pe ee Slanted news on Vietnam By RAE MURPHY HIS headline in the Toronto Star is a reflection of the Bc dishonesty and slanted Aoteae that Canadians re-- Since on the war in Vietnam. Li € when did the National, a ration Front in South Viet- mM become our enemy? Perhaps one could conclude ie this is a mere detail, but it s aa fact represent the efforts isn € news media to align Cana- to pe blic opinion and chain it Phi © American propaganda ma- ine. To one degree or another € political writers in the-daily Viet Cong. Nash also indicates that U.S. involvement has no- thing to do with South Vietnam or the. Viet Cong but because there “is a growing body of opinion among the senior author- ities in the U.S. government that, in the 1970s and 1980s, China will be the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. If this is so, it enormously improves the desirability of staying in South Vietnam and keeping large forces‘in the Southeast Asia re- gion as a check against C ina.” Mindless of this evident con- tradiction of American purposes, ship?” The key element however, of that interesting description is that one’can take a choice and characterize the Thieu regime as a “democracy” or a “dictator- ship” but in any case since it survives on because of U.S. sup- port, it is a quasi-government. One is tempted to consider Nash’s article as perhaps a gig- antic put-on, but it is really ty- ° : pical of the “objective” report- age given Canadians about the war in Vietnam. It is along the same lines that Mark Gayn, the Toronto Star’s resident expert on damn: Thursday. February 5, 196S—G4 pases Mond: ay to Friday 10c; Saturday lc; Home, Press accept the premises of the ‘Merican position in Vietnam expound these theories in anada, ._ One can’t ascribe all the mis- a Ormation in the Canadian ine to stupidity of the pundits, ae Ough the cliche that de- = ibes George Romney, that ioe. down deep he is very shal- ad applies to many of our rrespondents. we Case in point is Knowlton en Washington correspon- 7 ot for the Financial Post and: © Canadian Broadcasting Cor- ' Poration who visited Saigon in 5 it SS and reported back that Americans were winning the ee This was a few weeks be- nal ae offensive of the Natio- iberation Front in the cities South Vietnam and perhaps eee be somewhat unfair to abo € Nash’s prognostications the ut the course and outcome of o War, but they stand as an ample of the vast snow-job lat has been done on the Cana- , dian people by the news media a5 cae reportage of military, poli- ia and social reality in Viet- yas, writing from Saigon -in © Financial Post of Jan. 27: att th The Americans are winning . cud < War in Vietnam. eae ney are killing more of their ee than they are taking eualties, and little by little a Y are making the country Ore secure. Pret ey should have the war . ty well won—about 15 years Om now,” € rest of Nash’s article in- fea all the historical and poli- Ss Tationale which would flow ™ such a haywire. military as- 8 thement. Nash indicates that ee U.S. involvement comes «-™ some committment to a South Vietnam from the Nash goes on to report, with a presumably straight face, that the United States is expending great efforts to build a “rela- tively viable and relatively demo- cratic society in South Vietnam as now exists in South Korea.” Nash’s thinking does not in- clude the aspirations of the South Vietnamese anywhere. Maybe they don’t want to be a “democratic society” like South Korea. As the aspirations of the Viet- namese are quite incidental to Nash’s thinking, thus it is per- haps too much to ask that the desires of people could provide a clue to why they can fight so tenaciously and confound the typewriter generals of the West- ern press. The picture is also conjured of the marines as “de- dicated social workers in villages and hamlets”. The puppet government of generals Thieu and Ky are ical- led ‘“quasi-democratic, but in fact, basically a military dicta- tarship that survives only be- cause of U.S. support.” Perhaps it is unfair to ask what exactly is a “quasi-democracy that is \basically a military dictator- near everything,. produces copy’ from Saigon which judges the re- cent offensive in the cities of the South as a political and military’ debacle for the NLF. Gayn in one article writes: “The Viet Cong, to be sure, had the assistance of a large and well-organized underground. But nowhere have the masses poured out into the streets with red banners.” Such sopistry is accepted. in the Canadian press as analytical reportage. It may well .be that the credibility gap in the Can- adian press is not expressed as crudely as it is in much of the American press, but it is still there. Without even dwelling on the stone-age mentality of col- umnists like Lubor J. Zink, there is enough misinformation about Vietnam being sprayed in all dir- ections by the so-called “liberal” and “objective” journalistic es- tablishment. Thus the “liberal” and “con- servative’ bower of the mono- poly press in Canada tilt at each other with paper lances and col- lectively dig the credibility gap into the unbridgable canyon be- tween fact and fiction. MA TENGIAC MY LAE AY a FOSb a DANOUAN“IHUPHONG BAN Laing The wreckage of his F-105 jet lies beside the grave of U.S. J Coleone} Nelson William who was shot down by a militia unit of Moung villa while on an air raid over the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. jvocally for peceel CNTU’s brief to Ottawa Last week the Confederation of National Trade Unions~ pre- sented the brief of their organi- zation to the federal government. Prime Minister Pearson and other members of the cabinet indicated that the government would proceed with Bill C-186 which has been the subject of controversy between the CNTU and the Canadian Labor Con- gress. : “We cannot insist too much,” said the CNTU brief, “that the government maintain the policy which is outlined in the Bill now under consideration.” The state- men coninued: “We will never agree that a trade union centre should be so far compromised’ with American trade unionism that it would claim the right by legal compul- sion to impose on groups of workers any union whatsoever, let alone unions imported from across: the border. “The effectiveness of a trade union hardly derives from its size; on the contrary, it depends much ‘more rather on its mili- On February 8, 1968, a huge police force broke up the press tancy, which is the natural result of the freedom of the member- ship and of its solidarity. “Our position is moreover the same whether Canadian or American trade unions are con- cerned. The principle we defend. with all our force is that of free- dom. “Everyone today in Canada knows that groups whose scope embraces almost half the given number of workers have found and still do find themselves bound to representation by trade unions they did not choose and which they have moreover endured too long. “Those who stir up the spec- tre of anarchy, of chaos and of numerous crises .which would follow the adoption of this Bill,” said Mr. Pepin, “are reciting stories to frighten people.” He made clear at the outset of his remarks that “the CSN is entire- ly Canadian, that it asks no fa- vors or privileges but that it struggles for the freedom’ of people.” conference of the Communist Party of Germany, held in Frankfort- on-Main (West Germany), where the new program of the party was to be publicized. The program was not released, because of the arrest of Political Bureau members Herbert Mies and Max Schaefer. ee a MARCH 1, 1968—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 5