a decade

in 68.69 wo Kirokusuru Kai, T¯ odai t¯ os¯ o shiry¯ oshu [Tokyo University Struggle Collected Documents] 2 (1992): 680118. 50 Takemasa, Japan’s New Left Movements, 81, 87. 51 See The Sen-Ki (Battle Flag) 1,1 (1969), Freie Universität Berlin, Universitätsarchiv,

Bestand Außerparlamentarische Opposition-S [hereafter FU Berlin, UA, APO-S], Signatur 432; Zengakuren: Twenty Years’ Struggle (1967), IISG; AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 1 (November 1969).

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later marched under the slogan “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution.”52 They claimed that the debate over ANPO 1970 was about global imperialism, rather than simple domestic politics. Groups like Bund had spent years producing fine-grained analyses of how ANPO facilitated the US war in Indochina that included a global pattern of intervention and domination in the Third World. ANPO tied the Japanese state to the US in ways that many other supposedly “imperialist” states were not. A major example of the engagement with the military occurred on Okinawa. The island had been the site of a major battle in 1945—and had remained under American control even after the formal end of the occupation of Japan. In November 1969, Sat¯o and US president Richard Nixon met and agreed on a process by which Okinawa would revert back to Japanese control, which took place in 1972.53 In the minds of anti-imperialists, however, Okinawa was a particularly egregious example of the US using Japan as a launching pad and, more ominously, perhaps even a base of operations for controlling all of Asia and the world. On 28 April 1969, workers affiliated with both Hansen and the Japanese Communist Party banded together for a mass demonstration against US and Japanese imperialism in Okinawa called “Okinawa Day” with almost 130,000 protesting in central Tokyo. Although most groups received official permission to protest, radical Zengakuren factions took to the streets without authorization. An additional 10,000 demonstrators occupied commuter train tracks at Tokyo station and turned a section of the upscale Ginza neighbourhood into a “liberated zone”—a reference to protests in Paris’s Latin Quarter the previous May.54 Some of this concern over Okinawa came from statements by US officials, who stated that the island was a “keystone” or “lynchpin” of US East Asia strategy. Okinawa was, as AMPO magazine noted in the run-up to Okinawa Day, 1500 miles equidistant from the capitals and industrial centers of China and North Vietnam—making it crucial to

52 “70 Nen he no shis¯ o—4–28 okinawa t¯ os¯o kara” [Towards an Ideology of 1970— From the 28 April Struggle], J¯ oky¯ o 11 (June 1969): 65–66. 53 See Michael Schaller, Altered States: The United States and Japan Since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapters 11 and 12. 54 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 176–178.

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American imperial strategy.55 As a result, the debate around Okinawa often blended into protests against the reauthorization of ANPO in 1970 and intersected with debates concerning Japanese participation in the Vietnam War.56 All were seen as tangible examples of cooperation between Japanese and US imperialisms. With the massive military installations on the island, the US could crush any revolutionary struggle in East Asia; Okinawa therefore represented the most important link in US imperial strategy. Moreover, as the global imperialist system fell into a supposedly deepening crisis due to Vietnam, Okinawa was the “flashpoint” of revolutionary activity aimed at crumbling the whole system. The student faction Ch¯ ukaku-ha (Central Core Faction) adopted “Crush ANPO, Defeat Japanese Imperialism, Victory in the Okinawa Struggle” in preparations for Okinawa Day in 1969, blending a number of stated goals into one revolutionary slogan.57 Okinawan airfields indeed provided the US military a kind of “frontline supply base” for the war in Indochina.58 For some protesters, Okinawa simultaneously implicated the Japanese people in the American war and exposed Japanese imperialism’s revitalization through cooperation under ANPO.59 The planned reversion was either seen as a liberation from USimperialism or simply a trade-off in imperial domination. A Ch¯ ukaku-ha student journal claimed that the island’s “Japan-American rulers” (nichibe shihaisha) were both interested in using Okinawa for the same purpose: as a keystone in a plan to dominate Asia. In this theory, both the US and

55 “AMPO 70: Part 4: Okinawa in the American Empire,” AMPO: A Report from the

Japanese New Left 5 (1970): 4. 56 “70 nen he no shis¯ o—4–28 okinawa t¯ os¯o kara,” 67–68. 57 “4–28 okinawa dakkan, shuto bus¯ o seiatsu—shush¯okantei senkyo!” [28 April

Okinawa Recovery, Taking Control of the Capital through Arms—Occupy the Prime Minister’s Residence!], Ch¯ ukaku 63 (April 1969): 5. 58 Hansen Seinen Iinkai Hen, Beikyokut¯ o senryaku to nihon: okinawa, jieitai, entaapuraizu [American Far East Strategy and Japan: Okinawa, Self Defense Forces, Enterprise] (Tokyo: Hansen Seinen Iinkai, 1967), 5–13; “AMPO 70: Part 4: Okinawa in the American Empire,” 4; “Okinawa ni okeru hansens¯o no gendankai” [The Current State of Okinawa’s Anti-War Struggle], Tatakau Zengakuren 8 (September 1965): 176. 59 “Okinawa: The Keystone,” Okinawa: A Special Issue of AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 7/8 (1970): 20–21; Nakatani Fumio, “Okinawa mondai no kakumei ronteki kaimei he no kokoromi” [An Attempt at a Clarification of the Okinawa Problem’s Revolutionary Debate], Ch¯ ukaku 59 (July 1967): 24–28; Hansen Seinen Iinkai Hen, Beikyokut¯ o senryaku to nihon, 44–45.

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Japan looked to achieve the old 1940s Japanese imperialist dream of an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by subtler means.60 Japan would protect US imperialism’s “flank” on the island with the SDF, which had been expanded in the 1950s, even though Japan was constitutionally banned from offensive war. The fact that by 1969 and 1970 the US appeared to many to be losing the war in Vietnam further confirmed this arraignment: with US imperialism in crisis, they were forced to concede more and more to a rising Japanese imperialism to protect the entire system.61 Following closely after Okinawa Day, demonstrations against the reauthorization of the US–Japan Security treaty largely concentrated left-wing activism towards the end of the decade into a single focal point.62 Crucial to these debates were perceptions of the “Japanese-American Imperialist Alliance” (Nichibei teikokushugi d¯ omei) facilitating a newly emboldened Japan to dominate Asia. Nakatani Fumio, writing in the journal Ch¯ ukaku, claimed: “Japanese imperialism, dismantled through crisis and defeat in war, is once again quickly accomplishing international participation in the emerging postwar imperialist global order through extreme economic, political, and military dependence on American imperialism.”63 Beheiren similarly combined their anti-war, anti-reversion treaty, and anti-ANPO stances into a weekly journal published in the run-up to 1970 called Sh¯ ukan ANPO. The first issue, published in June 1969, declared: “This is not simply a magazine […] This is a weapon” against the “USJapan military system.”64 Organized under the slogan “Anpo funsai!” (smash ANPO!), Oda Makoto wrote that the magazine was not “limited to Vietnam. As long as this treaty is in place, we are subjected to an inhuman role that suppresses innocent people in other countries and torments us.”65 The dual role as people victimized by US imperialism and aspiring imperialist victimizer was a key component of the anti-ANPO struggle. The magazine AMPO, itself an attempt by Beheiren to spread

60 Nakatani, “Okinawa mondai,” 18. 61 “AMPO 70: Part 1: Okinawa,” AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 1

(November 1969): 9. 62 See, for example, Iida Momo (ed.), 70 Nen he no kakumeiteki shiron [A Revolutionary Ideological Argument Going into 1970] (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobou, 1968). 63 Fumio, “Okinawa mondai no kakumei ronteki kaimei he no kokoromi,” 32. 64 “Sh¯ ukan anpo to ha nani ka” [What Is Sh¯ ukan Anpo?], Sh¯ ukan Anpo 0 [June 1969]. 65 “Anpo he ningen no uzumaki wo…,” ibid., 2.

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protest material internationally in preparation for the US–Japan Security Treaty, saw ANPO as the crowning moment of the “imperialist camp’s strategic reorganization of the Pacific by restoring Japan to the status of full-fledged imperialist power.”66 Whereas the ANPO struggle in 1960 had been mainly concerned with the role of the people in government, the supposed “shaking” of the imperial system by the late 1960s brought the US–Japan agreement into a new light.67 Bund, in a limited run journal specifically published for the approach to 1970, argued that the Vietnamese revolution was succeeding and thereby bringing the postwar global capitalist order into question.68 In the wake of the Okinawa Day protests, Ch¯ ukaku-ha member Aoyama Kiyoshi wrote that just as ANPO and its reliance on Okinawa as the cornerstone of Vietnam strategy was soon to be smashed, de Gaulle’s resignation in France and the Deutsche Mark crisis in West Germany signalled the end to NATO. In the interconnected system of global imperialism, however, the defeat of one system of control in Europe would logically cause the US to rely more heavily on ANPO in Japan. This was why the struggle against the Vietnam War and ANPO was so significant. “Surely,” Aoyama continued, “this must collapse the imperialist world!”.69 The incorporation of Vietnam War protest into the larger demonstrations against the Japanese Left’s main enemy, ANPO, was part of an anti-imperial critique coming especially from the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnam War exacerbated debates around the long-term US military presence in Japan by openly displaying how the US used the island nation as a launching pad for their supposed imperial expansion. The location of Okinawa and the upcoming reversion of the island fed into this worldview. Factions like the anti-imperialists in Beheiren and the radical students of Ch¯ ukaku-ha argued that the “keystone” island had

66 “AMPO 70: Part 2: The Deal,” AMPO: A Report From the Japanese New Left 2 (1970): 2. 67 “70 Nen he no shis¯ o—4–28 okinawa t¯ os¯o kara,” 67. 68 “70 Nen anpo t¯ os¯o to nihon kakumei tenb¯o” [The 1970 ANPO Struggle and the

Prospect of Japanese Revolution], Hanki 1 (November 1968): 2–7. 69 Aoyama Kiyoshi, “Tokubetsu kik¯ o: 4–28 no sh¯ori no h¯on¯o wo anpo funsai—nihon kakume sh¯ori he to moehiro ga raseyo!” [Special Climate: The Dedication of Victory on 28 April Smashes ANPO—the Victory of Japanese Revolution Spreads like Wildfire!], Ch¯ ukaku Supplement (May 1969), 5.

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been the strategic point of imperial penetration into Asia in the 1940s as well as in the 1960s—and would be yet again in the 1970s. The events of 1969 and 1970, the Okinawa struggle and the final push against ANPO’s renewal were all seen in the context of Vietnam War protest. Crucially, many on the radical fringes began to argue that the time was ripe to strike more actively at a supposedly faltering international capitalist system.

The Anti-Imperial Revolt: 1970–1972 The 1970s began with a sense of urgency among anti-imperialist factions: the struggle against ANPO and the US–Japan alliance had failed, the war in Vietnam had not ended, and, in fact, Richard Nixon had raised the stakes in the conflict by spreading the war to neighbouring Laos and Cambodia. For the most radical anti-imperialists, these developments and an increasingly draconian response to demonstrators signalled the need for even more direct action. In response to sporadic bombings at Okinawa Day protests, police employed mass search and seizure campaigns against suspected radical meeting places and enforced lowlevel crimes into months or even years-long detentions without formal charges.70 At the same time, brutal infighting between student factions also helped to radicalize views about violence. This was called uchigeba or “internal violence”—a portmanteau of the Japanese uchi for “internal” and the German Gewalt or “violence/force.” Within the Japanese New Left, radicals consciously used the phoneticized “gebaruto” rather than the Japanese “b¯ oryoku” to imply a political meaning behind their violence.71 Between 1968 and 1975 alone, 1776 uchigeba disputes between different Zengakuren factions resulted in 44 deaths and 4848 injuries.72 By the early 1970s, faced with a brutalization of the domestic political landscape and also increased violence in the war, a small core of radicals decided to deliver on the promise of a Red Army that would bring

70 Peter J. Katzenstein and Yutaka Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms, and the Political Responses to Terrorism and Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1991), 142–148. 71 Marotti, “Japan 1968,” 131. 72 Patricia Steinhoff, “Student Conflict,” in Conflict in Japan, ed. Ellis Krauss, Thomas

Rohlen, and Patricia Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984), 174–214. For the definitive history of this conflict, see Takashi Tachibana, Ch¯ ukaku vs Kakumaru, 2 vols. (K¯odansha, 1983).

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the war home. When Tamiya and the other hijackers left Japan, they were not simply fleeing a defeat, as some scholars have claimed—in their minds they were finally linking the Japanese revolution to the global struggle.73 Much like the rest of the Japanese left in the 1970s, Sekigun was stratified with a number of factions. The history of these groups largely focuses on the domestic fight between guerrillas and the state, rather than anti-imperial politics that linked them to wider movements against the war in Vietnam. This is typified in the infamous URA purge in 1972. In February, under the leadership of Mori Tsuneo and Nagata Hiroko, URA took a contingent of radicals into the mountains of Nagano Prefecture for paramilitary training. What followed was a series of particularly brutal Maoist jikohihan (criticism/self-criticism) sessions and a purge leaving twelve members dead. A resulting 218-hour hostage standoff at a nearby ski lodge on Mt. Asama, broadcast live and still one of the most watched events in Japanese history, ended with three more deaths and Mori and Nagata in custody.74 Given the brutality of the URA purge and the general decline in New Left activity after 1972, it has been easy for scholars to distance any of the Sekigun radicals from wider protest against the war in Vietnam. Historian Thomas Havens, for example, argues in his exhaustive study of Japan’s relationship to the American war in Vietnam, Fire Across the Sea, that “except for firebombing American bases in Japan, there was nothing to tie the United Red Army to the movement against the Vietnam War.”75 Yet, URA and other Sekigun groups were actually drawing from the same ideas developed through the late 1960s and early 1970s. In fact, there were links between the wider movement against the war and urban guerrilla groups—both in terms of ideological affinities and engagements between movements. Beheiren’s response to the 1970 Yodog¯ o hijacking is instructive, as AMPO magazine praised the Sekigunha hijackers as finally breaking through the revolutionary deadlock of the late 1960s: “the incident revealed clearly that Japan’s leftist forces now contain at least one group of steeled, determined revolutionaries

73 William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990), 87. 74 Steinhoff, “Memories of New Left Protest,” 134–140. 75 Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 216–217, quote 217.

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[…] The New Left as a whole will be forced to re-examine its attitudes about military insurrection.”76 Indeed, some of Sekigun’s main actors either found their way into politics through the citizen’s movement or eventually defined themselves against it. On 30 May 1972, three members of the Middle East-based Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army, JRA) killed 24 and wounded 79 more in Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport. The lone surviving attacker, Okamoto K¯oz¯o, first entered politics through Beheiren as a university student, but later dismissed the “masturbation” of student protesters in favour of direct guerrilla action.77 Nihon Sekigun’s leader, Shigenobu Fusako, later wrote in her memoirs that she was deeply motivated by the American war, noting that her first ever political rally was a Beheiren demonstration in Hibiya Park as a student, where she recalled the fiery rhetoric of Beheiren co-founder Oda Makoto.78 When police raided the JATEC-affiliated Hobbit Bookstore outside of Iwakuni Airbase on 4 June 1972 in response to allegations that Okamoto had used a US military issued M-16 in the Lod attack stolen from the base, some GIs actually sympathized with the JRA, claiming that Japanese imperialism was, in fact, more violent than any guerrilla attack.79 Sekigun differed dramatically with putatively non-violent Beheiren activists and even students who advocated only for “counter-violence.” Yet, the Red Army members also shared a similar theory of Japan’s place in global imperialism and in the domination of Vietnam in particular. The concept for a “Red Army” had come directly from debates about the Vietnam War and the global imperial order in 1968. These urban guerrillas drew on the same sources of inspiration and the same global

76 “Japan’s First Hijacking,” AMPO: A Report from the Japanese New Left 5 (1970):

31. 77 In an article based on an August 1972 interview, however, Steinhoff largely dismissed Okamoto’s ideological and political foundations as “untrained and relatively shallow.” Patricia Steinhoff, “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto,” Asian Survey 16 (September 1976): 830–845, quote 833. 78 Shigenobu Fusako, Nihon sekigun shishi paresuchina to tomo ni [A Personal History of Japanese Red Army: Together with Palestine] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobou Shinsha, 2009), 18–23. 79 R. T. Hobbit, “June 4—Hobbit Invaded and Searched by 25 Japanese Police—June 22 Hobbit Declared Off-Limits by US Military,” AMPO: A Report on the Japanese Peoples’ Movements 13/14 (May/July 1972): 30–31; “Hobbit Raided by Cops!,” Fall in—At Ease (June 1972), CCCS, S01 File 1486, 1.

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imaginary: Tamiya cited the Black Panthers and the struggling Vietnamese as a model just as many in the Japanese New Left had. In the view of the Red Army, the violence of imperialism was the justification for violence against imperialism; in the 1960s and 1970s there was seemingly no place more violent than the US war in Vietnam. When Sekigun claimed “the right to indiscriminately kill” world leaders in retribution for the indiscriminate murder of their “Vietnamese comrades” in their 1969 Declaration of War, they were taking a wider anti-imperial logic to an extreme.

Conclusion Japanese Vietnam War protest was part of a larger discussion that groups in many places around the world were having at the same time. Japanese are often portrayed as refusing to come to terms with their past, especially in comparison with the supposedly much more positive German example. Japanese anti-imperialist discourse, however, constantly discussed Japanese fascism and imperialism.80 On the occasion of the 1966/67 Russell Tribunal, the British philosopher wrote an appeal to the American people in which he claimed that “in order to suppress a national revolution, such as the great historic uprising of the Vietnamese people, the United States is obliged to behave as the Japanese behaved in Southeast Asia and the Nazis behaved in Eastern Europe.”81 Japan’s place in the global language of protest, however, was not simply rhetorical as was its role in the US war effort in Indochina. The image of the Zengakuren street fighter was widely recognized and emulated by protesters around the globe, especially among more radical groups trying to delineate their own theories of “counter violence” against the state. In places like the US, Italy, and West Germany demonstrators donned helmets, picked up staves, and locked arms in their own versions of the “snake dance” in battles with police.82 80 Franziska

Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 23–24. 81 Bertrand Russell, Appeal to the American Conscience (London: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1966), 1. 82 Alex F. Macartney, “Hirohitler on the Rhine: Transnational Protest Against the Japanese Emperor’s 1971 West German State Visit,” Journal of Contemporary History 55,3 (2020): 82–86.

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The diverse array of groups opposed the US war in Vietnam and the Japanese complicity or participation in this conflict may have disagreed in terms of tactics, but largely shared a conceptual framework for understanding the war. By historicizing anti-imperialism, we can more fully understand the motivations and actions of radical groups on the left. As such, this takes seriously Japanese anti-imperial ideas, rather than approaching them as mere projections, escapism, or a form of national pathology.83 When Bund announced their appeal for the 8–3 Conference, they included a wide ranging slogan: “Support the Vietnamese People, Smash NATO / the Japan-American ANPO, Defeat Global Imperialism!”84 These three goals help to explain what the US war in Indochina meant to anti-imperialists, both radical and more moderate, in 1960s and 1970s Japan. Supporting the Vietnamese people fighting against the US in Southeast Asia was not just an anti-war position: it was designed to bring down a larger system of imperialism, one that tied Japanese and American imperialisms into a wider, global strategy against the struggling people of the “Third World.”

Bibliography Andrews, William, Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture, from 1945 to Fukushima (London: Hurst & Company, 2016). Avenell, Simon, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Dowsey, Stuart (ed.), Zengakuren: Japan’s Revolutionary Students (Berkeley: The Ishi Press, 1970). Duus, Peter et al. (eds.), The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Eiji, Oguma, 1968 (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2009). Farrell, William R., Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990). Frei, Norbert, 1968: Jugendrevolte und Globaler Protest (München: dtv, 2008).

83 This builds on the work of Slobodian, who is critical of interpretations of Maoism that do not take the ideas of historical actors seriously. Quinn Slobodian, “The Meaning of Western Maoism in the Global 1960s,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building, ed. Chen Jian et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), 74–75. 84 “Nikaso de hansen kokusai sh¯ ukai” [International Anti-War Conferences in Two Places], Asahi Shimbun (4 August 1968): 14.

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Fusako, Shigenobu, Nihon Sekigun Shishi Paresuchina to tomo ni [A Personal History of Japanese Red Army: Together with Palestine] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobou Shinsha, 2009). Glynn, Ruth, Women, Terrorism and Trauma in Italian Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Havens, Thomas, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Katzenstein, Peter J., and Yutaka Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms, and the Political Responses to Terrorism and Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 1991). Kesavan, K. V., “The Vietnam War as an Issue in Japan’s Relations with the United States,” International Studies 16,4 (1977). Knaudt, Till, Von Revolution zu Befreiung: Studentenbewegung, Antiimperialismus und Terrorismus in Japan (1968–1975) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2016). Koda, Naoko, “Challenging the Empires from Within: The Transpacific AntiVietnam War Movement in Japan,” The Sixties 2 (2017): 182–195. Macartney, Alex F., “Hirohitler on the Rhine: Transnational Protest Against the Japanese Emperor’s 1971 West German State Visit,” Journal of Contemporary History 55,3 (2020). Malloy, Sean, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). Marotti, William, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review 114 (2009). Orr, James, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Packard, George, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Prestholdt, Jeremy, “Resurrecting Che: Radicalism, the Transnational Imagination, and the Politics of Heroes,” Journal of Global History 7 (2012). Russell, Bertrand, Appeal to the American Conscience (London: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1966). Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley Makoto, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Schaller, Michael, Altered States: The United States and Japan Since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Seraphim, Franziska, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Shigematsu, Setsu, Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Slobodian, Quinn, “The Meaning of Western Maoism in the Global 1960s,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and NationBuilding, ed. Chen Jian et al. (London: Routledge, 2018).

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Steinhoff, Patricia G., “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” The Journal of Asian Studies 48 (1989). Steinhoff, Patricia G., “Japan: Student Activism in an Emerging Democracy,” in Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness, ed. Meredith L. Weiss and Edward Aspinall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Steinhoff, Patricia G., “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Kozo Okamoto,” Asian Survey 16 (September 1976): 830–845. Steinhoff, Patricia G., “Memories of New Left Protest,” Contemporary Japan 25,2 (2013). Szendi Shieder, Chelsea, “Left Out: Writing Women Back into Japan’s 1968,” in The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest, and Counter Culture, ed. Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney (New York: Routledge, 2018), 140– 155. Tachibana, Takashi, Ch¯ ukaku vs Kakumaru, 2 vols. (K¯ odansha, 1983). Takazawa, K¯ oji, Destiny: The Secret Operations of the Yodog¯ o Exiles, ed. Patricia G. Steinhoff (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). Takemasa, Ando, Japan’s New Left Movements: Legacies for Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 2014). Thomas, Nick, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003). Vowinckel, Annette, “Skyjacking: Cultural Memory and the Movies,” in BaaderMeinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

PART IV

The Global South: Emancipation, Anti-Colonialism, Third Worldism

CHAPTER 10

The Vietnam War, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution: Propaganda and Mobilization in the People’s Republic of China Kazushi Minami

The Vietnam War agitated China.1 Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese leaders viewed U.S. “imperialists” as a belligerent enemy trying to encircle China by its regional allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and threaten it with “nuclear blackmail.” Beijing sent the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to fight American soldiers during the Korean War (1950–1953) and nearly provoked nuclear war with the United States during the Taiwan Strait Crises (1954–1955 and 1958). Chinese leaders evinced willingness to improve relations with 1 In this chapter, I call the People’s Republic of China, a country/regime ruled by the Communist Party, “China” and the Republic of China, a country/regime ruled by the Nationalist Party, “Taiwan.”

K. Minami (B) Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University, Suita, Japan e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_10

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the capitalist bloc, including the United States, in the wake of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) , a failed attempt at rapid industrialization that precipitated tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Deeply suspicious of Beijing’s intentions, the John F. Kennedy administration nonetheless not only maintained a hawkish China policy, but also contemplated air strikes against nuclear facilities in China before the successful detonation of its first atomic bomb on 16 October 1964.2 Unsurprisingly, Chinese leaders interpreted the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s as an existential threat, a prelude to U.S. attack on China. The Vietnam War, however, provided China with unique opportunities as well. With the emergence of the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Mao Zedong tried to replace the Soviet Union as the leader of the international communist movement. To this purpose, Beijing bolstered political, economic, and military support for developing countries in Asia and Africa, countries that Mao argued belonged to the “intermediate zone” between the U.S. and Soviet camps.3 The Vietnam War, the most conspicuous symbol of U.S. “imperialism,” gave Mao a chance—and a litmus test—to show his commitment to the liberation movement in the Third World. The Vietnam War also enabled Mao to enhance his political standing at home. After the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward, he withdrew to obscurity, leaving the task of salvaging the economy to pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping. They implemented partial marketization of the agricultural sector, countermanding the full collectivization of the late 1950s. This infuriated Mao. To eradicate what he condemned as revisionism, Mao decided to use the Vietnam War as a

2 Noam Kochavi, A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy during the Kennedy Years

(Westport, CN: Praeger, 2002); William Burr and Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Whether to ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle’: The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960–1964,” International Security 25,3 (2000): 54–99. 3 On the Sino-Soviet split, see Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). On Chinese foreign policy towards the developing world in the Cold War, see Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Gregg Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

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vehicle to launch another political campaign against his rivals—the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This chapter analyzes how the threat and opportunity created by the Vietnam War changed China. It focuses on the dynamics between China’s domestic politics and foreign relations at a time of national crisis, dynamics that facilitated radicalization at home and abroad. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines the mobilization campaign that engulfed the entire nation following the Gulf of Tonkin incident on 2 August 1964. It created a culture of anti-Americanism, which I define as widely shared hostility against the United States, a combination of a natural reaction to the Cold War and an artificial emotion fabricated by the state. This hostility became a culture when it was politicized by propaganda and embraced by the masses.4 Such a culture was visible not only in mass meetings and militia exercises, but also in popular films and street performances. The second section illustrates the war scare among the Chinese masses, a by-product of the mobilization campaign. Although Beijing tried to avoid war with the United States by preparing for it, Chinese people often expressed fear of nuclear annihilation. The third section discusses Beijing’s efforts to portray China as the vanguard of the international liberation movement by utilizing “foreign friends,” including Americans who extolled Chinese support for Vietnam. The fourth section illuminates the connection between the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution. Viewing U.S. involvements in Vietnam as an imminent threat to the Chinese revolution, Red Guards expressed enthusiastic support for Hanoi’s war, and some even tried to join the battle themselves. This chapter concludes that Vietnam War protest in China 4 “Anti-Americanism” in Mao’s China was a complex phenomenon, operating at least on three dimensions. The first two were political and personal. While state propaganda constantly vilified U.S. “imperialists” as a global class enemy, many Chinese probably felt genuine anger against U.S. interventions around the world, particularly in Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, which was turned into a collective feeling through propaganda. The third dimension was historical. Despite the quixotic American myth of the “special relationship,” the relationship between China and America in the early twentieth century was complicated by its “breadth, complexity, and instability,” in the words of historian Michael Hunt. The CCP denounced all forms of American presence in China, from missionaries to philanthropists, businessmen to educators, as economic and cultural imperialism, but those who benefitted from U.S. connections, most notably Chinese scientists trained in the United States, probably retained positive impressions of America even after 1949. Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), x.

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was a political process in which an external threat, real and imagined, was internalized as a popular movement to support the leader trying to achieve utopian visions in foreign policy and domestic politics.

Resist America, Aid Vietnam The shadow of Vietnam absorbed China in the summer of 1964. On 20 July, on the tenth anniversary of the Geneva Agreement of 1954, which ended the First Indochina War, and about two weeks before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Beijing announced: “If the United States assumes that it can do whatever it wants in Vietnam and Indochina, it is simply wrong. We have to tell the United States frankly that Chinese people absolutely cannot sit idly and watch the United States expand the war of invasion against Vietnam and Indochina.”5 On 6 August, Beijing made another statement, dismissing the U.S. claim of a North Vietnamese torpedo attack against USS Maddox as “an outright lie” to justify the expansion of the war in Southeast Asia. “U.S. invasion of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam is an invasion of China,” it asserted, “and Chinese people definitely cannot sit idly without rescuing [Vietnamese people].”6 China’s mobilization campaign, under the slogan “Resist America, Aid Vietnam” (kangMei yuanYue), picked up the pace in early 1965, when the United States significantly deepened its commitment in Vietnam by launching sustained bombings and sending ground troops. In response to Washington’s decision to bomb military targets in North Vietnam on February 7, the CCP leadership requested local Party officials throughout China to organize mass meetings and street demonstrations. Between February 9 and 11, millions of Chinese from all walks of life took to the street in major cities—many of them voluntarily—to chant slogans and sing songs against U.S. “imperialists.”7 In Beijing, Mayor Peng Zhen addressed a crowd of 1.5 million gathering at the Tiananmen

5 “Zhongguo jue bu zuoshi Meiguo kuoda qinlüe Yuenan he Yinduzhina de zhanzheng [China absolutely cannot sit idly and watch the United States expand the war of invasion against Vietnam and Indochina],” People’s Daily (20 July 1964), 1. 6 “Meiguo dui Yuenan minzhu gongheguo de qinfan jiu shi dui Zhongguo de qinfan [U.S. Invasion of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Is an Invasion of China],” People’s Daily (6 August 1964), 1. 7 These street demonstrations were extensively covered by People’s Daily, published on 9–11 February 1965.

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Square, denouncing U.S. “imperialists” as “the deadly enemy of the people around the world.”8 Mass protests were also organized in southern provinces such as Guangxi and Yunnan, where ethnic minorities lived close to the Vietnamese border. One student militia of the Zhuang tribe in Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi, emphasized the proximity of her home and Vietnam, claiming that they faced each other “across the hills” and were connected by “a strip of water,” namely the Red River. “We share weal and woe with the Vietnamese brothers,” she stated, “[w]e simply cannot sit idly and see U.S. imperialists ignite a fire of war on our big threshold.”9 Calling Chinese and Vietnamese “intimate brothers,” “nourished by the same river,” one Hani tribe student militia member blared that the U.S. attack on Vietnam meant “nothing but an invasion against China.” “We are always ready to support the Vietnamese brothers and fight back U.S. imperialists,” he averred.10 News stories about these large and small gatherings entered most of the Chinese households through radio broadcast, shaping a collective sense of solidarity with North Vietnam (Illustration 10.1). Resist America, Aid Vietnam was primarily aimed at enhancing the vigilance of the masses. In April 1965, about a month after the onset of Operation Rolling Thunder, the CCP leadership issued a directive to accelerate war preparation, including air defence programs and citizen militia drills, especially in large cities. The Chinese masses, it stated, should “be prepared to handle the worst-case scenario,” in which they had to not only suffer U.S. bombings, but also “fight on the soil of our country.” Instead of demanding Chinese people to receive professional military training, this document instructed local officials to direct “the enthusiasm of the masses” to “working hard and carrying out various jobs at their workplaces.” It argued that as part of war preparation, farmers and workers should increase production at communes and factories; scientists

8 “Zhongguo renmin yiding yao jiajin nuli jiaqiang zhunbei jueding zhiyuan Yuenan datui Meidi de zhanzheng tiaopan [Chinese People Should Accelerate Efforts to Strengthen Preparation for Decisive Support for Vietnamese Repulsion of the U.S. Imperialists’ Provocation of War],” People’s Daily (11 February 1965), 2. 9 “Suishi zhunbei tong Yuenan renmin bingjian zhandou [Always Prepared to Fight Shoulder-to-Shoulder with Vietnamese People],” People’s Daily (10 February 1965), 3. 10 “Dui Yuenan de qinfan jiu shi dui Zhongguo de qinfan [Invation of Vietnam Is Invation of China],” People’s Daily (11 February 1965), 3.

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Illustration 10.1 “Women in Nanshi District, Shanghai, participate in a protest against the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam.” Similar protests took place throughout China in 1965.11

should expedite research in laboratories; and students should study diligently at schools.12 About a week later, the standing committee of the Third National People’s Congress issued a declaration, urging the masses to “support Vietnamese people with actual deeds.” It encouraged Chinese people to “widely propagate” North Vietnamese denunciations of the United States, “deeply study” Beijing’s policy statements, and launch “a powerful mass movement” against U.S. “imperialists.” These deeds,

11 H1-23–32-43, Shanghai Municipal Archive (hereafter SMA). 12 “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu jiaqiang beizhan gongzuo de zhishi [Instruction of

the CCP Leadership on Strengthening War Preparation]” (12 April 1965), in Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenxian xuanbian [Collection of Important Documents since the Foundation of the Nation], vol. 20 (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi, 1998), 141–145.

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stated the declaration, would form “sufficient preparation” to send volunteer soldiers, if requested by Hanoi.13 Local Party committees across the country formulated propaganda strategies based on the CCP directive and the People’s Congress declaration. One propaganda guide printed before the May 1 Labour Day by the municipal Party committee of Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi Province, accentuated the imminence of a threat from the United States: “The fire of U.S. imperialists’ invasion has burned the areas very close to the threshold of our home,” it asserted. “Their next goal is to invade China. The U.S. imperialists’ invasion plan includes China.”14 Resist America, Aid Vietnam went far beyond mass meetings and shaped Chinese culture in the form of popular art. In mid-1965, the CCP leadership sent out a directive to strengthen anti-U.S. propaganda not only through study sessions and street demonstrations, but also through art activities.15 For instance, major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, hosted “U.S. aggressors get out of Vietnam” photograph exhibits.16 Chinese songwriters composed numerous songs and operas glorifying Vietnamese resistance and demonizing U.S. “imperialists,” including the dance drama “Flames of Fury in the Coconut Field” (Yelin Nuhuo). In May, Beijing held a chorus meeting in support of the struggle of the Vietnamese people, attended by more than four thousand students, workers, and soldiers, as well as professional singers and 13 “Quanguo renmin daibiao dahui changwu weiyuanhui guanyu zhichi Yuenan minzhu gongheguo guohui huyushu de juece [National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s Decision to Support the Appeal Letter of the Congress of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam]” (20 April 1965), www.npc.gov.cn. 14 Propaganda Bureau of the CCP Municipal Committee of Nanchang, “Tigao jingti, jiaqiang guofang, quanli zhiyuan Yuenan renmin de kangMei douzheng—1965 nian ‘wu yi’ laodongjie xuanchuan cankao tigang [Heighten Vigilance, Strengthen National Defence, Use Full Force to Support the Anti-U.S. Struggle of the Vietnamese People— Outline of Propaganda Reference for the 1 May Labour Day of 1965],” April 1965, author’s personal collection. 15 Propaganda Department of the CCP Municipal Committee of Shanghai, “Guanyu yuanYue kangMei xingshi jiaoyu de qingkuang he jinhou yijian de baogao (caogao) [Report on Education on the Situation of Aid Vietnam, Resist America and Opinion on Future Work (Draft)]” (14 June 1965), A22-2-1295, SMA. 16 “‘Meiguo qinlüezhe cong Yuenan gun chu qu’ tupian zhanlan zai Jing kaimu [‘U.S. Invaders, Get Out of Vietnam’ Photograph Exhibition Opens in Beijing],” People’s Daily (30 April 1965), 5; “Duifu qinlüezhe jiu yao wojin qianggan henhen de da [To Deal with Invaders, We Should Mercilessly Fire Guns],” People’s Daily (3 May 1965), 2.

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performers.17 In addition to art galleries and song festivals, major cities throughout China also organized mass viewings of Chinese and Vietnamese films about the war at communes, factories, and schools. These film viewings were usually followed by discussion sessions among the viewers, who debated how the film enhanced their revolutionary spirit. One worker at an iron factory near Beijing recounted that when the Viet Cong guerrillas defeated American and South Vietnamese soldiers in the film, he felt “very elated inside.”18 One commune member near Beijing stated after viewing a film that the United States owed “an infinite debt of blood” to the Vietnamese people. “We should take revenge,” he asserted.19 These comments perhaps merely reflected the official line set by the Party, but as historian He Hui explains, ordinary Chinese— who had limited exposure to information about the United States outside newspapers and radio broadcast—had little reason to doubt and defy the Party line. Propaganda art, therefore, served the CCP by reinforcing the conviction of the masses—and affirming the reality of the Cold War—that the United States was “an enemy.”20 Resist America, Aid Vietnam became a staple of everyday life in China. Street performances, both planned and spontaneous, played an instrumental role in this process. Between August 1964 and May 1965, Shanghai held 78,977 shows of 983 plays related to the Vietnam War not only at theatres, but also at workplaces and on the street, attended by over thirteen million locals in total.21 “U.S. Aggressors Get Out of

17 “Tong chou di kai, she zuo hou dun [Having the Same Enemy, Pledging to Back

Up],” Renmin Yinyue, no. 3 (1965), 14–15. 18 Li Lanting et al., “Gaohao shengchan yuanYue kangMei—Shijingshan gangtie gongsi gongren, ganbu zuotan jilu yingpian ‘Meiguo qinlvëzhe cong Yuenan gunchuqu,’ ‘Zai shengchan gaochao Zhong’ [Produce Well and aid Vietnam, Resist America—Workers and Cadres at Shijingshan Iron Company Discuss Documentary Films ‘U.S. Iinvaders Get Out of Vietnam’ and ‘At the Peak of Production’],” Dianying Yishu, no. 3 (1965), 12. 19 “Yi shiji xingdong zhiyuan Yuenan xiongdi—ZhongYue youhao renmin gongshe ganbu, sheyuan zuotan yingpian ‘Meiguo qinlvëzhe cong Yuenan gunchuqu,’ ‘Zai shengchan gaochao Zhong’ [Assist Vietnamese Brothers by Actual Deeds—Cadres and Members of Sino-Vietnamese Friendship Commune Discuss Films ‘U.S. Invaders Get Out of Vietnam’ and ‘At the Peak of Production’],” ibid., 17. 20 He Hui, “Xin Zhongguo minzhong dui Meiguo de renzhi ji qi bianhua,” Lengzhan guojishi yanjiu 9,2 (2012): 50–52. 21 Culture Bureau of the CCP Municipal Committee of Shanghai, “Shanhai shi youguan yuanYue kangMei wenyi yanchu huodong tongji biao [Statistical Table of

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Vietnam” became one of the most popular plays. In this performance, American villains with Guy Fawkes masks bullied innocent Vietnamese peasants, but they eventually fought back with the help of Viet Cong and PLA soldiers. Towards the end of the show, the Vietnamese, joined by Chinese spectators, pointed their fingers at the Americans and shouted: “U.S. aggressors get out of Vietnam!” These street performances functioned as a social mechanism to reinforce anti-Americanism among the masses by enhancing their sense of unity and participation. As a result, Chinese people, including those who did not have to undergo incessant indoctrination at their workplaces, came to believe that they had high stakes in the war. One report in Shanghai, for instance, mentioned a housewife pledging to “stand at the thresholds [of our homes] and look out to the entire world, with a vegetable basket in one hand and a vegetable chopper in the other,” and a retail clerk insisting on doing the same, “with a weighing balance in one hand and a gun in the other.”22 China’s war propaganda turned anti-Americanism, an abstract notion for the masses, into a tangible feature of ordinary life in the mid-1960s.

War Scare The mobilization campaign emphasized the imminence of war. It constantly reminded Chinese people that the United States would soon launch aggression against China, and Beijing would dispatch volunteer troops to North Vietnam. The belligerent rhetoric of Chinese leaders reinforced this message. In September 1965, People’s Daily published an article under the name of Defence Minister Lin Biao, glorifying “people’s war.” Drafted by PLA Chief of Joint Staff Luo Ruiqing and leftist radical Kang Sheng, it proclaimed that China, if invaded, would wage a protracted guerrilla war against the United States in its territory as it did against the Japanese and the Nationalists before 1949. This article—a Chinese Mein Kampf in the words of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration—was translated into foreign languages and celebrated as one of the foundational documents for anti-imperialism in the Third World, on

Cultural Activities Related to Aid Vietnam, Resist America in Shanghai]” (25 May 1965), B172-5-999-10, SMA. 22 Propaganda Department of the CCP Municipal Committee of Shanghai, “Guanyu yuanYue kangMei xingshi jiaoyu de qingkuang he jinhou yijian de baogao (caogao).”

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par with Che Guevara’s Message to the Tricontinental .23 At a press conference the same month, Foreign Minister Chen Yi spelled a tirade against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He maintained that if the U.S. “imperialists” were to invade China, they were “welcome to come sooner, to come as early as tomorrow.” “Let Indian reactionaries, British imperialists and Japanese militarists come along with them! Let modern [Soviet] revisionists act in coordination with them from the north!” asserted the foreign minister. “We will still win in the end.”24 Diplomatic historians tend to discount Beijing’s resolve for war. They explain that contrary to their belligerent remarks, Chinese policymakers painstakingly tried to avoid direct confrontation with the United States. Beijing, for example, sent warning signals—at ambassadorial talks in Warsaw and through Pakistani, Indonesian, and British interlocutors— that it would send combat troops to Vietnam, as it did during the Korean War, only if the United States invaded North Vietnam or bombed Chinese territory.25 To further clarify its intention to avoid war, Beijing limited PLA activities in North Vietnam and made them detectible for U.S. intelligence, while refusing the North Vietnamese request for volunteer pilots, much to Hanoi’s disappointment.26 These direct and indirect signals reached U.S. policymakers and influenced their military decisions in Vietnam. By early 1966, Washington and Beijing had reached a tacit agreement to prevent the Vietnam War from further expansion. 23 Lin Biao, “Renmin zhanzheng shengli wansui: jinian Zhongguo renmin kangRi zhanzheng shengli er shi zhounian [Long Live the Victory of People’s War: Commemorating the Twentieth Anniversary of the Victory of Chinese People’s War against Japan],” People’s Daily (3 September 1965), 1–4. For the English edition, see Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War!: In Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of Victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japan (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1965). On the “Chinese Mein Kampf ,” see Congressional Record—Senate (8 February 966), 2563. 24 Chen Yi’s remark at a press conference on 29 September 1965, cited in VicePremier Chen Yi Answers Questions Put by Correspondents (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 23–24. 25 James G. Hershberg and Chen Jian, “Informing the Enemy: Sino-American ‘Signaling’ and the Vietnam War, 1965,” in Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World beyond Asia, ed. Priscilla Roberts (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), 193–258. 26 Zhai Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 137–139; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 221–229.

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Beijing’s warmongering was not a bluff, however. To make their deterrence credible, Chinese leaders showed clear and visible determination to fight. Even before the U.S. escalation in the mid-1960s, Beijing promised to Hanoi that should the United States invade North Vietnam, it would send soldiers. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CCP ordered army, air force, and naval units stationed in cities in the south and southwest, including Guangzhou and Kunming, to increase combat readiness. The PLA also dispatched four air divisions and one anti-aircraft division into border areas and put them on a high alert. Beijing, moreover, offered fighter jets to Hanoi; agreed to train North Vietnamese pilots; and began to build airfields for war assistance near the border. These measures preceded the massive military assistance after 1965, including anti-aircraft artillery troops, engineering troops, and other material support. Before the widening rift between Beijing and Hanoi precipitated a sharp decline in Chinese aid in 1969–70, Beijing sent hundreds of thousands of PLA soldiers—170 thousand in the peak year of 1967—to North Vietnam, fighting U.S. bombers and assisting Hanoi’s war efforts.27 As historian Zhai Qiang argued, a U.S. invasion of North Vietnam or bombing of Chinese territory would have created “a real danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world.”28 The most conspicuous evidence of Beijing’s acute sense of insecurity was the so-called Third Front Construction (sanxian jianshe). In 1964, Beijing embarked on this ambitious project to develop the hinterland and resettle defence industries from major coastal cities. Propelled by their overwhelming fear of U.S. attack, Chinese leaders, including Deng, Zhou, and Mao, expedited this project after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, pouring hundreds of billions of yuan into it. Historian Lorenz Lüthi wrote that contrary to Mao’s rhetorical emphasis on the Soviet threat for his political gains, the Third Front Construction “was essentially directed against the immediate and real perceived threat from the United States.” Internal discussions about the project were “sober, without the hyperbole and ideological distortions” that pervaded the discussions on

27 Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 131–135. 28 Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 156. See also Wang Dong, “Grand Strategy,

Power Politics, and China’s Policy toward the United States in the 1960s,” Diplomatic History 41, 2 (2017), 272–279.

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Illustration 10.2 “If the enemy dares to invade us, he will perish in the boundless ocean of people’s war.” Despite its belligerent tone, the “people’s war” rhetoric was intended to deter American aggression towards China.32

Soviet “revisionists.”29 As China scholar Barry Naughton explained, the Third Front Construction was an economic failure.30 Despite the enormous cost, both financial and human, most of the construction projects, including inland railroads, remained of limited use until the mid-1970s.31 The Third Front Construction, however, revealed Beijing’s seriousness in war preparation. Chinese leaders tried to avoid war by bracing themselves for it (Illustration 10.2). The mobilization campaign caused a war scare among Chinese people. Despite the unwavering support for the campaign in public, they feared in private a repetition of the Korean War, in which over 200 thousand Chinese soldiers died. Since the early 1950s, Beijing had been trying to eradicate a tendency among the masses to “respect America, fear America” (chongMei kongMei) through propaganda activities, but such a tendency survived among the generations that lived through the internecine war in 29 Lorenz Lüthi, “The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10 (2008), 49. 30 Barry Naughton, “The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese

Interior,” China Quarterly, no. 115 (September 1988), 351–386. 31 Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 140–146; Covell Meyskens, “Third Front Railroads and Industrial Modernity in Late Maoist China,” Twentieth-Century China 40,3 (2015): 245. 32 International Institute for Social History Amsterdam (IISH), Landsberger collection, https://chineseposters.net/posters/g2-61-2.

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Korea, marking a generational difference with the youth.33 In the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Chinese youth tended to insist on “moving early” in sending volunteer troops before the United States raised their force levels. Intrepid and foolhardy, one youngster in Tianjin claimed, “What’s the matter? We have fought U.S. imperialists in Korea and measured [their strength]. This [new war] counts for nothing.” “China is different from the past. China’s military power is stronger in many areas than during the Resist America, Aid Korea campaign,” asserted another. “The United States may be big, but we do not care.” The older generations, in contrast, remained cautious. They understood that if the Vietnam War spilled over into China, they had to fight the powerful U.S. forces without Soviet assistance, a crucial difference from the Korean War. “All modern wars involve all [kinds of] heavy bombs and also nuclear weapons, unlike in the past,” one old post office worker remarked, “I am a little fearful.” Poor living conditions after the Great Leap Forward also affected the morale of Chinese servicemen. One officer complained to the police, “My housing [situation] is already tense enough, but you make demobilized servicemen register again.” “I would not go if the war breaks out this time,” he averred.34 The attitudes of the Chinese masses towards the Vietnam War, therefore, were far more complex and nuanced than the public discourse indicated. Resist America, Aid Vietnam spread the war scare across the country, especially in large cities. Harald Munthe-Kaas, a Norwegian journalist and a frequent traveller to China, reported in early 1966 that street committee officials in Beijing were whispering rumours of war into residents, arguing that war with the United States was “fast approaching.” He also noted that numerous Beijing residents interpreted the resettlement of Beijing and Qinghua University scholars to the hinterland as part of war preparations, although it was a product of the Socialist Education

33 He, “Xin Zhongguo minzhong,” 52–54. 34 CCP Tianjin Municipality Nankai District Committee, ed., Nankai jiankuang

[Nankai digest] 20 (17 August 1964), 3-C-12636-5, Tianjin Municipal Archive (hereafter TMA); CCP Tianjin Municipal Post Office Committee, “Guanyu Meidi qinlüe Yuenan hou wo ju zhigong sixiang fanying qingkuang huibao [Situation Report on thought Reflections of Workers at Our Office after the U.S. Invasion of Vietnam]” (10 August 1964), 3-C-12636-16, TMA.

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Movement, also known as the Four Cleanups Movement, aimed at reeducating intellectuals.35 While participating in the mobilization campaign, many commoners “cherished peace as desirable” and “argued for peace negotiations,” according to one report in Guangzhou.36 The ostensible belligerence against U.S. “imperialists,” conspicuously exhibited by Chinese people during the Resist America, Aid Vietnam campaign, belied their fear of nuclear annihilation.

Championing the Oppressed National security was not the only catalyst for the mobilization campaign in China. As Zhai argued, the rivalry with Moscow for the leadership in the developing world also prompted Beijing to commit itself to the war against U.S. “imperialism” in Vietnam.37 This rivalry began in the late 1950s, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev embarked on a new policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States. In the eyes of the Chinese, this was a treacherous departure from the revolutionary anti-imperialism espoused by his predecessor Joseph Stalin. When Mao decided to shell Jinmen Island off the coast of China governed by Taiwan and launch the Great Leap Forward in late 1958, Khrushchev reprimanded the chairman for his recklessness. The personal relationship between them crumbled in the same year, when Moscow proposed building a joint submarine flotilla and long-wave radio stations in China, which Mao condemned as infringement of China’s national sovereignty. The Sino-Soviet split became apparent to the outside world in August 1960, when Moscow withdrew all Soviet technicians from China. Beginning in the early 1960s, Beijing redoubled its efforts to provide support for newly independent countries in the developing world. In doing so, it tried to kill two birds with one stone—helping these countries resist U.S. influence and enhancing the status of China vis-a-vis the Soviet

35 Telegram, Hong Kong to Dean Rusk (10 January 1966), “China Cables, Vol. V 10/65-1/66,” box 239, Country File, National Security Files, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library (hereafter LBJL). 36 “Sheng jishu jiguan tuanyuan, qingnian dui yuanYue kangMei he beizhan dongyuan de sixiang fanying [Thought Reflections of Communist Youth League Members and Non-member Youth in Provincial Institutions Toward Aid Vietnam, Resist America and Mobilization for War Preparation],” 225-5-11-058-070, Guangdong Provincial Archive. 37 Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 146–151.

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Union in the international liberation movement. Premier Zhou Enlai, for example, travelled to African countries on three grand tours between 1963 and 1965, followed by a steep increase in Chinese aid. Vilifying U.S. interventions in Cuba, the Congo, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, Beijing invited delegations from these and neighbouring countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to China to bolster solidarity. China was seeking to lead a global anti-U.S. struggle, and Vietnam was the main frontline of this endeavour. Zhou’s telegram to Hanoi illustrated this worldview in late 1964. Calling U.S. “imperialists” “the common enemy of people around the world,” the premier argued that anticolonial struggles of the Vietnamese and others “encourage and support one another.” “The victorious struggle of the Vietnamese people makes a significant contribution to the maintenance of world peace.”38 People’s Daily reiterated Zhou’s claim in an editorial, which argued that the Vietnamese struggle had “a significant international implication” because it “promoted” similar struggles worldwide.39 A victory against U.S. “imperialists” in any country was a victory for the entire world. Resist America, Aid Vietnam emphasized this international aspect of the Vietnam War. The propaganda guide written by the municipal Party committee in Nanchang, for example, placed Vietnam in a larger context of anticolonial movements in the Third World. The war in Vietnam, it claimed, comprised “an important component” of “the joint struggle of all people around the world to oppose U.S. imperialists and preserve world peace.” The struggle of the Vietnamese people— and the support of Chinese people for it—had “a great international importance.”40 Resist America, Aid Vietnam, therefore, was not merely intended for war preparation; it was also aimed at instilling the masses

38 “Zhongguo renmin jue bu hui zuoshi xiongdi lingbang zao dao qinfan jue bu neng tingren Meidi zai Yinduzhina huzuo feiwei [Chinese People Absolutely Cannot Sit Idly and Watch the Neighbouring Brother Undergo Invasion, Absolutely Cannot Allow U.S. Imperialists to Run Amok in Indochina],” People’s Daily (25 November 1964), 1. 39 Editorial, “Xiang zhan zai fanMei douzheng di yi xian de Yuenan renmin zhijing [Hail to the Vietnamese People Standing at the Forefront of the Anti-U.S. Struggle],” People’s Daily (25 November 1964), 1. 40 Propaganda Bureau of the CCP Nanchang Municipal Committee, ed., “Tigao jingti, jiaqiang guofang, quanli zhiyuan Yuenan renmin de kangMei douzheng,” April 1965, author’s personal collection.

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Illustration 10.3 “The struggle of all the people in the world against American imperialism will be victorious!” This poster captures the internationalist spirit that Resist America, Aid Vietnam aimed to install in the minds of the Chinese people.41

with an internationalist mindset—that their protest against U.S. “imperialists” at home contributed to a global struggle for world revolution and peace (Illustration 10.3). In mid-1965, China’s Vietnam propaganda made a radical turn. It began to denounce the Soviet Union for “collusion” with and “capitulationism” towards the United States. Loath to risk nuclear war in Southeast Asia, Moscow supported Washington’s call for peace negotiations in Paris, while proposing “joint actions” among socialist countries in assisting Hanoi. Mao and other CCP leaders saw these initiatives as evidence of Soviet “revisionism,” as well as Moscow’s desire to discredit Beijing’s leadership in the developing world. Chinese officials tried to expose this “big conspiracy” at international venues, including the World Disarmament Conference, the World Peace Council, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation, although their accusations were often backed only by Albania. The Soviet Union, they asserted, not only opposed China, but also “sold out the fundamental interest of the Vietnamese people.”42 Chinese people became increasingly convinced

41 IISH, Landsberger collection, https://chineseposters.net/posters/e15-861-862. 42 “Wo chuxi shijie helihui daibiaotuan tichu liang ge wenjian cao’an bing fabiao guanyu

toupiao zong shengming qianze Sulian lingdao jituan lianMei fangHua chumai Yuenan renmin [Our Delegates to the World Peace Council Submit Two Draft Documents and Make a General Statement Regarding Voting, Censuring the Soviet Leadership for Allying

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that Soviet “revisionists” no longer championed the oppressed in the world—China did. To augment its global leadership, Beijing used foreigners for propaganda purposes. Following the proverb “make the foreign serve China,” Beijing recruited foreigners, both those residing in China and those invited to China, as spokespersons, encouraging them to extol Chinese socialism and eulogize Chinese support for developing countries, including Vietnam.43 This included numerous Americans. Journalist Anna Louise Strong, for example, stayed in China after 1949 and published “Letters from China” between 1962 and 1966, in which several American leftists residing in China, including Talitha Gerlach, Joan Hinton, and Sidney Rittenberg, offered positive depictions of Chinese socialism. Journalist Edgar Snow, famous for his account of the Communist movement in the late 1930s, revisited China in 1960 and 1964, interviewing Mao and Zhou. The writings of these Americans had little impact on the general U.S. public, but they did inform the generation of radicals in the Vietnam era. For instance, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of young Asia specialists dissatisfied with the silence of the mainstream scholarly community on the Vietnam War, criticized U.S. “imperialism” and lauded the achievements of Chinese socialism.44 These “pro-China” voices enabled Beijing to portray the American people as allies in the global struggle against U.S. “imperialism.” While denouncing U.S. leaders as greedy capitalists anxious to exploit people in other countries, Chinese propaganda depicted ordinary Americans as subjects of oppression by the reactionary government and heroic revolutionaries engaging in liberation struggle, a struggle that Beijing hoped would one day precipitate a revolution in the United States. The antiwar movement reinforced this line of thinking. In the mid-1960s, Chinese media began publishing numerous articles about the surge of street demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the United States. Situating the protest movement within the international struggle against U.S. with the United States against China and Selling Out the Vietnamese People],” People’s Daily (18 June 1966), 5. 43 Anne-Marie Brady, Make the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 44 Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

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“imperialism,” a People’s Daily commentary in February 1966 acclaimed the protesters for “piercing the long years of darkness” and “walking toward a new awakening” in “the bastion of capitalism.” “What the great American masses stood up against is U.S. imperialism – imperialism of their own country. This kind of phenomenon is unprecedented in U.S. history. This is a deep change with a revolutionary character.”45 Beijing found African Americans the most effective allies against U.S. “imperialism.” It invited several high-profile black activists to China in the 1950s and 1960s, most notably between 1959 and 1963 W.E.B. Du Bois, showing them a society ostensibly free from racism and friendly towards people of African descent.46 Mao doubled down on this strategy in 1963, when he made a famous statement of support for the civil rights movement in the United States.47 Maoism arguably became one of the ballasts for militant Black Power in the 1960s. While moderate activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., espoused non-violence, many of those who advocated armed struggle against white supremacists embraced Maoism as a useful tool to unite with people of colour in Asia and Africa.48 For example, members of the Black Panther Party waved Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, commonly known as Mao’s Little Red Book— to show allegiance to the chairman and his anti-imperialist cause. This “spiritual atom bomb of infinite power,” in Lin Biao’s words, had global fallouts in more than a hundred countries from Europe to Africa, Asia to 45 Commentary, “Meiguo renmin qilai fandui benguo diguo zhuyi [American People Stood Up to Oppose the Imperialism of Their Own Country],” People’s Daily (7 February 1966), 4. 46 Robeson Taj Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Keisha A. Brown, “Blackness in Exile: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Role in the Formation of Representations of Blackness as Conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” Phylon 53, 2 (2016): 20–33. 47 Mao Zedong, “Statement Calling Upon the People of the World to Unite to Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism and Support the American Negroes in Their Struggle Against Racial Discrimination, August 8, 1963,” Peking Review (16 August 1963), 6–7. 48 Matthew D. Johnson, “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with AfricanAmerican Transnational Networks, 1949–1979,” Past & Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 233–257; Bill V. Mullen, “By the Book: Quotations from Chairman Mao and the making of Afro-Asian radicalism, 1966–1975,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 245–265; Hongshan Li, “Building a Black Bridge: China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 20,3 (2018): 114–152.

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Latin America, empowering local revolutionaries, socialists, and nationalists to pursue their sundry political agendas.49 Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panthers, also travelled to China on a fact-finding mission in 1970 and marvelled at the achievements of Chinese socialism.50 Mao used Robert F. Williams, one of the most militant Black Power activists, to project the image of a model American. Williams, living in exile in Beijing in the late 1960s, agreed with the chairman on the necessity of violence in liberation struggles in the United States and elsewhere. At the National Day celebration at Tiananmen Square on 1 October 1966, he gave a speech as a representative of “black freedom fighters in the United States undergoing cruel oppression and persecution.” Maoism, argued Williams, “is reforming the entire world.” He asserted that thanks to the support of China, “a reliable basis for the struggle of people around the world,” U.S. “control of the world” was “rapidly falling apart.”51 The audience probably had little doubt that China was now the leader of the oppressed in the world.

Defending Revolution at Home Resist America, Aid Vietnam lighted the fuse of the Cultural Revolution. As historian Chen Jian argued, the escalation of the Vietnam War gave Mao “much-needed stimulus to mobilize the Chinese population” for his last attempt at revolutionizing the entire society and eliminating his rivals who allegedly espoused capitalism and revisionism in collusion with foreign enemies.52 Prior to the onset of the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, the CCP leadership started to portray the war in Vietnam and anti-American culture at home as necessary means to defend the Chinese revolution from U.S. “imperialists,” Soviet “revisionists,” and their collaborators in China. “Because China holds aloft the banner of

49 Lin Biao, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1966). For the global circulation and reception of the book, see Mao’s Little Red Book, ed. Cook. 50 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 51 Luobote Weilian, “Weida de Mao Zedong sixiang zheng gaizao zhe quan shijie [Great Mao Zedong Thought Is Reforming the World],” People’s Daily (2 October 1966), 6. 52 Chen, Mao’s China, 212. See also Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 151–152.

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revolution and extends unflinching support to revolutionary struggles everywhere,” a Peking Review article argued in February 1966, “she is looked upon by U.S. imperialists as the major obstacle to its schemes for world conquest and therefore as its chief enemy.” The article added, however, that the U.S. “paper tiger” would balk if China upheld its revolutionary spirit.53 The Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution were inextricably intertwined. In a meeting with a Japanese Diet delegation in September 1966, Foreign Minister Chen Yi depicted the Cultural Revolution as a “counterattack” to the U.S. threat in Vietnam, an “inevitable thing for us.” While “not too pessimistic” about the future of Sino-American relations, he claimed that the Cultural Revolution was “part of preparation for war.” “It is so that no back-stabbers emerge [in China] when America comes to attack China,” the foreign minister explained. “The direct effect of the Cultural Revolution is to eliminate forces which would cooperate with the United States if it came to attack China.”54 This perception was shared with PLA soldiers in Vietnam. In a letter addressed to these soldiers in early 1968, the PLA General Staff eulogized them for not only “ensuring the security of the great mother country,” but also “defending the Cultural Revolution.” The letter encouraged PLA soldiers to “turn every comrade into a good soldier with infinite love, loyalty, belief, and worship for Chairman Mao” and “turn every fighting unit, battle field, and construction site into a bright red university of Mao Zedong Thought.”55 Chinese leaders viewed Resist America, Aid Vietnam as an essential component of the Cultural Revolution. Being anti-American and being revolutionary were two sides of the same coin. Red Guards did not fail to understand this logic. For example, a mass protest meeting against U.S. “imperialists” in Beijing in December 1966, attended by a hundred thousand Red Guards and other “revolutionary crowds,” issued a statement that the Cultural Revolution was “the most fundamental war preparation.” “No matter what difficulties [they face],”

53 “The Shifts in U.S. Global Strategy,” Peking Review (11 February 1966), 16. 54 Telegram, Tokyo to Dean Rusk (17 September 1966), “CHICOM-US Relations,”

box 1, Alfred Jenkins, National Security Files, LBJL. 55 PLA General Staff, General Politics Department, and General Logistics Department, “Weiwen xin [Letter of Consolation],” dated on the eve of the Chinese New Year in 1968, author’s personal collection.

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“the Chinese people holding high the bright red banner of MarxismLeninism-Maoism resolutely unite with their Vietnamese brothers and fight together until driving out all the U.S. invaders from the Vietnamese soil.”56 Red Guard representative Shen Aiqun asserted at this meeting that Red Guards had no fear of U.S. “imperialists,” Soviet “revisionists,” or “reactionaries” in China. “Once the Vietnamese people need [us], once Chairman Mao orders [us],” pledged Chen, “we, the Red Guards, will fight shoulder to shoulder with the Vietnamese people right away.”57 Similar gatherings of Red Guards took place in other major cities throughout China, where they expressed similar messages. With a sense of unity with the Vietnamese people, Red Guards believed that they were fighting the war in Vietnam from afar. A Red Guard in Beijing wrote in mid-1967: “Hearing the sound of artillery and the news of victory from South Vietnam, our blood boils with excitement. The struggle of the Vietnamese people is the struggle of the Chinese people, and the victory of the Vietnamese people is the victory of the Chinese people. The hot blood of the Chinese and Vietnamese pulses in the same vessel.”58 Red Guards, therefore, were revolutionary soldiers fighting enemies abroad—at least in their imagination (Illustration 10.4). Nobody embodied this view better than Zhao Jianjun, a high school student Red Guard in Beijing. On 31 October 1966, Zhao and his Red Guard friends, ten high school students in total, secretly hopped on a long-distance train to Nanning. From there, they tried to walk across the Vietnamese border and join the PLA troops in Vietnam. The Chinese border patrol found the students and sent them back to Nanning, but

56 “Mao Zedong sixiang wuzhuang de Zhongguo renmin shi Yuenan renmin de jianqiang houdun, Zhongguo wuchan jieji wenhua da geming shi yuanYue kangMei zui genben de zhanbei [Chinese People Armed with Mao Zedong Thought Are a Stronger Supporter for the Vietnamese People. China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Is the Most Fundamental War Preparation for Aid Vietnam, Resist America],” People’s Daily (19 December 1966), 1–2. 57 Shen Aiqun, “Zhi yao Yuenan renmin xuya, zhi yao Mao zhuxi yi sheng ling xia women hongweibing jiu liji yu Yuenan renmin bingjian zhandou [Once the Vietnamese People Need Us, Once Chairman Mao Orders Us, We, the Red Guards, Will Fight Shoulder to Shoulder with the Vietnamese People Right Away],” People’s Daily (19 December 1966), 5. 58 Beijing School of Mining and Technology Commune Dongfang Hong, “Hongweibing shi zuo Yuenan renmin de jianqiang houdun [Red Guards Pledges to Become a Stronger Supporter for the Vietnamese People],” People’s Daily (17 May 1967), 5.

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Illustration 10.4 “Red Guards kill American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, the world strikes down American imperialism and Soviet revisionism.” Red Guards were fighting an imaginary battle with the American “imperialists” and the Soviet “revisionists” abroad, while pummelling their alleged sympathizers at home.59

59 IISG, Landsberger collection, https://chineseposters.net/posters/pc-1968-009.

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Zhao and three other Red Guards escaped and crossed the border successfully. When they arrived at the Chinese embassy in Hanoi on November 9, Ambassador Zhu Qiwen could not hide his astonishment. He sent an urgent telegram to Beijing, asking what to do with the high school Red Guards. Perhaps concerned about the political ramification of forceful repatriation of these students, Zhou Enlai decided to allow them to join the PLA forces in Vietnam. Two months later, on 19 January 1967, Zhao, now in an anti-aircraft artillery regiment, was fatally wounded by a U.S. F-105 aircraft.60 Zhao Jianjun became the first Red Guard to die in Vietnam—and the last. The news of Zhao’s death spread quickly among Red Guards, and many of them expressed desire to follow Zhao’s path. Between late 1966 and early 1967, more than two hundred students and workers from twenty provinces and municipalities swarmed the small city of Pingxiang in Guangxi Province, demanding the municipal Party committee to issue them passports to go to Vietnam. Many also wrote letters, sent telegrams, and made calls to the Vietnamese Embassy in Beijing, requesting visas to participate in the war. Frustrated with the diplomatic irritants, the CCP leadership issued a directive in March 1967, ordering local revolutionary committees across the country to discourage the masses from these activities. While praising the “revolutionary spirit” and “internationalist spirit” of Chinese youth, it proclaimed that “any disorganized, disorderly behaviors” were “wrong,” and students and workers should “go back to their original workplaces in their hometowns to make a revolution.” Only by doing so could they provide “active support” for North Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution, concluded the directive.61 Zhao Jianjun, and his student and worker admirers, by no means represented the majority of Chinese people. However, the revolutionary anti-Americanism of Chinese youth, fomented by Resist America, Aid Vietnam, exceeded the level 60 Zhao Jianjun was recently featured as a war hero by Chinese TV programs. See Phoenix Television, “Leng nuan rensheng [C’est La Vie]” (12 November 2011); Beijing Media Network Science Channel, “Feichang jiyi [Extraordinary Memories]” (6 August 2013). 61 “Zhonggong zhongyang, Guowuyuan, Zhongyang junwei guanyu quanzu hong-

weibing he geming qunzhong zifa fuYue yuanYue kangMei de tongzhi [Notice from the CCP Leadership, the State Council, and the Central Military Committee on restraining Red Guards and Revolutionary Workers from Voluntarily Going to Vietnam to aid Vietnam, Resist America]” (3 March 1967), Chinese Cultural Revolution Database http://ccradb.appspot.com/post/171.

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anticipated by the Chinese government during the peak years of the Cultural Revolution.

Conclusion The anti-American culture in China began to wither in the late 1960s. Having lost control of the Red Guard movement, which not only paralyzed government functions, but also instigated violent uprisings against local authorities across the nation, Mao decided to use PLA forces to suppress the insurgents and restore order in the summer of 1968. Half a year later, the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet border clash in March 1969 replaced U.S. “imperialists” with Soviet “revisionists” as China’s most dangerous enemy. Two famous reports solicited by Mao and written by four prominent PLA marshals claimed that China could now exploit the rivalry between the two superpowers and pit one enemy against the other. This was a case for Sino-American rapprochement.62 Meanwhile, SinoVietnamese relations plummeted in 1969 due to what Chen Jian called the “ethnocentrism” and “universalism” practiced by Beijing, manifest in its disapproval of Hanoi’s willingness for peace negotiations.63 Sporadic mass gatherings against U.S. “imperialists” continued a few more years, condemning, in particular, the invasions of Cambodia in 1970 and the two rounds of Operation Linebacker in 1972, but Resist America, Aid Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution had clearly lost momentum by the end of the 1960s. Washington and Beijing celebrated Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s. Following Richard Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972, they stated in the Shanghai Communiqué that despite “essential differences” in “social systems and foreign policies,” China and the United States would apply “the principles of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity,” “nonaggression,” “noninterference in the internal affairs,” “equality and mutual benefit,” and “peaceful

62 Report by Four Chinese Marshals, “A Preliminary Evaluation of the War Situation,” excerpt (11 July 1969), and Report by Four Chinese Marshals, “Our Views about the Current Situation” (excerpt) (17 September 1969), Cold War International History Project Bulletin11 (1998), 166–168, 170. 63 Chen, Mao’s China, 237.

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coexistence” to the bilateral relationship.64 By the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, Beijing had stopped vilifying the United States as “imperialists.” Resist America, Aid Vietnam overshadowed Sino-American rapprochement, however. To justify Mao’s new foreign policy, the CCP leadership launched a nationwide propaganda campaign, depicting the Nixon trip as a late victory of the chairman’s revolutionary foreign policy. “The U.S. imperialists did not recognize us in the past. Now, Nixon came to us, had meetings with us, and announced the Communiqué,” argued one old factory worker in the tourist city of Guilin. “This by itself shows the failure and bankruptcy of U.S. imperialists’ policy toward China.”65 Such rhetoric, a residue of the mutual hostility in the previous two decades, would fade away, if not disappear, in the next several years, as the crux of China’s discourse on the United States shifted from “imperialism” to “modernization.”66 In a broad sense, Vietnam War protest in China was a political movement to make the country a socialist leader of the world. To be sure, security was paramount in China’s reaction to the Vietnam War. Beijing tried to deter U.S. invasion by preparing for it, while both leaders and commoners seriously feared nuclear war. Mao, however, turned the security risk into a political opportunity. By championing the struggles of Vietnam and other decolonizing countries around the world, he catapulted China into the stardom of the Third World, as a liberator of the oppressed. The Red Guards eagerly promoted this internationalism during the Cultural Revolution, as they branded themselves as heroic soldiers defending revolution in both Vietnam and China. The culture of anti-Americanism, based on the genuine and artificial hostility towards the United States, enabled Chinese people to connect revolution at home and revolution abroad as a unified battle against U.S. “imperialists.” A 64 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1972 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 376–379. 65 Political Working Group Propaganda Team of the CCP Municipal Committee of Guilin, “Guilin shi xuexi ZhongMei lianhe gongbao de qingkuang [Situations in Studying the Sino-American Joint Communique in Guilin]” (17 March 1972), 003-002-0199-14, Guilin Municipal Archive. 66 On this shift, see Kuisong Yang and Yafeng Xia, “Vacillating between Revolution and Détente: Mao’s Changing Psyche and Policy toward the United States, 1969– 1976,” Diplomatic History 34,2 (2010): 395–423; and Kazushi Minami, “Re-examining the end of Mao’s revolution: China’s changing statecraft and Sino-American relations, 1973–1978,” Cold War History 16,4 (2016): 1–17.

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victory in Vietnamese revolution would be a victory in Chinese revolution, and vice versa. China should strive for both. This amplifying mechanism between the local and the global accelerated the radicalization of China’s domestic politics and foreign policy in the late 1960s, before the new realities inside and outside the country put an abrupt brake on it.

Bibliography Brady, Anne-Marie, Make the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Brazinsky, Gregg, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Brown, Keisha A., “Blackness in Exile: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Role in the Formation of Representations of Blackness as Conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” Phylon 53,2 (2016): 20–33. Burr, William and Jeffrey T. Richelson, “Whether to ‘Strangle the Baby in the Cradle’: The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960–1964,” International Security 25,3 (2000): 54–99. Dong, Wang, “Grand Strategy, Power Politics, and China’s Policy toward the United States in the 1960s,” Diplomatic History 41, 2 (2017). Frazier, Robeson Taj, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Friedman, Jeremy, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Hershberg, James G. and Chen Jian, “Informing the Enemy: Sino-American ‘Signaling’ and the Vietnam War, 1965,” in Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World beyond Asia, ed. Priscilla Roberts (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), 193–258. Hui, He, “Xin Zhongguo minzhong dui Meiguo de renzhi ji qi bianhua,” Lengzhan guojishi yanjiu 9,2 (2012). Hunt, Michael H., The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Jian, Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Johnson, Matthew D., “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949–1979,” Past & Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 233–257. Kochavi, Noam, A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy during the Kennedy Years (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2002).

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Lanza, Fabio, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Li, Hongshan, “Building a Black Bridge: China’s Interaction with AfricanAmerican Activists during the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 20,3 (2018): 114–152. Lüthi, Lorenz, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Lüthi, Lorenz, “The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10 (2008): 26–51. Meyskens, Covell, “Third Front Railroads and Industrial Modernity in Late Maoist China,” Twentieth-Century China 40,3 (2015): 238–260. Minami, Kazushi, “Re-examining the end of Mao’s Revolution: China’s Changing Statecraft and Sino-American Relations, 1973–1978,” Cold War History 16,4 (2016): 1–17. Mullen, Bill V., “By the book: Quotations from Chairman Mao and the making of Afro-Asian radicalism, 1966–1975,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 245–265. Naughton, Barry, “The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior,” China Quarterly 115 (September 1988): 351–386. Qiang, Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Radchenko, Sergey, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Yang, Kuisong, and Yafeng Xia, “Vacillating between Revolution and Détente: Mao’s Changing Psyche and Policy toward the United States, 1969–1976,” Diplomatic History 34,2 (2010): 395–423.

CHAPTER 11

The Vietnam War, Protest, and Democratization in South Korea Tae Yang Kwak

Introduction This chapter examines how Park Chung Hee effectively undermined popular protest and civil opposition as well as parliamentary protest throughout his presidential tenure (1961–1979). Throughout the twentieth century, Koreans have participated in large-scale mass protests against authoritarians, colonial rulers, dictators, and corrupt, presidents. However, at a time when civil protests peaked in much of the world during the Vietnam War era, mass protests were conspicuously absent in South Korea. Journalist Mark Kurlansky described the breadth and impact of the global “Protests of 1968” driven by demands for political, social, and economic justice.1 While in much of the rest of the world the Vietnam War provoked or reinforced the Protests of 1968, in South Korea 1 Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2004).

T. Y. Kwak (B) Ramapo College of New Jersey, Mahwah, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_11

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the exceptional circumstances of its own participation in that war largely precluded participation in the global movement and blunted its cultural impact. American Cold War (1947–1989) strategy in Northeast Asia was to minimize antagonism between its client states like South Korea and the so-called Communist Bloc, including North Korea, and to subordinate those client states to a Japan-centered industrial economy. Park was able to “wag the dog” by levering the patron state by exploiting the global hegemon’s desperation for third country support in an internationally unpopular war. Park not only extract billions of dollars in exchange for hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops but used those resources to develop an autonomous military-industrial capacity that contradicted America’s Cold War strategy by provoking North Korea and competing with Japan’s economy. Through industrialization, Park did facilitate economic prosperity which did win him much popularity, but as they rose out of poverty, Koreans increasingly challenged Park’s growing authoritarianism, resulting in an escalating positive feedback loop of civil opposition and official suppression. Park justified his 1961 “May 16 Revolution” by claiming to be rescuing Korea from its history of vulnerability and stagnation.2 The nucleus of Park’s new beginning and the focus of his revolution was economic development, but particularly development as part of a military strategy to overwhelm the North into surrender or submission.3 The formula for a “strong army, rich nation” (fukoku ky¯ ohei), conceived of over a century ago in Meiji Japan, remained remarkably unchallenged when it was embraced by Korean modernizers throughout Korea’s history from the late Chos˘on Enlightenment via colonization, liberation, and division to civil war and its aftermath. Park’s goal was to maintain American commitment while creating a South Korean military-industrial capacity overwhelming enough to compel North Korean surrender. Park’s nephew-in-law and coup mastermind, Kim Jong Pil, founded the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) with US CIA support in 1961,

2 Park Chung Hee [hereafter PCH], Country, the Revolution, and I (Seoul: Dong-A Publishing Co., 1962), 168; PCH, Kukka wa hy˘ongmy˘ong kwa na (Seoul: Hyangmun sa, 1963), 249–250. 3 Ch˘ ong-ny˘om Kim, Policymaking on the Front Lines: Memoirs of a Korean Practitioner, 1945–1979 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1994), 116; Kim, Han’guk ky˘ongje ch˘ongch’aek 30-y˘onsa [Thirty Years of Korean Economic Policy] (Seoul: Sahoe sasang sa, 1991), 426.

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shortly after the coup as an explicit instrument of social control, censorship, and propaganda to support the junta. While civil protests against Park’s government never disappeared, this genuine gain in popularity was mostly fueled by the prosperity that was the byproduct of Park’s ambitious military-industrial development funded and facilitated by billions of dollars of de facto payments, technology transfers, and political support provided in exchange for the deployment of 312,853 South Korean troops for the Vietnam War (1964–1973). Notably, this was a slightly larger proportion of the South Korean population than the proportion of the US population that fought in the war. Throughout the 1960s–1970s, Park and American leaders became partners in undermining democracy and protest in South Korea to prosecute the Vietnam War. Mass popular protest in Korea first manifested in the 1919 March First Movement (3·1 undong ) against Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). Since liberation and division, protest in North Korea has been effectively eliminated due to total state control, but in South Korea where authoritarian control was never effectively total, there have been many mass protests, notably the 1949 Cheju Uprising (Cheju 4·3 sag˘on), the 1960 April 19 Student Revolution (4·19 hy˘ongm˘ong ), the 1980 Kwangju Democratization Movement (5·18 Kwangju minjuhwa undong ), the 1987 June Democratic Movement (6-w˘ol minju hangjaeng ), and most recently, the 2016/17 Candlelight Revolution (Ch’otbul hy˘ongm˘ong ). In South Korea, the success of the Candlelight Revolution has inspired renewed interest in examining the historical and cultural impact of the Protests of 1968 in the Korean context, and whether the protests, or lack thereof, played any role in the democratization of South Korea.4 One of the central inquiries is that, although the Protests of 1968 were global, spanning the Western world, the Eastern bloc, Third World countries, and even across the Pacific Ocean including Japan, why did it not inspire Koreans, including workers and students, despite a long tradition of student and labor protests throughout the twentieth century. Most Korean scholars argue that overwhelming anti-communism effectively insulated or precluded the participation of South Koreans. The “division system” describes the two Koreas as rival states that depend on each other, specifically the opposition to each other, as the basis

4 Y˘oksa pip’y˘ong [Critical Review of History] 123 (2018) devoted five articles to the subject as its summer special edition.

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of political legitimacy and cultural identity.5 However, this argument is insufficient because there were anti-authoritarian mass protests in anticommunist South Korea both before and after Park’s rule. There is something exceptional about the Park era. Korean scholar Kim Nuri argues that the dispatch of South Korean troops to Vietnam fundamentally undermined the possibility of “’68 Revolution” along the themes of the Protests of 1968, because massive participation and anti-communist propaganda precluded the possibility of a strong anti-war movement and undermined public “’68 discourse.” Consequently, Kim asserts that “undemocratic” features prevailed in South Korea even after institutional democratization was achieved, and this is inspiring further interest in the Protests of 1968.6 While participation was certainly a factor, this view is problematic since the United States had a strong anti-war movement precisely because of its massive role in the war, and one could argue that “racist” features still prevail in America despite the legal anti-discrimination in response to the US Civil Rights movement (1954–1968) that was an integral part of the Protests of 1968. Popular understanding of the South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War was and is complex. For most of the 1960s, Park had been bolstered by the positive image of “heroic” Koreans fighting alongside Americans. But after the 1968 Tet Offensive demoralized Americans, accounts of civilian massacres perpetrated by American and South Korean troops in South Vietnam started circulating in the international press. In 1970, Sen. Stuart Symington (D-MO) chaired the Senate Arms Services and Foreign Relations Committee hearings exposing the secret quid pro quo agreements negotiated between the Johnson administration (1963– 1968) and Park to secure South Korean troops for the Vietnam War. Before the “Symington Subcommittee Hearings” exposed the mercenary nature of South Korean participation in the war, many South Koreans had accepted the propaganda that the troop deployments beginning in

5 Nak-chung Paik, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea (University of California Press, 2011). 6 Kim Nuri, “Hanguk yeooeju˘ ui: Wae Hanguk en˘un 68 hy˘ongmy˘ong i o˘ pss˘onn˘unga? [Korean exceptionalism: Why Was There No’68 Revolution in South Korea?],” T’ong’il inmunhak 76 (2018): 169–172.

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1964 represented a genuinely equal partnership between South Koreans and Americans.7 There is a persistent contradiction in Park’s rule that was usually buried in a national cognitive dissonance but sometimes emerged into troublesome consciousness. Park satisfied national aspiration by glorifying strength and independence while simultaneously evoking South Korea’s vulnerability and dependence. Park had to manipulate two contradictory positions, that South Korea was a strong enough international ally that could meaningfully support the US in a remote third country without jeopardizing its own defense, while being too weak to survive without bolstered US security commitments and billions of additional dollars in aid. The former he needed to counter political opposition to ROK troop dispatches to Vietnam, and the latter to secure American concessions. But Park was not always successful, and ultimately Richard M. Nixon withdrew the US 7th Infantry Division from South Korea because he believed that South Korea had grown sufficiently stronger than North Korea. Opposition candidates such as Kim Dae Jung convinced many voters that Park was jeopardizing South Korean security with his adventurism in Vietnam, particularly since Park consistently used the trope of the “Northern Wind” (pukp’ung, manufactured or exaggerated North Korean threat) as justification for his authoritarianism. Beyond the direct impact of the Vietnam War, the anti-communist environment of the South Korean intellectual community in the 1960s is key to understanding the dearth of the’68 discourse in South Korea. Park’s government directly repressed intellectuals’ influence as social critics and suppressed their activism. South Korea’s political climate curtailed the discussion of new leftism in protests. Although it was limited, contemporary South Korean intellectuals were aware of the global events of the Protests of 1968. Hwang By˘ongju roughly divides intellectual responses to the Protests of 1968 into four categories: (1) most scholars wrote simple descriptions of the background and process, while distancing themselves from the Protests. (2) Some criticized the violent elements and youth counterculture in the protests, while (3) some argued the inapplicability of the ideas in the protest to Korean reality. (4) However, a 7 US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on United States Agreements and Commitments Abroad, United States Agreements and Commitments Abroad: Hearings [hereafter “Symington Subcommittee Hearings”], 91st Cong., 2nd sess., vol. 2, 6 (24–26 February 1970), Committee Print.

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few favored some relevant ideas for Koreans. Hwang emphasizes that the obsession with modernization theories in South Korean academia was also a factor in minimizing contemporary academic interest in the Protests of 1968. He argues that Korean intellectuals’ commitment to “progress” could not have fully embraced the anti-modern thesis that promoted the recovery of humanity from modernization and progress, that South Korea’s vision of modernization became an integral part of nationalism that had forsaken the democratic values and ideas in the 1968 Protests.8 Rhee Young-hee was the exceptional intellectual critic of authoritarianism in the 1960s–1970s. He was particularly influential among the progressive “386 Generation,” a term coined in the early 1990s to describe the 30-somethings instrumental in the democratization of South Korea, who had been student activists in the ’80s, and born in the’60s.9 After being jailed for his writing in 1964, he wrote an indepth analysis of the Vietnam War for the Chos˘on ilbo [Chos˘on Daily newspaper] from 1965 to 1967.10 Characterizing the Vietnam War as a struggle for national liberation, Rhee explicitly criticized American Imperialism. To avoid government censorship, Rhee provided his audience information about anti-war movements, as well as critiques of American military involvement in Vietnam by publishing translations of American and French newspaper articles in South Korean newspapers.11 However, the Park’s anti-communist military government did not allow a public sphere where people could discuss the worldwide ‘68 Protests. Rhee’s 1975 Ch˘onhwan sidae ui ˘ nolli [Logic for an Era of Transition] was the first Korean book to provide a critical and systematic examination of the propaganda of protecting the “Free World” and containment of insidious communism as justification for the Vietnam War in particular and the 8 Hwang By˘ ongju, “1960 y˘ondae chisigin u˘ i 68 undong tamron [The Korean Intellectuals’ Discourse on the Protest of 1968 in the 1960s],” Y˘oksa pip’y˘ong 123 (2018): 39–40. 9 H˘ o Chunhaeng, “Ri Y˘ongh˘ui u˘ i Chungguk y˘ongu-Hanguk pip’y˘ong: 1970 y˘ondae Hanguk es˘ou˘ i munhwa taehy˘ongmy˘ong non˘ui l˘ul chungsim u˘ ro [Rhee Younghee’s Study on China-Criticism in Korea: Centering on the Discussion of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970],” Y˘ongju o˘ mun 41 (2019): 475–476. 10 Paek S˘ unguk, “Haes˘ok u˘ i ssaum u˘ i konggan u˘ ros˘o Yi Y˘ongh˘ui u˘ i Pet˘unam ch˘onjaeng: Chos˘on ilbo hwaltong sigi (1965–1967) l˘ul chungsim u˘ iro [The Vietnam War as a Space for Rhee Young-hee’s ‘Interpretation Battle’ in His Days at the Chos˘on Daily (1965–1967)],” Y˘oksa munje y˘ongu (2014): 73–92. 11 Paek S˘ unguk, “Haes˘ok,” 57–58.

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Cold War in general.12 Right-wing Koreans and South Korean authorities attacked Rhee as a Maoist because of his positive evaluation of the Cultural Revolution for which he was jailed in 1977. Protesting authoritarian governments is fundamentally an unsanctioned challenge of authority when official channels of expression are ineffective or nonexistent. A society’s position on the spectrum of representative democracy to authoritarian dictatorship can be measured by the quality of protest. In case of representative governments, civil opposition, directed against the government, may indicate a relatively minor breakdown of authority, but if they are allowed at all to exist in dictatorships, then the level of authoritarian control is weak or weakening. Parliamentary opposition, in which opposition political party officials employ extra-parliamentary methods, such as boycotts and even melees, against an abusive ruling party indicates government dysfunction, but again is at least an indication of the possibility of opposition. Executive opposition in which members of a state leader’s official inner circle conspire to depose, or even assassinate, and replace the leader, indicate a categorical breakdown of unilateral government. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Park Chung Hee’s government (1961–1979) experienced all of these levels of opposition, from civil protests challenging his legitimacy throughout the 1960s following his 1961 military coup (5·16 kunsa ch˘ongby˘on), to the parliamentary protests in the mid to late 1960s particularly against the ROK-Japanese Normalization Treaty and the deployment of ROK combat troops to Vietnam, to the relative stifling of all protest following the 1972 Yusin Constitution, which formalized his dictatorship, to his 1979 assassination by the Director of his own Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). In her recent book on Cultures of Yusin, Youngju Ryu argues that during the Fourth Republic era (1972–1979) of formal dictatorship under the Yusin Constitution, radical progressives failed to directly win the support of the masses, but that it was the heavy-handed excesses of regime against radical progressives that moved the masses to have sympathy for these reformers. There were indirect forms of protest, but radical direct protest erupted only after Park was replaced by a

12 Yi Y˘ ong-h˘ui, Ch˘onhwan sidae ui ˘ nolli (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa Pip’y˘ongsa, 1975).

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less effective military strongman.13 The ideology of the vanguard and the popularity of their revolutionary democratic message were almost completely suppressed during the Park Chung Hee era, but the ideas were incubating. Whether or not Kim Chae-kyu was delusional or disingenuous in his claims of tyrannicide, Park had consolidated power so unilaterally and so effectively, only his elimination unleashed the potential for Koreans to fight for liberal democracy.

The Vietnam War: Leveraging the Hegemon Throughout the 1960s–1970s, undermining democracy and protest in South Korea became the common method for Park and American leaders to achieve their conflicting goals. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations wanted a Japan-centered economic and security apparatus in Northeast Asia and third country troops in Southeast Asia. The Nixon administration wanted to abandon anti-communist garrison states like South Vietnam and South Korea in favor of a geopolitical rapprochement with the region’s great power, China. Park wanted the US to provide the resources for developing an autonomous heavy military-industrial capacity with the goal of overwhelming the North and reunifying Korea. Since this could potentially threaten not only North Korea but Japan and China as well, Park would not have had any leverage against the hegemon, except for the exigencies of the Vietnam War and America’s desperate need for “More Flags” or third country, “Free World” forces in that internationally unpopular war.14 The Vietnam War became the determining focus in the precarious, otherwise irreconcilable triangle of US, South Korean, and Japanese regional interests. Park was not the first Korean president to try and leverage Korean troops for Southeast Asia to reverse American policy in Korea. Despite abject dependence, President Syngman Rhee had famously refused to sign the armistice agreement that effectively ended the Korean War (1950–1953) . Determined to conquer North Korea, Rhee made multiple unsolicited offers to the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration in early

13 Youngju Ryu, Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). 14 Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994).

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1954 to dispatch up to 60,000 Korean troops to support the ailing USfunded French war in Indochina (1946–1954) in exchange for a total mobilization of Korean manpower on the peninsula. Eisenhower seriously considered the option, but ultimately rejected it since Rhee’s quid pro quo would effectively guarantee American sponsorship of a renewed war on the Korean peninsula.15 Like his predecessor, Park also resorted to leveraging Korean troops to support American interests in Southeast Asia in an attempt to reverse US policy. The Kennedy administration planned to dovetail American disengagement with increased Japanese commitment following a normalization settlement. In an effective restoration of the colonial Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, agrarian and light industries in South Korea were to complement Japan’s revived heavy industries and support Japan’s role as the capitalist, anti-communist paragon of Asia. For a small, poor, and weak state such as South Korea the situation was hopeless without some extraordinary exigence that would afford small state leverage over the hegemon. During Park’s first state visit to the White House in 1961, he surprised Kennedy with an unsolicited offer to deploy South Korean troops to fight for American interests in Vietnam.16 In exchange Park requested increased American economic aid for South Korea to pursue heavy and chemical industries, which would serve as the basis for an autonomous military complex. As Park left Washington, he “reiterated his offer of ROK troops for Vietnam or guerrilla wars elsewhere.”17 The Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 and the subsequent more direct involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War finally gave Park the leverage to convince the Johnson administration to abandon pre-established, long-term plans for South Korea including democratization and limited militarization. Lyndon B. Johnson and his successor Richard M. Nixon allowed the exigencies of the Vietnam War to determine ad hoc concessions to South Korea in exchange for deploying and sustaining troops in Vietnam. Over the course of the war (1964–1973), instead of disengaging aid to South 15 “Record of Rhee Visit to White House,” Hagerty Diary (27 July 1954), The Foreign

Relations of the United States [hereafter “FRUS”] 1952–1954, 15,2 (1984): 1839, 1846– 1847. “John C. Hagerty Was Press Secretary to and Confidant of President Eisenhower,” ibid., 1838n. 16 MemCon, PCH, John F. Kennedy [hereafter JFK], et al. (14 November 1961), Secret, FRUS 1961–1963 12 (1996): 536. 17 Ibid., 539n.

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Korea, Johnson and Nixon provided the Park regime with $8.14 billion dollars in total aid and concessions. At least $4.62 billion of these earnings were directly attributable to US concessions in exchange for Korean troop commitments to Vietnam: (1) $2.41 billion from additional military aid, (2) $1.12 billion from export promotion to the US, (3) $617 million from services and procurements for Vietnam, and (4) $474 million in military earnings and civilian remittances.18 The face value amounts to more than ten times the $800 million normalization settlement from Japan, which was paid out over the same time (1965–1975). Beyond the dollar amount in grants, loans, and subsidies, Park secured vital American technology transfers and preferential markets through the Vietnam War. A year after the initial 1964 dispatch of a 2000-man, non-combat “Dove Unit” to Vietnam, on May 17, 1965, Johnson personally met with Park to propose the further dispatch of a 20,000-man ROK combat division to Vietnam, explicitly linking ROK troop commitments with American aid. “President Johnson then emphasized how much more difficult it was now to get aid through Congress than it had been 20 years ago when the aid program first began. He said that the 2000Korean troops that had been sent to Viet-Nam in his opinion had helped save the aid bill in Congress. He asked President Park whether he felt additional Korean troops could be sent to Vietnam from Korea.”19 Since the beginning of the Cold War, American leaders had been unsuccessfully pressuring South Korean leaders for diplomatic normalization with Japan. It was politically impossible because of deadlock between colonial resentment in Korea and Japanese refusal to genuinely apologize or sufficiently compensate Koreans for decades of colonial exploitation. Furthermore, most Koreans believed Korea must first be unified before normalizing relations with Japan. Indeed, Japanese critics warned that a premature normalization with only South Korea would exacerbate the Korean division and “impede unification of the North and South Korea.”20 In South Korea, the ratification of the normalization treaty 18 Tae Yang Kwak, “The Anvil of War: The Legacies of Korean Participation in the

Vietnam War” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006), 152. 19 MemCon, Lyndon B. Johnson [hereafter LBJ] and PCH, “US-Korea Relations,” (17 May 1965), Secret, FRUS 1964–1968 29 (2000): 120 (emphasis mine). 20 MemCon, Robert S. McNamara (SecDef), Estubara Shiina (Japanese Foreign Minister), et al., “Korea-Japan Settlement” (12 July 1965), Confidential, LBJ Library, NSF, CO, Japan, vol. II, 9/64–10/65.

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became inexorably linked to ratifying Johnson’s first request for a division of 20,000 ROK combat troops for Vietnam. Both were extraordinarily unpopular and were fiercely criticized by opposition party Assemblymen, for “selling-out” the country to the Japanese and for betraying domestic security to American needs.21 Park decided that a fast resolution of the normalization despite deficiencies was critical as it would bring him badly needed development capital, facilitate legitimate trade and enterprise with Japanese companies, and most importantly, ingratiate himself to Johnson from whom he expected much more. According to the US National Security Council (NSC), national resistance to both normalization and troop deployment constituted an existential crisis for the Park’s government. “Park has decided to move on the Vietnam division first, the ROK-Japan ratification second, [in] the new Assembly session. This will probably assure troops for Vietnam but may seriously endanger either the ratification or parliamentary government in Korea.”22 Even though 110 of the 175 National Assemblymen were loyal members of Park’s Democratic Republican Party, the troop dispatch bill, which had been scheduled for ratification vote on August 9, 1965, was postponed in the face of intense opposition parties’ resistance.23 The break for Park came on August 12 when 62 opposition Minjung Party Assemblymen resigned after a physical melee over the normalization ratification.24 Park took advantage of the resignations to extraordinarily ratify the controversial troop dispatch bill on August 13, and it passed 101 to 1 with 2 abstentions and 71 Assemblymen absent.25 Continuing to exploit the opposition boycott, the next day, August 14, Park convened the Assembly to ratify the ROK-Japan Normalization bill, which passed 110 to 0 with 1 abstention and 74 Assemblymen absent.26 21 “Seoul Ratifies Tokyo Amity Pact as 62 Foes Boycott 110-0 Vote,” New York Times

(15 August 1965). 22 Memo, NSC to McGeorge Bundy (National Security Advisor), “The Week in Asia,” (31 July 1965), Secret, JFK Library, Papers of James C. Thomson, Far East, 1961–1966, Thomson-Cooper Memoranda, 4/64–1/66 (emphasis mine). 23 Embtel Seoul 129 (7 August 1965), Limited Official Use, LBJ Library, NSF, CO, Korea, vol. II, 7/64–8/65. 24 “62 Korean Deputies Quit in Treaty Fight,” New York Times (12 August 1965). 25 “Vote in Seoul Backs Troop Aid to Saigon,” New York Times (14 August 1965). 26 Embtel Seoul 157 (14 August 1965), Limited Official Use, LBJ Library, NSF, CO,

Korea, vol. II, 7/64–8/65.

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The voting was done quickly and without ballots, Park had finally been able to deliver to the Americans, what he had repeatedly promised since 1964 would be only weeks away. In the Basic Agreement, Park settled for far less than his predecessors had demanded ($2 billion by Rhee, and $1.25 billion by Chang My˘on). Additionally, the funds were mostly loans not grants ($500 and $300 million, respectively), and the funds were never recognized as “reparations” by the Japanese.27 It left some territorial questions unresolved, but it categorically settled all issues related to annexation and thirty-five years of colonial occupation, barring any future claims against Japan.28 When Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Samuel D. Berger asked National Assemblyman Han K˘on-su what Koreans “expected from the $800,000,000 due from Japan. Mr. Han replied that Korea still expects more from the U.S. than from Japan. He cited the sending of a division to Viet-Nam as a token of Korean appreciation.”29 Park’s aspiration directly contradicted American intentions for South Korea. Park and the Johnson administration were at cross purposes with respect to South Korea’s direction. Following Kennedy’s plans, Johnson wanted to disengage aid to Korea and promoted the normalization with Japan and subsequent Japanese patronage over Korea. Based on the prospect that a normalization settlement with Japan was imminent, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) projected in 1964 that “U.S. aid grant to Korea could be phased out over the next three to five years.”30 In anticipation of US economic disengagement and Japanese takeover, American grant aid had already been steadily reduced from a peak of $325 million in 1956 to only $71 million (only 22%

27 Jung-Hoon Lee, “Normalization of Relations with Japan: Toward a New Partnership,” in The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, ed. Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 451. 28 Hapdong News Agency, Korea Annual (1967), 169; Jung-en Woo, Race to the Swift: State Finance in Korean Industrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 85–88. 29 MemCon, Samuel D. Berger (Deputy Assistant SecState/FE), Han K˘ on-su (ROK NA) et al., “Korean Situation and Economic Development” (1 September 1965), Confidential, NARA, Lot Files 66D503 and 69D54, POL KOR S-JAP (emphasis mine). 30 Joungwon Kim et al., Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945–1972 (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1975), 258.

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of peak) in 1965.31 Park of course wanted increased American aid and strategic commitment. After Park triumphed in two major political battles in Korea at great cost to the parliamentary process in 1965, Johnson officials wasted no time in planning to request yet another division of 20,000 Korean combat troops for Vietnam. Consequently, the Johnson administration continued their program of reinforcing Park’s political capital and conceding to reverse their own policy for Korea. Deputy National Security Advisor Francis Bator advised Johnson, “From our point of view useful to keep Park happy and give him a success. He has played brave hand in normalizing relations with Japan, and on Vietnam. Understand we are about to ask him for a second division.”32 Instead of winding down aid, American military and economic aid to South Korea reached unprecedented heights. For his part, Johnson consciously allowed it to happen, and Park himself had grown dangerously dependent on the war itself.

Uneven Development: Classism and Regionalism The strategies that Park Chung Hee successfully exploited to establish his power were the very factors that led to his removal by assassination. Prosperity through industrialization did lead to genuinely growing public support for Park, but it also relieved the economic desperation that tolerated authoritarianism. Additionally, the prosperity and rapid industrialization was distinctly uneven, and Park’s discriminatory economic policies created and exacerbated social cleavages across class and regional lines. Liberalism and inequity were unintended consequences of Park’s military-industrial push, but they threatened to undermine his Messianic mission, and he responded to civil and parliamentary opposition with increasingly repressive and effective authoritarian measures. The billions of dollars of American concessions and technology transfers fueled South Korea’s chaeb˘ol -centered heavy industrialization, but the salaries, commodities, and remittances that ROK soldiers as well as civilian workers brought back to South Korea funded school fees and small businesses that significantly contributed to an emerging middle 31 US Agency for International Development, US Overseas Loans and Grants and Assistance from International Organizations (1962), 64; (1965), 64. 32 Memo, Francis Bator (Deputy National Security Advisor) to LBJ (28 December 1965), LBJ Library, WHCF Subject Files, CO 151, Korea (Executive).

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class. But prosperity was uneven and exacerbated regional and class conflicts. The capital region and Southeast provinces (Y˘ongnam) enjoyed far greater infrastructural investment and political influence than the Southwest provinces (Honam). Furthermore, the chaeb˘ol mega conglomerates and the dynastic families that owned them received the lion’s share of the profits of national sacrifice and would become the tail that wagged the dog. The minjung (an explicitly non-Marxist Korean term for the “masses” of people) resented the increasingly uneven development and acquired the vocabulary to articulate their discontent, to organize, and to protest Park’s leadership anew in the late 1960s protesting oppressive government labor policies and security laws. As for the chaeb˘ol leaders, they refused to continue playing pawns in the command economy, and by the 1970s began competing with the government for resources, and by the next decade were arguably more powerful than the governments of Park’s successors. Park’s pursuit of a military-industrial capacity capable of overwhelming the North inadvertently created two disparate forces that would ultimately undermine his dictatorship, the chaeb˘ol above and the minjung below. In the 1990s North Koreans retroactively named a fundamental shift in their ideology and policy since the 1960s as “military first” (s˘on’gun). Park had also pursued a military first policy South Korea since the 1960s. Everything else, from democracy to inclusive growth, was an indefinite secondary priority to the primary, virtually exclusive, priority of reconciling the “unnatural” reality of a divided Korea. In attempting to overwhelm the North, Park inadvertently proved that South Korea could be prosperous alone and perhaps even better off divided. Overwhelming the North through rapid development of South Korean military-industrial capacity was a doomed strategy from its conception for three reasons: (1) Necessary leverage over American leaders lasted only as long as the Vietnam War lasted, and even “America’s Longest War” wasn’t long enough; (2) North Korea proved to be an undaunted, moving target; (3) the race could not be won fast enough, because collateral prosperity produced an increasingly critical and empowered society in South Korea, creating considerable social friction against Park’s increasingly costly dictatorship. Poor, desperate Koreans, with little or nothing to lose, had been more risk-seeking and more amenable to strong leadership, even authoritarianism in the early 1960s, but as the growth of the South Korea’s military-industrial complex collaterally fueled economic prosperity in the late 1960s and 1970s, the growing middle class of South

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Korea awoke to become increasingly critical of Park’s militant corporatism and the physical, political, and even spiritual sacrifices it demanded. Park did not risk everything to pursue economic development as its own end. Prosperity was incidental and often unwelcomed because it inspired demands for democracy and social agency. Park explicitly promoted national unity, but through military corporatism without regard for popular viability or inclusive growth, which produced uneven development and lasting regional and class divisions. The fetishization of national unity is consistent with the development model with which Park was most familiar, that of Japan’s wartime (1937–1945) empire. It was a Fascist model, anti-labor, anti-communist, anti-liberal, militant, and corporatist, which was overly reliant on a handful of crony conglomerates (zaibatsu, chaeb˘ol ) that conspired with the state to pursue the state’s objectives. South Korean development through militant corporatism produced uneven development and enduring social divisions. In the 1963 and 1967 presidential elections, Park received a similar proportion of votes from both the Southwest and the Southeast regions (Honam and Y˘ongnam respectively). In fact, in 1963, he was even more popular in the Southwest than his home province of Southeast, but the regional schism expressed in the 1971 election was stark and foreboding. The ultimate legacy of Park’s nationalism is negative nationalism (anti-Japanese, anti-Communist, and anti-North Korean), political regionalism, socioeconomic inequity, and a state corrupted by its own instrument of economic development, the chaeb˘ol. After successfully amending the Constitution to allow a third presidential term, Park prepared for his third-term presidential election in 1971. Despite his ability to manipulate the economy and to exploit direct and indirect US support, Park faced serious political challenges in Korea. Civil unrest and student demonstrations were increasing in scale and frequency, and unlike the elections of 1963 and 1967 when the opposition had been fractured or ineffectively led, in the 1971 election the opposition was unified under one dynamic candidate, Kim Dae Jung. Kim ran on a five-point, anti-militaristic platform: (1) ideological conciliation, (2) collective security, (3) demilitarization, (4) social welfare, and (5) Korean withdrawal from Vietnam. Kim was directly challenging the negative consequences of Park’s wartime partnership in Vietnam, particularly the exacerbation of inter-Korean division and divisive development. “During the [1971] campaign, Kim’s platform included a softened policy toward the Communist nations, particularly North Korea, a guarantee by

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the major powers against renewed war in the Korean peninsula, disbandment of the two-million-member home militia, an economic policy to benefit the masses and an early withdrawal of South Korean troops from South Vietnam to reduce tensions in Korea.”33 Instead of softening his own platform, Park increased his militant posture. As election day drew near, Park saturated the Korean press with the threat of the “Northern Wind” (pukp’ung ). “For example, on April 9, a North Korean spy reportedly turned himself in and confessed to plotting a coup d’état; on April 20 and 23, two espionage rings were revealed, and on April 24, President Park ordered all ROK military forces on full combat alert.”34 Bowing to public concern that Park would try to become president for life, he publicly pledged on April 24 that he would not seek a fourth term if reelected. Park won the election on April 27 with an official count of 51% of the vote against Kim Dae Jung’s 44%.35 Opposition leaders charged that Park had secured victory only by engaging in massive fraud, and students again took to the streets in hordes. Despite victory in the presidential election, for the first time, the ruling party failed to secure the two-thirds majority in the National Assembly required to propose another Constitutional amendment, eliminating the possibility of a “fourth term amendment” except under extraordinary circumstances.36 The 1971 elections reflected an interesting paradox. Park had become both more popular and less popular. He received his highest national proportion

33 Kyung-Cho Chung, Korea: The Third Republic (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 179– 180 (emphasis mine). 34 “Koreagate Hearings,” Report (1978), 36. United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations. Subcommittee on International Organizations. Investigation of Korean-American Relations: Hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations. 95th Cong., 2nd sess., Part 1 (22 June 1977); Part 2 (28 July, and 3 August 1977; Part 3 (29/30 November 1977); Part 4 (15/16, 21/22 March, 11, 20 April, 20 and June 1978); Part 4 suppl, (15/16, 21/22 March 1978); Part 5 (1, 6/7 June 1978); Part 6 (19 July and 2 August 1978); Part 7 (22 June 1977, 20 July, 15 August 1978; Report (31 October 1978); Appendixes to the Report, 2 vols. (31 October 1978). Committee Print. [Series collectively known as the “Koreagate Hearings.”]. 35 ROK, Economic Planning Board, Bureau of Statistics [hereafter EPB, BOS], Korea Statistical Yearbook (Seoul: Ky˘ongje kihoegw˘on, 1972), 457. 36 Ibid., 458; ROK, National Assembly, Secretariat, Kukhoe samuch’o samsipp’al ny˘on sa [Thirty-Eight Year History of the Secretariat of the National Assembly] (Seoul: Kukhoe samuch’o, Kirok p’y˘onchan’guk charyo p’y˘onch’an’gwa, 1987), 31–33.

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of the presidential votes of any of the three elections,37 representing genuine growth in popularity, but simultaneously, protests throughout the country, particularly in Seoul, had become alarmingly frequent and potentially devastating in scale. The apparent incongruence was the result of two socially diversifying economic factors: divisive development and the formation of a sizeable middle class. Korean society was becoming highly polarized along both inter-regional and urban–rural cleavages. Military compensation and civilian remittances from Koreans stationed in Vietnam already exceeded $100 million by 1967, and these direct inputs immediately benefited the everyday lives of millions of Koreans, the vast majority of whom had lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and had a positive effect on Park’s popularity in the 1967 elections. “The normal savings of frugal civilian employees during a two-year tour in Vietnam has been estimated from $5,000 to $8,000, and savings in excess of $10,000 are not uncommon.”38 To put things in perspective, $5000 represents over twenty-two times the average annual ROK income per capita ($224) in 1970.39 By 1972, the military compensation and civilian remittances of nearly half a million Koreans in Vietnam totaled $474 million, and the total tangible capital earnings from Vietnam exceeded one billion dollars.40 Of course this continued to be a key factor in Park’s increasing popularity, but there was a point of diminishing returns. Ironically, the intensification of attacks by Park’s critics stemmed from the phenomenon that Korean participation in Vietnam was successful economically, contributing to the rapid emergence of a middle class. The 37 Park received 43, 49, and 51% of total votes cast (including invalidated votes) in the 1963, 1967, and 1971 elections, respectively. EPB, BOS, Korea Statistical Yearbook (1964), 376; (1968), 332; (1972), 457. 38 Se-Jin Kim, “South Korea’s Involvement in Vietnam and Its Economic and Political Impact,” Asian Survey 10,6 (June 1970): 522. 39 ROK, Bank of Korea [hereafter BOK], Economic Statistical Yearbook (Seoul: Han’guk u˘ nhaeng chosabu, 1981), 235, 304–305. 40 Dong-Ju Choi, “The Political Economy of Korea’s Involvement in the Second IndoChina War” (PhD diss., SOAS, University of London, 1995), 212; ROK, BOK, Economic Statistics Yearbook (1965), 242–245; (1969), 304–307; (1973), 184–189; (1977), 186– 191; (1981), 208–213; “Symington Subcommittee Hearings” (1970), 1570, 1572; Ch’oe Yong-ho, (Han’gw˘on uro ˘ ingnun) ˘ Betunam ˘ ch˘onjaeng kwa Han’gukkun [The Vietnam War and Korean Troops in One Volume] (Seoul: Kukpangbu kunsa py˘onch’an y˘on’guso, 2004), 196, 424, 429; Asan sahoe pokchi sa˘op chedan [Asan Foundation], Han’guk ui ˘ haewoe ch’ui˘op: o˘ je, onul ˘ kurigo ˘ naeil [Korean Employment Overseas: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow] (Seoul: Asan sahoe pokchi sa˘op chedan, 1988), 176–182.

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increasing militarization of society and industrial development paid for by increased American military and economic concessions in exchange for Korean troops contributed to unemployment relief and improved infrastructure. Remittances from Koreans in Vietnam led to the blossoming of new family businesses and educational opportunities. Tuition fees for secondary and post-secondary education had previously made higher education inaccessible for most Koreans, but by 1970, there were twice as many high school and college students as there had been in 1960.41 These factors in turn contributed to a growing middle class, particularly in urban areas. Free from the grips of endemic poverty, some middle class citizens began to resent Park’s social control and command economy. Middle class parents did not want their sons killed or maimed in a faraway war. The swelling ranks of educated middle class youth organized and participated in increasingly intense demonstrations. Since the beginning of the Vietnam War, the opposition parties maintained that Korean participation would jeopardize peninsular security and exacerbate inter-Korean tensions. When the population had little or nothing to lose, the risk may have been worth the rewards, but by the early 1970s many Koreans, particularly of the emerging middle class were reluctant to risk their newfound position and novel gains. Korean economic growth was inequitable and divisive. Park’s industrial development plan produced vast numbers of newly urbanized factory workers who labored for paltry pay under brutal conditions. The cornerstone of Park’s economic development was manufacturing exports. American trade promotion in exchange for Korean troops was critical. During the Vietnam War (1964–1973) the US imported $3.55 billion of South Korean exports, representing $1.12 billion above “normal” levels before and after the war (1961–1963 and 1974–1978).42 Modeled on wartime Japanese corporatism, Park mobilized a tiny chaeb˘ol elite to operate ambitious, state-financed and -directed enterprises. In a state of perpetual war against North Korea, Park demanded maximally efficient and rapid development.

41 Edward S. Mason et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1980), 348. 42 ROK, BOK, Economic Statistics Yearbook (1965), 242–245; (1969), 304–307; (1973), 184–189; (1977), 186–191; (1981), 208–213.

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Park’s “Korean-style democracy” (Han’guk-j˘ok minjujuui) ˘ ironically manifested as the indefinite postponement of democracy and sacrifice of laborers for the sake of national development. In this scheme, labor was highly repressed, afforded few rights, and often forcibly controlled by armed police intervention.43 Labor conditions were abysmal and sparked hundreds of demonstrations by the turn of the decade, the most famous of these involving the self-immolation of Ch˘on T’ae-il on 13 November 1970 over the abominable working conditions in textile sweatshops due to the government’s non-enforcement of its own Labor Standards Law.44 Surrounded by conspicuous signs of prosperity, particularly the growth of a middle class and the rise of an ultra-wealthy chaeb˘ol elite, Korean laborers were not satisfied by merely having employment, but demanded fair and equitable treatment. Rapid industrialization was producing regional inequities and divisive regionalism as well. The 1971 presidential election results clearly show a dramatic, regional political polarization where none had existed before. Park had used the Vietnam earnings and Japanese reparations to improve infrastructures and build industrial complexes primarily in the Capital region and Y˘ongnam region. The Honam region had been the most economically disenfranchised in the 1960s. In the 1963 election, there was no significant voting discrepancy between the two regions. In both regions Park received almost half the votes and his opponent Yun Pos˘on only about a third. Park received a slightly higher percentage of the Honam (49%) vote than he did from the Y˘ongnam region (46%) in 1963, which if anything verifies that there was no inherent favoring of Park in his native Y˘ongnam region. Honam voters’ notable gravitation toward favoring the opposition was steady throughout the three elections (34, 45, 59%) regardless of the regional birthplaces of the opposition candidates. Y˘ongnam voters’ aversion to the opposition remained constant (29, 25, 27%) throughout the decade but its affinity for Park showed very strong growth (46, 63, 69%).45 In 1963 when both regions were relatively undeveloped, the Honam and Y˘ongnam regions showed no significant regional disparity. In 1967, 43 Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). 44 Hak-Kyu Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea (New York: Routledge, 1989), 34–35. 45 ROK, EPB, BOS, Korea Statistical Yearbook (1964): 376; (1968): 332; (1972): 457.

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Honam voters were decidedly neutral toward both candidates, but Y˘ongnam voters began to strongly favor Park. After years of planning, construction of the 100,000-ton Ulsan Petrochemical Complex began in 1968, and major construction of the monumental 1,030,000-ton Pohang Steel Mill began in 1970.46 Both were the largest heavy industrial complexes built in Korea, and both were built in the Y˘ongnam region, a precedent that would be repeated especially after the formal inauguration of the HCI initiative in 1973. Since 1971, regionalism, the political polarization of Honam and Y˘ongnam grew to extraordinary levels, with a first culmination in the 1980 Kwangju Massacre and reaching its political zenith in the 1997 presidential election. Ironically, Park successfully resisted the United States’ Japan-centered regional development strategy as unjust and unfair to Korea, but himself ignored charges of unjust and unfair development within Korea. Unexpectedly, economic success stemming from Korean participation in the Vietnam War was both a source of popularity for and discontent with Park’s rule. Early in the war, when economic circumstances were dire, when poverty and unemployment were pervasive and South Korea’s economic performance was far behind that of the North, the financial rewards and economic promise of Korea’s participation in Vietnam proved to be a tremendous asset for Park’s domestic legitimacy. But as the South Korean economy grew at phenomenal double-digit percentage rates throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the growing middle class, the swollen ranks of urban working poor, and the economically disenfranchised provinces, increasingly threatened Park’s vulnerable legitimacy. The extremes of this centrifugal social polarization were becoming unwieldy and threatened to tear the country apart even without external threats. Park’s reaction was more militarism, more authoritarianism, and more rapid industrialization.

46 Suk-Chae Lee, “The Heavy Chemical Industries Promotion Plan (1973–1979),” in Economic Development in the Republic of Korea: A Policy Perspective, ed. Lee-Jay Cho and Yoon Hyung Kim (Honolulu: East–West Center, University of Hawai’i Press, 1991), 431–432.

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1972 Yusin Reforms and US Retreat Many observers of Korean politics have argued or inferred that in 1971 opposition consolidation and the strong showing of the opposition presidential candidate were the main factors in motivating Park to seek the Yusin Reforms.47 However, the fact that Park was able to maintain a firm hold of the presidential office as well as a majority of National Assembly seats through existing political and Constitutional processes severely undercuts this argument. It is true that in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, both Park’s margin of victory in the presidential race (Park received 26% points more votes than Yun Po-s˘on) and commanding majority in the National Assembly (74% of the seats) were greater than in the 1971 elections, but the fact remains that in 1971 he still enjoyed both a substantial lead in the presidential elections (18% points more votes than Kim Dae Jung) and a ruling majority in the National Assembly (55%).48 The desperate timing of the 1972 Yusin Reforms (10-w˘ol yusin) cannot be explained by the election results of 1971 alone, but must also consider the context of the United States’ withdrawal strategy from the Vietnam War, the major external source of Park’s economic and political capital. By 1971, the scale and speed of Park’s success toward building his military-industrial complex as well as its profound dependence on the continuing war in Vietnam resulted in critical challenges to his selfreliance efforts and consequently his authority. Largely due to Korea’s troop commitments to Vietnam, US economic aid levels to South Korea remained remarkably constant despite extraordinary economic growth, but the proportion of loans to grants had grown steadily, and by 1971 US loan aid exceeded grant aid. Since the beginning of the war, the military assistance program (MAP) that required Korea to pay, with foreign reserves, for military equipment had been suspended every year as a direct concession in exchange for Korean deployments to Vietnam, but starting in 1971, the US refused to suspend further MAP transfers. In addition, the Nixon administration was practicing economic protectionism from which Korea was not given a reprieve, completely reversing earlier American commitments to import more Korean products. “The economic 47 C.I. Eugene Kim and Young Whan Kihl, Party Politics and Elections in Korea (Research Institute on Korean Affairs, 1976); Sohn, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea. 48 See Fig. 5.1, “Overview of ROK Election Patterns, 1963–1971.”

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situation had become precarious in the latter half of 1971. President Nixon’s new economic policy had worldwide repercussions that affected South Korea’s foreign trade and balance of payments. Further, the United States had pressured the Korean Government into limiting textile imports to the United States.”49 The imminent economic crisis was further exacerbated by Park’s pre-election manipulation of the Korean economy to create a temporary boom through massive foreign loans. This strategy contributed to the bankruptcies of two hundred Korean firms and pushed Korea’s external debt to 30% of GNP.50 So that US withdrawal from Vietnam would not seem like a singular retreat, but as one aspect of a consistently applied global policy, Nixon had to find Asian countries other than Vietnam from which the United States could reduce its commitments. South Korea was one such country.51 At a press conference in Guam, “The President professed to see several hopeful signs that non-Communist Asia had recently become stronger, including rapid economic development. He rattled off an impressive list of statistics showing the economic growth of South Korea ….”52 Despite the assurances that Nixon gave Park about the enduring ties forged in the jungles of Vietnam between the United States and South Korea, Nixon targeted South Korea as the best candidate for applying the Nixon Doctrine. In terms of manpower, with 600,000 standing troops and potentially 2,000,000 reservists, South Korea had the fourth largest army in the world. By Park’s design, South Korea was both economically vibrant, and militarily strong. The supreme irony was that the success that Park achieved through Korean participation in the Vietnam War proved to be the very basis for US withdrawal from Korea. On August 4, 1970, General Michaelis and Ambassador Porter presented Park with a unilaterally formulated plan to remove a division of 20,000 American soldiers from Korea. Porter reported in his telegram to the Secretary of State that Park was appalled at Nixon’s betrayal.53 As compensation for US troop 49 “Koreagate Hearings,” Report (1978), 37. 50 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton,

2005), 367. 51 “Koreagate Hearings,” Pt. 4 (1978), 22. 52 Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Nixon Plans Cut in Military Role for U.S. in Asia,” New

York Times (26 July 1969). 53 Embtel Seoul 4044 (4 August 1970), Top Secret, NARA, RG 59, Central Files 1970–1973, POL KOR S-US (emphasis mine).

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withdrawals from the peninsula, Nixon sent Vice President Spiro Agnew to offer Park a $1.5 billion military modernization package for South Korea to be administered over five years. Park never asked Nixon to reconsider his rapprochement with China. Park was merely seeking to “save face” and prevent his political critics from charging his government with losing American support. The State Department noted: “We are aware of ROKG need for some public demonstration of our concern for protection of Korean interests, as well as Park’s problem of ‘face’.”54 Despite this, the Nixon administration disregarded Korea’s status as a regional power and role as an ally. Immediately after receiving Nixon’s letter denying any possibility of a meeting, Park preemptively decreed a State of National Emergency on December 6 to fend off the predicted fallout of political criticism. By December 27 Park codified the decree in a Special Security Bill that afforded him broader executive powers. Park publicly justified this as being necessitated by the belligerence of the North.55 However, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research pointed out that the Northern threat was a ruse, and that Park was in fact concerned with the political consequences from Nixon’s rebuff. “Although the North Korean threat was cited in the emergency declaration […] Park’s move is related much more directly to the internal situation, where he sees stability threatened by a combination of factors including […] declining US support [… Park] is not confident he can maintain discipline without an appeal to the threat from the North.”56 The Bureau also recognized that Park’s move toward greater authoritarianism was related to the impending end of the Vietnam War and the “declining Vietnam procurements, thus adding to

54 Deptel Seoul 219526, “Letter to President Park from President Nixon” (2 December 1971), Secret, Nodis, Priority, NARA, RG 59, Central Files 1970–1973, POL 15-1 KOR S. 55 “The new law is intended to give the President some special authority he needs in shielding the nation against possible invasion by the north Korean Communists who have completed their war preparations.” “Prescription Before the Patient’s Dead: Special Security Bill Passes Assembly,” Democratic Republican Party Bulletin 7.1 (January 1972), 8. 56 INR Intelligence Note, “Park Increases His Power to Counter ‘Emergency Situation,’” (10 December 1971), Confidential, Noforn, NARA, RG 59, Central Files 1970–1973, POL 15–1 KOR S (emphasis mine).

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factors threatening the economic success that Park regards as his major achievement.”57 Park’s final turn toward authoritarianism was not foreordained. Indeed, it was a gambit born of desperation. Nixon viewed American rapprochement with China as a strategy for bringing enemies to the table. It was effective, and less than a year after his 1972 visit to Beijing, the Paris Peace Accords were signed between the United States and North Vietnam. Quite unexpectedly, the United States’ détente with China brought two other enemies to the table, North and South Korea. Just as Park was apprehensive that the United States might abandon South Korea in the pursuit of geopolitical strategy, Kim Il Sung was anxious about China abandoning North Korea for American concessions. On the fourth of July 1972, Park and North Korean officials stunned the world by publicly announcing that basic agreements had been reached concerning reunification. The rivals revealed that months of secret negotiations in Pyongyang had led to a breakthrough, and they pledged that after resolving remaining issues through a broad consensus involving all Korean people, reunification would finally be realized.58 After the proclamation, delegates were publicly exchanged between the North and South, and the issue all but monopolized the media’s attention. In the hearts and minds of the Korean people, reunification was and remains an intensely emotional issue of incalculable appeal. Park attempted to use the North–South Dialogue as leverage to forestall any further demobilization of American forces from Korea. Kim, on the other hand, may have believed that signs of relaxation in peninsular relations would give the US the pretext for withdrawing from South Korea. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence considered both options. They recognized the impediment that the inter-Korean negotiations imposed on America’s strategic flexibility, since a withdrawal of American forces

57 Ibid. 58 Portions of the negotiation transcripts were published in Kim Chin-yong, “Ch’oech’o

kong’gye Kim Il-s˘ong – Yu Hu-rak P’y˘ongyang mildam ch˘onmun [First Release of Transcript of Secret Meeting Between Kim Il Sung and Yi Hu-rak in Pyongyang],” W˘olgan chungang 158 (1989): 280–299.

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from Korea during the process would undermine Park’s position in the negotiations.59 On October 17, 1972 Park declared martial law. He dissolved the National Assembly, suspended the Constitution, censored the press, shut down universities, and banned all political activity. Ten days later, Park presented the Yusin Constitution. He emphasized, “If we do not fully secure our national strength at this crucial moment, and if we fail to consolidate, we will forever be discarded from the history of the world, and the peaceful reunification of our fatherland will be immediately reduced to nothing but a vain fantasy.”60 Some of the key features of the Yusin Constitution included severe curtailment of civil liberties, presidential authority to dissolve the National Assembly at will, presidential appointment of one-third of National Assembly seats, the abolition of presidential term limits, and the election of the president through the National Conference for Unification instead of direct elections. Over the next thirty days, Park orchestrated the most intense program of propaganda in Korean history in preparation for the November 21 national referendum to ratify the new Constitution. Under martial law conditions, no critical or oppositional campaigning was allowed. Only Park’s official election management committees and “persons of learning and virtue” selected by these committees were permitted to “guide and enlighten” the public of the upcoming referendum and voting procedures.61 South Koreans were led to believe that voting for the reforms was a vote for reunification and voting against it was a vote for permanent division. The referendum was passed on November 21, 1972 with an official count of 91.5% approval among the 91.9% of eligible voters who cast ballots. Martial law was lifted on December 13. On December 23, Park was elected president with 100% of the votes cast by the National Conference for Unification. Park himself was the chairman of this committee

59 Memo, Paul M. Popple (INR/REA) to Marshal Green (Assistant SecState/EA) “The Impact of the Korean Talks” (7 July 1972), Confidential, NARA, RG 59, Central Files 1970–1973, POL KOR S-US. 60 PCH, “H˘ onb˘op kaej˘ong’an kong’go e ch˘uu˘ mhan t’˘ukpy˘ol tamhoemun [Special Declaration Concerning the Proclamation of Constitutional Reforms]” (27 October 1972), Pak Ch˘ong-hui ˘ taet’ongny˘ong y˘ons˘ol munjip 9 (Seoul: Tae’tongny˘on kongbo pis˘olgwansil, 1972), 333 (translation mine). 61 “Seoul Issues Rules for Referendum,” New York Times (24 October 1972).

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and had appointed its members. On December 27, Park was inaugurated, whereupon he officially promulgated the Yusin Constitution. The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee was highly critical of the Yusin Reforms and in February 1973 “concluded that President Park probably would remain in office until he died, decided to resign, or was overthrown by revolution.”62 But American leaders did not make any public criticism of Park’s excesses even when there was overwhelming evidence that Park’s subversion undermined genuine democracy. The scandal and investigation into “Koreagate” did not start until 1976 because until after the “Fall of Saigon,” U.S. leaders had been reluctant to criticize or embarrass its ally. Ambassador William J. Porter testified, “I sensed a good deal of permissiveness [in] the lack of reaction from Washington where it was all happening right here in our front yard [… which] was due to a lack of desire to make things difficult for an ally who was contributing so much to the Vietnam effort.”63 Kim Il Sung similarly exploited the events to write the first new Constitution in the North since it was founded in 1948. He presented it to the Supreme People’s Assembly on October 23 and it was ratified on December 28, 1972. Although Kim had purged all rivals and well consolidated his power before 1972, the new DPRK Constitution was an assertion of independence and isolation from the communist world. North Korea had become distanced from the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and the Sino-American rapprochement made China seem like a less reliable ally. The 1948 DPRK Constitution simply stated, “Our state is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” but the first article of the 1972 DPRK Constitution asserts, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an independent socialist state with represents the interests of all the Korean people.”64 Under the new Constitution, Kim promoted his position from Chairman to President putting him on titular par with South Korean and American leaders and distinguishing himself from other communist leaders. The last article formally replaced Seoul with Pyongyang as North Korea’s capital. 62 Korea and the Philippines : November 1972. A Staff Report Prepared for the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations (93rd Cong., 1st sess.) (18 February 1973), 44. 63 “Koreagate Hearings,” Report (1978), 155. 64 Se-Jin Kim and Chang-Hyun Cho, Government and Politics of Korea (Silver Spring:

Research Institute on Korean Affairs, 1972); Tai Sung An, North Korea: A Political Handbook (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1983), 213–244.

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In the same month as the signing of the Paris Agreement that effectively ended direct American intervention in Vietnam, on January 1973, Nixon proclaimed to Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil, “Unlike other Presidents, I do not intend to interfere in the internal affairs of your country.”65 Less than a year after convincing Koreans that the Yusin Reforms were necessary for the “peaceful reunification of our fatherland,” Park told the nation on October 1, 1973: “We cannot hope to attain peace in Korea, nor can we expect to emerge victorious from the harsh contest in the international arena, without first accelerating the growth of our national strength. And we cannot increase our national strength without first consolidating our own national defence capabilities.”66 Park’s true motivation for consolidating all political power and moving away from any semblance of participatory politics was to continue his quest to build a military-industrial complex in a post-Vietnam War era.

Conclusion Since his coup d’état in 1961, Park proclaimed that his ultimate objective was the reunification of Korea. His strategic model was late nineteenthcentury Meiji mercantilism, with a strong dose of mid-twentieth century Sh¯owa anti-communism, fueled by the military spending of the occupation of US Army. Park was no free-market capitalist, and he certainly did not pursue economic prosperity as an end in and of itself. In fact, Park viewed affluence and civil liberties as corruptive and counterproductive. Park’s three-stage plan to unify the peninsula was ultimately undermined by frictions he had not anticipated and to which he could not effectively respond, including North Korea’s reactive military escalation, and South Koreans’ emerging middle class’ intolerance of dictatorship. He left in his wake a peninsular arms race infused with billions of dollars of external capital and technology transfers. Rapid escalation of South Korea’s military-industrial complex did not overwhelm the North but

65 Confidential staff interview, cited in “Koreagate Hearings,” Report (1978), 39. 66 PCH, “H˘ onb˘op kaej˘ong’an kong’go e ch˘uu˘ mhan t’˘ukpy˘ol tamhoemun” [Special

Declaration Concerning the Proclamation of Constitutional Reforms] (27 October 1972), Pak Ch˘ong-hui ˘ taet’ongny˘ong y˘ons˘ol munjip 9 (1972), 333 “Cultivation of National Strength Comes First” (1 October 1973); PCH, Major Speeches by President Park Chung Hee (Seoul: Samhwa Publishing, 1973), 144.

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pushed them to create nuclear weapons, resulting in an arms race threatening the entire Northeast Asian region. By his own terms, despite extraordinary sacrifices extracted from the masses, he failed to unify Korea and in fact drove the two states further apart. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there is an evolution of civil, parliamentary, and executive opposition in South Korea directly related to the Vietnam War because Park had become too dependent on US support for his military industrial ambitions on the peninsula, and the American government, both Democratic and Republican administrations, had become too dependent on the individual, Park Chung Hee, to further US strategic interests in Northeast Asia. They were at cross expectations because Park’s national interests contradicted the United States’ regional interests. Furthermore, both the leaders of South Korea and the US were overtly anti-democratic, as was endemic during the Cold War, when anticommunism, even in the form of authoritarianism, consistently trumped liberalism, the founding ideology of the United States. Serious fissures between Park and the Johnson administration already developed over the January incidents of 1968 (the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Blue House Raid in South Korea, and the capture of the USS Pueblo by North Koreans), but the Nixon administration (1969– 1974) ended the Vietnam War in the worst possible way for South Koreans’ democratic aspirations. The Nixon administration explicitly rejected the idealism, the democratization mission, of their immediate predecessors, and communicated this to authoritarian leaders of both allies and adversaries. That allowed Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to replace America’s strategic dependence on anti-communist garrison states like South Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines by normalizing US relations with the People’s Republic of China. The two Korean presidents conspired in response to the SinoAmerican rapprochement and perceived alienation by their respective patron states with new Constitutions which formalized their dictatorships with virtually unlimited executive authority. In October 1972, Park presented South Korea’s fourth Constitution, the Yusin Constitution, for a national referendum, and Kim Il-sung simultaneously presented North Korea’s second Constitution to the Supreme People’s Assembly for ratification. During this most oppressive era of the Fourth Republic (1972–1979), South Koreans had ample reasons to protest and had unprecedented material and intellectual resources to articulate their political discontent. The desperation of post-colonial and post-Korean War

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poverty had largely been resolved, and an emerging middle class was both literate and conscious, but it is a testament to the near totalizing effective control of the Yusin government that all popular protests were thwarted. Even as he consolidated his power and authority, Park remained too dependent on US support and on the leverage of the Vietnam War. During the Nixon administration, US leaders abruptly shifted from intensively prosecuting a multimillion casualty Cold War crusade to the paralysis of the “Vietnam Syndrome.” In the last days of the Vietnam War, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee presciently noted in its investigation into the Yusin Reforms that Park had consolidated his authority so thoroughly that his grip on power could be only loosened by his death.67 In 1979, the Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), Kim Chae-kyu, assassinated Park and claimed during his interrogation that he wanted to “overturn the Yushin system.”68 At the end, Kim attempted to cast himself as a Brutus-like patriot who committed tyrannicide, the ultimate expression of executive opposition, for the sake of democracy. Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BC) had hoped his act would bring out the best of his fellow Romans in reviving their own democracy. Kim, however, hoped his act would bring out the best of the foreign Americans patrons to deliver liberal democracy. Of course, American leaders did no such thing, and it took the sacrifices and protests of Koreans themselves since the 1980s to realize genuine democracy in South Korea.

Bibliography An, Tai Sung, North Korea: A Political Handbook (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1983). Asan sahoe pokchi sa˘op chedan [Asan Foundation], Han’guk ui ˘ haewoe ch’ui˘op: o˘je, onul ˘ kurigo ˘ naeil [Korean Employment Overseas: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow] (Seoul: Asan sahoe pokchi sa˘op chedan, 1988). Blackburn, Robert M., Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994).

67 US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Korea and the Philippines ,

44. 68 William H. Gleysteen Jr., Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 1999), 60.

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Ch’oe, Yong-ho, (Han’gw˘on uro ˘ ingnun) ˘ Betunam ˘ ch˘onjaeng kwa Han’gukkun [The Vietnam War and Korean Troops in One Volume] (Seoul: Kukpangbu kunsa py˘onch’an y˘on’guso, 2004). Choi, Dong-Ju, “The Political Economy of Korea’s Involvement in the Second Indo-China War” (PhD diss., SOAS, University of London, 1995). Chung, Kyung-Cho, Korea: The Third Republic (New York: Macmillan, 1971). Cumings, Bruce, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 2005). Eckert, Carter J., Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991). Gleysteen Jr., William H., Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 1999). H˘o, Chunhaeng, “Ri Y˘ongh˘ui u˘ i Chungguk y˘ongu-Hanguk pip’y˘ong: 1970 y˘ondae Hanguk es˘ou˘ i munhwa taehy˘ongmy˘ong non˘ui l˘ul chungsim u˘ ro [Rhee Younghee’s Study on China-Criticism in Korea: Centering on the Discussion of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970],” Y˘ongju o˘mun 41 (2019). Hwang, By˘ongju, “1960 y˘ondae chisigin u˘ i 68 undong tamron [The Korean Intellectuals’ Discourse on the Protest of 1968 in the 1960s],” Y˘oksa pip’y˘ong 123 (2018). Kim, C.I. Eugene, and Young Whan Kihl, Party Politics and Elections in Korea (Research Institute on Korean Affairs, 1976). Kim, Chin-yong, “Ch’oech’o kong’gye Kim Il-s˘ong – Yu Hu-rak P’y˘ongyang mildam ch˘onmun [First Release of Transcript of Secret Meeting between Kim Il Sung and Yi Hu-rak in Pyongyang],” W˘olgan chungang 158 (1989): 280– 299. Kim, Ch˘ong-ny˘om, Policymaking on the Front Lines: Memoirs of a Korean Practitioner, 1945–1979 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1994). Kim, Han’guk ky˘ongje ch˘ongch’aek 30-y˘onsa [Thirty Years of Korean Economic Policy] (Seoul: Sahoe sasang sa, 1991). Kim, Joungwon, et al., Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945–1972 (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, 1975). Kim, Nuri, “Hanguk yeooeju˘ui: Wae Hanguk en˘un 68 hy˘ongmy˘ong i o˘ pss˘onn˘unga? [Korean Exceptionalism: Why Was There No ’68 Revolution in South Korea?],” T’ong’il inmunhak 76 (2018). Kim, Se-Jin, and Chang-Hyun Cho, Government and Politics of Korea (Silver Spring: Research Institute on Korean Affairs, 1972). Kurlansky, Mark, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2004). Kwak, Tae Yang, “The Anvil of War: The Legacies of Korean Participation in the Vietnam War” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006).

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Lee, Jung-Hoon, “Normalization of Relations with Japan: Toward a New Partnership,” in The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea, ed. Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Lee, Suk-Chae, “The Heavy Chemical Industries Promotion Plan (1973–1979),” in Economic Development in the Republic of Korea: A Policy Perspective, ed. Lee-Jay Cho and Yoon Hyung Kim (Honolulu: East-West Center, University of Hawai’i Press, 1991). Mason, Edward S., et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1980). Paek, S˘unguk, “Haes˘ok u˘ i ssaum u˘ i konggan u˘ ros˘o Yi Y˘ongh˘ui u˘ i Pet˘unam ch˘onjaeng: Chos˘on ilbo hwaltong sigi (1965–1967) l˘ul chungsim u˘ iro [The Vietnam War as a Space for Rhee Young-Hee’s ‘Interpretation Battle’ in His Days at the Chos˘on Daily (1965–1967)],” Y˘oksa munje y˘ongu (2014): 73–92. Paik, Nak-chung, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea (University of California Press, 2011). Park, Chung Hee, Country, the Revolution, and I (Seoul: Dong-A Publishing Co., 1962). Park, Chung Hee, Kukka wa hy˘ongmy˘ong kwa na (Seoul: Hyangmun sa, 1963). Ryu, Youngju, Cultures of Yusin: South Korea in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). Sohn, Hak-Kyu, Authoritarianism and Opposition in South Korea (New York: Routledge, 1989). Woo, Jung-en, Race to the Swift: State Finance in Korean Industrialization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 85–88. Yi, Y˘ong-h˘ui, Ch˘onhwan sidae ui ˘ nolli (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa Pip’y˘ongsa, 1975).

CHAPTER 12

The Vietnam War in Africa Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre

On 24 February 1966, hundreds of Chinese Communist Party leaders gathered in Beijing to host a high-level banquet for Kwame Nkrumah, the charismatic leader of Ghana, sub-Saharan Africa’s first country to gain its independence from Britain. Nkrumah was one of Africa’s most prominent figures of the era. In 1945, together with other African leaders, he had forged a continent-wide anti-colonial agenda at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester; six years later, he had become the Prime Minister of colonial Ghana’s first exercise in “Self-Government”; and after independence in March 1957, he had established an ambitious, far-reaching project of decolonization.1 Yet decolonization to Nkrumah was much 1 See: Jeffery S. Alham, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017); Matteo Grilli, Nkrumahism and African Nationalism: Ghana’s Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

D. Hodgkinson (B) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Melchiorre Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_12

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more than transforming a colony into an independent nation-state. It was a project of what Adom Getachew calls “worldmaking.”2 Decolonization, for Nkrumah, was about remaking societies and an international system that was more equitable and just. Implicit in such ambitious global visions was the notion that Africans should play a far more consequential role in world affairs. Nkrumah, of course, was not alone in his worldmaking ambitions. The 1960s was the decade when the Cold War went global.3 In the 1950s, Soviet and US foreign policies had been overwhelmingly focused on Europe, with the exception of Korea and China, and heavily shaped by the strategic possibilities of nuclear war. After his rise to power in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev began to take the Third World more seriously, establishing relationships with emergent, decolonizing countries and driving new initiatives to theorize non-capitalist development and agrarian reform.4 John F. Kennedy, who arrived in the White House in January 1961, also prioritized the Third World, in part as a way to move on from a high-stakes nuclear brinkmanship strategy pursued by his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower.5 It was partly in response to the 1950s Cold War that anti-colonial and post-colonial political leaders from across the world began to turn to each other—rather than Washington and Moscow—to share imaginations of internationalist political change and community and to create the institutions needed to realize them.6 The highpoint of this collective anti-colonial worldmaking came at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. There, leaders from twenty-nine African and Asian countries and liberation movements espoused their collective commitment to nuclear disarmament, the fight against racism and colonialism, and the need to “mobilize,” what Indonesian President Sukarno called, 2 Adom Getachew, “Introduction,” in World-Making After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 3 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. 4 Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 34–48. 5 Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 18–26. 6 On the role of the World Peace Council in African internationalist politics, see the chapter by Christiaens in this volume.

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“‘the Moral Violence of [Third World] nations’ in favour of peace.”7 As Vijay Prashad argues, the most important outcome of the conference was not a policy commitment but the “Bandung Spirit”: a belief that “the colonized world” should “claim its space in world affairs, not just as an adjunct of the First and Second Worlds, but as a player in its own right.”8 The Bandung Spirit was not just a statist vision. As Christopher J. Lee argues, this rubric “while ineluctably involving states as a political backdrop and at times as sources of support, sought to place their political aspirations in identity-based communities that extended beyond the formal boundaries of nation-states.”9 In the years following Bandung, anti-colonial organizing and “Third World” solidarities took diverse forms among political leaders, activists, intelligentsia and militant revolutionaries in new “hubs of decolonization” such as Cairo, Accra, Havana, Dar Es Salaam and Hanoi.10 From the perspective of Third World activists and state leaders, the American war in Vietnam was not some marginal conflict on the other side of the world but an important site of decolonization. The Bandung Spirit and Nkrumah’s worldmaking ambitions led him to Beijing, following the intensification of war after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. He had “dismiss[ed] counsel to remain in Accra where rumours of a coup circulated,”11 to travel to Hanoi to discuss with Hô` Chí Minh and the North Vietnamese leadership the possibility of entering negotiations with the US. Nkrumah’s foreign minister had presented his

7 George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956), 45–46. 8 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (London: The New Press, 2008), 45. 9 Christopher J. Lee, “The Rise of Third World Diplomacy: Success and Its Meanings at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,” in Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy, ed. Robert Hutchins and Jeremi Suri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 53. 10 Eric Burton, “Hubs of Decolonization: African Liberation Movements and ‘Eastern’ Connections in Cairo, Accra and Dar es Salaam,” in Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War “East”: Transnational Activism 1960–1990, ed. Lena Dallywater et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019). 11 Robert B. Rakove, “The Rise and Fall of Non-Aligned Mediation, 1961–66,” The International History Review 37,5 (2015): 1007.

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proposal to President Lyndon B. Johnson in August the previous year.12 However, all did not go to plan. Nkrumah had come under domestic criticism for his increasingly authoritarian rule and the country’s deepening economic crisis.13 His political enemies took advantage of his absence and on 24 February 1966, a group of army officers organized a coup. Nkrumah was powerless to stop them. In Beijing, his embassy closed its doors to him. His Chinese hosts nevertheless held the banquet that Nkrumah attended, in what Ali Mazrui calls “one of the most painful diplomatic occasions in modern history.”14 This story of Nkrumah’s banquet presents a historiographical challenge in thinking about the relationships between the war in Vietnam and contemporary histories in Africa. Much of the scholarship on the international dimensions of the American war in Vietnam has foregrounded protest as an object of study. Fascinating work has explored how the war inspired a generation of young Americans to not only oppose their government’s war policy in Vietnam, but also to create new “counter-cultures” that challenged the underlying political and social order of American society.15 Historians of different countries in “the West” have read the effects of the war in similar ways, as it “permeated the domestic political settings and cultural discourses in many countries to a surprising degree.”16 In West Germany, for instance, Wilfried Mausbach has shown how the Vietnam War became “a symbolic weapon” which young protestors used to take “aim at the cultural, political and

12 “Memorandum of Conversation—August 6 1965,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–65, vol. III, Vietnam (June–December 1965), Office of the History Archives, US Dept of State, available online at www.history.state.gov. 13 See Dennis Austin, “The February Coup, 1966,” in Ghana Observed: Essays on the Politics of a West African Republic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 102–110. 14 Ali Mazrui, “Nkrumah, Obote and Vietnam,” Transition 43 (1973): 37. 15 Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in the West Germany and United

States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: California University Press, 1994); Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). 16 Andreas Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner and Wilfried Mausbach, “Introduction: America’s War and the World,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, ed. Daum et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.

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social fabric.”17 Increasingly, though scholars have begun to question the extent of countercultural, anti-state narratives in explaining protests in these contexts during this era and it is this critical approach that we follow here. Starting a transnational history of the war’s effects in Africa by foregrounding protest is fraught with problems. The recent surge in “global” historiography—of which this book is a part—carries with it a dangerous inclination of many historians of the Global North to universalize “western” experiences as a common norm, without accounting for the contextual assumptions that such experiences are built upon or the contexts to which such norms are applied. To write a history which assumes that protest is the central object of study on the Vietnam War in Africa, or which assumes that protestors were anti-state or countercultural, is to write a story about the Global South using a script from dominant schools of the Global North. The imposition of stories and narrative forms, as many post-colonial theorists have argued, can be seen as the essence of colonialism.18 Yet, in avoiding the imposition of unsuitable interpretive frameworks, we should not resort to simplistic narratives of anti-colonial romanticism. Such narratives tend to ignore post-colonial authoritarianism and have “created a sense of disconnection between the failures of the post-colonial present and the complex visions of post-colonial futures expressed during moments of decolonization.”19 These are two of the reasons that historians of the Global South have been particularly defensive towards global and romantic narratives of historical change. But the critical stance of many Africanist historians towards global historiography has led to a tendency of defensive parochialism that can obscure genuine forms of transnationalism. Indeed, in speaking to one prominent Africanist historian on the paucity of transnational histories about Africa and Vietnam, he said: “Yes, perhaps

17 Wilfried Mausbach, “Auschwitz and Vietnam: West German Protest against America’s War during the 1960s,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World, ed. Daum et al., 298. 18 See for instance, Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Oxford: James Currey, 1981), 9. 19 Christopher J. Lee, “Introduction,” in Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 8.

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there’s a reason for that. There are none.”20 Nkrumah’s banquet, however, attests otherwise. Although many African state leaders and activists at the time were far more concerned by such international issues as the Congo Crisis (1960–1965) that involved the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba; or the Biafran civil war; or the struggles against White-minority rule in southern Africa, it does not mean that the war in Vietnam was marginal to events on the continent. So, how does one write a decolonial, transnational history of the Vietnam War in Africa? Considering how to approach this problem opens up fascinating sets of historical questions. What interactions did Africans have with events in Vietnam during this era? Did the war fire the imaginations and sense of injustice of African political leaders, soldiers, social activists and public at large, and if so, why? What were the political subjectivities of those that spoke out against the war, and what were their relationships with the state and broader political communities? These questions force us to step back from approaches that begin with protest and assume an antagonistic relationship between protestors and their states. To answer them substantially requires overcoming considerable methodological challenges and much more space than we have here.21 This chapter, therefore, instead seeks to open a vista from which the historiography of the Vietnam War in Africa might be meaningfully developed. To this end, we decentre protest and focus on four sets of transnational relationships to argue that the Vietnam War shaped African histories in contexts where politics was imagined in internationalist terms: primarily in the struggles over White-minority rule and in the states that aspired to lead worldmaking projects. As such, it explores: (a) how anti-colonial armed struggles created military interactions between Southeast Asia and African liberation movements; (b) how the Vietnam War was rendered a key issue in projects of anti-colonial worldmaking by ambitious post-colonial leaders; (c) why particular activist groups chose to lead anti-war demonstrations in solidarity with the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) and the North Vietnamese; and (d) how White conservatives in the US and Southern Africa created solidarities by imagining the war in Vietnam 20 Anonymous discussion with author (Oxford, 2019). 21 To date, the Vietnam Workers’ Party (VWP), military and Foreign Ministry archives

are closed to researchers. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2012), 17–18.

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Illustration 12.1 Zhou Ruizhuang, “Vigorously support the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America” (Shanghai, c. 1964).22

and the repression of African nationalism as two fronts in a global struggle against communism (Illustration 12.1).

Revolutionary Soldiering: Anti-colonial Struggles and Transnational Fighters International solidarity in anti-colonial struggles made for a great source of imagery and rhetoric across the world in the 1960s. Yet the realities of what solidarities existed between Vietnamese revolutionaries and African liberation movements are harder to pin down. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen argues that Vietnam’s socialist leaders were unable to create a “Havana of the East” and export their revolutionary expertise because of the conflicts

22 Chinese Posters.net, “Foreign Friends: African Friends,” International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, Stefan R. Landsberger, private collection, https://chinesepo sters.net/themes/african-friends.php.

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in Southeast Asia that persisted up until the 1980s.23 To some African anti-colonial leaders, Vietnam’s conflicts actively worked against their own struggles for national liberation. In 1967, for instance, Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) that was fighting against Portuguese colonialism, argued that: “The struggle in Vietnam seems to overshadow every struggle everywhere in the world […] the American press… are not covering us because they are preoccupied with Vietnam […] As long as there is no peace in Vietnam, Portugal will never think of negotiating until she has been completely ruined in Africa.”24 The views of Nguyen and Mondlane notwithstanding, the Vietnamese wars against French rule and US aggression were a source of tactical, strategic and political inspiration for many African liberation movements. African military leaders and soldiers in liberation movements—and particularly those of Algeria—had direct experiences of and lasting relationships with Vietnamese revolutionaries. These relationships were primarily concerned with the practicalities of armed struggle and, as such, were shaped by the period’s global architectures of soldiering: both the inter-continental operations of late-colonial armies and the Cold War era’s complex networks of international military assistance and cooperation. Overlooked in new literature on Cold War military histories, these transnational experiences and the exchange of strategy between Vietnam and African liberation movements shaped the wartime conduct of the continent’s most iconic anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and South Africa.25 Decolonization was a particularly violent and brutal process in Southeast Asia and in settler colonies in Africa. Resisting demands for majority rule following World War II, colonial and breakaway settler regimes attempted to coerce national liberation movements into submission,

23 Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, 234. 24 Helen Kitchen, “Conversation with Eduardo Mondlane,” Africa Report 12,8 (1

November 1967): 31. 25 For new Cold War military histories, see Westad, The Global Cold War; Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2013); Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Blessing-MilesTendi, “Southern Africa Beyond the West,” Journal of Southern African Studies 43 (2017).

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sparking protracted wars of liberation. For Francophone Africa and Southeast Asia, these histories were not just comparative but integrative, particularly that of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)’s war against French rule in Algeria. This conflict, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, cost more than half a million lives26 and was described by Frantz Fanon as the essence of anti-colonial struggle.27 Yet the first direct encounters that many FLN soldiers had with organized anti-colonial war was the Viê.t Minh’s revolutionary warfare against the French in Indochina. The war in Algeria began six months after France had withdrawn from Indochina, where since 1946 the French had fought a bitter conflict against the Viê.t Minh culminating in their humiliating defeat at Ðiê.n Biên Phu. The Indochina War was also “the first large-scale anti-colonial war in which African soldiers took part.”28 122,900 North Africans fought for the French along with 60,340 Africans from French West Africa in the French Expeditionary Force.29 While being a tirailleur 30 gave these soldiers some status and a wage, they—and particularly those from south of the Sahara—were often untrained for counterinsurgency missions and typically had to endure belittling racial discrimination from French comrades. These tirailleurs were also on the receiving end of the Viê.t Minh’s revolutionary warfare. Organized around the concept of Dau Tranh (armed struggle), the Viê.t Minh embraced Maoist ideas of protracted war proceeding through several stages and had a twin-pronged strategy that put political control on equal footing with military success.31 In line with Dau Tranh were a series of tactics and strategies that sought to psychologically destabilize the enemy, which included guerrilla warfare, civilian battlefield participation, POW “re-education” camps and propaganda campaigns—both in the field and in international public spheres.32 ij

26 Westad, The Global Cold War, 89. 27 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Black Cat, 1963), 89. 28 Ruth Ginio, The French Army and Its African Soldiers: The Years of Decolonization

(Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 87. 29 Ibid., 86. 30 A French African colonial soldier. 31 Douglas Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986). 32 George K. Tanham, Communist Revolutionary Warfare: From the Vietminh to the

Viet Cong (London: Praeger Security International, 1967), 40.

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Viê.t Minh propagandists infiltrated French camps and targeted the thousands of African tirailleurs with anti-colonial rhetoric urging them to revolt against their superiors. (This tactic was also used to devastating effect on African American GIs in the late 1960s.)33 The direct effects of this propaganda on tirailleurs are hard to judge but it clearly tapped into a well of discontent: between May 1953 and March 1954, African soldiers killed three French commanders and attacked several more. The French military command was so worried about the effects of the Viê.t Minh’s anti-colonial propaganda on their African soldiers that they established the Bureau des Affaires Africaines in 1952 to monitor this activity.34 Tirailleurs’ experiences of the Viê.t Minh’s revolutionary warfare had important bearings on their subsequent lives and on the Algerian armed struggle. Indochina scarred many: hospitalization was common after a soldier’s tour and many returned with opium or alcohol addictions.35 Others dealt with their trauma by turning to politics. For some, the war deepened their sense of professional loyalty to France while for others it sparked a militant anti-colonialism. In the early 1950s, radical Algerian nationalists such as Krim Belkacem and Ahmed Ben Bella, who had themselves fought for the French in World War II, welcomed these veterans into the movement as skilled fighters in the war of independence.36 These soldiers and the direct links between the FLN and the North Vietnamese contributed to the FLN’s successes. As Jeffrey Byrne argues, in the early stages of the war, the FLN’s armed wing, the armée de libération nationale (ALN), composed of many former veterans, was the crucible of an effective campaign of urban and rural guerrilla warfare. They initially won over important sections of Muslim opinion, who were outraged by the French military and police’s brutal ratissage approach to dissent, which involved extrajudicial detention, torture and summary

33 See David Cortwright, “Black GI Resistance during the Vietnam War,” Vietnam Generation 2 (1990), 56. 34 Ginio, The French Army, 89. 35 Ibid., 90. 36 Ben Bella, who became Algeria’s first president, had once “boasted that de Gaulle himself had decorated him after the Battle of Monte Cassino.” Jeffrey J. Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31.

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execution.37 But by late 1958, the French military leaders had reversed these gains through a new counterinsurgency strategy (which Pierre Asselin argues was a model for Ngô Ðình Diê.m’s subsequent South Vietnamese counterinsurgency operations).38 The French recruited thousands of harkis , local Muslim troops; developed an extensive psychological operations programme; built a 320 km, electrified border fence across the desert to stop FLN infiltration; and resettled two million villagers into “protected villages.” The political wind also changed in France’s favour after de Gaulle, who became French President through a coup in 1958, won over moderate Muslim support by promising a New Algeria after the war. Ironically, these French strategies of utopian political rhetoric and communist-style re-education were, in part, inspired by Indochina and “brought to Algeria by veterans of the Viê.t Minh prison camps.”39 In response to this sea change, the FLN sought to strategically harness the Bandung Spirit. The movement had long relied on international Third World solidarity. Since 1956, the FLN had run operations out of neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco (and Mali also became a rear base after its independence in 1960).40 ALN soldiers were also trained in Nasser’s Egypt following the Suez Crisis, where several North Vietnamese instructors were based.41 At Bandung, the FLN leaders publicly affirmed their solidarity with a much more far-flung set of Third World leaders and movements, including Hô` Chí Minh and the North Vietnamese.42 The most concrete form that this solidarity could take was military assistance, which by the late 1950s, under the rubric of international solidarity, took place within a new global architecture of revolutionary soldiering. By that time, the FLN was particularly enamoured with Cuban revolutionaries. But they also looked East. In April 1959, a delegation of ALN leaders travelled to Hanoi and Beijing. Though China far outstripped 37 James McDougal, “The Impossible Republic: The Reconquest of Algeria and the Decolonization of France, 1945–62,” Journal of Modern History 89 (2017): 787. 38 Pierre Asselin, “Global Revolutionary Currents, the Vietnamese Revolution, and the Origins of the American War,” African Identities 16 (2018): 195. 39 Ethan M. Orwin, “Squad Leaders Today, Village Leaders Tomorrow: Muslim Auxiliaries and Tactical Politics in Algeria, 1956–62,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23,2 (2012): 342. 40 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 82–87, Burton, “Hubs of Decolonization,” 31–40. 41 Asselin, “Global Revolutionary Currents,” 194. 42 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 50.

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Vietnam in its material contributions,43 Hanoi was revered for its strategic expertise. One of the trip’s main events was a briefing by North Vietnam’s Minister of Defence, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the mastermind of Ðiê.n Biên Phu. A central debate among revolutionary strategists of this era was over the point at which a conflict leaves the guerrilla stage and enters the decisive, conventional stage.44 Giáp cautioned the Algerians not to try and move on too soon. “Like any great revolutionary endeavour,” Giáp told them, “the Algerian people’s endeavour to liberate their country currently faces temporary difficulties.”45 In contrast to the Cuban foco theory of revolutionary warfare, Giáp advised the Algerians to refocus on winning widespread political support, particularly from the peasantry. “Victory proceeds from the accuracy of the political line”, he argued: the FLN should agitate in rural areas and promise peasants land as well as gain the French public’s sympathies and inspire antiwar protests to sap their enemies’ political will, as the Viê.t Minh had so effectively done.46 It is hard to disentangle the precise effects of this meeting. After it, in a military review, the ALN’s leader, Colonel Houari Boumediene, re-emphasized the centrality of explaining the benefits of national liberation to peasants.47 More significant, however, was the FLN’s concerted internationalization of their struggle during these years. Despite French military gains, the FLN and its allies “snatched a diplomatic victory from under the noses of the French by adroit manipulation of international opinion and the support of the powerful forces of anticolonialism.”48 Just as with the Viê.t Minh in Indochina, the emergence of a popular French anti-war movement proved critical in France’s decision to negotiate an end to the war in 1962. North Vietnam’s provision of strategic expertise to African liberation movements was diminished during the American war in Vietnam, between 1964 and 1975. Yet Vietnamese revolutionaries’ experience fighting US ij

43 Between 1964 and 1985, China trained an estimated 20,000 fighters from 19 African countries. Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (London: Bodley Head, 2019), 65. 44 Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, 34, 50. 45 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 61. 46 Pike, PAVN , 399. 47 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 63. 48 O. Peter St. John, “Algeria: A Case Study of Insurgency in the New World Order,”

Small Wars and Insurgencies 7,2 (1996): 200.

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forces refined their military thinking. The failure of operations such as the 1968 Tet Offensive demonstrated the dangers of moving too quickly into the final conventional stage of protracted revolutionary warfare. By the same measure, the war showed the remarkable successes of guerrilla warfare. Through such means, on the one hand, military capabilities could be sustained deep into South Vietnam through civilian support as well as a labyrinth of tunnel networks on the Cambodian border and in the Iron Triangle near Saigon.49 Significant political gains, on the other hand, could be made from US airpower attacks, such as the carpet bombing during 1965–1968 and the Christmas bombing of 1972, which were propaganda victories for the Viet Cong at home and in encouraging anti-war protests abroad. These insights informed the Vietnamese military advice given to African liberation movements in the late 1970s. By the mid-1970s, the global focus of Cold War rivalry had shifted to southern Africa, where liberation movements were fighting Whitesegregationist regimes and where civil wars were taking hold in Angola and Mozambique. In 1978, South African and Zimbabwean liberation army leaders visited Hanoi to discuss their strategies with Vietnamese military leaders.50 In October 1978, Oliver Tambo, president of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), and Joe Slovo, a leader of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), travelled to Hanoi to learn from the now twice-victorious Vietnamese military. Up to then, MK had led a largely ineffective campaign of armed struggle out of neighbouring host states.51 The leaders met with Giáp, who advised against military confrontation in favour of a protracted approach to the struggle, rooted in urban political agitation and Armed Propaganda. According to Howard Barrell, this caused a “Damascene moment” for Slovo, and a significant

49 George Herring, “Vietnam Remembered,” The Journal of American History 73 (1986): 152–164. 50 The military leaders of the Zimbabwean African People’s Union visited Hanoi in 1978. See Dumiso Dabengwa, “Zipra in the Zimbabwean War of National Liberation,” in Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, ed. Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 1995). 51 Tom Lodge, “The African National Congress in South Africa, 1976–1983: Guerrilla War and Armed Propaganda,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 3, 1/2 (1983/4): 153–180.

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revision in MK strategy in 1979, away from the isolated vision of military victory towards the more expansive form of urban unrest that they undertook against the Apartheid state in the 1980s.52 As these histories show, the realities of what international solidarity between Vietnamese and African armed struggles involved was a lot more complex than romantic anti-colonial rhetoric suggests. Vietnam’s revolutionary leaders probably wished to export their military principles more than they did. But significant bonds did nevertheless exist. Out of the African tirailleurs that fought against the Viê.t Minh, many became anticolonial nationalists on their return home to places like Algeria, while others continued in colonial service. Vietnamese strategies too spread among African military leaders, who travelled to Hanoi to learn how Vietnam defeated a colonial power and a superpower and shaped their thinking on how to win their own struggles.

Anti-colonial Worldmaking: Cold War Geopolitics and Non-Aligned Mediation In the wake of the Bandung Conference, a multitude of incipient projects of Third Worldist solidarity emerged with increasing cohesion between them. Holding its first conference in Belgrade in 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) sought to give those countries not formally aligned to either the capitalist West or the communist East a platform to collectively advance the fight against racism and colonialism and to work towards international peace.53 Africa’s newly independent leaders, who had spent years leading anti-colonial movements and protests with visions of social and political transformation, committed their states to nonalignment and enshrined this principle in the founding charter of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. At the core of non-alignment was the belief that the Third World could be a revolutionary force in remaking a more just geopolitical order. Yet this did not mean African member states adhered around a single vision of non-aligned worldmaking. Among the more conservative, Western-aligned African regimes, 52 Howard Barrell, Conscripts to Their Age: African National Congress Operational Strategy, 1976–1986 (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1993), https://www.sahistory.org. za/archive/conscripts-their-age-african-national-congress-operational-strategy-1976-1986howard, 78. 53 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 71.

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like Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya, the espousal of non-aligned rhetoric frequently did not square with their own pro-Western foreign policy.54 By contrast, the most radical African advocates of non-alignment—such as Nkrumah, Mali’s Modibo Keïta, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere—tended to be those leaders who were most ideologically committed to socialism, pan-Africanism, and Third World internationalism. They believed that their efforts to enact revolutionary or socialist transformation domestically required an equally strong commitment to anti-colonial worldmaking abroad, which made them some of the most enthusiastic supporters and hosts to the African liberation movements discussed above.55 For these leaders, Vietnam was a sort of reckoning for their commitment to anti-colonialism and global transformation. By the mid-1960s, a desire to broker peace in Southeast Asia became a concrete objective for some of these leaders. While the limitations of such efforts were clear almost immediately, revisiting these diplomatic attempts to shape the events of the Vietnam War reveal an important, oft-forgotten history of post-colonial African state leaders’ early global ambitions. To understand African statesmen’s involvement in the Vietnam War, it is first important to recognize their sense of the possibilities and limitations of non-alignment. This had been significantly shaped by the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s: the first major event where African leaders were able to put their commitment to a non-aligned foreign policy into practice. In June 1960, led by Patrice Lumumba, Congo (Kinshasa) formally gained independence from Belgium. Less than two weeks later, its mineral-rich province of Katanga declared its intention to secede from the newly created African republic. In response, Lumumba sought to reunify the country by seeking military support from first, the US, then the UN, and finally the USSR. The subsequent conflict over the Katangese secession pitted the Congolese army and a 18-nation United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) force against the breakaway territory, which was backed by the Belgian government, international mining interests and foreign mercenaries from Southern Africa, Britain and Belgium.56 Over the course of 1960, leading non-aligned states, 54 Faith Mabera, “Kenya’s Foreign Policy in Context (1963–2015),” South African Journal of International Affairs 23,3 (2016): 370. 55 Getachew, Worldmaking, 4–5. 56 Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold: The UN, the Cold War and White

Supremacy in Africa (London: Hurst, 2014), 40.

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like Nkrumah’s Ghana, played a central role in the creation of ONUC, providing it with troops and personnel and helping to guide its subsequent operations. Ultimately, the Congo Crisis produced some bitterly disappointing outcomes for non-aligned African leaders. The assassination of Lumumba in January 1961, “in a plot that included the United States and the Belgian governments” and the subsequent emergence of the US and Belgian-backed General Joseph Mobutu as President, were read as hard warnings of the dangers that the Cold War posed to newly independent states.57 On the other hand, the experience did also consolidate Third World collective action in international forums, helping, these countries to “crystallize the power of the NAM at the [United Nations].” In December 1960, for example, the Afro-Asian bloc within the UN, in response to the Crisis, led the passage of the General Assembly Resolution 1514, which affirmed the importance of the granting of independence to all colonial countries and peoples. Hence, the legacies of the Congo Crisis for non-alignment are complex: while the event showed ambitious African state leaders, such as Nkrumah, the limitations of their control over international affairs even on their own continent, it also demonstrated the possibilities that were open to them to advance “the normative agenda of decolonization” on the world stage.58 These formative experiences in the Congo were an important precursor to the approach that Nkrumah and other radical African non-aligned leaders took to the mounting conflict in Southeast Asia. To an extent, it deepened their resolve to intervene in world affairs, particularly those affecting their Third World compatriots. Indeed, for a brief period, in the mid-1960s, as Robert B. Rakove argues, African states committed to non-alignment, “earnestly explored the prospects of a negotiated peace in South[e]ast Asia.”59 This was particularly evident following the Johnson’s administration’s announcement in December 1965 of a “peace offensive,” wherein the US government halted their bombing of North Vietnam and called for a ceasefire and multinational negotiations to end the war. In the aftermath of this announcement, Johnson sent US envoys around the 57 Jean Allman, “The Fate of All of Us: African Counterrevolutions and the Ends of 1968,” American Historical Review 123,3 (2018): 729. 58 Alanna O’Malley, “Ghana, India, and the Transnational Dynamics of the Congo Crisis at the United Nations, 1960–61,” The International History Review 37,5 (2015): 970. 59 Rakove, “The Rise and Fall of Non-Aligned Mediation,” 1009.

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world supposedly in an effort to win international support for the new initiative.60 Buoyed by a new optimism that peace could be attainable, African proponents of non-alignment joined Nkrumah in attempting to persuade Johnson to enter negotiations that would put an end to the US war effort in Vietnam. One such African statesman was Mali’s first president, Modibo Keïta. Since coming to power in September 1960, the Malian socialist leader had proven himself to be a committed pan-Africanist, welcoming members of the Nigerien Sawaba opposition movement into his country and also allowing ALN camps on Malian soil.61 His ability to impress Kennedy in a meeting with the US president in Washington prior to the Belgrade conference62 and the leadership role that he played in mediating an African-led peace agreement between Algeria and Morocco over a border dispute in October 1963, confirmed his reputation as an articulate African spokesperson for non-alignment (Illustration 12.2).63 Keïta had also actively sought to strengthen relations with other non-African regimes committed to Third World Internationalism. Mali, for example, had emerged as “the most openly pro-Chinese of the African states.”64 Moreover, like Nkrumah, the Malian president had made a point of publicly aligning his regime with the North Vietnamese, allowing them to maintain an embassy in Bamako, while consistently criticizing US “imperialist” aggression in Southeast Asia.65 In October 1964, he even made a friendship visit to Hanoi to meet with Hô` Chí Minh, where the two leaders released a joint communique that committed both of their governments

60 Thomas J. Noer, Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 292. 61 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 84. 62 Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Black

Dog & Leventhal, 2005 [1965]), 521. 63 Patricia Berko Wild, “The Organization of African Unity and the Algerian-Moroccan Border Conflict: A Study of New Machinery of Peacekeeping and for the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes among African States,” International Organization 20 (1966): 18–36. 64 Tareq Y. Ismael, “The People’s Republic of China and Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 9,4 (1971): 507. 65 Mazrui, “Nkrumah,” 37; Pascal J. Imperato, Mali: A Search for Direction (New York: Routledge, 2019), 143.

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Illustration 12.2 Malian President, Modibo Keïta, meeting with US President, John F. Kennedy, at the White House in September 1961.66

to national struggles for independence against “bellicose and aggressive imperialism.” 67 In spite of his opposition to the US war in Southeast Asia, Keïta twice made overtures to President Johnson on the topic of Vietnam between mid-1965 and early 1966. Most notably, in February 1966, Keïta, encouraged by the “peace offensive,” reached out to Johnson through a personal letter, in which he stressed to the president the need “to recognise the National Liberation Front (NLF), both as his main adversary in South Vietnam, but also for the ‘preponderant’ role the revolutionary organization enjoyed in the country.”68 In spite of the Malian president’s close contacts with Hanoi and Beijing, Johnson showed little interest in engaging with Keïta on this issue. Indeed, just a week prior to the arrival of Keïta’s letter, the US had already lifted their 37-day bombing halt on North Vietnam and with it any optimism related to the “peace offensive” evaporated.

66 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Modibo_Keita#/media/File:JFK WHP-KN-C18793_(cropped).jpg. 67 United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , “Text of Ho-Chi Minh and Modibo Keita Joint Communique,” Hanoi VNA International Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts (26 October 1964), 209–210. 68 Rakove, “Rise and Fall,” 1005.

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Keïta was not the only African leader to be initially encouraged by the news of the “peace offensive.” In January 1966, the post-coup Algerian government of President Boumediene also made a concerted effort to advance the cause of peace in Southeast Asia. In contrast to Keïta, US officials appeared to take Algerian overtures in relation to mediation in Vietnam seriously. Following a 90-minute meeting with Boumediene and his Foreign Minister in January 1966, US envoy G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams cabled Washington proclaiming that he “sincerely believe[d] [that the US government had] hit pay dirt,” as the Algerians appeared “genuinely interested” in supporting Johnson’s “peace offensive,” expressing “a strong desire to be of any assistance possible.”69 Given the Algerian state’s close historical ties with the North Vietnamese,70 Williams was optimistic that the Algerians could play a key role in mediating the conflict, providing a backchannel to exchange messages between the US and the NLF and Hanoi. In the aftermath of this supposedly positive meeting, US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, replied dismissively to Algiers that Washington did “not want to appear to be ‘negotiating’ our position on this important and fundamental question [i.e. the possibility of negotiations that included the Viet Cong] with third parties only peripherally involved [i.e. Algeria].”71 This communique effectively shut the door on Algeria playing a meaningful role in brokering peace and the opportunity was lost. By 1967, Boumediene, who remained publicly supportive of the NLF and the North Vietnamese, was convinced that Washington “was punishing [the] Algeria[n] [government] for its stance on Vietnam.”72 Both the Johnson administration’s resumption of bombing at the end of January 1966, and their apparent indifference to African states’ credible overtures prior to this, supported the North Vietnamese government’s contention that the “peace offensive” was an American charade designed to disguise the fact that the US was not seriously committed to achieving peace in the region.73

69 Ibid. 70 Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 201. 71 Rakove, “Rise and Fall,” 1005. 72 Robert B. Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 245. 73 Rakove, “Rise and Fall,” 1005.

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While efforts among non-aligned African leaders to broker peace in Vietnam effectively slowed down after the resumption of the US bombing in January 1966, and particularly after the removal of Nkrumah the following month, they did not cease all together. As George Roberts shows, in 1967, Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s president, twice attempted to shift international opinion on the Vietnam War in favour of peace. After unsuccessfully encouraging Pope Paul VI to discuss the prospects for peace in Vietnam with Johnson, during the US President’s visit to the Vatican in December 1966, Nyerere took a more dramatic step the following month. In a personal letter to Johnson, the Tanzanian President stressed that he believed, based on his discussions with North Vietnamese diplomats in Dar es Salaam, that North Vietnam was sincerely open to reaching a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Nyerere wrote that the “real question is whether the United States of America is powerful enough to be able to talk with the small nation which has defied it and bring those talks to a conclusion which means peace for the unhappy Vietnamese people and relief to the rest of the world.”74 In the end, Johnson merely responded to Nyerere in a letter, which reiterated his well-worn position that the US would only accede to halting bombing and entering into peace negotiations, if the North Vietnamese and the NLF offered reliable assurances that they would not exploit such US actions for their own military gain.75 Nyerere’s peace initiatives, therefore, came to nothing, like those of Keïta, Boumediene and Nkrumah before him. In all four instances, African leaders with strong connections to communist Asia and a firm commitment to Third World internationalism and non-alignment, demonstrated genuine interest and initiative in attempting to facilitate communication between the US and North Vietnam and the NLF. In all these instances, however, their efforts were either formally rebuffed or not taken seriously by the Johnson administration. As the 1960s ended, the promise of a revolutionary Third World internationalism that had so excited political leaders and activists in hubs of decolonization across the continent in the early post-independence period had waned. As Jean Allman argues, by 1968, the forced removal from power of many of the leading lights of Pan-African non-alignment

74 George Roberts, Politics, Decolonization, and the Cold War in Dar es Salaam, 1965– 72 (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2016), 141. 75 Ibid., 142.

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(Lumumba, Ben Bella, Nkrumah, Keïta), caused post-colonial Africa to enter a period of “reversal and retrenchment,” where “most African freedom dreamers [now] understood the inevitability of the nation-state and the entrenchment of a world order in which they had to face either east or west.” Within such a geopolitical context, the “spaces for radical political imagination [… and] a new global politics of the possible” were dramatically narrowed.76 Part of this retrenchment was the abandonment of any African attempt to lead non-aligned mediation of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Increasingly, “the conscious rhetorical restraint and moderation” that had marked many non-aligned African statesmen’s approach to Vietnam for much of the 1960s evaporated.77 These shifting political sands were on display at the Third Conference of Non-Aligned States in Lusaka in September 1970, where the NAM emphatically called for “the immediate, total and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign forces from Vietnam”; and where the conference’s “greatest ovation” was reserved for the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam.78 Angered by the Nixon administration’s continued escalation of a war that the newly elected US president had promised to end during his successful 1968 electoral campaign, many African leaders began to adopt a more critical, adversarial stance against the American war in Vietnam. By this time, as a result of the war, “US prestige in the non-aligned world had reached its nadir.”79 While it is important not to romanticize these visions of anti-colonial worldmaking or the Third World Internationalist solidarity initiatives that emerged out of them, it would also be a mistake to dismiss these efforts as historically unimportant. Revisiting African attempts to alter the course of the Vietnam War is significant as it offers an important perspective on the globally ambitious roles that African statesmen aspired to play on the world stage in the years following independence and the possibilities and limitations that their non-aligned diplomatic interventions faced in attempting to reshape the global political order.

76 Allman, “The Fate of All of Us,” 730. 77 Rakove, “Rise and Fall,” 1004. 78 “The ‘Nonaligned’ at Lusaka,” The New York Times (13 September 1970), 14. 79 Rakove, Kennedy, 248.

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Vietnam War Protest: Third Worldist Solidarities and Post-colonial State-Building The Vietnam War was not just an issue in state diplomacy and military struggles: in some African contexts, it was also woven into popular ideologies by activists as an example of the dangers of neocolonialism. While most Africans had never been to Vietnam, many African activists did maintain aspirational connections—that is “a collectively held belief that unknown others in the world shared a similar set of ideas and goals, and that they are simultaneously working to enact them”80 —with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during the war. This was evident in the numerous African protests against US aggression in Southeast Asia. Yet these protests cannot be understood outside their post-colonial contexts. As the 1960s progressed, and African state leaders increasingly struggled to deliver on their independence promises of social transformation, the turn towards some form of single-party or military rule was widespread.81 A key component of these processes of political centralization was not just the banning of opposition parties, but also the bringing of civil society organizations, like trade unions, more tightly under the control and direction of African ruling regimes. In such circumstances, African state leaders often used old structures of anti-colonial organising and appealed to socialist, nationalist or revolutionary ideologies and rhetoric as a means of mobilizing supporters and consolidating popular legitimacy.82 This did not mean, however, that these anti-Vietnam War protests were simple manifestations of state power. As historians of the former socialist states have also shown, activists’ political activity in such contexts should not simply be understood through the “use of binary categories […] such as oppression and resistance, repression and freedom, the state and the people […] official culture and counterculture.”83

80 Victoria Langland, “Transnational Connections,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 20. 81 Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre, “Introduction—Student Activism in an Era of Decolonization,” Africa 89 (2019): 1–14. 82 Sara Dorman, “Nationalism in African Politics,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, ed. William R. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 8. 83 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.

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Aside from a few exceptions, which we discuss below, Vietnam protests tended to happen in national contexts where Third Worldist internationalism had been deeply inscribed into popular political imaginations by nationalist leaders at the moment of decolonization, and where activists were closely imbricated in these projects. This shared language between protestors and the state, also meant that, in contrast to stereotypical images of anti-Vietnam War protestors in the West, African demonstrations in solidarity with the NLF and the North Vietnamese were frequently aligned to, and sometimes even organized in concert with, post-colonial ruling regimes. These protests highlight the value that activists placed upon Bandung projects of anti-colonial worldmaking and state leaders attempts to mobilize around these discourses in increasingly complex and fractious post-colonial political contexts. The aspirational connections forged in such protests provided one of the main avenues through which the Vietnam War came to animate the lives and political imaginations of many African activists throughout the course of the long sixties. While events unfolding on the continent—like the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the UDI in Rhodesia in 1965, the Biafra War in Nigeria and anti-colonial wars of liberation in southern Africa—were more central to the political socialization of Africa’s younger generation than the war in Vietnam, protests in solidarity with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese did emerge. In some instances, as in much of the West, the Vietnam War did open public space for new forms of political dissent that were not sanctioned by domestic African governments. This occurred in those states, like Mobutu’s Congo (Kinshasa) and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, whose governments were closely aligned to the United States. In early January 1968, for example, Mobutu Sese Seko invited his honoured guest, US Vice President Hubert Humphrey, to visit the Patrice Lumumba monument in Kinshasa. News of this intended visit enraged local Congolese youth, who, as Pedro Monaville argues, “held Humphrey accountable for US interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhere” and also viewed the US government as “one of the main instigators of Lumumba’s assassination.” In the ensuing protest against Humphrey’s visit, organized by the Congolese Student Union, “three hundred protestors gathered near the monument, pelt[ing] vegetables at Humphrey’s motorcade, burn[ing] the American flag, and chant[ing]

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pro-Vietnam slogans” to the embarrassment of Mobutu.84 Given the lingering outrage and resentment over the destructive role that international actors had played during the Congo Crisis, particularly in their support of Katanganese rebels and the orchestration of Lumumba’s assassination, it is not surprising that Vietnam’s struggle against a foreign aggressor resonated so strongly with Congolese students. Examples like the Kinshasa protests in 1968, however, represented the exception in post-colonial Africa.85 More commonly, African protests against US aggression in Southeast Asia occurred in those states, like Mali, Algeria and Tanzania, which, as we have seen, were deeply committed to a project of Third World Internationalism. In such cases, these African governments maintained strong and very public bonds of solidarity with the North Vietnamese and the NLF and were prone to levy fierce and open criticisms against the US war policy in Southeast Asia. As such, these protests went alongside solidarity campaigns and were either organized in concert with ruling regimes, or they received their tacit consent and approval. In equating their own national struggles for liberation, decolonization or nation-state-building to those of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, these African regimes were encouraging citizens to see anti-Vietnam War protests as an opportunity to both affirm their commitment to these states’ post-colonial vision of worldmaking, while, at the same time, enabling protestors to imagine themselves and their national governments as being “one part of a larger, Third World struggle against imperialism.”86 Additionally, in invoking the US intervention of Vietnam as an act of imperialism, ruling parties sought to further remind their own citizens of the “need for self-reliance, as a defence against neo-colonial predation” at home.87 But while the influence of African regimes over Vietnam demonstrations was apparent, to read activists’ participation in such protests solely as an example of post-colonial states’ coercive capacity, ignores activists’ own underlying belief in transformational projects of 84 Pedro Monaville, “How Third World Students Liberated the West,” Chimurenga (2016), http://chimurengachronic.co.za/how-third-world-students-liberated-the-west/. 85 On this same trip, similar, smaller protests accompanied Humphrey’s visits to US allies in Ethiopia and Kenya, “A Big Warm Welcome for Mr. Humphrey,” Daily Nation (14 January 1968), 8. 86 Langland, “Transnational Connections,” 20. 87 Roberts, Politics, Decolonisation, 150.

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decolonization and worldmaking of which the Vietnam War was a potent political symbol. The three examples of Mali, Algeria and Tanzania, which all witnessed large public demonstrations of solidarity with the North Vietnamese and the NLF, illustrate these points. In the case of Mali, in March 1965, several thousand Malian labourers made their way from the headquarters of the government-aligned National Union of Malian Workers (UNTM) to the US Embassy in Bamako to protest US “imperialist” interventions in Asia and Africa. Once there, the demonstration, which was led by the organization’s General Secretary, Mamadou Sissoko, echoed President Keïta’s party line on Vietnam, condemning “the colonialist policy of American imperialism in Southeast Asia,” and equating US interventions there with “the provocations staged by American imperialism in the Congo, [and] Uganda.”88 In reiterating Keïta’s position on Vietnam, such public declarations of solidarity with the NLF and the North Vietnamese on the part of Malian officials and citizens could also be read as a demonstration of protestors’ continued commitment to not only the internationalist Third World struggle against US imperialism, but also their loyalty to Keïta’s socialist nation-state-building project and his Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Democrátique Africain (US-RDA) regime. Similarly, in Algeria, the FLN government also encouraged and organized public displays of solidarity with the Viet Cong. In December 1966, as the Algerian General Secretary of the Minister of Foreign Affairs formally hosted the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) ambassador to Algeria, the FLN government declared a National Vietnamese Solidarity Week to commemorate the 6th anniversary of the creation of the NLF. The week’s festivities included a demonstration in front of the US Embassy, where several hundred Algerians condemned “the criminal war waged by the United States in Vietnam.” At the end of this week of solidarity, “a mass meeting in Algiers saw more than one thousand Algerian workers, students and women chanting ‘Johnson is the murderer’, ‘Yankees go home’, ‘Down with U.S. imperialists!’ and

88 CIA, “Sissoko Condemns US Policy,” Moscow TASS International Service, Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, 47–48, 9 (March 1965), I3.

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‘Long live Vietnam!’89 These protests very much echoed official proclamations of the post-coup government of Boumediene, who in that same month announced the creation of the Algerian Committee of Investigation into US Crimes in Vietnam, composed of all government-aligned national organizations and tasked with the job of “investigat[ing] the crimes committed daily by the Americans in South Vietnam.”90 Finally, the case of Tanzania also attests to the importance that the Vietnam War played in animating the domestic political landscape of some African countries. Throughout the 1960s, largely on account of the popular appeal of Nyerere and his unique brand of African socialism, Ujamaa, Dar es Salaam had developed into a “hub of decolonization.” In addition to attracting high-profiled leftist luminaries like Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis, the city also came to be populated by “different strands” of young activists from across the world.91 Within this vibrant political context, unfolding events in Southeast Asia were followed closely. Yet, for much of the early stages of the Vietnam War, Nyerere had remained somewhat reluctant to publicly criticize the American war policy in Southeast Asia. This changed, however, in October 1967, when the Tanzanian president delivered a scathing critique of US policy in the region, while giving a speech at the TANU National Convention in Mwanza. In that speech, Nyerere, branded the war “as probably the most vicious and all-enveloping […] which has been known to mankind”92 and urged the Americans to effect an “immediate and unconditional” end to bombing of North Vietnam and to find a peaceful settlement to the conflict on the basis of the Geneva Agreement of 1954.93

89 Ngoc H. Huynh, “The Time-Honoured Friendship: A History of VietnameseAlgerian Relations,” College Undergraduate Electronic Research Journal: University of Pennsylvania (2016): 53–54, https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/214/. 90 CIA, “Groups to Investigate Crimes in Vietnam,” Algerian News Service in Arabic, Daily Reports, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, 246–252 (20 December 1966), I2-I3. 91 Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard I. Jobs and David M. Pomfret (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 188–189. 92 Rakove, Kennedy, 248. 93 Roberts, Politics, Decolonization, 141.

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In the aftermath of Nyerere’s Mwanza speech, throughout the first half of 1968, as Roberts notes, public displays of solidarity between North Vietnam and Tanzania became increasingly common. As in Mali and Algeria, many of these displays were organized by the ruling party. In March 1968, for example, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) hosted a “Solidarity with Vietnam Week,” wherein the ruling party hailed the NLF’s war against US aggression as “the greatest pillar of liberation in modern times.” Subsequently, different TANU-affiliated organizations offered displays of solidarity to the NLF and the North Vietnamese.94 Most notably, in July 1968, the University College branch of TYL organized a protest outside of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam to commemorate the fourteenth anniversary of the Geneva Accords. This was the first student protest that had been permitted by the ruling party since the infamous October 1966 student National Service demonstrations.95 After having their request to meet with the US Ambassador to Tanzania declined, the students left a “Note of Protest Against U.S. Imperialist Aggression in Vietnam” for him at the Embassy, which called for the “unconditional withdrawal of ‘Yankee and their satellite troops from South Vietnam’” and condemned both the US military’s use of Napalm in Southeast Asia, and the atrocities that they had “committed [there] in the name of American democracy and western civilization.”96 The protest concluded with Tanzanian students making their way to the North Vietnamese mission in Dar es Salaam, singing songs in praise of both Nyerere and Ho, and dropping off a note of solidarity, which declared that “the Vietnamese fight was their fight.”97 As with demonstrations in Mali and Algeria, in Tanzania, African protests against US intervention in Vietnam did not follow the pattern most commonly associated with anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that had emerged in the West. Far from rallying in the streets to publicly

94 Ibid., 143. 95 Luke Melchiorre, “Under the Thumb of the Party’: the Demise of the Univer-

sity of Dar es Salaam’s (UDSM) Student Left and the Limits of Tanzanian socialism, 1970–1989,” Journal of Southern African Studies 46,4 (2020), 649: In October 1966, Tanzanian university students protested against the introduction of the Tanzanian National Service. In response, Nyerere suspended around 400 demonstrators for a year from university. 96 Roberts, Politics, Decolonization, 143–145. 97 Ibid., 145.

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oppose the foreign policy of their national governments as it pertained to Southeast Asia, African activists most commonly used such demonstrations to reaffirm their continued belief in the incipient political and ideological projects of these post-colonial states, which, of course, included a fervent commitment to Third World internationalism. In declaring that the “Vietnamese fight was their fight,” these African antiVietnam War protests were attempts by African activists and their states to both mobilize support for state leaders in increasingly tense domestic circumstances and to reaffirm their commitment to anti-colonial worldmaking—in which they imagined themselves side-by-side with the NLF and the North Vietnamese against the forces of Western imperialism.

Counter-Revolution: White Supremacism and the Anti-Communist International The Vietnam War did not only effect African events under the sign of the Spirit of Bandung. It also shaped a transnational constellation of rightwing conservatives that included politicians, business owners, activists, public intellectuals, state officials, ex-spies and down on their luck war veterans that stretched from the white settler states of southern Africa to the deep south of the US. Described as the Anticommunist International by Kyle Burke, this constellation was bound together by an explicit anticommunism and an implicit anti-Black racism and had its own rival global architecture of soldering built, in part, out of the detritus of colonial institutions.98 The war in Vietnam gave White Southern African politicians a chance to make common cause with the US—and the West more broadly—through the Anticommunist International and thereby attempt to justify their repression of African nationalism and the continuation of racial segregation. The ultimate effects of these global anti-communist imaginations, however, were diffuse and partial. The Anticommunist International did not emanate from the US state but was imbricated within it during the early years of the Cold War, particularly in the CIA. A central concern of anti-communists was counterinsurgency: the strategic response to revolutionary warfare. This was a preoccupation shared with many liberal political leaders including JFK,

98 Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right : Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2019), 2.

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who introduced it into US policymaking when he entered the White House in 1961, setting up new paramilitary training programmes, an interagency strategy group on “subterranean war, and a new, comprehensive counterinsurgency doctrine.”99 Kennedy saw counterinsurgency as a flexible, less dangerous response to nuclear or conventional combat against the Soviet Union, and was influenced in this line of thought by the ideas of Walt Rostow, an advisor and scholar who believed that the main threat to Third World modernization was the malign external influence of communism.100 These ideas influenced Kennedy into supporting Ngô Ðình Diê.m’s corrupt and unpopular South Vietnamese regime rather than pressing it into political reforms that would address its people’s grievances. This tendency to misread local politics—wilfully or unconsciously—as international communist infiltration also shaped the perspectives of white settler regimes in Southern Africa. It gave politicians there a sense of common cause with the US and helped create a rival, anti-communist global architecture of soldiering, specializing in counterinsurgency. The conservative white settler regimes of South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies of Southern Africa had long histories of anticommunism. In 1920s South Africa, with its industrialiszed urban labour force, political and business elites read the growing strength of black Trade Unions as evidence of the subversive effects of Comintern.101 Similarly in Rhodesia, as Donal Lowry argues, politicians imagined African liberation movements as a form of “Black peril” that was also part of a global communist conspiracy.102 Anti-communism was also used to justify Portuguese rule over its colonies, but with deeper roots in European fascism of the 1930s, when Salazar founded his Estado Novo regime.

99 Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, 288–289. 100 Ibid., 306. 101 Wessel Visser, “Afrikaner Anti-Communist History Production in South African Historiography,” in History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007), 307. 102 Donal Lowry, “The Impact of Anti-Communism on White Rhodesian Political Culture, ca. 1920s–1980,” Cold War History 7,2 (2007): 169–194; Dan Hodgkinson, “Nationalists with No Nation: Oral History, ZANU(PF) and the Meanings of Rhodesian Student Activism in Zimbabwe,” Africa 89 (2019): 40–64.

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In an era of decolonization, these regimes were pariahs. Salazar locked Mozambique, Angola and Guinea into anachronous colonial arrangements, maintaining his grip on power through the nationalist belief that Portugal was the centre of “a Christian, anti-communist West”103 and ruthless counterinsurgency campaigns.104 In South Africa and Rhodesia, White nationalism emerged as colonial rule’s successor among settler communities that were fearful of the consequences of black representation. In 1948, the Nationalist Party began Apartheid, a systematic programme of racial segregation. Seventeen years later, a similar move occurred in Rhodesia, where the White nationalist Rhodesian Front, led by Ian Smith, broke away from British designed processes of decolonization in 1965. In a world hostile to them, these states looked to each other for support and to make new friends further afield. International condemnation of these states came from Communist, nonaligned, and Western states, but it did not affect them all equally. Portugal was a founding member of NATO and a strategic Western partner and South Africa produced strategically vital commodities such as gold and uranium. Rhodesia, in contrast, was a much smaller state and in a much more precarious position. It was a landlocked country dependent on agricultural exports and industrial imports. After 1965, Britain sought to force the Rhodesians into conceding political reforms and black majority rule through UN-imposed sanctions against the regime. The US, under Johnson, adopted a policy of supporting Britain in matters concerning Rhodesia. Facing this crisis, RF politicians attempted to influence US policy by emphasizing their common cause with the US and their war in Vietnam. In February 1966, Rhodesian politicians established the Rhodesian Information Office (RIO) in Washington DC to run an aggressive public relations campaign. This strategy was built on others’ successes. The Portuguese government had hired a PR firm in April 1961, after JFK

103 Marcus Power, “Geo-politics and the Representation of Portugal’s African Colonial Wars: Examining the Limits of ‘Vietnam syndrome’,” Political Geography 20 (2001): 474. 104 John P. Cann, Portuguese Counterinsurgency Campaigning in Africa: 1961–1974: A Military Analysis (PhD diss., King’s College London, 1996), https://kclpure.kcl.ac. uk/portal/en/theses/portuguese-counterinsurgency-campaigning-in-africa-19611974--amilitary-analysis(6c1bfe35-104e-42ca-a033-e94a6158d5c2).html.

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became president, to safeguard their reputation of rule “in its overseas provinces,”105 and Belgian and British industrialists had created “the Katanga lobby” in support of succession during the Congo Crisis. These were the first efforts to focus the Anticommunist International on Africa, and involved US Senators Strom Thurmond, Thomas Dodd and Harry Byrd Jr. and public figures such as William F. Buckley, Marvin Liebman, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson as well as the influential magazine National Review.106 For these US conservatives, many of whom were fiercely opposed to Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation, Rhodesia became something of a darling. The RIO presented the country as a front in a global struggle for white “civilization” and invoked “transatlantic bonds of settlerism.”107 By late 1966, RIO publications had a readership of over thirteen thousand, for many of whom Rhodesia was “a screen on which to play out their own racial fantasies.”108 Narratives of White supremacy cut little ice with moderate US conservatives.109 Anti-communism, however, was a more promising line for the RIO, particularly during the mid-1960s when the US substantially increased its involvement in Vietnam. Building off the widespread support for the war, RIO “offered an African form of the domino theory” that presented Rhodesia as essential to preventing “the whole continent [coming] under the control of Moscow.”110 In 1966, when British Prime Minister Harold Wilson publicly distanced himself from the US bombing campaign of North Vietnam and continued to trade with Hanoi, the RIO believed that they could turn US and British division to their advantage. They seized the moment and pushed their narratives of anti-communist solidarity which hit home with their US conservative allies who resented

105 William Minter, Portuguese Africa and the West (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 83–89. 106 Josiah Brownell, “Diplomatic Lepers: The Katangan and Rhodesian Foreign Missions in the United States and the Politics of Nonrecognition,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 42,2 (2014): 209–237. 107 Josiah Brownell, “Out of Time: Global Settlerism, Nostalgia, and the Selling of the Rhodesian Rebellion Overseas,” Journal of Southern African Studies 43,4 (2017): 815. 108 Brownell, “Out of Time,” 815. 109 Eddie Michel, “Those Bothersome Rho-dents: Lyndon B. Johnson and the

Rhodesian Information Office,” Safundi 19,2 (2018): 227–245. 110 Thomas J. Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 223.

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Britain’s position. In the days following Wilson’s public statements, Governor George Wallace of Alabama claimed that, “Rhodesia is a fine country” and called it “ludicrous” for America to support Great Britain while it aided “communism in Vietnam.”111 A year later, Senator Thurmond attended a “Peace With Rhodesia” protest rally in Washington DC, organized by the RIO. At the rally, Thurmond gave a speech in which he stated that Ian Smith was ready “to make available immediately 5000 troops” to help in Vietnam. In a National Review article about the rally, Ian Smith was described as “the George Washington of Africa” and urged US recognition of the regime. While this support—rooted in the notion of combating a global communist conspiracy—was able to generate enthusiasm amongst the Anticommunist International, it never changed US policy to Rhodesia while Johnson was in the White House. It did, however, gain one success after Nixon became president. By 1970, Nixon was facing huge domestic anti-war protests and relied on Rhodesia-supporting hawks, such as Byrd and Thurmond, to continue the war. These men used this influence to pass the Byrd Amendment in 1971, which allowed the US to break sanctions and buy Rhodesian chrome as a strategic resource. This was an important economic success for the Rhodesians and undermined Britain and the UN’s attempts to uphold international sanctions.112 While these conspiratorial connections between the US war in Vietnam and Rhodesia’s white segregationist nation-building had limited effect in shifting US policy, they had a much stronger hold in the minds of the Anticommunist International, particularly as the US withdrew from Vietnam. The withdrawal left many US veterans resentful of their government and wondering what they had fought for. One of those veterans was US Army Reserve Lt. Col. Robert K. Brown, who was a devout anti-communist, and in 1975 set up the magazine Soldier of Fortune to recruit disgruntled Vietnam veterans for anti-communist conflicts, and which by 1976 had a readership of 125,000. In Brown’s first issue, he stated that: “The Vietnam war has left the US with the largest number of unemployed combat-trained soldiers in the world […] most of the

111 Ibid., 230–231. 112 Andrew Deroche, Black, White, and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953

to 1998 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), 145.

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new mercenaries [will] come from here in the next few years.”113 Again, Rhodesian officials sensed an opportunity to mobilize the Anticommunist International for strategic advantage. By late-1972, Rhodesia’s rural war against Zimbabwean nationalists had begun in earnest. During this war, which ended with Zimbabwean independence in 1980, Rhodesia lost an average of 13,070 emigrants a year—many of them members of the country’s white population of around 250,000 people.114 This put the Rhodesian military under real pressure to recruit. As well as extending conscription domestically, the RF turned to the Anticommunist International, and specifically to disgruntled US Vietnam veterans. The recruitment officer of the Rhodesian army, Major Nick Lamprecht, became a regular contributor to Soldier of Fortune, urging US veterans to sign on and fight for western, anti-communist civilization, for which they would be rewarded with a wage and plots of land in the sun. Around three hundred Vietnam veterans took up Lamprecht’s call. They informally named themselves “the Crippled Eagles” and embraced the mercenary life and ideals of global anti-communist struggle and white settlerism to the extent that after the war, many went on to fight in paramilitary units in Angola and South Africa. These often-overlooked connections are important histories between Africa and the war in Vietnam. Like post-colonial socialist African states to the north, Rhodesia and other southern African regimes imagined their role in the world in relation to the war in Vietnam. Through their conservative connections, southern African white-minority regimes, and particularly Rhodesia, hoped that US involvement in Vietnam could open up the possibility of a closer relationship with the superpower by reimagining their projects of segregationist nation-building as part of anti-communist global war. The success of this strategy in shifting US policy was at very best partial, yet it made an important impression on the Anti-communist International and particularly those US veterans who had played a significant paramilitary role in southern African conflicts from the late 1970s.

113 Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right, 109. 114 Josiah Brownell, The Collapse of Rhodesia: Population Demographics and the Politics

of Race (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 74.

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Conclusion The US war in Vietnam was not a footnote in African history. Yet the war did not shape politics and society on the continent as it did in “the West.” Through concrete and aspirational relationships, the conflict was bound to specific contexts across the continent in particular ways. ALN fighters had first experienced anti-colonial warfare fighting against the Viê.t Minh in Indochina and took these experiences back with them to their own war in Algeria. The leaders of this movement—as well as later, those of the ANC and ZIPRA—also sought out Vietnamese strategic expertise and advice on revolutionary warfare through navigating the anti-colonial global architecture of soldiering. It was not just in armed struggle that relationships were forged. Non-aligned African leaders saw in the war an opportunity to realize their own worldmaking ambitions. High-profile African nationalist political leaders, such as Nkrumah, Keïta, Boumediene and Nyerere, sought to shape the course of the war by taking concrete steps to bring parties to the negotiating table. These efforts were largely stifled by the late 1960s, as Cold War insecurities over the role of the Third World caused US and Soviet interventions that silenced the independent voices of non-aligned worldmaking. The Vietnam War’s impact on African societies was also felt beyond the world of foreign policy and military strategizing. While protesting US aggression in Southeast Asia was not as widespread in Africa as in much of the West, such protests did occur in cases where postcolonial African leaders had their own “worldmaking” visions. In such contexts, African protests in solidarity with the NLF and the North Vietnamese were organized in concert or with the approval of ruling regimes. These protests were affirmations of a belief in anti-colonial worldmaking that post-colonial states sought to use to legitimize their rule in increasingly fractious domestic political arrangements. These three forms of transnational relationships—all originating out of the Spirit of Bandung—had a rival form of transnational politics. For Whitesegregationist regimes of Southern Africa and their allies in the Anticommunist International, the Vietnam War meant something entirely different. Segregationist White African politicians appealed directly to conservative US opinion through shared imaginations of White racial solidarity and anti-communist struggle that made the war in Vietnam and settler states’ repression of African nationalists two sides of the same coin. While largely ineffective at moving the US government, these efforts did

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fire the imaginations of US conservatives and many Vietnam veterans, who arrived in Southern Africa to fight as mercenaries in their global war against communism.

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CHAPTER 13

Revolutionary Soulmates? Cuba’s Slow Discovery of Vietnam Antoni Kapcia

In summer 1968, a familiar sight on the world’s television screens was young people in the United States and Europe marching through the streets with two placards held high: one carried the image of the North Vietnamese leader Hô` Chí Minh and the other the already iconic Korda image of the recently killed Che Guevara. That year’s so-called “youth revolt” had adopted both in its protest, seeing them as politically related in their cause and as heroes of the time, to be extolled as examples of the kind of world, or the kind of dissidence, to which many protestors aspired. They seemed two related icons of a broad multilayered protest whose many targets included the ills of western capitalist society, like

A. Kapcia (B) School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_13

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racism, inequality, alienation, injustice, exploitation, homophobia, imperialism, and ecological damage, but among which one usually stood out, almost as the issue uniting them all: the Vietnam War. Indeed, foremost among those seeing a link between Vietnam and Cuba were many (mostly young) US radicals who created solidarity groups to challenge the hegemonic US position on Cuba: out of that movement came the Venceremos and Antonio Maceo brigades, bringing enthusiastic volunteers to Cuba to work, build bridges, and see for themselves the reality of 1960s’ Cuba. They not only took Cuba’s importance for the US Left a step further from the early 1960s’ “Hands off Cuba” campaign,1 but both reflected and shaped a newer US New Left that often explicitly saw the Cuban and the Vietnamese struggles as parallel victims of the same problem US imperialism which they increasingly opposed.2 That pattern may well tell us more about the time and about the social character of the protesters than about the reality behind the images extolled: one (Hô` Chí Minh) was still very much alive, leading his country’s struggle successfully against the US war machine, while Guevara was already iconised as a tragically killed martyr to world revolution, killed indirectly by that same machine the year before. However, the countries with which those two figures were associated (Guevara, an Argentine, being an adopted Cuban) did share an ideological affinity and an evolving relationship, and did seem to be revolutionary “soulmates” at a revolutionary time. However, in 1968 whatever relationship existed was in fact relatively new, with the leadership of either country only a few years earlier not fully aware, it seemed, of the other’s ideological similarity or global importance. Certainly, in the case of Cuba (this chapter’s prime focus), the process of becoming aware of the Vietnamese struggle was gradual but had become much more significant by 1968. Moreover, that process tells us much about the Cuban Revolution’s other underlying processes of often difficult discovery: of a national identity more radical than hitherto conceived, of a socialist identity that might be seen as genuinely Cuban

1 Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 Teishan Latner, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

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and different, and of a global identity to give the Revolution a wider meaning and a role. Therefore, in order to understand the character of the two countries’ relationship at that time (which, as will be argued here, was perhaps more one-sided than it seemed), we must first understand some details of those three (increasingly interrelated) processes of discovery, to clarify what exactly Vietnam as an idea and a struggle meant to Cubans in 1968. That is because when the guerrilla-led insurrection led by the 26 July Movement (M26J) ended on 31 December 1958, followed rapidly by the first revolutionary measures, there was little evidence that the Vietnamese struggles—against French colonialism until 1954 and then the NLF-led insurgency in South Vietnam—had impinged much on the Cuban rebels’ consciousness. Some within the old communist party—since 1944 known as the People’s Socialist Party (PSP)—from late 1958 part of the revolutionary alliance, knew of North Vietnam and the insurgency; so too did Guevara, already much more aware than his comrades of both Marxism and global politics. However, few M26J rebels knew much more than that a struggle existed, their attention to struggles beyond Cuba tending to focus on Latin America.

The Cuban Revolution as a Nation-Building Project The explanation for that ignorance may well lie in the reality that the whole pre-1959 revolutionary struggle in Cuba, from 26 July 1953 (the attack on Santiago’s Moncada barracks), followed by the rebels’ imprisonment, exile, and guerrilla insurrection, arose from a nationalist (albeit radical) imperative for change and nation-building. Certainly, their focus was always on “nation” and national sovereignty, with adjacent issues including how exactly to construct a new nation, i.e. what would and should that “new Cuba” look like? Thus, the natural starting point here is: why the nationalism and why (and how) was it radical? The question is pertinent given that the Vietnamese struggle from early on was always referred to as a struggle for “national liberation”: so, did the affinity between the two countries stem from that parallel? To understand Cuban nationalism, we must first recognise why independence came so late, in 1902 and not alongside most of Spain’s other American colonies, in 1810–1826. A summary (of what is a long and complex story) starts with Cuba’s unique combination of historical factors

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and processes and the timing of Cuba’s emergence as one of the world’s most significant exporters of sugar. While Spain’s hold on its colonies was weakening and the Bourbon monarchy’s attempts to recover some control created resentment among criollos (locally born Whites), Cuba’s criollos were discovering the benefits of exporting one of the evolving world’s most valuable commodities, with a fast-growing market in Europe and North America, leading to the mass importation of African slaves. Hence, Cuba’s criollos sat astride a unique contradiction: between a decidedly modern commodity (mass-produced and exported to industrialising and urbanising capitalist markets) and a labour mode which, close to abolition, would soon become increasingly expensive. Pragmatism and fear (haunted by the spectre of Haiti after 1804) thus made many criollos reluctant to rebel, hoping that Spain might protect them doubly: against British and US drives to force abolition and against the slaves themselves. Those same motives then shifted more liberal criollos towards a quasi-separatism of annexation by the United States on the Texan 1845 model: a movement which, lasting two decades but with an enduring influence, arose from a growing tendency among progressive White Cubans to look northwards, admiring the US model of modernity. Indeed, only events in Spain and the end of the American Civil War persuaded them finally to rebel in 1868 (for 10 years). However, that rebellion had two levels: while White liberals saw “nation” as White and hierarchical, most grassroots rebels were non-White slaves or ex-slaves, seeing social equality as integral to their vision of a Cuba Libre. That lower level made Cuba’s emerging nationalism more popular and radical than any elsewhere in Latin America apart from Mexico, a character that continued into the next two rebellions of 1879/80 and 1895–1898, in the latter case enhanced by the leadership and influence of the poet and thinker José Martí. After a lifetime of campaigning for independence, he created the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) to unite all separatists, basing it firmly in the politically radical emigrant tobacco workers of Florida. Hence, that radicalised nationalism (with Martí’s warnings about the imperialist threat from the United States) can be seen to have made the final rebellion less the last Latin American war of independence than the first “Third World” war of national liberation. What followed 1898 was a unique sequence: unilateral US intervention (making the War of Independence into the Spanish-American War), almost four years of US military occupation (enabling an “Americanisation” of many structures and the economy) and conditional independence

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in May 1902. It was conditional on Cuban acceptance (in a draft Constitution) of the text of the Platt Amendment , whose purpose was to limit an independent Cuba’s freedom in external relations and financial arrangements and allow unilateral US military intervention. That condition (forcing reluctant agreement among enough Cuban politicians) became a running sore in Cuban politics until expunged in 1934 by Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbour” policy in Latin America: it justified interventions in 1906–1909, 1912, and 1917–1923. Meanwhile, a 1903 US–Cuban Reciprocity Treaty, while guaranteeing Cuban sugar privileged access to the US market, tied Cuba to that role, while giving US manufactures substantial freedom in Cuba. Those guarantees, however, created enough confidence and security to bury nationalist resentment until 1920, when a World War-generated boom ended with a precipitate price collapse, undermining (and then further Americanising) Cuba’s economy and then bringing a new awareness: that the once beneficial US link was Cuba’s real problem, guaranteeing dependency, and underdevelopment. A decade of student and union unrest followed, ending Gerardo Machado’s repressive presidency, and launching a “100-day revolution” in 1933 which consisted of several disparate currents, most either socialist or nationalism that increasingly equated US imperialism and capitalism. Essentially that political dissent was increasingly focussed on Cuba’s long overdue process of genuine nation-building, but now more radical than imagined a century earlier. Hence, the various elements in the 1933 “revolution” essentially proposed a programme for that process, which eventually led to a new constitution in 1940, which, replacing the 1901 document (and the Platt Amendment’s legitimacy), sought a more equal and economically Cubanised nation. However, the Constitution was never fully enacted and was undermined by two key factors: a still unequal US–Cuban relationship, cemented by a second Reciprocity Treaty (1934) that, repeating the first, ensured a lack of Cuban manufacturing and shaped by the annual quota of sugar allowed into the US market; and a pseudo-nationalist populism that lacked the strength of the economic nationalism of other contemporary Latin American countries after 1930. Thus, despite some regulatory procedures and structures,3

3 Jorge I. Domínguez, Cuba: Order and Revolution (London: The Belknap Press, 1975), 54–109.

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Cuba remained an economic neo-colony; however, the Platt Amendment’s disappearance undermined and dissipated nationalism’s force and presence.

The Emergence of a Cuban Socialism The 1940 Constitution was a watershed. It arose from an assembly that was not only nationalist, but also characterised by socialism whose roots followed closely the radicalisation of that nationalism: in the egalitarianism of the non-White rebels from 1868 and the ideas of Martí and the PRC. Indeed, one PRC co-founder, Carlos Baliño, went on to co-found the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 1925; by then, a more widespread radicalisation had brought in new ideas, and a new model in the Russian (and then Soviet) Revolution. That duly introduced many radicals (especially Julio Antonio Mella, another PCC founder) into Marxism, Lenin’s theories of imperialism often giving their instinctive critique of US domination a sharper ideological form. As that radicalism intensified in growing opposition to US hegemony, dependence, and authoritarianism, the PCC’s role in labour militancy gave it greater visibility, but dependence on the twists and turns of Comintern policies marginalised it during the unrest of 1930–1933 (which they refused to acknowledge as a revolutionary situation, even unsuccessfully agreeing with Machado to end a national strike) and then in 1939 led to a (quasi-“popular front”) electoral alliance, the Democratic Socialist Coalition (CSD), with a then populist Fulgencio Batista: that lasted until 1944, bringing two party leaders into Batista’s government. That had contradictory effects: while it gave the PCC legality, allowing it to lead the new CTC union confederation, publish their newspaper, and contribute to the 1940 Constitution, it was often thereafter seen by the Left as cautious and conservative. Instead, it was the nationalist pole of radicalism which dominated the Left from 1934: principally Antonio Guiteras’s influential 1934–1935 Joven Cuba (Young Cuba) and from 1947 the Cuban People’s Party (the Ortodoxos ), where Marxist readings of imperialism and socialist egalitarian ideas infused nationalism with a clear social dimension. That was the context for creating the M26J and the Cuban Revolution. Indeed, the link with that context could not be clearer: because the 1940 Constitution was never fully enacted, it retained a symbolic importance among those seeking a more independent and equal Cuba, including

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Fidel Castro and the other Ortodoxos who plotted the 1953 Moncada attack. Castro then made its proposals the basis for the programme in his seminal 1953 History Will Absolve Me defence speech and in the Revolution’s first measures after January 1959. Hence, the early Revolution emerged from that tradition of radical nationalism with a visible socialist current.

The Evolving Discovery of the Revolution’s Different Socialism Nonetheless, in January 1959 the idea of the Revolution being explicitly socialist (let alone communist) was not being widely considered by Cubans beyond the rebel leadership. However, in Washington, Cold War obsessions increasingly equated land reform and nationalisation with socialism, in 1954 driving indirect US intervention in Guatemala to topple the elected Jacobo Arbenz government. In Cuba, the US embassy searched for potential communism in the rebel movement in late 1958 and early 1959, although that may tell us more about US perceptions than about the reality in Cuba.4 There, the reality was that the 1959 rebel movement was ideologically mixed: the M26J mixed liberals, social democrats, socialists, Catholic activists, and ardent anti-communists, because Cuban politics from the 1930s had seen many opposition groups use the term “socialist” to define their stance. However, what they meant by that varied widely: the range of such groups encompassed the proMoscow PSP (and its predecessor forms since 1925); Batista; the main post-1934 populist-nationalist Authentic Cuban Revolutionary Party (the Auténticos ) and its splinter, the Ortodoxos, including Fidel Castro and other 1953 plotters; several armed action groups of the 1930s and 1940s. By 1959, it therefore included many in the M26J, especially the veterans of the Sierra Maestra-based Rebel Army guerrillas, now radicalised by their experience of struggle, contact with the peasantry and political education under Guevara and (in the Second Front which he led from March 1958) Raúl Castro, who in 1953 had briefly belonged to the PSP’s youth wing.

4 Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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Hence, although 1959–1961 saw many of those interpretations harden on one side and move apart more generally (as the Cold War’s increasing relevance driving US policy towards Cuba [and the Soviet willingness to help the Revolution from 1960] narrowed the range of possible interpretations), by 1961 the notion of the Revolution being socialist in some form was much more possible. Hence, when in April 1961 Castro first referred publicly to the Revolution as socialist, few of those Cubans listening would have been surprised: building on existing traditions, on the Sierra experience, and on the collective hardening of attitudes through the shared experience of rapid transformation and mass involvement, perspectives had radicalised. Moreover, the PSP’s early decision to support the Revolution unconditionally, putting its (possibly) 10,000 members at the Revolution’s service, helped to normalise “socialism” , as did the February 1960 Cuban–Soviet trading agreement; when that agreement sparked a rapid unravelling of US–Cuban relations, “socialism” and an inherent nationalism merged naturally. From that point on, the only question was: “What sort of socialism?” That debate had two dimensions in the 1960s: internal (focussed on what socialism was possible for building a genuinely Cuban nation) and external (focussed on what wider definition of socialism, and even revolution, best accommodated the Cuban model). The internal focus arose directly from the Cuban Left’s mixed roots before 1959 and the unforeseen radicalisation after 1959; it was essentially a debate between an orthodox Left (represented by the PSP) and the evolving heterodoxy of the “new communists” of the M26J and its Rebel Army. By 1962, the debate had become open schism: while many M26J members (especially Guevara) moved towards socialism, the PSP maintained a conventional reading of Marx (following contemporary Soviet dictates) that argued that the Revolution could not be socialist. Their basis was that socialist Revolution was only possible in fully capitalist countries, where internal contradictions created the “objective conditions” for revolution, something impossible in a “semi-feudal” Cuba. That stance had partly led them to publicly condemn the Moncada attack and the 1956 Granma expedition to Cuba, an attitude causing much M26J resentment. However, that resentment reached new heights with an open scandal in March 1962: one PSP leader (Aníbal Escalante) had evidently used his authority as convenor of the interim ORI coalition (Integrated Revolutionary Organisations) to manoeuvre PSP people into influential positions. That led Fidel Castro to voice public criticism of him, to downgrade the PSP

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within ORI, and to accelerate the creation of the planned single party: the United Party of the Socialist Revolution (PURS) under clear M26J hegemony. Then in October 1962, the Soviet failure to exact a better deal (i.e. the embargo’s end) in the negotiations settling the Cuban Missile Crisis brought bitter memories of Cuba’s future negotiated by Washington and Madrid in the 1899 Treaty of Paris. To those antagonisms was now added a growing ideological challenge, best articulated by Guevara in his emerging neo-Gramscian idea of the “subjective conditions” for revolution: principally consciousness and the vanguard role of a guerrilla foco, rather than the conventional communist mantra of the party’s leading role. He argued that such conditions could overcome the lack of objective conditions in Cuba and Latin America. Hence the indigenous nationalist and socialist traditions came together in Cuban leadership’s growing belief that Cuba’s rapid advance towards communism was possible and necessary. That issue went to the heart of the third process of discovery: for a wider context for the Revolution’s self-definition since the external dimension of that debate addressed precisely that context.

Discovering a Wider Context for a Different Cuban Socialism: Latin America The roots of this process lay in the incipient nationalism of the early 1800s, reflecting what we might call the necessary colonial dichotomy: that any colonialism (to dispense with the need for permanent coercion) depends on the colonised accepting that they are “the problem” and the coloniser “the solution”. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, pragmatically loyal Cuban criollos essentially accepted that Cuba’s new slave dependency made Cuba too Black and unstable to survive independently, basing this on their widely shared vision of Haiti’s bloodshed and economic decline nearby Haiti and post-independence Latin America’s volatility and “barbaric” backwardness. Few Whites shared Martí’s view that Cuba’s historically and culturally rightful community was Latin America, which in 1892 he called Nuestra America (Our America), and not the “other America”, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon North. That pragmatism was steadily reinforced, as thousands more Spanish immigrants: after 1803 refugees arrived from Louisiana and then from Spain’s former mainland colonies; either side of the 1868–1878 rebellion, two periods of an official of “whitening” Cuba encouraged Spanish (and

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Irish and Chinese) immigration. Thus, a greater “Spanish” character was added to criollo pragmatism, building a belief among Whites that Cuba’s natural wider context was Spain. That Hispanism was, however, only skin-deep, being paralleled by the growing awareness from the 1840s of the United States’ power, importance, and attraction for Cuba: by then, around half of Cuba’s sugar went to the US market; by the 1890s, many political exiles sought refuge there, some even taking US citizenship as an anti-Spanish gesture.5 Hence, as perspectives shifted from Spain towards the United States’ economic security and modernity, the Norte attracted Cuban conservatives and liberals alike, generating annexationism. Therefore, we might say that Cuba’s first significant separatist expression, once criollos ceased to see Spain as “the solution” but still saw Cubans as “the problem”, shifted the external “solution” northwards. That reading of Cuba’s context, however, was undermined slowly by the humiliation of repeated US occupations, the 1920–1921 economic crisis, and the resulting economic “Americanisation”. As the ensuing radicalisation of Cuban discourse and action painted “US imperialism” as capitalist imperialism, a new dimension was added: that Cuba’s wider identity might not, after all, be in subordinate attachment to the United States. Hence, while the new urban elite’s commercial and cultural affinities looked northwards, doubts about the US connection had clearly set in. Nonetheless, a residual belief in Cuba’s supposedly natural “Americanness” spawned an even stronger sense of superiority over what many criollos and peninsulares saw as a backward Latin America, since their loss of faith did not necessarily make Latin America the “solution”. That ambivalence arose an even greater Spanish immigration after independence in 1902 than in colonialism’s last two decades, coupled with the continuing power of the Spanish middle class in retail, commerce, and the bureaucracy. Furthermore, the United States’ declining attraction curiously stimulated an intellectual and cultural shift back to Spain as the

5 Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (New York: The Ecco Press, 1994), 44.

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cultural Mecca and definer. In 1926, the criminologist and later anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who in 1910 had railed against Spain’s “reconquest” of Cuba, founded an Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura.6 This partly reflected the rise of what was called arielismo after Rodó’s 1900 essay tapped into a growing “Latinism” (Ariel, in his view), extolling a more “spiritual” Latin America rather than the Caliban of a materialist Anglo America. Yet anti-Spanish sentiment remained, especially among those fearing displacement by the new immigration; violent protests in August 1933 then generated (in November) restrictive nationalist labour legislation, insisting that a majority of workforces should be Cuban. Since that legislation also targeted Haitian and Jamaican workers (imported from 1913 to bring reduced militancy), this also suggested a residual sense of superiority over the rest of the Caribbean, especially given the attraction among some Cuban intellectuals and reformers of the premises of positivist thinking, whose manifestations in Latin America talked of the need for a European-based modernizing society (“civilisation”) as against the non-White “barbarism”. Even more curiously, in 1936–1939 Cuba sent more volunteers (in the International Brigades) to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco’s rebellion than any other Latin American nation, although that may have reflected the concerns of a rising Cuban Left more than any lingering attachment to a Spanish context. Nonetheless, all these suggested that by the 1940s Cubans’ search for a consensus on a wider cultural context remained elusive, an ambivalence which continued until 1959: by then, few Cubans yet looked beyond either Spain (culturally) or the United States (commercially and socially), with a few writers attracted by the Spanish-language publishing possibilities of Mexico or Argentina. In 1959, however, signs rapidly emerged of a new view of Cuba as Latin American. In March, Alfredo Guevara was given authority to create a cinema institute (ICAIC) that would use film to politicise Cubans in their own history and Revolution, create a genuinely Cuban cinema (copying 1930s Mexico and challenging Hollywood’s hegemony), and make Cuba a vanguard in the new Latin American cinema. In April Haydée Santamaría (a 1953 Moncada plotter) founded the Casa de las Américas cultural centre and magazine, focussing on the wider Latin American context, bringing Cuban and Latin American cultures closer 6 Antoni Kapcia, Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 74.

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together. Early in 1959, Guevara began to act his 1956 promise to Fidel (before the Granma expedition’s arrival in Cuba) that once the rebellion was secure, he would leave to fight other revolutions in Latin America. Guevara’s stance reflected two motives. Firstly, as an Argentine with substantial experience of Latin America, he saw the United States differently from his Cuban comrades; having witnessed the 1954 Guatemalan intervention, he was viscerally aware of the potential US threat. Secondly, already believing that Cuba’s organic context was Latin America, defying orthodox interpretations of the possibility of socialist Revolution he believed that such a Revolution in Latin America was both possible and necessary. Therefore, he and Camilo Cienfuegos soon began planning to take the Cuban guerrilla example to the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.7 In September 1960, Fidel Castro issued his First Declaration of Havana, which explicitly exhorted Latin America to follow Cuba’s example of overthrowing dictatorships, while Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare: A Method was published in Havana, both making Cuba’s insurrectionary leadership in the region more explicit. By 1961 revolutionary Cuba had clearly found a new context, even defining Cuba as the vanguard of the Latin American revolution. 1961 saw those early hints become more characteristic. When US– Cuban relations were broken in January, that was followed by the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) invasion in April, an invasion which, launched from Somoza’s Nicaragua and an authoritarian Guatemala, was immediately trumpeted in Cuba as the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas. That same year saw Cuba’s successful Literacy Campaign also trumpeted as creating el primer territorio libre del alfabetismo en las Américas (the first American territory free from illiteracy). Meanwhile, in April 1961 the clandestine Liberation Department was established under Guevara (run by Manuel Piñeiro) within the Interior Ministry, establishing the effective headquarters of Cuba’s new strategy of insurrectionary activity across Latin America. The following February, Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana, responding to the Organisation of American States’ expulsion of Cuba and other regional governments’ almost unanimous support for the US embargo, reinforced that anti-imperialist tone. Cuba’s enforced isolation from the “American community” (apart from a dissenting Canada 7 Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 42–72.

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and Mexico) was a justification for a vehement and radical assertion of Cuba’s revolutionary Latin American-ness, confirming its historic identity as a different kind of Latin America: radical, popular, and anti-imperialist. That different Latin America was now expressed through a variety of means: Granma newspaper’s “Sur del Río Bravo” section giving a daily diet of news of protest, revolution, and military rule; the cultural focus on the new Latin American cinema and literary “boom”; and, in 1967 Casa de las Américas hosted the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (Festival of Protest Song) which, despite its aim to reflect protest song across the globe, eight of the 18 countries represented were from Latin America.8

Discovering a Wider Context for a Different Cuban Socialism: The Third World and Vietnam That latter event, however, was to some extent a bridge between Cuba’s new revolutionary Latin-Americanism and an even wider context being discovered from 1966: the Third World. On 2 January 1966, Castro hosted and opened the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, an event designed and encouraged by the Soviet leadership as an opportunity to steal a march in the Sino–Soviet conflict on Chinese ambitions in the Third World by publicly lining up alongside Cuba’s beleaguered Revolution in its struggle against US imperialism.9 However, rather than supporting either a Soviet or Maoist view of the Third World, it soon became a platform to highlight Cuba’s own differences from the Soviet Union on a revolutionary strategy in the colonial and post-colonial world, supporting Cuba’s view of encouraging and backing anti-imperialist revolution. Indeed, the new wider context (Latin America) had already been extended to stress revolutionary Cuba’s identity in, and belonging to, the Third World, even extending Cuba’s vanguard identity, as the front line against imperialism. That therefore also meant that Cuba was challenging the Chinese claim to such vanguardism, at a time when Cuban–China relations were frayed by China’s failure to deliver agreed rice imports. However, that wider identity was not that new. In 1962 Cuba had joined the Non-Aligned Movement, having already built alliances with the

8 See Matías Hermosilla’s chapter in this volume. 9 Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2018).

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Algerian FLN, recognising their provisional pre-independence government in June 1961, and sending a shipload of arms to the FLN in December. In May 1963, after Algerian independence, one of Cuba’s first internationalist missions (of health workers) arrived, followed by 700 Cuban troops and 22 tanks in response to the new government’s request for aid to repel a Moroccan invasion.10 Simultaneously, early cautious contacts were built with other new post-colonial African governments and with anti-colonial rebel movements in some Portuguese colonies, notably the PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea and the MPLA in Angola. By 1964, that had continued to broaden Cuba’s Third World focus beyond Latin America: it became more common in Cuban periodical publications, especially the theoretical journal Cuba Socialista and the Prensa Latina news agency coverage, both reflecting the thinking of Havana’s decisionmaking circles. Hence, the Tricontinental developments simply confirmed an evolving wider focus on what was emerging as the Revolution’s “wider context” for a new identity. That was therefore the context for Vietnam to acquire a special importance for the Cuban leadership. Until then Vietnam had not been evident in revolutionary Cuba’s consciousness as much as either Latin America or Algeria. Although Cuba had formally recognised the South Vietnamese NLF in September 1963, Cuba Socialista (which more than any other organ showed the steady fusion between the M26J and PSP) made little or no mention of Vietnam in 1961–1965, while China and the Soviet Union figured prominently in articles dealing with extra-Cuban issues. Meanwhile, however, December 1963 (following NLF recognition) saw a week dedicated to solidarity with the “people of South Vietnam”, with Guevara (on behalf of PURS) making the closing speech on 20 December: addressing NLF representatives and the North Vietnamese ambassador, he spoke of all Latin Americans’ awareness of the Vietnamese defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and of Cubans’ awareness of the many victories of the Vietnamese fighters. However, given his constant preoccupation with the Latin American revolution, he equated that struggle to the other anti-imperialist wars across Africa and Latin America, including Cuba’s recent “war of liberation”. In a foretaste of his later reading of global struggle, he suggested that the US military actions

10 Martin Koppel and Róger Calero, “Cuba and Algerian Revolutions: An Intertwined History,” The Militant 83,8 (2019).

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and strategies in Vietnam were a training ground for later use in Cuba and Latin America. The point here is that, although the Cuban leadership was fully committed, rhetorically and practically, to solidarity with Vietnam, it was not yet clear what role the Vietnamese struggle actually played in Cuba’s emerging foreign strategies or in the leadership’s emerging ideological definitions. Indeed, Cuba Socialista’s relative silence seemed to confirm that uncertainty. By the mid-1960s, however, Vietnam was beginning to figure more overtly in Cuban public discourse and revolutionary thinking. Indeed, in many respects the Cuban cultural world was already showing the way, making Cuba–Vietnam connections that highlighted parallels and mutual solidarity. In 1967, the Canción Protesta event included two South Vietnamese performers as the sole Asian representatives, and the leading Cuban film-maker Santiago Álvarez had since 1965 shone a light on Vietnam in a very particular way: besides constant coverage of Vietnamese struggle in the regular news bulletins for which he was largely responsible, he produced two major documentaries on Vietnam: the 1965 Solidaridad Cuba y Vietnam and the 1967 Hanoi, martes 13. Both stressed the parallel struggles of Vietnam and Cuba, two societies sharing a collective defiance to resist attacks by US imperialism. Hence, before the leadership generally (as opposed to Guevara) stressed that, Cubans were already attuned to those parallels, without deducing explicit ideological similarities. By 1966, however, some in the leadership were drawing such conclusions, if only because of the upsurge in US actions against North Vietnam from 1964. When US planes began bombing North Vietnam in August 1964, Guevara easily persuaded his colleagues that a new stage in the anti-imperialist struggle had begun: Fidel Castro responded by condemning the US action and calling for worldwide socialist unity to defend Vietnam, knowing full well that, since the Soviet Union was unlikely to get involved actively, the onus was on others such as Cuba. Guevara would follow this on 11 December 1964, with his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, arguing, in an otherwise remarkably short mention of Vietnam, that the bombing had put world peace at risk.11 Indeed, it is suggested that he saw the escalation as an opportunity to repair the Sino–Soviet split which he saw as a serious

11 Che Guevara, “At the United Nations,” (11 December 1964), https://www.mar xists.org/archive/guevara/1964/12/11.htm.

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weakness in world socialism, prolonging an unnecessary and costly division of the front against imperialism.12 Moreover, it seems possible that the escalation also finally persuaded both Guevara and Castro that the time had come for Guevara to fulfil his 1956 promise to leave Cuba and fight other revolutions.13 The logic for that interpretation was by then impeccable, given that the perceived similarities between the situations in which Vietnam and Cuba found themselves in the mid-decade were evident to all. By 1966, Cuban leaders certainly felt that Cuba had been shamefully neglected by the Soviet Union, both in October 1962 and in refusing Cuba entry to the socialist-bloc trading organisation, Comecon. Meanwhile, Cuba was also, of course, being subjected to an actively hostile and armed US siege: although the 1962 agreement between Moscow and Washington had guaranteed Cuba freedom from US invasion, for many Cubans that sustained hostility felt real, especially with a continuing US support for internal sabotage (the post-1961 Robert Kennedy-directed Operation Mongoose) until the mid-1960s. Moreover, the explicit legal character of the embargo (begun in 1960–1963 but thereafter firmly and effectively in place) had been defined by its enactment under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, suggesting that the US government at least considered Cuba as the enemy, continuing to act accordingly. Therefore, Cuba’s leaders at least could argue that the two people were abandoned by those that should be defending and supporting them. Certainly, on 13 March 1965, Fidel Castro condemned both the Soviet and Chinese governments for talking tough on solidarity with Vietnam but doing nothing to actually help their struggle.14 The Vietnamese, however, were unlikely to respond with similar reasoning: while Cuba was indeed almost totally isolated within the Western Hemisphere since 1962 and kept alive by the thinnest of economic pipelines until 1972 (when Comecon membership was granted), North Vietnam had the comfort of the NLF’s successes in the South, the sanctuary and supply chains allowed by Cambodia’s determined neutrality under Sihanouk, and Laos’s

12 Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (London: Bantam Press, 1997), 603. 13 Ibid., 627–628. 14 Ibid., 627.

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inability to halt either the Hô` Chí Minh trail or the Pathet Lao insurgency. Moreover, although China might not get actively involved in the military action, its relations with Hanoi were still positive and supportive internationally. Therefore, what the two countries had in common in that respect was Soviet reluctance to do more than offer verbal and diplomatic support. Beyond that, however, Cuba and Vietnam did have real parallels that could be stressed and were commonly felt. Both countries’ resistance to US hostility was rooted in decades of an increasingly popular radical anti-imperialist struggle; both were expressed in recent decades through guerrilla warfare which, seen as a natural milieu for that struggle, was firmly based in “the people”, which moreover could broadly be defined as largely a peasant people. Hence, both leaderships could justifiably see their fight for national independence against the odds as the crucial link between their past histories of long and sustained struggle and their present drives for socialism that would reflect their national particularities and would be relevant to their specific identities. Vietnam had Võ Nguyên Giáp as the hero and architect of guerrilla warfare, while Cuba had Guevara, whose prologue to the 1964 Cuban translation Giáp’s People’s War, People’s Army showed his admiration for, and debt to, the ideas of the Vietnamese strategist.15 Therefore, it was logical that, in his opening speech to the watershed Tricontinental conference, Fidel Castro declared Cubans’ willingness to shed blood in the Vietnamese people’s struggle16 ; the whole twoweek event then carried large portraits of three leaders from the three continents, Hô` Chí Minh’s representing Asia (Fidel himself and Patrice Lumumba being the other two). That was enhanced by Guevara’s Message to the Tricontinental , written in 1965 (before his clandestine departure from Cuba) but not published until 16 April 1967 (by when he was already in Bolivia): taking his cue from the speed and scale with which the US government had intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic in April 1965, explicitly to prevent what was defined as “a second Cuba”, he referred to the goal of spreading Revolution all over Latin America specifically to drag the US government and army into

15 Vo Nguyen, Guerra del Pueblo: Ejército del Pueblo (Havana: Editora Política, 1964),

1–7. 16 Granma 2,2 (3 January 1966), 1.

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a series of unwinnable guerrilla wars, which he defined as “two, three, many Vietnams”.17 Developing his 1963 observation about the parallels between Vietnam and Latin America, that message suggested both a clear faith in the long-term significance of the NLF’s armed struggle (when relatively few elsewhere yet shared that positive reading) and his parallel belief that the United States could not help being dragged into such wars in their own backyard. Meanwhile, the hitherto silent Cuba Socialista (by now firmly in the hands of former M26J people, reflecting the leadership’s heterodox ideological stances) dedicated a whole issue to the Tricontinental in February 1966: half of the space devoted to Asia in the conference’s faithfully recorded resolutions focussed on Vietnam. The journal’s July and October 1966 editions then contained articles written on behalf of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Now, it seemed, Vietnam was centre stage in Cuban thinking. Indeed, in 1968 the relatively new Política Internacional journal (organ and theoretical journal of the Foreign Ministry’s research institute and foreign policy establishment) contained a long, detailed history of the US–Vietnamese conflict in 1956–1966.18 One aspect of this development making the link particularly interesting was that Vietnam rapidly replaced (in Cuban thinking) another experience to which some in Cuban intellectual circles had previously compared Cuba: that was Israel, seen then by many on the Left as a besieged people (to some extent self-identified as socialist, especially in its communal principles) in a hostile world, carving a national identity through anti-colonial struggle and centuries of denial and emigration. That link would end abruptly in 1973, when Cuba broke off relations permanently, partly following the Soviet shift but mostly driven by a growing desire to support the Palestinians. However, that pro-Israel view in Cuba was never strong, open, or solid, and, as Vietnam gained in popularity as an exemplar and “soulmate” for the Cubans’ perceived historic, contemporary, and future identity, the Israel link faded into the background. Vietnam was now clearly Cuba’s closest parallel. What then was the nature of the Cuban image of Vietnam and how was it expressed? Most obviously, the Cuban public was treated to continual 17 Ernesto Che Guevara, “Mensaje a la Tricontinental,” Pensamiento Crítico, no. 14 (March 1967), 112. 18 René Álvarez Ríos, “Vietnam y los Estados Unidos, 1956–1966,” Política Internacional 3 (1968), 11–12.

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overt references to the struggle with which they (seemingly alone at that point, as an embattled enclave, a David against the imperialist [and very much nearby] Goliath) shared much: billboards, posters, photographs in the media, television programmes, and frequent meetings and rallies in solidarity with the Vietnamese people all became common currency. That campaign was especially led by the Organisation for Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) which the Tricontinental conference had spawned. While the parallel Organisation of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) tended to have a more real existence, directed from the Americas department of the new post1965 PCC, under Manuel Piñeiro and Osmany Cienfuegos, and more actively involved in supporting political groups and activism in the region, OSPAAAL tended to be somewhat formal. However, its public displays in posters all over Cuba (becoming something of a collector’s item much later outside Cuba) were its most visible and most lasting achievement, speaking eloquently and visibly for the Cubans’ new global positioning. Vietnam became a constant theme in many posters, especially in the work of Félix René Mederos whose 1969 visit to Vietnam (on behalf of the PCC’s high-ranking Department of Revolutionary Orientation) produced a series in which he aimed to persuade Cubans to emulate the North Vietnamese use of resources, with the running slogan “como en Vietnam” (as in Vietnam) (Illustrations 13.1 and 13.2).19 As already seen, Cuban cinema also joined in the celebration of Cuban– Vietnamese solidarity, while one outcome of the 1967 Encuentro was the pressing and sale of a long-playing album Canta Vietnam a Cuba, canta Cuba a Vietnam (Vietnam sings to Cuba, Cuba sings to Vietnam) which recorded different Cuban and Vietnamese singers and musicians to celebrate their joint struggle. Interestingly, it included Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, two rising younger musicians who had been left somewhat marginal in 1967, reflecting residual doubts about the revolutionary credentials of Cuba’s own canción protesta, the Nueva Trova (New Ballad) movement. Finally, it was proclaimed (in 1966) that 1967 would be “The Year of Heroic Vietnam”, enshrining Vietnam’s position in the Cuban pantheon; when 1968 was declared (in 1967) “The Year of the Heroic

19 Rebecca Onion, “Bright 1970 Cuban Propaganda Posters Urging Solidarity with Vietnam,” (1 May 2015), https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/05/history-of-cubaand-vietnam-posters-by-rene-mederos.html.

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Illustration 13.1 Like in Vietnam. Month of Vietnamese women.

Guerrilla” in honour of Guevara, the fusion of the two struggles was discursively explicit. In particular two periodicals, Tricontinental and Pensamiento Crítico, which represented the evolving Cuban view of the Revolution as a sui generis phenomenon, more radical than anything offered by the Soviet Union or socialist bloc, made Vietnam a major focus; they portrayed Vietnam as sharing, with the besieged Cuban people, the front line

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Illustration 13.2 NLF—South Vietnam’s nine years example of victory, 20 December 1960–1969, Cuban Committee for Solidarity with South Vietnam’s victory.20

against imperialism and as a different form of empirical and popular communism. Pensamiento Crítico’s position by then reflected a new reality: firmly Guevarist in its readings of Marxism, it overtly followed his search for that different communism, focussing on maverick and even heretical Marxist thinking in Latin America, past and present, especially 20 René Mederos, poster, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, ID 5886; ID 1608.

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Peru’s José Carlos Mariátegui and Cuba’s Mella, both of whom had argued for a more Latin American Marxism. For the editors, Guevara’s death legitimised Cuba’s Third World position and the correctness of their own ideological positioning. That attention in some respects reached its apogee. In January, the South Vietnamese rebels and North Vietnamese forces launched their successful (and widely reported) Tet Offensive against the US and South Vietnamese Army troops, and when Da Nang was bombarded, reversing the image of the Vietnamese as those under siege and suggesting the turning of the tide which it eventually turned out to be. That was also when three moments confirmed Cuba’s ideological independence from the Soviet Union. The first came in March in the so-called “micro-faction” affair, when Escalante (publicly castigated in 1962) was again publicly criticised, but now sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for plotting against the Revolution: he and others (possibly with Soviet knowledge) had sought to divert Cuban policy away from its unorthodox Marxism at home and abroad and bring the Revolution into the Soviet fold. The second was the March “Revolutionary Offensive”, when around 55,000 small urban businesses (almost all self-employed) were nationalised in a move to stimulate and standardise the drive towards the declared goal of producing 10 million metric tonnes of sugar in 1970 and to confirm the leadership’s drive towards communism much faster than the PSP and the Soviet Union thought either possible or desirable. It had also, incidentally, been hoped to use the income derived to pay off Cuba’s Soviet debts, gaining some leeway in the relationship. The third moment was the public falling out between the Cuban leadership and the pro-Moscow Venezuelan Communist Party, the first such party in Latin America to criticise Cuba openly for its insurrectionary policy, leading to Fidel Castro’s angry response: he referred to the revolutionaries’ duty not to sit on the doorsteps of history waiting for “the corpse of capitalism” to pass by, but instead to fulfil the slogan displayed during OLAS’s inaugural meeting in 1967—“the duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution” (implicitly, and not to wait for the conditions for Revolution to emerge).21 21 This slogan (“Die Pflicht jedes Revolutionärs ist, die Revolution zu machen”) became the main motto of the International Vietnam Congress in Berlin in 1968, “Vietnam Congress Berlin 1968,” http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Vietnam-CongressBerlin-1968/8d4b6e9c0f244debbeed8088c8a2c745.

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Thus, when the student radicals of the global North were marching behind the posters of Hô` Chí Minh and Guevara in 1968, they did indeed reflect something which was really happening: that the Cuban and Vietnamese leaders and people were seeing themselves as sharing a wider struggle against active imperialism and for different socialism; as Guevara expressed it in his Message to the Tricontinental: “To die under the flag of Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of Brazil – to name only a few scenes of today’s armed struggle – would be equally glorious and desirable for an American, an Asian, an African, even a European”.22 By 1968, the North Vietnamese leadership had moved towards closer ideological and practical communication with Havana: while Cuba was in no practical position to help the Vietnamese struggle significantly (beyond small volunteer contingents and medical aid), the signs were that both North Vietnam and the NLF leaders welcomed Cuba’s constant support. For them, the Cuban position seemed to be leading the worldwide solidarity reflected in the whole Vietnam War protest movement then reaching its own apogee, since Cuba was one of the few countries openly and actively supporting the popular struggle, while the Soviet and Chinese leaders seemed to be giving “moral” but largely rhetorical support, despite (in the view of the Cuban leaders) being much more capable than the Cubans of making that support more concrete and less rhetorical. Cuba’s leadership of global solidarity with Vietnam also had the effect of giving the widespread popular protests a degree of formal legitimisation: while the Cuban and Vietnamese cases were not as similar as people imagined, the Cuban willingness to take the lead made them into the leaders of that movement, explaining the juxtaposition of the posters of the two rebel leaders. Indeed, by 1968, the two countries’ historic anti-colonial struggles shared similar roots, albeit differing in the timing of those struggles’ radicalisation. While the Vietnamese struggle was clearly based historically in a long struggle for national independence and sovereignty (against both France and the United States) which, from the 1930s had, through the Communist Party’s involvement, become more explicitly Marxist (and Leninist) in its readings of imperialism, the Cuban Revolution was still (in 1968) more clearly based in a radical nationalism which, while (like

22 “Message to the Tricontinental,” Che Guevara Internet Archive, https://www.mar xists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm.

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all radical nationalism across Latin America) influenced by Leninist readings of imperialism, was never particularly Marxist until after the rebel victory. It was only in the later stages of the insurrection that any explicitly Marxist theorisation came into the Cuban equation, via some leaders and then via the pragmatic PSP support (however, reluctantly and despite reservations about the rebellion’s ‘scientifi’ justification or its socialism). However, by 1968 the Cuban and Vietnamese struggles were at very different stages. While the Vietnamese struggle seemed to be emerging victorious militarily and politically, arguably starting to win the global argument while also winning the battle on the ground, the Cuban struggle seemed weaker, even losing some momentum. Certainly, Cubans felt increasingly isolated, lacking external support other than the admiration of those 1968 protesting, whose image of Cuba tended to reflect earlier visitors’ accounts. Meanwhile, the leadership was desperately trying to rescue the failing economy by pursuing even more “radicalisation”. August 1968 then isolated the Cuban leadership even more: when Fidel Castro approved of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, albeit ambiguously, he shocked many of those who, misreading both what he said and why he said it, assumed that the Czechoslovak heresy under Alexander Dubˇcek and the Cuban version of socialism were similar struggles. What Castro had in fact implied was both logical and ambiguous. It was logical because the Cuban leadership perceived that the real global battle was against US imperialism and therefore that the Czechoslovak threat to leave the Warsaw Pact risked weakening the global front against that, at a time when the real front line was in Cuba and Vietnam and should not be weakened. It was ambiguous because Castro’s declaration included the caveat that, while the invasion was regrettable, it was necessary and that he hoped that the Soviet Union would do the same to protect Cuba in the future—as, of course, it had not done in 1962 or since. Interestingly, in that same ambiguous statement, he also included Vietnam and North Korea as embattled socialist nations similar to Cuba in his questioning hope that a similar level of military support might be offered to save their socialism, as well as Czechoslovakia’s.23 The point here, overall, was that by 1968 Cuba’s identification with Vietnam had become unequal, perhaps using that to stiffen domestic backbones and falling morale. At a time when, after Guevara’s death 23 Mervyn J. Bain, Moscow and Havana, 1917 to the Present: An Enduring Friendship in an Ever-Changing Global Context (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 73.

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and with Soviet pressure being witnessed, everything was beginning to seem less positive for Cuba than before, an identification with their seemingly victorious brothers in Vietnam might boost morale and give hope. Guevara’s death had indeed demoralised ordinary Cubans on a scale never fully appreciated outside Cuba: for many, the heroic phase of the 1960s’ “siege” was either coming to an end or needed to be revived. Hence, Vietnam was at the time less of a soulmate than a wish, a public example to bring hope to Cuba when hope had lessened. And the global support for ending the Vietnam War might, the Cuban leadership hoped, just about weaken the United States sufficiently to help ease their own siege, making the rhetorical parallel between Cuba and Vietnam, and between Hô` Chí Minh and Guevara, a powerful illustration of a global (if indirect) support for easing Cuba’s beleaguered position. Ultimately, of course, that did happen, but not until 1976, when the fallout from Vietnam (ignominious defeat in 1975) and Watergate led to Carter’s election and (in 1977) his decision to partially recognise the Cuban government. By then, however, Cuba’s ‘heroic’ phase had clearly ended with the process of less radical institutionalisation well under way since 1975 and with a better and perhaps more dependent relationship with the Soviet Union. However, the Cuban–Vietnamese relationship, based on those early similarities and mutual support, did survive. In September 1973, Fidel Castro made a highly publicised visit to Vietnam; while he had already visited North Vietnam in 1969, to attend Hô` Chí Minh’s funeral, this visit saw him become the first ruling foreign leader to visit NLF-liberated territory in the South. In the 1973 visit, moreover, he was accompanied by a contingent of agricultural advisors and construction workers, the latter sent specifically to rebuild the war-damaged Hô` Chí Minh Trail. The trade established already then began to include more concrete aid, as sugar and coffee were shipped to North Vietnam.24 Meanwhile, a steady flow began of Vietnamese students studying in Cuban education and scientific institutions, as Cuba’s internationalist drive developed. Significantly, when armed conflict broke out between China and Vietnam in 1979, the Cuban leaders immediately took sides to support Vietnam and openly condemning China.25

24 Margaret Randall, Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 109. 25 Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Cuban-Chinese Relations after the End of the Cold

War,” in Cuba in a Global Context: International Relations, Internationalism, and

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Finally, in the 1990s, there was a further curious twist to the longstanding relationship: when the Cuban economy went into freefall after the collapse of the socialist bloc and Soviet Union (1989–1891) and when Cuban leaders sought ways out of the crisis, some economists and politicians pointed to the Vietnamese example of economic reform as a possible model for Cuba, some of whose aspects did indeed find their way into Cuban thinking. Indeed, while outside commentators often assumed that a long-awaited Cuban transition (presumably towards capitalism) might follow the Chinese model, most of Cuba’s leaders and PCC activists rejected that possibility, seeing that model as dangerous for its implications of accompanying inequality and corruption; instead, they seemed more attracted by the experience offered of Vietnam, which still struck a chord in Cuba. Recent years’ warm relations and commercial exchanges, along with the continuing educational cooperation programmes and growing Vietnamese aid to Cuba on agricultural production,26 all suggest that that chord still resonates, the Vietnamese struggle still evidently enjoying a special place in many older Cubans’ memories and admiration. Now, with the Vietnamese “transition” (towards what is defined as an updated version of their own socialism), many younger Cubans continue to be willing to learn from a collective experience which, for all its differences from Cuba and despite the somewhat one-sided and even pragmatic nature of the 1960s’ relationship, still may have something from which to learn. Still revolutionary soulmates perhaps?

Bibliography Alzugaray Treto, Carlos, “Cuban-Chinese Relations after the End of the Cold War,” in Cuba in a Global Context: International Relations, Internationalism, and Transnationalism, ed. Katherine Krull (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). Anderson, Jon Lee, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (London: Bantam Press, 1997).

Transnationalism, ed. Katherine Krull (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 88–108. 26 Pedro Monzón and Eduardo Regalado Florido, “Cuba and Asia and Oceania,” in Cuban Foreign Policy: Transformation under Raúl Castro, ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 113–123.

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Bain, Mervyn J., Moscow and Havana, 1917 to the Present: An Enduring Friendship in an Ever-Changing Global Context (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Brown, Jonathan C., Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Domínguez, Jorge I., Cuba: Order and Revolution (London: The Belknap Press, 1975). Garland Mahler, Anne, From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Gosse, Van, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Kapcia, Antoni, Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005). Koppel, Martin, and Róger Calero, “Cuba and Algerian Revolutions: An Intertwined History,” The Militant 83,8 (2019). Latner, Teishan, Cuban Revolution in America: Havana and the Making of a United States Left, 1968–1992 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Monzón, Pedro, and Eduardo Regalado Florido, “Cuba and Asia and Oceania,” in Cuban Foreign Policy: Transformation under Raúl Castro, ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Onion, Rebecca, “Bright 1970 Cuban Propaganda Posters Urging Solidarity With Vietnam,” (1 May 2015), https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/ 05/history-of-cuba-and-vietnam-posters-by-rene-mederos.html. Paterson, Thomas G., Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Pérez Jr., Louis A., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality and Culture (New York: The Ecco Press, 1994). Randall, Margaret, Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

CHAPTER 14

Singing in Solidarity: The Latin American Protest Song Movement and the Vietnam War Matías Hermosilla

During the 1960s, many Latin American musicians took part in a transnational cultural project aiming to create what I conceptualize as a global “playlist of protest.”1 They operated within the mental framework of 1 Acknowledgments: This chapter has benefitted from the invaluable contributions of my professors, colleagues, and friends at Stony Brook University in the Department of History and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Due to limited space, I can only single out a few individuals by name. First, I want to thank Alexander Sedlmaier, the editor of this volume, for giving me the opportunity to take part in this important scholarly project. Second, I thank my advisor, Professor Eric Zolov, for his continuous lessons and dedicated and ever-insightful feedback that has greatly enhanced my work. Third, I must acknowledge Professors Lori Flores, Brooke Larson, and Ben Tausig for their thorough and thoughtful advice. Additionally, I owe a deep debt to my colleague and friend Spencer Austin, who has served as a generous editor and helped me to overcome

M. Hermosilla (B) Department of History, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] Centro de Estudios Históricos, Universidad Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago, Chile © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4_14

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what Vijay Prashad labelled the “Third-World project.”2 One of the multiple aspects of this project was the configuration and promotion of a transnational musical repertoire. This repertoire was created from different styles and lyrical topics to influence social movements around the world by shaping a common sound/language of protest. This protest song movement intensified the global wave of social movement mobilization and political polarization in the 1960s. In this context, support for the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) became a powerful symbol and unifying force for the left-wing transnational protest song movement. This chapter is centered on a transnational history of references to the Vietnam War in Latin American protest songs produced between 1967 and 1972. It is divided into four general sections. First, I explore the historiography of the “Global 1960s” to show how the concept of a “playlist of protest” offers a way to rethink the cultural, social, and political relations of the 1960s. Second, I analyze the importance of the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (Gathering of Protest Songs), organized in 1967 in Cuba, and how that event shaped the new “protest song” industry. Third, I focus on the production of songs and albums in Latin America that expressed solidarity with Hô` Chí Minh and the Vietnamese people. Finally, I will analyze the 1972 Encuentro de Música Latinoamericana (Latin American Music Gathering) that took place in Cuba and attempted to explicitly tie Latin American leftist political struggles to the ongoing fight in Vietnam.

A Playlist of Protest: Rethinking Global Connections in the 1960s In his 2005 book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Odd Arne Westad challenged the traditional bipolar narrative in Cold War historiography by highlighting the Third World as another actor in that chilly conflict. An emphasis on Third-World

the complex challenges of writing in my second language. Finally, I want to thank my friends Ximena López Carrillo and Lance Boos for their insightful comments and critiques that have helped me to refine the arguments presented in this chapter. 2 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), xv.

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agency helped to problematize traditional narratives focusing on a Washington/Moscow, North/North, or North/South dynamic. Westad also de-emphasized the use of the term “international” in favor of “global.” The nebulous notion of the “international” could mean relationships between two or more countries, but it did not imply a concern for the entire world. Most scholarships before Westad’s book saw the Cold War as a two-way confrontation between superpowers. Conversely, the concept of the “global” is broader and connected with the idea that the Cold War conflict occurred at the same time across different countries, regions, and continents, each with equal importance for understanding this historical event.3 Building on Westad’s global conceptualization of the Cold War, historians such as Hal Brands, Tanya Harmer, Greg Grandin, Alfredo Riquelme, Gilbert Joseph, and Daniela Spenser developed a new regional approach to explore the complexities of Cold War-era Latin America. This new approach saw the Cold War in Latin America as, in the words of Tanya Harmer, a kind of “Inter-American Cold War.”4 These interventions, made primarily by diplomatic historians, contributed to the development of a global conceptualization of political relationships during the post-World War II era. Also, the development of the “South/South” angle focusing on interactions and tensions within countries of the same or similar regions, highlighted the link among the so-called Third-World or non-hegemonic countries. These conceptualizations are crucial to this chapter’s analysis of cultural relationships. In a 2014 essay, Eric Zolov pushed for a rethinking of the Cold War and the relationship between the so-called centers and peripheries. In that essay, Zolov defined the Global Sixties as: “A new conceptual approach to understanding local change within a transnational framework, 3 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3, 5. 4 Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America and the Cold War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.), In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Tanya Harmer and Alfredo Riquelme (eds.), Chile y la Guerra Fría global (Santiago: RIL, 2014).

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one constituted by multiple crosscurrents of geopolitical, ideological, cultural, and economic forces.” Such forces produced a simultaneity of “like” responses across disparate geographical contexts, suggesting interlocking causes. For Latin Americanists, the historiographical transformation underway is reflected in a new approach whose interpretations move beyond viewing Latin America in the “long sixties” through the lens of imperialism and anti-imperialist struggle—a narrative overwhelmingly shaped by a presumption of US hegemony—and toward a more complex understanding of Latin America as an incubator for and a progenitor of the imagery, actors, ideas, and soundscapes that constituted a “Global Sixties.”5 As a field, the Global Sixties tries to develop a new lens of analysis that distances the discussion from exclusive national and diplomatic historiographies by employing a transnational framework that highlights the networks and shared cultural imaginations of the 1960s. Through the complexity of a transnational observation of that decade, the Global Sixties framework makes it possible to access material “contact zones” between actors from different geographical and cultural regions.6 This chapter contributes to discussions on the Global Sixties by analyzing the role that music played in the spread of ideologies and imaginations through the “Third-World project,” and how these manifestations contributed to escalating political polarization in countries around the world.7

5 Eric Zolov, “Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties,” The Americas 70,3 (2014), 354. 6 In recent years many scholars have published works that can be considered part of this Global Sixties historiographical angle. See especially Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Patrick Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Alberto Martín Álvarez and Eduardo Rey Tristán (eds.), Revolutionary Violence and the New Left (New York: Routledge, 2016); Vania Markarian, Uruguay ’68: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Patrick Barr-Melej, Psychedelic Chile: Youth, Counterculture and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Chen Jian et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nation-Building (New York: Routledge, 2018). 7 Prashad, Darker Nations, xv.

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Since the end of the twentieth century, historians have increasingly considered popular music an essential source to illuminate not only cultural histories, but social and political histories as well. One notable example is Zolov’s Refried Elvis: The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (1999), which opened a new lens for analyzing the rise of a rock counterculture in the 1960s student movement in Mexico. Another example, from the Chilean historiography, is the two-volume Historia Social de la Música Popular en Chile (Social History of Popular Music in Chile, 2005 and 2009). These works opened up a new national approach to different musical industries throughout the “long twentieth century” and how those cultural manifestations impacted the social history of Latin America.8 My analysis is inspired by the works of Jan Fairley and Ashley Black. Fairley analyzed particular cases and connections between musicians in the region in the late 1960s, while Black explored similar connections between Latin American and US musicians.9 Building upon their analyzes, I see more complex networks of connections that were not primarily based on personal relationships. My work illuminates the creation and consolidation of a transnational industry in the 1960s that was supported by governments, producers, and groups of musicians and sonic creations that circulated throughout the world and built a “playlist of protest.” That concept borrows from and expands upon Jeremi Suri’s notion of “languages of dissent,” which he used to understand transnational Marxist academic languages during the student protests of 1968. I explore a transnational non-academic project that aimed to build universal 8 Juan Pablo Gónzalez and Claudio Rolle, Historia Social de la Música Popular en Chile, 1890–1950 (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2004); Juan Pablo Gónzalez, Claudio Rolle, and Oscar Ohlsen, Historia Social de la Música Popular en Chile, 1950–1970 (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2009). The idea of the legacy that consolidated the “long” twentieth century has been extensively discussed by historians and sociologists, see in particular Giovanni Arriaghi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2009). 9 Jan Fairley, “‘There Is No Revolution Without Song’: ‘New Song’ in Latin America,”

in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–136; Ashley Black, “Canto Libre: Folk Music and Solidarity in the Americas, 1967–1974,” in The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America, ed. Jessica Stites Mor and Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 117–145.

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languages, imaginations, and sonic aesthetic narratives.10 The proponents of that massive musical project hoped to intensify social movement mobilization and political polarization by encouraging people from different and distant countries to define themselves as part of the same oppressed identity, or “Third-World self.” This cultural project was consolidated in 1967 with the organization of the first Encuentro de la Canción Protesta.

El Encuentro de la Canción Protesta: Third-World Solidarity and New Music Industries In 1966, Cuba was the setting for the first Tricontinental Conference where politicians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America gathered to shape the creation of a new counter-hegemonic, economic, political, and military aid pact. The Tricontinental Conference was the result of a decade of political gatherings that started in 1955 at Bandung, and it consolidated the idea of a Third-World project.11 The 1966 conference in Cuba resulted in the creation of the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África, y América Latina (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or OSPAAAL) as an institution to rally political, military, and economic support against the forces of colonialism. In other words, this conference was held to define a common enemy—imperialism and colonialism—and to conceive of ThirdWorld solidarity as a unique form of resistance against that enemy.12 The Cuban leader Fidel Castro expressed the following in the closing remarks of a speech to the conference: “Our People have felt each and every one of the problems of foreign peoples as their own. Our People […] received you with open arms and now say goodbye with closed arms. As a symbol

10 Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3. 11 The Bandung Conference was a gathering of postcolonial African and Asian countries that sought to create a league to fight against any possible threat to their newfound independence and to provide a counterbalance to the hegemonic power of “First World” and even “Second World” states. 12 Anne G. Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 70.

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of a bond that will not be broken anymore and as a symbol of their feelings of fraternity and solidarity for the peoples that fight, for which they are willing to give their own blood, too. Homeland or death, we shall overcome!”13 The conception of solidarity expressed here by Castro was shared by the guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara who, though absent from the conference, sent an open letter in which he argued that Vietnam offered a global model for progressive change. This message was spread and published in the magazine Tricontinental after Guevara’s death in 1967.14 He stated that the objective should be to create two, three, or even many Vietnams.15 The conference emphasized that the Third-World project must strengthen anti-imperialist sentiment through a worldwide feeling of solidarity, and for this reason, as Antoni Kapcia has developed in this volume, the symbol of the Vietnamese struggle became an important rhetorical tool for invoking solidarity.16 In this context, culture was considered a valuable means of spreading the ideology of a Third-World project. Based on these ideas, the Castro regime-backed cultural institution Casa de la Américas organized the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta in the year following the Tricontinental Conference. A group of fifty musicians representing eighteen countries and six continents (see Table 14.1) travelled to Cuba for the gathering. Held between July 29 and August 10, 1967, this meeting was an avant-garde moment in the history of popular 13 “Nuestro Pueblo ha sentido como suyo todos y cada uno de los problemas de los demás pueblos. Nuestro Pueblo […] los recibió con los brazos abiertos y los despide con los brazos cerrados. Como símbolo de un lazo que no se romperá más y como símbolo de sus sentimientos fraternales y solidarios hacia los pueblos que luchan por los cuales está dispuesto a dar también su sangre. ¡Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!” Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, “Conferencia tricontinental en la Habana” (Havana: ICAIC, 17 January 1966), https://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13020604/conferencia-tricontinental-enla-habana-conference-tricontinentale-a-la-havane-video.html. Translation by the author. 14 See Eric Zolov, “La Tricontinental y el Mensaje del Che Guevara. Encrucijadas de Una Nueva Izquierda,” Palimpsesto 6,9 (2016): 1–13; Robert Young, “Disseminating the Tricontinental,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. Chen Jian et al., 517–547. 15 Ernesto Guevara, “‘Crear dos, tres… Muchos Vietnam’: Mensaje a los Pueblos del Mundo a Través de la Tricontinental ” (16 April 1967), https://www.marxists.org/esp anol/guevara/04_67.htm. 16 For the Tricontinental Conference, see Zolov, “La Tricontinental y el Mensaje del Che Guevara”; Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South, 71–84; Antoni Kapcia, “Revolutionary Soulmates? Cuba’s Slow Discovery of Vietnam” in this volume.

Luis Cilia Manuel Oscar Matus, Celia Birenbaum, Rodolfo Mederos, Ramón Ayala, and Amada Aida Caballero Jean Lewis Rolando Alarcón, Ángel Parra, and Isabel Parra Onema D’Jamba Pascal Carlos Puebla, Rosendo Ruiz, and Alberto Vera Gerry Wolf Claude Vinci Martha Jean Claude Ivan della Mea, Mari Franco Lao, Giovanna Marini, Elena Morandi, and Leoncarlo Settimelli Oscar Chávez and José González Francisco Marín, Florence Marín, Virgilio Rojas, Luis Casasco, and Dionisio Arzamendía (Los Guaranís) Nicomedes Santacruz Tran Drung and Pham Duong Raimón John Faulkner, Sandra Kerr, Ewan Mac Coll, Peggy Seeger, and Terry Yarnell Barbara Dane, Julius Lester, and Irwin Silber Braulio López and José Luis Guerra (Los Olimareños ), Quitín Cabrera, Braulio López, Carlos Molina, Yamandú Palacios, Aníbal Sampayo, Marcos Velázquez, Daniel Viglietti, and Alfredo Zitarrosa

Angola/Portugal Argentina Australia Chile Congo/Kinshasa Cuba East Germany France Haiti Italy Mexico Paraguay

17 This table was created by the author and its contents were extracted from José Ossorio, “Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” Casa de las Américas 45 (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1967), 144; VV.AA., Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, Casa de las Américas, 1968; Cancion Protesta 1 (1968).

Peru South Vietnam Spain United Kingdom United States Uruguay

Name of attendee(s)

Country

Table 14.1 Encuentro attendees and countries of origin17

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music. The American musicologist Irwin Silber said during the conference: “I think that this festival is a historic event. I don’t know about any previous meeting of this kind, where committed singers and workers in the field of music met together and exchanged ideas and experiences.”18 This gathering included a series of concerts for workers and students in Havana, Varadero, Santiago de Cuba, and Sierra Maestra.19 During the working sessions, the “cultural workers” discussed the definition and use of the term “protest song.” At first, some participants conceived of the term as too narrow, but by the end of the conference, they decided it was the most accurate descriptor available because it could be applied to everyday global struggles and joined together different musical styles instead of limiting itself to folk/rural sounds.20 It is important to highlight that a commission of South Vietnamese musicians participated in the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, with Tran Drung and Pham Duong performing “San Sang Ban” (Ready to Shoot) in Vietnamese. This song formed part of the album produced after the event. The only other direct reference to Vietnam in that album is the composition “The Ballad of Hô` Chí Minh,” by the British singer Ewan MacColl. That song addresses the historic and heroic struggle for the liberation of Indochina from domination by “foreign soldiers.”21 Another noteworthy detail regarding the attendees is that representatives from Maoist China were not included in the event, the result of a serious political split between Cuba and China after the Tricontinental Conference.22 In 1966, Castro even claimed the Chinese government’s effort to spread

18 Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, “Festival de la Canción Protesta” (Havana: ICAIC, 7 August 1967), https://www.ina.fr/video/VDD13021120/festival-de-la-can cion-protesta-festival-de-la-chanson-contestataire-video.html; Canción Protesta 1 (1968), 39. 19 José Ossorio, “Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” Casa de las Américas 45 (1967), 140–141. 20 Ibid., 140. 21 Ewan MacColl, “The Ballad of Hô ` Chí Minh,” track 1, side B, vinyl 1 in VV.AA.,

Canción Protesta, Casa de las Américas, 1968, vinyl. 22 Yinghong Cheng, “Sino-Cuban Relations during the Early Years of the Castro Regime, 1959–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9,3 (2007), 104.

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Maoist propaganda on the island was a direct provocation comparable to US interventionism.23 This meeting resulted in different outcomes that encouraged the creation of a common playlist of protest. First, the Centro de la Canción de Protesta (Center for Protest Songs) was founded within Casa de las Américas to collect, classify, and distribute protest songs. Second, a double album was created that brought together twenty-seven live performances of some attendees recorded during the Encuentro.24 This was published in 1969 along with explanatory texts in Spanish, English, and French. Third, attendees decided to spread this music to all countries that lacked access to protest songs. Finally, attendees signed a resolution summarizing their joint project to use music as a tool of global change: “[The Gathering of Protest Songs] has allowed us [musicians and scholars] to meet with each other, exchange experiences, and understand the impact of our work, as well as the important role we play in the fight for the liberation of the people in the struggle against North American [US] imperialism and colonialism. […] Protest song workers must be conscious that music, because of its nature, has an enormous impact on mass communications while it breaks barriers, like illiteracy, that separate the dialogue between the artist and the people. Consequently, music should be a weapon at the service of the people, not a consumer product used by capitalism to alienate the people. […] The task of the protest song workers must be developed by taking a position defined by the people

23 Fidel Castro, “Discurso pronunciado en la Conmemoración del IX Aniversario del Asalto al Palacio Presidencial” (Havana: Universidad de la Habana, 13 March 1966), www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1966/esp/f130366e.html. 24 José Ossorio, “El Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” 141.

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to address the problems of the society in which they live.”25 This statement defined the pedagogical, political, and cultural role and potential for protest songs in the fight for a revolutionary future. Castro similarly expressed that this meeting symbolized the creation of a new kind of musical art form capable of releasing emotions and creating a common sentiment for all humanity.26 In addition, attendees agreed their artistic movement should focus its efforts on supporting the anti-imperial fight in Vietnam, the African American fight against discrimination and exploitation, and the struggles of proletarians and students in Europe and the United States. Finally, they expressed their support for the Cuban Revolution, which “showed the true path that [the] countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America should take to finally get liberated.”27 The Encuentro de la Canción Protesta was a foundational event for protest music, creating a sort of avant-garde artistic gathering two years before Woodstock was organized. The album produced in 1968 (Illustrations 14.1 and 14.2) was spread around the world and selected tracks were published in new versions edited in Japan (1969) and the United

25 “[El Encuentro de la Canción Protesta] nos ha permitido [músicos y estudiosos] conocernos, intercambiar experiencias y comprender el alcance de nuestra labor, así como el importante papel que cumplimos en la lucha por la liberación de los pueblos contra el imperialismo norteamericano y el colonialismo. […] Los trabajadores de la canción protesta deben tener conciencia de que la canción, por su particular naturaleza, posee una enorme fuerza de comunicación con las masas, en tanto que rompe las barreras que, como el analfabetismo, dificultan el diálogo del artista con el pueblo de cual forma parte. En consecuencia, la canción debe ser un arma al servicio de los de lo pueblos, no un producto de consumo utilizado por el capitalismo para enajenarlos. […] La tarea de los trabajadores de la canción de protesta debe desarrollarse a partir de una toma de posición definida junto a su pueblo frente a los problemas de la sociedad en que vive.” Ibid., 143–144. 26 “Voice of Fidel Castro,” in VV.AA., Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America, Paredon, 1970, vinyl. A longer excerpt was published in Jorge Ossorio, “Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” 139. 27 Ibid., 144; Casa de las Américas, Síntesis de Actividades de la Casa de las Américas, 1959–1971 (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1972), 6; internal document from Casa de las Américas extracted from Cuban Culture and Cultural Relations, 1959–, part 1: “Casa y Cultura” (Leiden: Brill, 2017), http://primarysources.brillonline.com/browse/cuban-cul ture-and-cultural-relations.

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Illustration 14.1 Cover of the album Encuentro de la canción protesta (picture by the author).

States (1970).28 The gathering also created material links among musicians based on adaptations of foreign songs and sounds to repertoires in new locales. These links were also forged through the creation of new music festivals dedicated to protest songs, like the Festival des Politischen Liedes (Festival of Political Songs) in East Germany.29 Additionally, new independent record labels—the majority with links to communist parties 28 VV.AA., Canción Protesta, Casa de las Américas, 1968, vinyl; VV.AA., Canción Protesta 世界のプロテスト・ソ, URC, 1969, vinyl; VV.AA., Canción Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America, Paredon, 1970, vinyl. 29 The Festival des Politischen Liedes was founded in East Germany in 1970 and was held for twenty years. This event brought together a varied group of musicians from all around the world and its concerts were recorded in albums, with the exception of the final one.

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Illustration 14.2 Explanatory texts of the album Encuentro de la canción protesta (picture by the author).

and youth leagues—were founded around the world in the years after the Encuentro with the mission to spread revolutionary music. The gathering resulted in the configuration of a kind of “spirit of protest song gathering”—based on the ideals of Third-World solidarity—that disseminated languages, imaginaries, and stereotypes at local, regional, and global levels. The spread of this radical knowledge resulted in the establishment of a new cultural industry that went on to create the playlist of protest.

Latin America Sings to Vietnam (1968–1972) The spirit of Encuentro de la Canción Protesta and the symbolism of the Vietnamese anti-imperial struggle supported the creation of a new avant-garde musical industry that, following the written resolutions of

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the gathering, transcended styles and genres and highlighted the importance of spreading the “right” political message to as many audiences as possible.30 To demonstrate this process, I will analyze different songs that represented typical approaches to Vietnam by Latin American musicians of this protest song movement. First, I will analyze the 1968 album X Viet-Nam from the Chilean group Quilapayún. Second, the Cuban– Vietnamese 1969 production Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam (Vietnam Sings to Cuba—Cuba Sings to Vietnam). Third, the 1971 album El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The Right to Live in Peace) by the Chilean singer Víctor Jara that came to symbolize a mix between rock and folk/protest song. Finally, I will explore the case of the Venezuelan singer Alí Primera and his 1972 album De Una Vez (Do It Now) that introduced Afro-heritage folklore. In Chile, the direct impact of the 1967 protest song gathering in Cuba was the foundation of the record label DICAP. The Chilean Communist Party youth wing founded the record company Jota-Jota in 1968, and this was renamed Discoteca del Cantar Popular (Discography of the Popular Song, or DICAP) later that year. DICAP produced sixty-seven long-duration albums and eighty-four singles that represented 30 percent of the domestic Chilean musical market between 1968 and 1973.31 According to the historian Natália Schmiedecke, the creation of DICAP guaranteed the circulation of politicized repertoires that were traditionally excluded from the mainstream industry. This facilitated the emergence of the Chilean protest song movement, the so-called Nueva Canción Chilena (Chilean New Song).32

30 José Ossorio, “Encuentro de la Canción Protesta,” 144. 31 Anny Rivera, Transformaciones de la Industrial Musical en Chile

(Santiago: CENECA, 1984), 15, 23–27; Jorge Rojas and Gonzalo Rojas, “Auditores, Lectores, Televidentes y Espectadores: Chile Mediatizado, 1973–1990,” in Historia de la Vida Privada en Chile, ed. Rafael Sagredo and Cristián Gazmuri, vol. 3 (Santiago: Taurus, 2007), 390. 32 Natália Schmiedecke, “La influencia de DICAP en la Nueva Canción Chilena,” in Palimpsestos sonoros : Reflexiones sobre la Nueva Canción Chilena, ed. Eileen Karmy and Martín Farías (Santiago: CEIBO, 2014), 207.

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The first album produced under the record label Jota-Jota was Quilapayún’s X Viet-Nam (1968).33 Quilapayún (“Three Beards” in Mapudungun), founded in 1965 by university students Julio Numhauser, Eduardo and Julio Carrasco, was a band dedicated to recovering folkloric sounds and transnational revolutionary discourses. This group first came under the artistic direction of Angel Parra (1965–1967) and afterward under Victor Jara (1967–1973).34 X Viet-Nam was Quilapayún’s third studio production. The album’s release was a turning point for the band as it was far more in touch with Communist Party doctrine than Quilapayún’s earlier works. Their previous record label, EMI-Odeón, forbid them to record more politicized songs; this situation resulted in their transition from a big transnational company to the communist Jota-Jota label.35

33 Quilapayún, X Viet-Nam, Jota-Jota, 1968, vinyl. 34 See the “Memoria Chilena” online service of the National Library of Chile, http://

www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-96426.html. 35 Eduardo Carrasco, Quilapayun: La Revolución y las Estrellas (Santiago: Las Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1988), 131.

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Illustration 14.3 Front cover of Quilapayún’s X Viet-Nam.36

The album is visually striking, with a provocative cover featuring a photographic insert of a Vietnamese fighter (Illustration 14.3) raising a rifle in his left hand to symbolize victory. According to the designer Antonio Larrea, this picture was extracted from a Chinese propaganda magazine dedicated to the US intervention in Vietnam.37 The back cover (Illustration 14.4) contains a message inviting participation in the IX. World Festival of Youth and Students that was organized that year in Bulgaria and was supported by the Communist Party of Chile. The back cover also emphasizes Chilean solidarity with Vietnam by highlighting 36 Quilapayún, X Viet-Nam, Jota-Jota, 1968, vinyl. Images extracted from https:// www.discogs.com/es/Quilapay%C3%BAn-Por-Viet-Nam/release/3454708. 37 Antonio Larrea, 33 1/3 RPM: La Historia Gráfica de 99 Carátulas, 1968–1973 (Santiago: Nunatak, 2008), 18.

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Illustration 14.4 Back cover of Quilapayún’s X Viet-Nam (see footnote 37).

a five-day-long march of 3000 students from Valparaíso to Santiago, and the so-called Latin American gathering in solidarity with Vietnam in Santiago (30 October–2 November 1967). Musically the production included twelve songs, including adaptations of a Pablo Neruda poem, songs from the Spanish Civil War, Italian folk music, and two pieces from the Chilean musician Violeta Parra. The only reference to the Vietnam War, outside of the imagery on the cover, is the first song of the album Por Vietnam. Stylistically, it is a “march” inviting the youth to go to the streets to fight in solidarity with Vietnam and

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its struggle. Eduardo Carrasco composed the music and the lyrics were written by the Chilean poet Jaime Gómez, also known as Jonás:

Yankee, Yankee, Yankee, cuidado La sangre que viertes va por la tierra Sangre que nunca te olvidará Aguila Negra ya caerás, Las aguilas negras rompen sus garras Contra el heróico pueblo en Vietnam

Yankee, Yankee, Yankee, watch out The blood that you spill on the ground It is blood that will never be forgotten black eagle, you will fall The black eagles break their nails Against the heroic people in Vietnam

QRC1: Scan to listen to the song.

The lyrics can be considered a “warning” to imperialistic forces that will be defeated by the “heroic people in Vietnam.” The last line in the poem references Che Guevara’s Tricontinental letter by saying that “El Guerrillero te vencerá” (The Guerrilla Warrior will defeat you). This combative song invited listeners to “stand up” in solidarity with Vietnam. It was used in a short documentary film made by the Film Institute of the University of Chile in 1969 to depict the March of 1967, held in solidarity with Vietnam.38 This pioneering song and album inaugurated a group of productions that addressed the challenges of transnational solidarity and the project to access different kinds of audiences. The first explicit cultural collaboration between Latin American and Vietnamese musicians was produced in Cuba in 1969. That year, Cuban and Vietnamese musicians created a joint bilingual album called Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba canta a Vietnam (Illustrations 14.5 and 14.6).39 This production included a repertoire of thirteen songs on two sides. Side A consists of seven songs from Cuban musicians singing in Spanish about the epic Vietnamese fight against US imperialism. Side B is a collection 38 Alvaro Ramírez and Claudio Sipiaín, Por Viet-Nam (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1969), http://www.cinetecavirtual.cl/fichapelicula.php?cod=12. 39 VV.AA., Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam, EGREM, 1969, vinyl.

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Illustration 14.5 Front cover of the album Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam 40 (picture by the author).

of six songs about the Cuban Revolution performed by Vietnamese musicians in their native language, with two songs entitled “Vietnam-Cuba.” These songs exemplified the idea that Vietnam was a central point of reference for the Third-World cultural imagination of the Global 1960s. Stylistically, the Vietnamese songs on Side B are mainly military marches except for the ballad “Siboney.” On the Cuban side, there are songs from a variety of artists that symbolized many different styles. These included Carlos Puebla and his “Cuban son;” the ballads of Omara Portuondo, Elena Burke, and Pablo Milanés; and Silvio Rodríguez’s rock-inspired song “3.000 Pájaros Negros” (3000 Black Birds), which referenced US

40 VV.AA., Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam, EGREM, 1969, vinyl.

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Illustration 14.6 Back cover of the album Vietnam Canta a Cuba—Cuba Canta a Vietnam (picture by the author) (see footnote 40).

bomber planes. This album shows the transition between two generations of Cuban musicians, from Carlos Puebla (practically the official singer of the early years of the revolution) to younger figures like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés who became the new voices of the Cuban government during the 1970s. Additionally, Pablo Milanés’s ballad “Hô` Chí Minh: Su Nombre Puede Ponerse en Verso” (Hô` Chí Minh: Your Name Can Be a Verse) expressed these musicians’ highly idealized and emotional image of the North Vietnamese leader Hô` Chí Minh:

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Porque usted, presidente Ho Chi Minh, Poeta Ho Chi Minh, Sereno campesino vietnamita Ho Chi Minh, Tiene setenta y siete años de lucha en vida entera.

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Because you, President Ho Chi Minh, Poet Ho Chi Minh, Peaceful Vietnamese peasant Ho Chi Minh, You have fought all seventy-seven years of your life.

Y porque usted ha dejado de ser todo, sus All of this is because you left aside all your life, nombres, your names, y una voz, un aliento, una mirada, your voice, breath, and eyes, Para ser solamente y nada menos, To become nothing less than, Que tierra y sangre y huesos de la patria. The earth, blood, and bones of your nation.

QRC 2: Scan to listen to the song.

In this song, Milanés, accompanied only by a guitar, built an imaginary conception of Hô` Chí Minh as a poet, peasant, and president, in other words, as a sensible artist, a true working class subject, and a leader for his people. The references to this exemplary fighter who “sacrificed” everything for his people speak to the image of Ho as more than just a local Vietnamese figure, but a warrior battling for the liberation of the wider Third World. In other words, Ho was committed to sacrifice for the whole of humanity. This song symbolized the configuration of a shared sonic aesthetic. The circulation of this music shaped a “common struggle” identity in Cuba and Vietnam and tied them together through an imagined destiny as Third-World nations that must be protected, in this case through cultural and material solidarity. The year 1971 was an important one for the New Left. It was the first year of the Allende government in Chile and witnessed intensifying political polarization.41 This year saw the triumph of the left-wing governing coalition Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in the municipal elections, the 41 The New Left in Latin America consisted of new generational left-wing movements

that counted on the use of force as a primary tool to succeed in revolutionary projects. See Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993); Eric Zolov, “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” A Contracorriente 5,2 (2008): 47–73.

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assassination of Edmundo Pérez Zujovic (the Minister of the Interior in the administration of former President Eduardo Frei) by radical leftists, the state visit of Fidel Castro to Chile, a massive women’s march against Allende’s economic policies, and the approval of the nationalization of the copper companies that had previously been controlled primarily by US interests.42 As Tanya Harmer argued, these events, in addition to the popularity of the Chilean socialist project across the Third World, increased US government fears of the Chilean administration and led the US to intensify both overt and covert actions against Allende.43 In this context of local polarization and international pressure, Victor Jara gained international recognition through the release of his album El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The Right to Live in Peace). Jara started his musical career in 1957 as a member of Cuncúmen (Water’s Whisper in Mapudungun), and he joined that group’s Latin American and Eastern European tours. In parallel to his musical career, he enrolled at the University of Chile in 1956 to study theater and directed a variety of theatrical productions. Jara later served as the artistic director for Cuncumén, as well as Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani. He became more politicized when he started his career as a solo artist. This is best demonstrated with reference to the 1969 release of his fourth solo album, Pongo en Tus Manos Abiertas ... (I Put This in Your Open Hands ...), which included the song “Preguntas por Puerto Montt” (Questions about Puerto Montt). This song asks Edmundo Pérez Zujovic about his involvement in the 1969 Puerto Montt massacre, when forcible evictions of squatters by Chilean police resulted in the wrongful deaths of eleven people.44 The album also includes songs about Salvador Allende’s government, which were written to persuade audiences to intensify 42 For a general overview of 1971 in Chile, see Chile 1971: El primer año de gobierno de la Unidad Popular, ed. Pedro Milos (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2013). For the women’s march, see Margaret Power, La Mujer de Derecha: el poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador Allende, 1964–1973 (Santiago: Centro de Estudios Barros Arana, 2008), 151–192. 43 Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, 107–109. 44 On Pérez Zujovic’s assassination see Albert Michaels, “The Alliance for Progress

and Chile’s ‘Revolution in Liberty,’ 1964–1970,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 18 (1976), 89; Marcelo Bonnassiolle, “Violencia Política y Conflictividad Durante el Gobierno de la Unidad Popular: El caso de la Vanguardia Organizada del Pueblo (VOP), 1970–1971,” Diálogos Revista Electrónica de Historia 16 (2015), 125– 164; Victor Jara, side A, track 5 of Pongo en Tus Manos Abiertas, Jota-Jota, 1969, vinyl.

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their commitment to the Chilean Revolution. These included “Ni Chicha Ni Limoná” (Neither Chicha nor Lemonade), “Brigada Ramona Parra” (Ramona Parra Brigade), “El Alma Llena de Banderas” (The Soul Full of Flags), and a cover version of “Little Boxes” by the US musician Malvina Reynolds translated as Las Casitas del Barrio Alto (The Houses of the Richest Neighborhood). The songs on this album made a variety of international folk references, including “Vamos por Ancho Camino” (We are Going through the Wider Path) and “A la Molina No Voy Más” (I Am Not Going to La Molina Anymore), musical compositions originating in Peru, and the song “El Ñiño Yuntero” (The Plowman Kid), the musical version of a poem by the Spanish writer Miguel Hernández. There are two songs from the album El Derecho de Vivir en Paz that explicitly referenced solidarity and the Third-World project. First, “A Cuba” (To Cuba) was composed to show how Cuba was an inspiration for Chile but at the same time how both projects were different, which Jara highlights with the phrase: “Because we are not guajiros [Cubans] our Sierra is the election.”45 This metaphor implies that the “Chilean challenge” was to institute a revolution through the electoral process, while the Cubans fought their liberation struggle through the military campaign in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. The contexts were different; therefore, the nature of revolutionary efforts (democratic or insurrectionary) also had to be different. The second Third-World project song was the title track, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” which was dedicated to the Vietnamese fight against imperialism:

Biographical information on Jara can be found in Joan Jara, Victor Jara, un canto truncado (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1983), 31–58. 45 Víctor Jara, El Derecho de Vivir en Paz, DICAP, 1971, vinyl.

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El derecho de vivir poeta Ho Chi Minh, que golpea de Vietnam a toda la humanidad. Ningún cañón borrará el surco de tu arrozal. El derecho de vivir en paz.

The right to live Poet Ho Chi Minh, That from Vietnam It shakes all humanity. No cannon will erase Your rice paddy The right to live in peace.

Indochina es el lugar mas allá del ancho mar, donde revientan la flor con genocidio y napalm. La luna es una explosión que funde todo el clamor. El derecho de vivir en paz.

Indochina is the place Across the long sea, Where they destroy the flower With genocide and napalm. The moon is an explosion That merges all the clamor. The right to live in peace.

QRC 3: Scan to listen to the song.

The title track “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” was the first time in Jara’s career that rock was use in Chile to advocate for the New Left political project. Although rock songs about the Vietnam War were produced in the US, they rarely promoted solidarity with the people of Vietnam. They promoted the anti-draft campaign opposed to the “American sacrifice” of those young men who were sent off to fight in Vietnam. Examples of this include Country Joe and the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ Die Rag” (1965), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (1969), and Edwin Starr’s “War” (1970). Conversely, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” tried to unite the folk tradition cultivated by Victor Jara with rock music and a message of solidarity with Vietnam.46 This mix between rock and the protest song movement, however, had an antecedent when Jara, as a theater director in 1969, adapted the rock musical Viet Rock created by the US screenwriter Megan Terry.47 The Chilean rock band Los Blops 46 Fabio Salas, La Primavera Terrestre: Cartografías del Rock Chileno y la Nueva Canción Chilena (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2003), 95–96. 47 Megan Terry, Viet Rock and Other Plays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).

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participated in a musically impactful way in the making of the song “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz.” According to Los Blops guitarist Eduardo Gatti, the band was mainly dedicated to playing cover songs of The Doors and The Rolling Stones and these sonic influences are felt in their collaborations with Jara for this song.48 “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” begins with an electric guitar and then other instruments progressively enter, first vocals, then bass, and finally drums. The lyrics explicitly address the heroic legacy of Hô` Chí Minh, who “shakes from Vietnam all humanity,” reinforcing the idea presented in 1966 by Che Guevara that Vietnam is an example that should be followed. But this song was not only about the Vietnam struggle. The idea behind “The Right to Live in Peace” was a claim that all countries have a right to self-governance, a particularly appealing notion for many Chilean leftists within the political context of the Allende administration. The last case is the Venezuelan singer and songwriter Alí Primera. In 1972, Primera released his first studio album in West Germany called De Una Vez: Lieder der Dritten Welt – Für Eine einzige Welt (Do It Now: Third-World Songs—For One World Only).49 We know little about Primera’s life and he was mythologized in the early 2000s by Hugo Chavez’s government.50 According to his friend, the troubadour Silvio Rodríguez, Primera was a “furious militant, a born barricade singer, who mercilessly attacked the bourgeoisie.”51 Primera drew upon different social and political struggles from around the world in this album, including the Black American struggle with the song “Black Power” and a critique of the counter-cultural call “to peace” in his song “Cuando las Águilas” (When the Eagles). The latter contains the phrase “cuando las 48 Dino Pancini and Reiner Canales, “Eduardo Gatti: Cantando lo Imperceptible” [Interview with Eduardo Gatti], in Los Necios : Conversaciones con Cantautores Hispanoamericanos, Dino Pancini and Reiner Canales (Santiago: LOM, 1999), 204–205. 49 Alí Primera, De Una Vez: Lieder Der Dritten Welt, Für Eine Einzige Welt, Pläne, 1972, vinyl. 50 Hazel Marsh, Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera and Venezuela: The Politics of Music in Latin America (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 51 “[F]oribundo militante, el nato cantor de barricadas, puteando sin piedad a la burguesía.” Matías Hermosilla interview with Silvio Rodríguez, “Recuerdos Buenos, Intensos Recuerdos,” published on Silvio Rodríguez’s blog Segunda Cita, https://seg undacita.blogspot.com/2020/02/recuerdos-intensos-buenos-recuerdos_18.html.

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aguilas se arrastre, le cantaré a la paz” (when the eagles crawl, I will sing to peace), arguing that he would only start singing about peace once the US was defeated. In this album he included a song called “La Mujer del Vietnam” (The Woman of Vietnam): Con un hijo en la mano y en la otra un fusil, la mujer de Vietnam labra su porvenir

Carrying a son on one hand In the other a rifle The woman of Vietnam Carves her future

La madre de Ho la hija de Ho la sangre, la hermana, la tierra, la lucha de Ho Chi Minh

The mother of Ho The daughter of Ho The blood, the sister, The land, the fight Of Ho Chi Minh

QRC 4: Scan to listen to the song.

This song includes two aspects not considered in the previous songs. First, it was built on the heritage of African folk music represented in the rhythm and percussion, as well as the mestizo Venezuelan folk tradition of using the cuatro.52 Second, the lyrics reflect on a gender angle by discussing the role of Vietnamese women in the resistance. Lyrics connecting the feminine Spanish expressions “la lucha, la sangre, la tierra” (the fight, the blood, and the earth) with the sacrifice of women show they served their traditional “gender role” as caregivers for children in addition to their “revolutionary duty” to fight the enemy.53 Although this song offers a glimpse of women in this radical musical tradition, the 52 The cuatro is a stringed instrument, similar to the ukulele, traditionally used in Venezuelan folk music. 53 There is a growing body of literature that addresses the gender dynamics of ThirdWorld struggles. See especially, Sandra Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Hô` Chí Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); Michelle

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powerful symbolism of Hô` Chí Minh overshadows or even replaces the role of women during this conflict. The role of women in this fight was replaced by symbolic figures, mainly men, who were meant to represent the Third-World identity.

´ El Encuentro de Musica Latinoamericana and Silent Vietnam In October 1972, musicians from across Latin America gathered again in Cuba to reconsolidate the cultural, political, and musical links among the different countries of the region. They invited important international figures like the composers Luigi Nono (Italy) and Gerd Natschinski (East Germany). In this meeting, as in the 1967 Gathering of the Protest Songs, they made a general declaration that aimed to highlight the role of music and art in resisting imperialism in the region: “The researchers, creators, and interpreters of music […] should resist imperialistic penetration, unveil and denounce any organization that covertly serves the diversionist tactics that the pseudo-revolutionaries use, and reject alienation incorporating ourselves, with our actions and productions, into the fight for our people’s integral independence, which shows the revolutionary originality of our continuous practical and theoretical Marxist creativity supported by the practice of the class struggle […]. This participation in the liberation movement will be more efficient when it interprets the feeling of the people with the authentic values of our production and rigorous artistic quality.”54 Chase, Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952– 1962 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (New York: Verso, 2016); Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro’s Victory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 54 “Los investigdores, creadores e intérpretes musical debemos […] resistir a la penetración imperialista, desenmascarar y denunciar todo organismo que, bajo cualquier pantalla sirva a ésta, y a las tácticas diversionistas que se valen de seudorrevolucionarios, y rechazar la enajenación incorporándonos, con nuestra acción y nuestra obra, al combate de nuestros pueblos por su independencia integral, que da muestras de originalidad revolucionaria en la continua creatividad práctica y teórica marxista basada en la lucha de clases […]. Esta participación en el movimiento de liberación tendrá más eficacia cuando más profundamente interprete el sentir del pueblo, por los valores auténticos de nuestra obra y por una rigurosa calidad artística.” VV.AA., Declaración Final del Encuentro de Música Latinoamericana, 1972, folder 212, Archive of Casa de Las Américas, Havana, Cuba.

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In addition to this general declaration, the gathering’s participants presented three other specific causes: supporting the Puerto Rican independence movement, promoting the struggle against US interventionism in Chile, and declaring the US War in Vietnam a crime against humanity.55 This consolidated the parallels between tensions in Latin America and Vietnam, merging the sensibilities of the different struggles together and shaping a shared solidarity feeling. In December of the same year, Salvador Allende gave a famous address at the University of Guadalajara during a diplomatic trip to Mexico. In this speech, he referenced the necessity of developing a “universal solidarity” conveying the idea that when someone in Africa or Asia (and particularly in Vietnam) died, they did so for all Third-World nations.56 Employing the words of the poet Pablo Neruda, Allende expressed that Chile was experiencing a “silent Vietnam” in which the country’s revolution was not being impeded through foreign military occupation, but by economic barriers erected by the United States and its allies. Speaking directly to his Mexican audience, Allende claimed that Third-World solidarity was the only way for those countries to remain independent from US imperialism. In other words, like Victor Jara or the declarations of the Encuentro de Música Latinoamericana, Allende claimed that for Third-World countries to secure the “Right to Live in Peace,” they had to collectively construct a project of sociopolitical liberation.

Conclusion This account of the Latin American protest song movement shows there was a concerted cultural project during the late 1960s and early 1970s to connect anti-imperial movements in distant countries and to construct Third-World solidarity. The 1967 Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, inspired by the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, tried to create a common language of revolution by way of music. This resulted in the constitution of a global “playlist of protest,” organized from the periphery (Cuba) 55 The three declarations were published in a special December 1972 issue of Boletín de Música Casa de las Américas (Casa de las Américas: Havana, 1972), 8 (Puerto Rico), 11 (Chile), and 14–15 (Vietnam), Archive of the Music Department of Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba. 56 Salvador Allende, Discurso ante los Estudiantes de la Universidad de Guadalajara (Guadalajara: 2 December 1972), https://youtu.be/K1dUBDWoyes.

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but which ultimately spread around the world. This Third World “playlist of protest” experienced a significant transformation in the Latin American context between 1967 and 1973. Compositions celebrating the hopes and triumphs of the Third-World revolution were superseded by those seeking to maintain the memory of the Chilean socialist project. Chile turned into a Latin American version of Vietnam after the overthrow of Allende—a symbol of the fight against US imperialism. Protest music concerts were no longer held in solidarity with Vietnam but in solidarity with Chile. In the visual and discursive imaginary, alongside Hô` Chí Minh, Commander Che Guevara, and other heroes and martyrs of the Left, El Compañero Presidente Salvador Allende began to appear. The surviving musicians decided to play an active role in the defence of their legacy by touring, performing, and reissuing albums. They kept alive music and lyrics that evoked the dream of a better world, but these compositions were not the same after the coup d’état. After 1973, the protest song playlist became a mechanism to resist time and evoke the nostalgic legacy of a dream that dramatically failed. This chapter traces the ties of solidarity that bound Latin America and Vietnam together through music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The works of leftist Latin American musical artists of this era demonstrate the rhetorical importance of the Vietnam War for New Left political struggles. Vietnam was an inspiration for local struggles, as Guevara outlined in his letter to the Tricontinental Conference. Additionally, the conflict allowed for the creation of a compelling form of symbolic solidarity that was represented in official speeches, protest marches, and songs. Latin American protest musicians sang about Vietnam with the aim of connecting their local imaginaries with the distant struggles of Hô` Chí Minh and his people, as part of a collective “Third-World project.” Their sonic creations aimed to build a real sentimental bridge between these different geographies while also radicalizing local audiences and persuading them to follow Vietnam’s revolutionary example.

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Index

A Aachen, 197 Abendroth, Wolfgang, 183 Accra, 327 Acheson, Dean, 355 advocacy protest, 222 aerial bombardment(s). See air strike(s) Afghanistan, 132, 144 Africa, 8, 29, 31, 38, 42, 43, 93, 96, 103, 118–120, 182, 266, 279, 282, 325–359, 376, 396, 401, 418 African American(s), 35, 189, 282, 334, 401 African National Congress (ANC), 28, 43, 337, 358 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), 16, 21, 31, 38, 41, 93, 95, 98, 118, 119, 121 Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, 22, 38, 90, 92–95, 103, 118 Afryka (journal), 120 Agnew, Spiro, 315

aircraft hijacking, 180, 235–237, 244, 247, 256, 266 air strike(s), 88, 143, 180, 184, 196, 266, 337 Alabama, 356 Albania, 24, 280 Aldermaston Marches, 177 Algeria, 5, 27, 35, 37, 41, 117, 144, 153, 156, 191, 332–336, 338, 341, 343, 348, 349, 351, 358, 376 Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), 19, 20, 27, 117, 191, 333–336, 339, 349, 376 Algerian War, 5, 208, 211 alienation, 221, 320, 364, 400, 417 Allard, Antoine, 24, 25, 32 Allende, Salvador, 34, 412, 415, 418, 419 All-Polish Peace Committee, 119 All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), 89, 90, 92, 99 Al Messa (newspaper), 31

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Sedlmaier (ed.), Protest in the Vietnam War Era, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81050-4

423

424

INDEX

Álvarez, Santiago, 377 America House, 147, 150–152 Amerikahaus , 185, 192, 193 American Civil War, 366 Americanisation/Americanization, 132, 366, 372 Amnesty International, 34 Amsterdam, 18, 64, 156, 188, 244 anarchism, 157, 226, 227 Anders, Günther, 183, 213 Angola, 135, 337, 354, 357, 376 Anthony, Earl, 248 anti-Americanism, 267, 273, 287, 289 anti-American, 94, 97, 107, 144, 151, 188, 283, 284, 288 anti-Apartheid, 34, 42, 43, 45, 46 anti-colonialism, 8, 13, 16, 20, 38, 39, 44, 45, 51, 56, 57, 193, 211, 217, 226, 325–327, 329–334, 336, 338, 339, 345–347, 352, 358, 380, 385 anti-communism, 2, 5, 7, 8, 32, 33, 57, 101, 103, 113–137, 175, 186, 295–298, 300, 307, 319, 320, 352–358, 369 anti-fascism, 8, 96 anti-imperialism, 8, 15, 37, 44, 50, 106, 113–137, 145–147, 151, 161, 182, 188, 201, 209–211, 213, 220, 226, 235–238, 240, 241, 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 255, 258, 259, 273, 278, 282, 331, 374–377, 379, 394, 397, 401, 403, 418 anti-imperialistic, 214, 220 anti-nuclear, 20, 183, 240 anti-Zionism, 136 Antonio Maceo Brigade, 364 Aoyama, Kiyoshi, 254 Apartheid, 16, 31, 46, 338, 354 April 19 Revolution (South Korea), 295

Arab world, 29, 31, 43, 120 Arab people, 31 Arab countries, 37 Arbenz, Jacobo, 369 Argentina, 373 Armenia, 127 armistice, 300 arms race, 16, 319 Aron, Raymond, 208 artillery, 275, 285, 287 artists, 6, 16, 31, 155, 159, 409, 419 Ashcroft, Peggy, 75 Asselin, Pierre, 335 Association of Conscientious Objectors (VK), 187, 188, 191 Association of the Women of Vietnam for National Salvation, 52, 61 Astorg, Bertrand d’, 218, 221 Athens, 156 atom(ic) bomb, 266, 282 nuclear arms/weapons, 177, 240, 277, 320 atrocity/atrocityies, 68, 69, 86, 102, 103, 135, 136, 351 Auschwitz, 175, 329 Australia, 54, 132 Austria, 64, 181 Authentic Cuban Revolutionary Party, 369 authoritarian(ism), 7, 164, 294, 295, 297–299, 305, 306, 312, 315, 320, 328, 329, 368, 374

B Ba’ath party, 31 Baader, Andreas, 195 Babovi´c, Spasenija Cana, 152 Baez, Joan, 159 Bahrein, 31 Bakoˇcevi´c, Aleksandar, 152 Baliño, Carlos, 368

INDEX

Bamako, 341, 349 Bandung Conference (1955), 3, 8, 118, 146 Bandung, 3, 146, 326, 327, 335, 347, 352, 358, 396 Bangkok, 129 Bangladesh, 74 Bantigny, Ludevine, 210, 222 Barrell, Howard, 337, 338 Barton, David, 200 Barton, Jane, 200 Basso, Lelio, 25, 157 Batista, Fulgencio, 368 Bator, Francis, 305 Bay of Pigs invasion, 147 Beauvoir, Simone de, 212, 213 Beheiren (Japan), 241, 244–250, 253, 254, 256, 257 Beijing, 20, 38, 119, 121, 133, 265–268, 271–279, 281–285, 287–289, 316, 325, 327, 328, 335, 342 Belarus, 94 Belgian Union for the Defence of Peace, 18, 22, 26, 33 Belgian/Belgium, 18, 20, 24–27, 32, 33, 41, 146, 156, 339, 340, 355 Belgrade, 97, 143, 144, 146–153, 158–162, 338, 341 Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), 160 Belkacem, Krim, 334 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 334, 345 Bensaïd, Daniel, 226 ´ Tre Province, 58 Bên Berger, Samuel D., 304 Berkeley, 26, 35 Berlin, East, 33, 35, 45, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 73, 173, 177, 178, 181, 189 Berlin Wall, 147

425

Berlin, West, 156, 184–186, 192, 193, 195, 226, 246 Bernal, John D., 20–22, 24, 29 Beuve-Méry, Hubert, 225 Biafra War, 330, 347 Bienkowska, ´ Danuta Irena, 133 Birnbaum, Norman, 149 Bitola, 153 Black, Ashley, 395 Black Panther Party/Black Panther(s), 188–191, 193, 237, 248, 258, 282, 283 Bloch, Ernst, 149 blood donation(s), 27, 154 Bloomquist, Paul, 194, 196 Blue House Raid (1968), 320 Blume, Isabelle, 18, 22, 24, 27–32, 35, 37–39, 42–44 boat people, 132, 135 Bolivia, 379, 385 bombardment(s), 1, 21, 39, 52, 57, 58, 60, 73, 79, 87, 100, 102, 107, 114, 143, 152, 163, 180, 192, 194–196, 199, 241, 255, 268, 274, 275, 277, 337, 340, 342–344, 350, 355, 377, 384 Bonn, 174, 197, 199, 201 Bonner, Clyde R., 196 Bor, 153 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 151 Boulier, Jean, 32 Boumediene, Houari, 336, 343, 344, 350, 358 Bourdieu, Pierre, 209 Bradley, Mark Philip, 219 Brands, Hal, 393 Brandt, Willy, 199 Brazil, 5, 385 Bremen, 99 Brown, Freda, 66, 76, 77 Brown, Robert K., 356

426

INDEX

Brownmiller, Susan, 53, 68, 69, 71, 72 Brundert, Willi, 187 Brussels, 18, 22, 26, 28, 32, 34, 35, 131 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 321 Buckley, William F., 355 Budapest, 21, 23, 29, 61, 70, 123 Buddhism, 70, 73, 128, 130, 134 Buddhist Uprising (1966), 128 Bulgaria, 72, 113, 121, 136, 406 Bundeswehr (FRG), 187 Bund (Japan), 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 259 Burke, Elena, 409 Burke, Kyle, 6, 352 Burrell, William, 189, 191 Byrd Amendment (1971), 356 Byrd, Harry F. Jr., 355, 356 Byrne, Jeffrey, 334 Byrski, Zbigniew, 133, 134 C Cairo, 31, 34, 93, 118, 119, 327 California, 189 Cambodia(n), 65, 121, 135, 192, 236, 255, 279, 288, 337, 378 Cambodian Invasion, 135, 192, 193, 288 Campaign for Disarmament (FRG), 176 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 29, 178 Campion, Pierre, 215 Canada, 115, 130, 374 Candlelight Revolution (South Korea), 295 capitalism/capitalist(s), 6, 7, 85, 93, 97, 98, 108, 198, 238, 242, 248, 249, 254, 255, 266, 281–283, 301, 319, 338, 363, 366, 367, 370, 372, 388, 400

Carmichael, Stokely, 350 Carrasco, Eduardo, 408 Carrasco, Julio, 405 Carter, Jimmy, 387 Casa de las Américas (Cuba), 373, 375, 400 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 221 Castro, Fidel, 369, 370, 374, 377– 379, 384, 386, 387, 396, 400, 401, 412 Castro, Raúl, 369 Catholic(s), 19, 32–34, 45, 99, 115, 122, 123, 126, 128–132, 134, 135, 369 censorship, 122, 131, 295, 298, 317 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 89, 129, 294, 342, 349, 350, 352 Centre des Archives du Communisme en Belgique (CArCoB), 18 Ceylon, 144 chaeb˘ol (South Korea), 305–307, 310, 311 Chandra, Romesh, 28, 29, 31, 39–41, 43–45 Chang My˘on, 304 Chavez, Hugo, 415 Cheju Uprising (1949), 295 chemical weapons, 73, 88, 102, 212 chemicals, 69, 73 chemical warfare, 73 Chen Jian, 4, 283, 288 Chen Yi, 274, 284 Chicago, 126, 189 Chile, 395, 404, 406, 408, 411–414, 418, 419 Chilean Communist Party, 404 Chilean Peace Committee, 34 China, 8, 14, 21, 29, 38, 39, 43, 55, 95, 107, 115, 118, 131, 158, 191, 229, 245, 251, 265–285, 288, 289, 300, 316, 318, 320,

INDEX

326, 335, 375, 376, 379, 387, 399 Chinese, 20, 21, 24, 103–105, 107, 108, 176, 224, 265–281, 283–285, 287–290, 320, 328, 372, 375, 378, 385, 388, 399, 406 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 55, 56, 224, 266–269, 271, 272, 275, 280, 282, 283, 287, 289, 325 Cholière, Yves, 28 Ch˘on T’ae-il, 311 Christian Democratic Union (FRG), 180–182 Christian Peace Conference, 34 Ch¯ ukaku-ha (Japan), 252, 254 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 374 Cienfuegos, Osmany, 381 civil disobedience, 141 civilian(s), 1, 69, 88, 102, 176, 188, 189, 212, 214, 225, 245, 296, 302, 305, 309, 333, 337 Civil rights movement, 29, 248, 282, 296, 355 civil society, 176, 346 civil war, 24, 28, 294, 337, 407 Cleaver, Eldridge, 191, 283 Cleaver, Kathleen, 190 coexistence, 7, 20, 24, 105, 106, 269, 278, 289 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 157, 226, 227 Cold War, 3, 4, 7, 8, 13–16, 43, 96, 131, 135, 141, 142, 147, 173, 176, 201, 240, 267, 272, 294, 299, 302, 320, 321, 326, 332, 337, 340, 352, 358, 369, 370, 392, 393 collective security, 307 Cologne, 200, 201 Colombia, 385

427

colonialism, 8, 31, 37, 62, 68, 72, 103, 118, 128, 326, 329, 332, 338, 365, 371, 372, 396, 400 colonies, 56, 120, 121, 332, 353, 365, 366, 371, 376 colonization, 238, 294 colonized, 60, 220, 221, 327 Comecon, 378 Committee for International Peace Action, 35 Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Vietnamese in the FRG, 197 Committee of 100 (United Kingdom), 26 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 281 Committee of Soviet Women, 91, 98–100, 102 communism, 32, 99, 133, 135, 136, 173, 298, 331, 359, 369, 371, 383, 384 communist(s), 13–16, 18, 20–22, 26–28, 39, 42, 44, 45, 54–57, 79, 86, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122–126, 128, 130–136, 144, 152, 158, 162, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201, 209, 215, 217, 221, 266, 281, 296, 318, 335, 338, 344, 353, 369, 371, 402, 405 Communist International (Comintern), 353, 368 Communist Party (Japan), 243, 251 Communist Party (North Vietnam), 26, 380 Communist Party of Belgium, 26 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 178, 199, 200 Communist Party of India, 28

428

INDEX

Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 105 Communist Party of Venezuela, 384 Côn Ðao prison, 200 Conakry, 31 conference(s), 3, 5, 6, 8, 19–25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 41, 42, 45, 52, 66, 98, 100, 119, 125, 144, 146, 157, 184, 199, 246–248, 259, 274, 314, 317, 327, 338, 345, 379, 381, 396, 397, 399, 418, 419 Confessing Church (Germany), 178 Congo(lese), 19, 20, 24, 37, 146, 279, 330, 339, 340, 347–349, 355 Congo Crisis (1960–65), 330, 340, 348, 355 Congolese Student Union, 347 Congress of American Women, 54 consulate, 148, 151, 180, 185 Copenhagen, 62, 212 corporatism, 307, 310 Cotton, Eugénie, 60, 65 counterculture(s, 132, 159, 297, 328, 329, 346, 395, 415 counterinsurgency, 8, 333, 335, 352–354 Country Joe and the Fish, 414 Cox, Harvey, 127, 135 Cracow, 124, 129 Creedence Clearwater Revival, 414 cross-movement mobilisation, 3, 6, 174, 175, 202 Cuba, 8, 65, 107, 147, 279, 363–388, 392, 396, 397, 399, 404, 411, 413, 417, 418 Cuban Communist Party (PCC), 368, 381, 388 Cuban Missile Crisis, 147, 371 Cuban People’s Party, 368 ij

Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), 366, 368 Cuba Socialista (journal), 376, 377, 380 cultural industry, 403 Cultural Revolution (China), 5, 267, 283–289, 299 Cuncumén, 412 Cyprus, 144 Cyrankiewicz, Józef, 116 Czechoslovakia, 28, 39, 40, 45, 98, 99, 134, 136, 156, 164, 386 D Dachau, 55 Damascus, 31, 97 Ð˘a.ng Thùy Trâm, 59 Dar Es-Salaam, 327, 344, 350, 351 ´ tranh (armed struggle), 333 d-âu Davey, Eleanor, 214 Davis, Angela, 189, 350 Davis, Chandler, 35, 36 Debray, Régis, 5 D˛ebsky, Tadeusz, 126 decolonisation/decolonization, 5, 19, 42, 96, 129–131, 136, 142, 173, 175, 202, 212, 237, 128, 325–327, 329, 332, 344, 347–350, 354 Dedijer, Vladimir, 157, 212, 214 Dekeng, Edi, 159, 160 Delhi, 97 Dembinski, ´ Ludwik, 125, 126, 128, 129 demilitarization, 307 democracy, 2, 56, 85, 95, 100, 134, 150, 154, 165, 181, 186, 220, 236, 240, 250, 295, 298–300, 306, 307, 311, 318, 320, 321, 351, 369, 413 democratization, 295, 296, 298, 301, 320

INDEX

Democratic National Convention (1968), 189 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), 24, 65, 158, 191, 235, 236, 294, 295, 297, 300, 306–308, 310, 315, 316, 318–320, 386 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 7, 16, 19, 21–23, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 52, 57, 58, 63, 65–68, 85, 87–91, 94, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 113, 116, 117, 120, 131, 154, 157, 158, 180, 187, 191, 194, 196, 209, 222, 223, 229, 241, 251, 268–270, 273–275, 287, 316, 327, 330, 334–336, 340–344, 346–352, 355, 358, 363, 365, 376–378, 381, 384, 385, 387, 392, 410 Democratic Socialist Coalition (CSD), 368 Deng Xiaoping, 266, 275 Denmark, 157, 183, 188, 213 Departmental Archives SeineSaint-Denis (DASSD), 18 desertion/deserters, 58, 187–189, 191, 244, 245, 335 de-Stalinization, 124 Deutscher, Isaac, 213 dictator/dictatorship(s), 46, 63, 123, 133, 198, 293, 299, 306, 319, 320, 374 Dien Bien Phu, battle of (1954), 5, 57, 208, 224, 228, 230, 376 Dien, Raymonde, 225 Diet (Japan), 284 Ðinh Bá Thi, 23 diplomacy, 18, 19, 23, 25–29, 38, 40, 42, 44, 45, 131, 144, 145, 147, 148, 178, 242, 287, 302, 328,

429

336, 339, 345, 346, 379, 393, 394, 418 diplomat(s), 19, 35, 36, 117, 146, 344 disarmament, 16, 18, 21, 22, 29, 34, 63, 127, 184, 280, 326 dissidents, 17, 39, 105, 115, 136 Dodd, Thomas, 355 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 215 Dominican Republic, 24, 374, 379 domino theory, 355 Donovan, 159 Doors, 415 Doronjski, Stevan, 152 Dortmund, 197 Dubˇcek, Alexander, 386 Du Bois, W.E.B., 282 Duiker, William J., 224 Du,o,ng Ðình Quý, 197 Dutch Peace Council, 37 Dutschke, Rudi, 184, 186, 226 Dylan, Bob, 159

E Eastern Bloc, 15, 17, 22, 24, 26, 32, 38, 43, 86, 92, 133, 158, 192, 295 communist bloc, 123, 131, 134, 294 socialist bloc, 7, 79, 86, 97, 378, 382, 388 Easter Offensive (1972), 194 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) East-West relations, 15, 18, 29, 32, 43, 45, 96, 99, 202 ecology, 53, 364 economic aid, 301, 305, 313 Egypt, 31, 35, 74, 144, 156, 335 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 28 Eisen, Arlene, 59, 70, 71

430

INDEX

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 300, 301, 326 Elbrick, Charles Burke, 143 embargo, 374, 378 embassy, 107, 108, 120–122, 150– 152, 161, 177, 197, 227, 287, 328, 341, 349, 351, 369 embassies, 66, 67, 146 Emergency Acts (FRG), 174, 187, 193 Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (1967), 375, 392, 396–404, 418 Encuentro de Música Latinoamericana (1972), 392, 417, 418 Ensslin, Gudrun, 195 Erhard, Ludwig, 180 Escalante, Aníbal, 370 Esprit (journal), 218, 221 Estado Novo (Portugal), 353 Ethiopia, 144, 347 exile(s), 130, 131, 133–136, 283, 365, 372 exploitation, 43, 123, 128, 242, 281, 288, 294, 302, 303, 307, 344, 364, 401 extra-parliamentary, 202, 299

F Fabian, Walter, 182, 183 Fairley, Jan, 395 Fanon, Frantz, 226, 333 Farge, Yves, 40, 41 Farocki, Harun, 184 fascism, 55, 143, 151, 182, 258, 307, 353 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 8, 38, 99, 136, 141, 151, 173–202, 244, 246, 254, 258, 328, 415 Federation of Labour for the Liberation of South Vietnam, 90

Federation of Trade Unions of Vietnam, 90 feminism, 51, 59, 68, 70, 72, 79 Ferluga, Jadran, 163 Festival des Politischen Liedes (GDR), 402 Finland, 40, 74 Florida, 366 foco theory, 336, 371 folk music, 407, 416 Fonda, Jane, 188 food, 90–92, 154 France, 8, 20, 27, 32, 41, 61, 65, 78, 99, 100, 141, 177, 181, 188, 207–230, 254, 333–336, 385 Frankfurt, 180, 181, 185–187, 189, 190, 193–196, 198 Frazier, Jessica, 60, 86 Free Europe Committee (FEC), 129 Free Officers Movement (Egypt), 31 Frei, Eduardo Montalva, 412 FRELIMO (Mozambique), 332 French Communist Party (PCF), 28, 209, 215, 219, 226, 227 French Revolution, 246 French Socialist Party, 222 Friedrich, Walter, 28 Fromm, Erich, 149 Front of National Unity (Poland), 119, 120 Frunze, 91 FTA Tour (1971), 188 Fukuoka, 235 Fulbright, J. William, 125 Fu Loi prison, 69 funding, 6, 55, 88–91, 93, 304 Fürst, Juliane, 108

G Gallimard (publisher), 216 Gäng, Peter, 178, 184

INDEX

Gatti, Eduardo, 415 Gauche prolétarienne (GP), 228, 229 Gaulle, Charles de, 191, 212, 237, 254, 334, 335 Gavin, James M., 125 gender, 8, 56, 60, 416 General Confederation of Labour (GCT) (France), 27 Geneva, 28, 29, 34, 63, 230 Geneva Accords/Agreements/Conference (1954), 5, 23, 29, 57, 63, 66, 88, 93, 99, 101, 115, 120, 181, 230, 268, 350, 351 genocide, 158, 163, 181, 182, 196, 213, 229 geopolitics, 3, 5–7, 175, 300, 316, 338, 345, 394 Gerlach, Talitha, 281 German Communist Party (DKP), 99, 192, 196 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 22, 28, 33, 37, 38, 41–44, 74, 63, 99, 114, 118, 121, 136, 173, 177, 182, 191, 398, 402, 417 German Peace Society, 178 German Trade Union Federation (DGB), 182–183 Getachew, Adom, 326, 339 Ghana, 119, 144, 325, 340 Ghent, 18 Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, 210, 216, 226 globalisation/globalization, 4, 6, 15, 18, 45 Global Sixties, 4, 393, 394 global South, 8, 16, 29, 121, 129, 329 Godard, Jean-Luc, 37, 222, 223 Golumbovski, Dušan, 159, 160 Gombrowicz, Witold, 131 Gómez, Jaime, 408 Gomułka, Władysław, 122, 145

431

Goodlet, Carlton Benjamin, 35 Goor, Raymond, 33 Graffiti (newspaper), 188 Grandin, Greg, 393 Granma expedition (1956), 370, 374 grassroots, 17, 87, 106, 366 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 301 Great Leap Forward (China), 266, 277, 278 Greece, 42, 181, 198 Greer, Germaine, 75 Guam, 314 Guangxi Province, 287 Guangzhou, 271, 275, 278 Guantanamo Bay, 147 Guatemala, 369, 374, 385 guerrilla(s), 2, 58, 59, 185, 195, 223, 224–229, 235, 236, 238, 256, 257, 272, 273, 301, 333, 334, 336, 337, 365, 369, 371, 374, 379, 380, 397 Guevara, Alfredo, 373 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 185, 380 Guinea, 144, 354, 376, 385 Guiteras, Antonio, 368 Gulf of Tonkin, 180, 267, 268, 275, 277, 301, 327 Guyot, Raymond, 28

H Habermas, Jürgen, 149 Haile Selassie, 347 Haiti, 366, 371, 373 Halimi, Gisèle, 212 Hallstein doctrine, 136 Hamburg, 100, 179 Hands off Cuba Campaign, 364 Haneda Airport (Tokyo), 243, 244, 250 Han K˘on-su, 304

432

INDEX

Hanoi, 2, 21, 25, 26, 29, 35, 53, 54, 59, 60, 65, 74, 75, 79, 86, 90, 117, 126, 163, 267, 271, 274, 275, 279, 280, 287, 288, 327, 335–338, 341–343, 355, 379 Hanoi, martes 13 (film), 377 Hansen (Japan), 242, 251 harkis , 335 Harmer, Tanya, 4, 393, 412 Harriman, W. Averell, 145 Havana, 97, 327, 331, 374–376, 385, 399, 417, 418 Havens, Thomas, 256 He Hui, 272 Heidelberg, 188, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197 Heinemann, Gustav, 199 Heller, Ágnes, 149 Helsinki, 16, 22–25, 28, 32, 42, 45, 67, 74, 125, 127 Hernández, Miguel, 413 Hinton, Joan, 281 hippie(s), 108, 160 Hiroaki, Yamazaki, 244 Hirohito, 199 Hiroshima, 129 Hitler, Adolf, 55, 135, 144, 152, 182 Hoàng Minh Giám, 40 ´ Thi.nh, 116 Hoàng Quôc ` Hô Chí Minh, 57, 65, 116, 127, 132–135, 146, 157, 160, 178, 220, 224, 227, 327, 335, 341, 363, 364, 379, 385, 387, 392, 399, 410, 411, 415, 417, 419 Hô` Chí Minh Trail, 379, 387 Hodgkin, Dorothy, 75 Hodži´c, Alija, 150, 163 Hollywood, 373 Holocaust, 8, 229 homophobia, 364 Horlemann, Jürgen, 178, 199

House Un-American Activities Committee, 54 Houtart, François, 33 ´ 183 Huê, Hugel, Cécile, 65–67, 70, 74 humanitarian, 7, 41, 44, 74, 92, 176, 178, 181, 201, 208 humanitarianism, 229, 230 Humphrey, Hubert, 347 Hungarian Uprising (1956), 32 Hungary, 86, 99, 114, 116, 134, 136, 177 Hu`ynh Liên, 73 Hwang By˘ongju, 297, 298 I IBM, 198 ideology, 13, 15, 30, 86, 87, 108, 300, 306, 320, 397 imperialism, 7, 16, 21, 24, 30, 31, 38, 39, 43, 45, 68, 78, 97, 100, 107, 123, 132, 134, 135, 161, 182, 221, 237–239, 242–244, 246–248, 250–254, 257, 258, 280–282, 286, 289, 298, 342, 348, 349, 352, 364, 368, 372, 374, 375, 377, 378, 383, 385, 386, 394, 396, 400, 408, 413, 417–419 imperial, 200, 218, 219, 238, 245, 249, 252, 254, 255, 257 imperialist(s), 40, 63, 68, 85, 93, 100–103, 105, 128, 195, 223, 247, 249, 251–254, 265, 267–271, 274, 277–280, 283–286, 288, 289, 341, 349, 366, 381 Ind-i´c, Trivo, 165 India, 19, 35, 115, 118 Indochina, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 42, 51, 61, 62, 87, 97, 101, 102, 115, 117, 192, 200, 202, 207–210, 214,

INDEX

215, 217–221, 227, 229, 237, 238, 241, 246, 251, 252, 258, 259, 268, 301, 333, 334, 336, 399 Indochina Wars, 1, 2, 5, 210 Indonesia(n), 24, 107, 116, 146, 274, 326 Industrialization, 266, 294, 305, 311, 312 inequality, 128, 135, 364, 388 Inextinguishable Fire (film), 184 infantry, 297 Initiative Internationale VietnamSolidarität (IIVS), 176, 177, 192, 197 injustice, 128, 330, 364 Inoue, Kiyoshi, 241 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográphicos (ICAIC), 373 insurgency, 58, 335, 353, 365, 379 insurgents, 85–87, 101, 288 Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (ORI), 370, 371 intellectuals, 5, 6, 8, 16, 31, 59, 89, 92, 105, 122, 130, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 164, 183, 191, 201, 208–212, 214–221, 226, 227, 229, 241, 278, 297, 298, 320, 352, 372, 373, 380 International Brigades, 373 International Children’s Day, 98, 108 International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace (ICDP), 34 International Conference for Solidarity with the People of South Vietnam, 21 International Control Commission (ICC), 115, 116, 118 Internationale der Kriegsdienstgegner (IdK), 178, 180, 187, 188

433

International Fellowship of Reconciliation, 178 International Institute for Peace (Vienna), 28 International Institute of Social History (IISH), 18 internationalisation/internationalization, 1, 3, 6, 20, 246, 250, 336 internationalism, 6, 8, 14–16, 18, 22, 106, 108, 159, 177, 178, 210, 227, 280, 287, 289, 326, 330, 339, 341, 344, 347–349, 352, 376, 387 international law, 158, 201, 211, 213, 214 International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week, 37 International Mobilisation Day (1969), 41 International Union of Students, 155 International Vietnam Congress (1968), 184, 185, 194, 226, 384 internment camp(s), 200 Inti-Illimani, 412 Iran, 31, 156 Iraq, 144 Israel, 31, 39, 74, 137, 380 Italy, 20, 65, 141, 153, 156, 181, 198, 199, 258, 417 Ivens, Joris, 37 J Jack Ketch, 71 Jackson, Glenda, 75 Jackson, Larry, 189 Jamaica, 373 Japan, 8, 35, 37, 61, 63, 65, 74, 87, 99, 136, 153, 196, 199, 200, 235–259, 265, 273, 274, 284, 294, 295, 300–305, 307, 310–312, 401 Japan–South Korea treaty, 242

434

INDEX

Japanese Red Army (JRA), 257 Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF), 242, 253 Japan Technical Committee to Aid Anti-war GIs (JATEC), 245, 257 Jara, Víctor, 404, 405, 412–415, 418 Jenkins, David, 191 Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (JCR), 226, 227, 246 Jiangxi Province, 271 Jinmen Island, 278 Johnson, Lyndon B., 2, 26, 40, 127, 144, 145, 152, 158, 163, 174, 178, 273, 278, 296, 300–305, 320, 328, 340–344, 349, 354, 356 Joseph, Gilbert, 393 June Democracy Movement (South Korea), 295 Jy¯ oky¯ o (journal), 250 K Kanba, Michiko, 240 Kangrga, Milan, 149 Kang Sheng, 273 Karsunke, Yaak, 183 Katanga, 339, 355 Kaufmann, Walter, 149 Keïta, Modibo, 339, 341–345, 349, 358 Kennedy, John F., 126, 266, 301, 326, 338, 342, 353 Kennedy, Robert, 378 Kent State shootings, 192 Kenya, 37, 144, 339 Kenyatta, Jomo, 339 Khmer Rouge, 121, 135 Khrushchev, Nikita, 7, 21, 136, 278, 326 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg, 182 Kim Chae-kyu, 300, 321 Kim Dae-jung, 297, 307, 308, 313

Kim Il-sung, 320 Kim Jong-pil, 294, 319 Kim Nuri, 296 King, Martin Luther Jr., 128, 282 Kinshasa, 339, 347, 348 Kishi, Nobuske, 240 Kissinger, Henry, 126, 320 Klein, William, 37 Klinghoffer, Arthur, 212 Klinghoffer, Judith, 212 Kołakowski, Leszek, 149 Kobayashi, Masami, 248 Koda, Naoko, 238 Komsomol, 88–92 Komunist (newspaper), 143 Kontynenty (journal), 120 Korˇcula, 149, 156 Korda, Alberto, 363 Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), 294, 299, 321 Korean War (1950–53), 7, 16, 125, 188, 215, 265, 274, 276, 277, 300, 320 Korniychuk, Oleksandr, 20 Kosicki, Piotr H., 113, 124, 126, 127, 129 Kostrzewski, Jan, 117 Kosygin, Alexei, 104, 105 Kozłowski, Krzysztof, 126 Kraft, Ruth, 41 Krahl, Hans-Jürgen, 185 Kranzusch, Uli, 200 Kraska, Wincenty, 117 Krivine, Alain, 226 Kron, Aleksandar, 163 Krygier, Ryszard, 132, 133 Kultura (journal), 115, 130–136 Kunert, Heinz, 33 Kunming, 275 Kurlansky, Mark, 293 Kuron, ´ Jacek, 122 Kushida, Fuki, 63

INDEX

Kuusinen, Hertta, 67 Kwangju Democratization Movement (1980), 295 Kyoto, 244, 246–248 Kyushu, 249

L Labour unions. See trade unions La Cause du peuple (newspaper), 228 Lahti, 40 Lambrakis Democratic Youth, 181 Lamprecht, Nick, 357 Langland, Victoria, 4–6 Laos, 135, 192, 236, 255, 279, 378, 385 Larrea, Antonio, 406 Latin America(n), 8, 96, 119, 122, 182, 279, 283, 331, 365–367, 371–376, 379, 381, 383, 384, 391–396, 401, 404, 407, 408, 412, 417–419 Lawyers Military Defense Committee, 188 League against Imperialism (FRG), 199 League of Communists of Yugoslavia, 154, 162 Lebanon, 37, 156 Lee, Christopher J., 146, 327, 329 Lefebvre, Henri, 149 Lefort, Claude, 219–222, 227, 230 Leiris, Michel, 215 Le Monde (newspaper), 27, 225 Leninism, 285, 385, 386 Lenin Peace Prize, 33 Lenin, Vladimir, 33, 100, 158, 368 Les Temps Modernes (journal), 211, 217–221 Lê Thanh Nghi., 116 Levi, Albert William, 149 Lewis, John, 248

435

liberation movement(s), 1, 7, 19–21, 24, 29, 31, 43, 92, 95, 97, 120, 121, 173, 266, 267, 279, 326, 330–332, 336, 337, 339, 353, 417 liberation struggle(s), 21, 24, 70, 93, 120, 151, 193, 248, 281, 283, 348, 413 war(s) of liberation, 333, 347, 376 Liebman, Marvin, 355 Lin Biao, 273, 274, 282, 283 Lister, Enrique, 28 Listy (journal), 39 literacy, 374 Liu Shaoqi, 266 Ljubljana, 156, 164 Loin du Vietnam (film), 36, 37 London, 54, 75, 96, 130, 131, 160, 213, 223 Los Blops, 414, 415 Louisiana, 371 Lowry, Donal, 353 Lübke, Heinrich, 182 Lublin, 125 Lumumba, Patrice, 146, 330, 339, 340, 345, 347, 348, 379 Luo Ruiqing, 273 Lusaka, 345 Lüthi, Lorenz, 275

M MacColl, Ewan, 399 Macedonia, 150 Machado, Gerardo, 367, 368 Madagascar, 74, 218 Madrid, 156, 371 Malaya, 68 Malcolm X, 350 Mali, 335, 339, 341, 348, 349, 351 Manchester, 156, 325, 328 Maneli, Mieczysław, 116

436

INDEX

Mansfield, Mike, 125 Maoism, 3, 192, 282, 283, 285 Maoist(s), 38, 158, 176, 177, 196, 197, 199, 226–229, 256, 299, 333, 375, 399, 400 Mao Zedong, 158, 228, 266, 275, 278, 280–285, 288, 289 March 1st Movement (Korea), 295 Marcuse, Herbert, 1, 2, 5, 149, 181, 195 Marcus, Steven, 149 Máriategui, José Carlos, 384 Marker, Chris, 37, 222 Markiewicz, Jerzy, 135 Mark, James, 114, 118, 121–123 Markovi´c, Mihajlo, 149 Marks, J.B., 28 martial law, 317 Martí, José, 366, 368, 371 Martin, Henri, 208, 209, 211, 214–217 Marxism, 122, 123, 285, 365, 368, 383, 384 Marxist(s), 221, 241, 248, 368, 383, 385, 386, 395, 417 Massacre of Puerto Montt (1969), 412 Mausbach, Wilfried, 4, 328 May 16 coup (South Korea), 294 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 124 Mazrui, Ali, 328, 341 McNamara, Robert Strange, 193, 194 Mederos, Félix René, 381 media, 20, 24, 33, 35, 101, 120, 121, 133, 136, 142, 144, 151, 152, 155, 156, 159–161, 183, 202, 236, 241, 244, 281, 316, 381 medical aid, 27, 74–78, 154, 385 medicines, 59, 74, 90, 92, 183 Medvedev, Roy, 105 Meiji (Japan), 294, 319 Meinhof, Ulrike, 200

Mekong, 241 Mekong on Fire (film), 37, 155 Mella, Julio Antonio, 368 memory, 5, 8, 17, 102, 174, 217, 242, 371, 388, 419 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 220 Merton, Thomas, 127, 128 Mexico, 99, 366, 373, 375, 395, 418 Miłosz, Czesław, 130 Michaelis, John H., 314 Michnik, Adam, 123 Mi´cunovi´c, Dragoljub, 165 Mi´cunovi´c, Veljko, 144, 159 Middle East, 26, 29, 31, 39, 42, 106, 236, 257 Mieroszewski, Juliusz, 131–134 Milanés, Pablo, 381, 409–411 militancy, 195, 368, 373 militant, 2, 192, 196, 197, 201, 228, 229, 237, 282, 283, 307, 308, 327, 334, 415 militarism, 7, 104, 274, 312 militarization, 301, 310 military aid, 57, 89, 302, 396 military base(s), 7, 147, 189, 215, 239, 241, 249, 256, 257 Mini´c, Miloš, 152 Minjung Party (South Korea), 303 Mitterrand, François, 208 mobilisation/mobilization, 2, 4, 6, 15–17, 19, 21, 22, 25–27, 29, 34, 41, 43–45, 86, 88, 91, 92, 103, 106, 108, 118, 119, 120, 122–124, 136, 142, 143, 174, 161, 184, 193, 194, 197, 207, 209, 210, 215, 217, 227, 267, 268, 273, 276, 278, 283, 301, 310, 326, 346, 347, 352, 357, 392, 396 Mobutu Sese Seko, 340, 347, 348 Moˇcnik, Rastko, 156 Modzelewski, Karol, 122

INDEX

Mohieddin, Khaled, 28, 31 Monaville, Pedro, 347 Moncada barracks, 365 Mondlane, Edoardo, 332 Mongolia, 155 Montaron, Georges, 129 Montreal, 98 morality, 101, 216 ethical, 177, 212 moral, 8, 65, 85, 87, 89, 92, 98, 105, 136, 173, 174, 178, 180, 183, 385 Morawska, Anna, 125, 126 More Flags campaign, 300 Morgan, Robin, 61, 70 Mori, Tsuneo, 256 Morning Star (newspaper), 76 Morocco, 218, 335, 341, 376 Moscow, 18–21, 26, 27, 29, 35, 45, 63, 100, 103, 107, 108, 118, 119, 133, 136, 278, 280, 326, 355, 378, 393 Moscow State University (MGU), 108 Mouvement de la Paix, 22 Movement of 22 March (France), 227 Mozambique, 194, 337, 354 Munich, 160, 180–182, 192 Munich Agreement (1938), 123 Munthe-Kaas, Harald, 277 music, 159, 394–396, 399–403, 407, 408, 411, 414, 416–419 Muste, A.J., 29 Mwanza, 350 M˜y Lai massacre, 69

N Nagata, Hiroko, 256 Nakatani, Fumio, 252, 253 Namibia, 31 Nanning, 269, 285 Nanterre, 223, 228

437

Napalm, 73, 249, 351, 414 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 31, 118, 335 National Assembly of Women (NAW), 54, 74–76 national independence, 16, 101, 127, 219, 379, 385 nationalism, 3, 242, 298, 307, 331, 352, 354, 365–371, 385, 386 nationalist(s), 283, 334, 338, 346, 347, 354, 357, 358, 365, 367, 368, 371, 373 National Liberation Army (Algeria), 19 National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), 2, 16, 19–23, 25, 27–29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 44, 58, 87–91, 93, 97, 101, 103, 106, 116, 120, 127, 148, 154, 177, 178, 181, 183, 185, 187, 211, 223, 227, 330, 342–344, 347–349, 351, 352, 358, 365, 376, 378, 380, 383, 385, 387, 392 National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (US), 184 National Party (South Africa), 354 National Review (journal), 355, 356 National Security Council (NSC), 303 National Socialists/Nazis, 55, 123, 151, 178, 182, 185, 217, 258 National Union of Malian Workers (UNTM), 349 nation-building, 348, 349, 356, 357, 365, 367, 370 Natschinski, Gerd, 417 natural law, 195, 196 Naughton, Barry, 276 Needham, Dorothy, 75 neocolonialism, 8, 78, 346, 348 Nepal, 144 Neruda, Pablo, 16, 407, 418

438

INDEX

Netherlands, 27, 44, 56, 181, 188, 199 New Left, 4, 14, 17, 39, 132, 149, 156, 162, 164, 165, 174, 209, 221, 226, 237, 240, 244, 250, 254–258, 364, 411, 414, 419 New York, 32, 133, 160 New York Times , 35, 125 Ngô Ðình Diê.m, 57, 58, 63, 101, 116, 335, 353 Ngô Ðình Nhu, 116 Ngô Bá Thành, 72 NGOs, 34, 93, 126 Nguyen An T., 51, 53, 61 Nguyen Lien-Hang T., 331 Nguy˜ên Ngo.c Loan, 174 Nguy˜ên Thi. Bình, 66, 67 Nguy˜ên Thi. Cho,n, 67 Nguy˜ên Thi. Ði.nh, 58, 64, 71–73 Nguy˜ên Thi. Thâ.p, 63 ´ 21, 28 Nguy˜ên V˘an Hiêu, ˜ Nguyên V˘an Lém, 174 Nguy˜ên V˘an Thiê.u, 70, 127, 199, 200 Nhân Dân (newspaper), 26 Nicaragua, 374 Niemeyer, Oscar, 28 Niemöller, Martin, 178, 184, 186 Niger, 341 Nigeria, 347 Nixon Doctrine, 314 Nixon, Richard M., 2, 67, 132, 133, 194, 195, 201, 237, 251, 255, 288, 289, 297, 300, 301, 313–316, 319–321, 345, 356 Nkrumah, Kwame, 325–328, 330, 339–341, 344, 345, 358 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 142, 143, 145, 152, 338, 340, 345, 375 non-aligned, 144, 146, 147, 153, 157, 338–340, 344, 345

Nono, Luigi, 417 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 173, 185, 247, 254, 259, 354 North Korea. See Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) North-South relations, 15, 18, 175, 202, 316 North Vietnam. See Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) North Vietnamese Army (NVA), 59, 72 Nouvelle Résistance Populaire (NRP), 228 Novi Sad, 150 nuclear arms/weapons, 16, 177, 240, 277, 320 Nueva Trova (Cuba), 381 Numhauser, Julio, 405 Nuremberg Trials, 182 Nyerere, Julius, 339, 344, 350, 351, 358 O Oakland, 56, 208 Oda, Makoto, 241, 253, 257 Ohio, 153 Ohnesorg, Benno, 192 Okamoto, K¯ oz¯ o, 257 Okinawa, 239, 241, 251–255 Operation Linebacker (1972), 288 Operation Marigold (1966), 115, 117 Operation Mongoose, 378 Operation Rolling Thunder (1965), 25, 58, 241, 269 Oranienburg, 55 Organization of African Unity, 338 Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), 381, 396 Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS), 381, 384

INDEX

Ortiz, Fernando, 373 Osaka, 37 Ostpolitik, 32 P pacifism, 2, 17, 86, 240 pacifist(s), 2, 29, 177, 180, 182, 186, 201 Pahlavi, Reza, 199 Pakistan, 153, 274 Palatinate, 189, 191 Palestine/Palestinian(s), 31, 46, 380 Pan-African Congress, 325 pan-Africanism, 339 paramilitary, 256, 353, 357 Paris, 16, 19, 26, 29, 38, 40, 41, 51, 55, 56, 60, 61, 66, 94, 96, 97, 115, 130, 131, 157, 160, 177, 178, 188, 198, 212, 213, 222, 223, 225–228, 251, 280, 319, 371 Paris Peace Accords (1973), 101, 116, 120, 127, 175, 197, 199, 200, 289, 316, 319 Paris Peace negotiations, 40, 66, 94, 280 Park Chung Hee, 69, 293, 294, 297–321 Parra, Angel, 398, 405 Parra, Violeta, 407 Pathet Lao, 379 Pax Christi International, 32–34 Pax Romana, 126, 129 Peace Council of the GDR, 42, 43 peace movement(s), 16, 19–22, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 34, 38, 42, 45, 107, 128, 175, 176, 178, 215, 241 peace activism, 19, 25, 27, 32, 51, 128, 157 peace negotiations, 40, 66, 115, 278, 280, 288, 344

439

peasant(s), 62, 122, 198, 273, 336, 379, 411 Peck, Charles L., 196 Peking Review (journal), 282, 284 Pelikán, Jiˇrí, 39 Peng Zhen, 268 Pensamiento Crítico (journal), 380, 382, 383 Pentagon, 62, 104, 126, 194, 196, 237 March on the Pentagon, 184 People’s Army of Vietnam, 194, 333, 379 People’s Daily (newspaper), 273, 279, 282 People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), 58, 72 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) (China), 265, 273–275, 284, 285, 287, 288 People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 376 People’s Socialist Party (PSP), 365, 369, 370, 376, 384, 386 people’s war, 177, 273, 276, 379 Percl, Ivica, 159 Pérez, Edmundo Zujovic, 412 performative rule breaking, 226 Perrin, Joseph-Marie, 32 Peru, 384, 398, 413 Peši´c-Golubovi´c, Zagorka, 165 Petrovi´c, Gajo, 149 ` 62 Pha.m Ngo.c Thuân, ` Pha.m V˘an Ðông, 116 Phan Anh, 116 Phan Thi. An, 67 Philippines, 318, 320, 321 Picasso, Pablo, 215 Piñeiro, Manuel, 374, 381 Pingxiang, 287 Pinochet, Augusto, 43, 46 Platt Amendment, 367, 368

440

INDEX

Poblete, Olga, 34 Pohang, 312 Poland, 7, 86, 113–118, 121, 122, 124, 128, 130–132, 134–137, 145, 156 police, 5, 68, 72, 107, 123, 141, 142, 146–150, 152, 161, 163, 164, 174, 180, 181, 186, 187, 189, 192–194, 196, 198, 199, 242–245, 249, 250, 255, 257, 258, 277, 311, 334, 412 Polish-African Friendship Association (TPPA), 119, 120 Política Internacional (journal), 380 Pompidou, Georges, 188 Pope Paul VI, 344 Popov, Nebojša, 165 Por˛ebski, Lesław, 118 Porter, William J., 318 Portugal, 31, 120, 121, 156, 194, 198, 332, 353, 354, 376 Portuondo, Omara, 409 postage stamps, 25, 97, 155 Pouillon, Jean, 218 Prague, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 35, 39, 40, 42, 45, 156, 177 Prague Spring (1968), 39, 40 Prashad, Vijay, 327, 392, 394 Pravda (newspaper), 88, 107 Praxis (journal), 149, 164 Prensa Latina (Cuba), 376 Primera, Alí, 404, 415 prison/prisoner(s), 69, 102, 120, 122, 164, 189, 193, 195, 199, 200, 215 prisoners of war (POWs), 333 propaganda, 14, 16, 17, 20, 34, 35, 37, 40, 44, 85, 103, 104, 123, 177, 189, 198, 215, 267, 271–273, 276, 279–281, 289, 295, 296, 298, 317, 333, 334, 337, 400, 406

protest song(s), 159, 183, 375, 392, 399–404, 414, 417–419 Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, 42, 345 pro-war movement, 2, 5, 186 Puebla, Carlos, 398, 409, 410 Puerto Rico, 418 Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, 149 Pyongyang, 316, 318

Q Quaker(s), 99, 178 Quang Ngãi Province, 59, 69 Quilapayún, 404–407, 412 ij

R racism, 61, 71, 105, 135, 221, 282, 296, 326, 333, 338, 352, 354, 364 Radio Free Europe, 133, 142 Rakove, Robert B., 327, 340, 342, 343, 345, 350 Ramstein, 189, 191 Rakovi´c, Aleksandar, 159, 163, 165 rape, 53, 68–73 Red Army Faction (RAF) (Germany), 192, 194–196, 200–201 Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), 235–237 Red Cross, 27, 154, 178, 179 Redgrave, Vanessa, 75 Red Guards (China), 267, 284–288, 289 Red River, 269 reform, 15, 116, 158, 163, 165, 299, 313, 317–319, 321, 326, 353, 354, 369, 388 refugees, 31, 101, 117, 130, 208, 371

INDEX

Republic of Korea (ROK), 8, 69, 242, 265, 293–316, 318, 320, 321 Republic of Vietnam (RVN), 19–21, 23, 25, 34, 35, 40, 42, 57, 58, 63, 65–69, 71–73, 87, 88, 90, 97, 98, 102, 120, 121, 127, 128, 133, 148, 177, 178, 181, 183, 194, 227, 240, 243, 285, 296, 300, 308, 320, 330, 337, 342, 345, 350, 351, 365, 398 Resistance (France), 55, 214, 217, 219, 221, 225, 228 Resistance Inside the Army (RITA), 188 Reston, James, 125 revisionism, 122, 123, 134, 136, 227, 266, 280, 283, 286 Revolutionärer Kampf (RK), 196, 198 Reynolds, Malvina, 413 Rhee Syngman, 298–301, 304 Rhee Young-hee, 298, 299 Rhodesia, 347, 353–357 Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), 347 Rhodesian Information Office (RIO), 354–356 riot(s), 107, 141, 145, 148, 150, 151, 162, 189, 250 Riquelme, Alfredo, 393 Rittenberg, Sidney, 281 Roberts, George, 344 Rodríguez, Silvio, 381, 410, 415 Roemer, Charel, 31, 34 Rolling Stones , 415 Romania, 40, 115, 136 Rome, 129, 130 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 367 Roskilde, 157, 212 Ross, Kristin, 225 Rostow, Walt, 353 Rote Hilfe (FRG), 193

441

Rowbotham, Sheila, 5, 70, 72, 73 Ruscio, Alain, 208, 215, 224–226 Rusk, Dean, 144, 278, 284, 343 Russell, Bertrand, 157, 158, 182, 184, 211, 213, 258 Russell Tribunal, 36, 38, 53, 157, 182, 183, 211, 213, 223, 258 Rüsselsheim, 198 Russian Revolution, 220

S Sahara, 333 Saigon, 29, 69–72, 75, 116, 129, 134, 174, 181, 188, 227, 337 Sakharov, Andrei, 105 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 353, 354 Salvatore, Gaston, 184 Salzburg, 64 Santamaría, Haydée, 373 Santiago de Cuba, 399 Sarajevo, 151, 153, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16, 23, 157, 182, 184, 208, 209, 211, 214, 216, 229 Sat¯ o, Eisaku, 241 Saudi-Arabia, 31 Sawaba (Niger), 341 Schauer, Helmut, 191 Schily, Otto, 194, 201 Schmiedecke, Natália, 404 Schmitz-Bender, Thomas, 182 Schoenman, Ralph, 212, 213 Schwartz, Laurent, 212, 227 Seale, Bobby, 189 Second World, 7, 175, 327, 396 Segal, Jane, 76 segregation, 337, 352, 354, 356–358 Seifert, Connie, 54, 75, 76 Semler, Christian, 199 Seoul, 235, 309, 318 settlerism, 332, 352–355, 357, 358

442

INDEX

sexual violence, 52, 53, 68–73 sex work, 62, 71 Shanghai, 270–273, 288 Shen Aiqun, 285 Shigenobu, Fusako, 257 Sh¯ owa (Japan), 319 Šibenik, 153 Sierra Maestra (Cuba), 369, 399, 413 Sihanouk, Norodom, 378 Silber, Irwin, 398, 399 Simonov, Konstantin, 103 Sino-American rapprochement, 288, 289, 315, 316, 318, 320 Sino-Indian War (1962), 119, 146 Sino-Soviet relations, 7, 17, 24, 43, 105, 119, 266, 278, 288, 375, 377 Sino-Vietnamese War (1979), 121, 387 Sissoko, Mamadou, 349 Six-Day War, 120, 136 Skopje, 150, 151, 153 slaves, 61, 62, 366 Slobodian, Quinn, 175 Slovenia, 156 Slovo, Joe, 337 Smith, Ian, 354, 356 Snow, Edgar, 281 social democracy, 369 Social Democratic Party (FRG), 178, 181, 187, 196, 198 socialism, 6, 7, 24, 56, 70, 79, 86, 94, 97, 100, 101, 106, 125, 135, 145, 151, 153, 156, 158, 161, 165, 182, 198, 221, 280, 281, 283, 289, 318, 331, 339, 341, 346, 349, 350, 357, 364, 367–371, 374, 377–380, 382, 385, 386, 388, 412, 419 Socialisme ou Barbarie, 221 Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, 154

Socialist Education Movement (China), 277–278 Socialist German Student Union (SDS), 177, 180–182, 184, 185, 187–189, 191, 193, 194, 226 social movement(s), 2–6, 8, 14, 18, 26, 44, 45, 85–87, 99, 100, 122, 147, 155, 156, 158, 161, 165, 174, 176, 186, 202, 210, 211, 224, 238, 239, 241, 242, 250, 281, 385, 392, 396 social welfare, 53, 132, 307 Sofia, 64 S¯ ohy¯ o (Japan), 242 Soldier of Fortune (journal), 356, 357 Solidaridad Cuba y Vietnam (film), 377 Solidarité avec le Vietnam (journal), 22, 26, 38, 40, 41 solidarity, 1–3, 6–8, 13–16, 18, 19, 21–25, 27–29, 31–33, 36–41, 43–45, 52, 62, 64, 74, 78, 79, 85–89, 91, 93, 94, 97–102, 104, 106, 107, 114, 115, 118–123, 136, 148, 151, 154, 160, 162, 165, 173, 174, 177, 179, 188, 189, 191, 193, 197, 200–202, 220, 221, 237, 269, 279, 327, 330, 331, 335, 338, 345–349, 351, 358, 364, 377, 378, 381, 385, 392, 397, 407, 408, 411, 413, 414, 418, 419 South Africa, 28, 332, 337, 353, 354, 357 South Korea. See Republic of Korea (ROK) South-South relations, 18, 43 South Vietnam. See Republic of Vietnam (RVN) South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), 31

INDEX

Soviet–Vietnamese Friendship Society, 92–94 Soviet Committee of Support for Vietnam, 93 Soviet Peace Committee, 20 Soviet Union (USSR), 7, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 42, 56, 65, 85–87, 89, 91–93, 95, 98–101, 103, 106, 107, 118, 121, 122, 124, 125, 131, 132, 136, 143, 153, 156, 240, 243, 245, 266, 279, 280, 318, 339, 353, 375–378, 382, 384, 386–388 Spain, 103, 198, 365, 366, 371–373 Spanish–American War, 366 Spanish Civil War, 28, 407 Spellman, Francis, 32 Spenser, Daniela, 393 Spiegel (journal), 186 Spontis (FRG), 192, 198 Stalinism, 7 Stalin, Joseph, 278 Starr, Edwin, 414 Stockholm, 20, 21, 34, 41–43, 66, 98, 157, 183, 184, 212 Stojanovi´c, Svetozar, 165 Stomma, Stanisław, 124, 125, 128 Strong, Anna Louise, 281 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 246, 248 student(s), 5, 37, 90, 91, 97, 102, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117, 122, 123, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152– 165, 174–176, 180–184, 186, 191, 193, 194, 197–199, 201, 202, 220, 235, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 254, 255, 257, 269–271, 285, 287, 295, 298, 307, 308, 310, 348, 349, 351, 367, 387, 395, 399, 401, 405, 407

443

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 180, 246 Stur, Heather, 60 Stuttgart, 150, 192, 201 Sudan, 41 Suez Crisis (1956), 118, 335 Sukarno, 326 Suri, Jeremi, 327, 395 Svahnström, Bertil, 34 Sweden, 131, 157, 181, 183, 188, 199, 245 Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, 34 Switzerland, 188 Symington, Stuart, 296 Syria, 37, 41, 144 Szlajfer, Henryk, 122 Szyr, Eugeniusz, 119

T Tadi´c, Ljubomir, 149, 165 Taiwan, 265, 267, 278 Taiwan Strait Crises, 265 Takabatake, Michitoshi, 241 Takaya, Shiomi, 246, 247 Tambo, Oliver, 337 Tamiya, Takamaro, 235, 236, 256, 258 Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), 350, 351 Tanzania, 37, 339, 344, 348–351 Taylor, Sandra C., 59, 416 Tel Aviv, 257 television, 120, 142, 143, 155, 159, 163, 199, 249, 363, 381 Témoignage chrétien (journal), 129 tenants’ union, 198 Tereshkova, Valentina, 77 Terry, Megan, 160, 398, 414 Tet Offensive (1968), 174, 211, 226, 229, 296, 320, 337, 384

444

INDEX

Tetovo, 153 Texas, 395 Thái Thi. Liên, 61, 62 ´ Ha.nh, 128 Thích Nhât Third World, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 15, 18– 21, 25, 26, 33, 39, 41, 43–46, 56, 95, 97, 105, 107, 113, 115, 118, 120, 128–131, 136, 137, 145, 146, 152, 173, 175, 193, 201, 202, 237, 246, 247, 251, 259, 266, 273, 279, 289, 295, 326, 327, 335, 338–341, 344, 345, 347–349, 352, 353, 358, 366, 375, 376, 384, 392–394, 396, 397, 403, 409, 411–413, 415–419 Third Worldism, 8, 145–147, 209, 211, 214 Thomas, Martin, 219 Thorndike, Sybil, 75, 76 3 August International Anti-War Conference (Tokyo, 1968), 246 386 Generation (South Korea), 298 Thurmond, Strom, 355, 356 Tiananmen Square, 269, 283 Tianjin, 277 tiersmondisme. See Third Worldism Tito–Stalin split, 142 Titoism, 142, 145, 148 Tito, Josip Broz, 142, 144–147, 153, 157, 161, 163, 165 Titov, German, 92 Tokyo, 199, 235, 243, 245, 246, 249, 251 Toronto, 35, 36, 133 torture, 68–70, 75, 200, 217, 225, 334 Toulon, 215 trade union(s), 16, 44, 76, 88, 89, 94, 95, 99, 102, 119, 181, 183, 222, 346, 353

Trading with the Enemy Act (1917), 378 ` Ðu´,c Thao, 220, 222, 230 Trân travel, 7, 35, 40, 62, 327 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (1965), 242 Tribuna (journal), 156 Tricontinental (journal), 274, 379, 382, 397 Tricontinental Conference, 21, 375, 379, 381, 396, 397, 399, 418, 419 Trieste crisis, 145, 146 Trotskyism, 3, 176, 213, 220–222, 226, 227, 229 Trybuna Ludu (newspaper), 114, 117 Tshombe, Moïse, 199 Tsurumi, Shunsuke, 241 Tucker, Robert, 149 Tunisia, 144, 335 Turchin, Valerii, 105 Turin, 198 Turner, Karen G., 58, 59, 72 Turowicz, Jerzy, 124, 125, 127–129 Tursun-zade, Mirzo, 92, 103 26th of July Movement (Cuba), 365 Tygodnik Powszechny (journal), 123–129, 131, 135, 136 ij

U Uganda, 144, 349 Ujamaa, 350 Ukraine, 94 Ulaanbaatar, 155 Ulsan, 312 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), 337 UNESCO, 96 Unger, Leopold, 131–133 Unidad Popular (Chile), 411 Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, 128

INDEX

Union of Australian Women, 54 Union of Indochinese Women in Paris, 61 Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, 182 Union of Soviet Writers, 89 Union of Women for the Liberation of South Viet Nam, 52, 65, 69 Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Democrátique Africain (US-RDA), 349 United Arab Republic, 31, 144 United Kingdom, 20, 27, 56, 156, 199, 356, 398 United Nations, 57, 67, 76, 96, 157, 339, 340, 377 United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC), 339, 340 United Party of the Socialist Revolution (PURS), 371, 376 United Red Army (Japan), 236, 256 United States (US), 6–8, 14, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 35, 38, 39, 43, 56, 57, 62, 66, 69, 73, 78, 85–87, 95, 97, 99, 104, 107, 115, 117, 123, 125, 126, 130–132, 134, 136, 141–143, 148, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162, 165, 175, 192, 202, 219, 228, 229, 238, 248, 258, 265, 267, 268, 270, 272–275, 277, 280, 281, 283, 284, 288, 289, 296, 301, 312–314, 316, 320, 340, 344, 347, 349, 363, 366, 372–374, 380, 385, 387, 401, 418 urban guerrilla, 2, 235, 236, 238, 256, 257 Uruguay, 394, 398 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 304, 305 US–Cuban Reciprocity Treaty, 367

445

US–Japan security treaty (ANPO), 239, 240, 245, 247, 250–255, 259 V Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Claude, 55 Valparaíso, 407 vanguard, 5, 135, 267, 300, 371, 373–375 Varadero, 399 Varda, Agnès, 222 Varna, 72, 75 Vatican, 32, 127, 130, 131, 134, 344 Venceremos Brigade, 364 Venezuela, 385 Vercors, 215 Versailles, 42 veterans, 27, 28, 53, 71, 119, 334, 335, 352, 356, 357, 359, 369 Vienna, 16, 28, 63, 181, 215 Viet Cong. See National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) Viê.t Minh, 61, 218–221, 224–229, 333–336, 338, 358 Vietnam Aid Campaign (FRG), 176 Vietnam Bulletin (journal), 66, 74 Vietnam committee(s), 18, 22, 31, 33, 34, 38, 182, 192 Vietnam Day/Week/Month, 23, 90, 93, 351, 381 Vietnam Day Committee, 26, 35 Vietnamese Women’s Movement for the Right to Live, 70, 72 Vietnamization, 133 Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU), 52, 53, 60, 63–65, 67–69, 73, 74, 76, 79 Vietnam Youth Federation, 158 violence, 3, 39, 40, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62, 68, 70–72, 78, 126, 128, 141, 142, 145–147, 148, 162, 164, 175, 180, 186, 187, 194,

446

INDEX

196, 198, 201, 224–226, 228, 229, 236, 237, 242, 244, 250, 255, 257, 258, 283, 288, 297, 327, 332, 373 Vittori, Jean-Pierre, 37 Vlahovi´c, Veljko, 151 Vogel, Helmut-Michael, 187 Voice of America, 133 Voice of the Lumpen (Newspaper), 189 Vojvodina, 150 Voltaire, 216 Võ Nguyên Giáp, 224, 336, 337, 339, 379 Vössing, Michael, 176–178

W Wales, 157 Wallace, George, 356 war crimes, 35, 36, 43, 53, 102, 104, 105, 152, 155–158, 177, 182, 194, 195, 350, 418 Warnenska, ´ Monika, 117, 118 War Resisters International (WRI), 178, 184, 187 Warsaw, 75, 114, 116, 121–124, 129, 134, 274 Warsaw Pact, 39, 98, 142, 386 Waseda University, 247 Washington, 126, 144, 148, 180, 245, 268, 274, 280, 288, 301, 318, 326, 341, 343, 354, 356, 369, 371, 378, 393 Washington, George, 116, 356 Watts, Max, 188 Weather Underground, 4 Weaver, Gina Marie, 53, 71, 73 Weiss, Peter, 183, 213 Werkmeister, Frank, 176 Wernicke, Günter, 176 Westad, Odd Arne, 4, 14, 142, 326, 332, 333, 392, 393

West European Student Committee for Peace in Vietnam, 181 West German Women’s Peace Movement (WFFB), 178, 180 White House (Washington, DC), 126, 301, 326, 342, 353, 356 Wi˛ez (journal), 123, 124, 129–131, 136 Wilkanowicz, Stefan, 124 Williams, Robert F., 283 Wilson, Harold, 355, 356 Winter Soldier Investigation, 53 withdrawal of troops, 41, 85, 99, 101, 127, 197, 199, 307, 308, 313, 314, 316, 345, 351, 356 Wolff, Karl Dietrich, 184, 188, 189 Women of the Whole World (journal), 63, 69 Women of Vietnam (journal), 64, 69, 70, 73 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), 5, 6, 55–79, 95–99, 280 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 55, 60, 184 Women’s Library (London), 54 Women Strike for Peace (WSP), 60 Woodstock (1969), 401 Woodward, Ronald A., 196 Workers’ Central Union of Cuba (CTC), 368 workers’ movement, 158, 202, 242 World Bank, 193, 294 World Conference on Vietnam (1967), 34, 183 World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace (1962), 18, 19 World Congress of Women (1969), 52, 67, 73, 74, 98

INDEX

World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), 16, 39, 44, 95, 96, 97 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 16, 44, 95, 96 World Organization of Mothers of all Nations, 178 World Peace Council (WPC), 6, 13–46, 67, 95, 98, 118, 176, 215, 280 World Peace Day, 66 World War II, 7, 8, 55, 87, 96, 124, 130, 135, 136, 145, 146, 148, 151, 178, 181, 191, 196, 197, 208, 218, 225, 228, 229, 238, 242, 245, 332, 334, 393 World War III, threat of, 245 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, 60 Wulff, Erich, 183

X Xuân Thuy, 66 ij

Y Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 132 Yoshikawa, Yuichi, 245 Yoshioka, Shinobu, 247, 248 Youngju Ryu, 299, 300 youth, 91, 92, 97, 103, 114, 119, 132, 156, 158, 164, 181, 183, 193, 277, 287, 297, 310, 347, 363, 369, 403, 404, 406, 407

447

Yugoslavia, 7, 37, 86, 114, 116, 141–166 Yugoslav city Split, 153 Yugoslav Student Association, 148, 154 Yunnan Province, 269 Yun Po-s˘on, 311, 313 Yusin Constitution (South Korea), 299, 317, 318, 320 Z Zagreb, 148, 150, 151, 153, 160 Zambia, 144 Zawadzki, Aleksander, 117 Zbyszewski, Wacław, 133 Zeit (newspaper), 186, 192, 193 Zengakuren (Japan), 243, 249, 251, 255, 258 Zetterling, Mai, 75 Zhai Qiang, 274, 275 Zhao Jianjun, 285, 287 Zhou Enlai, 266, 275, 279, 281, 287 Zhou Ruizhuang, 331 Zhu Qiwen, 287 Zimbabwe, 337, 357 Zimbabwe African People’s Union, 31 Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), 358 Zinn, Howard, 248, 328 Životi´c, Miladin, 165 Znák (journal), 123, 124, 129, 131, 136 Zolov, Eric, 393–395 Zurich, 115, 191