a
a,

Art and science
of mass murder

AIR WAR—Vietnam, by Frank
Harvey, 75 cents (Bantam
Books).

ITH whole areas of Saigon,

Hue, My Tho and other

South Vietnam towns and

cities flattened or being destroy-

ed at this moment by US.

planes, many must be asking

just what goes on in the minds

of the men who drop the bombs
and napalm.

An insight into the mentality
of the new American master man
is given in Air War—Vietnam,
surely the most nauseating book
that has appeared on the war.

Here’s how the US. pilot is
initiated into the art and science
of mass murder at long range at
Dixie Station from the U.S. air-

~ craft carrier, Constellation.

“It was fortunate,” says the
author, “that young pilots could
get their first taste of combat
under the direction of a forward
air controller over a flat country
in brilliant sunshine where no--:
body was ‘shooting back with

, high-powered ack-ack.

“He learns how it feels to
drop bombs on human beings
and watch huts go up in a boil
of orange flame when his aiumi-
num napalm tanks tumble into
them. \

“He gets hardened to pressing
the firing button and cutting peo-
ple down like little cloth dum-
mies as they sprint frantically
under him. He gets his sword
bloodied for the rougher things
to come.”

That’s how it is in the.South,
but “when you fly into North
Vietnam against the SAM sur-
face-to-air missiles, when the air
is so full of flak bursts you can’t
see how you possibly can go
through them unscathed, you
steam into the real hell!”

The author makes it clear that
“cutting people down like cloth
dummies” is just practice train-
ing to get experience to face the
sophisticated Soviet SAMs and
other anti-aircraft weapons de-
ployed in the North.

On Dixie Station, the U.S.
naval task force normally con-
sists of six carriers: Constella-
tion, Intrepid, Oriskany, Ranger,
Hancock and- Yorktown, two
missile-firing cruisers and a num-
ber of destroyers. Each carrier
has as many as 50 to 60 planes

_and all this and more is deploy-

ed day after day against the peo-
ple of Vietnam — North and
South.

Frank Harvey claims he is
neither a dove nor a hawk but
a reporter who just went to Viet-
nam to get the facts, but when
he draws conclusions and gener-
alizes from. his experience we
get an inkling as well as that
of his U.S. Air Force “Death
Bringers.”

“The truth is,” he writes at
One point, “most frontline GIs
who volunteer for their duty do
enjoy shooting and_ killing.
There’s a great deal of high-
flown theory going around that
Americans aren’t bad old killers
... Bullshit!

“Americans like to kill as well
as the next man and they do it
more effectively than most. It
happens to be a built-in factor
in the nature of men, like sex,
food and alcohol.”

Here we have the philosophy
of a spokesman of America’s
20th century “Great Society”
under the beneficent, fatherly

Fuehrer, Lyndon B. Johnson him-
self.

“Napalm,” we are told, “was
the favorite weapon of most peo-
ple I talked to” — Americans,
that is. “‘One or two napalm
attacks can change the fighting
spirit of a whole company,’ a
navy A-4 Skyhawk pilot, Lt.-
Cmdr. Fitch, told me.”

From napalm to white phos-
phorus bombs and cluster bomb
units with which a pilot “could
lawnmover for considerable dis-
tances, killing or maiming any-
body on a path several hundreds
of feet wide and many yards
long,” we get a detailed descrip-
tion of the weapons being used
against the people of Vietnam.

We also get long and detailed
descriptions of all the types of
planes being used in the con-
tinual series of murder missions

being carried out by the U.S.

against these same people, for
Frank Harvey is first and fore-
most an air reporter, and likes
to weigh up the relative advan-

. tages of the different planes.

But man cannot live by bread
alone, not even on planes alone,
even when he has the added
satisfaction of using them to
drop napalm on innocent people,
and so the American man in
Vietnam has to have his “R and
R,” which means rest and reha-
bilitation.

And so in Bangkok, Hongkong,
the Philippines and elsewhere,
“a GI has a chance to see some
of the most magnificent sights
and meet some of the most in-
teresting people in the Orient.
He can have a real ball on R and
R. Some of those bar girls are as
good-looking as movie stars and
not all of them have VD.

“And the GI Bill is almost
worth joining up for in itself,
when you consider that college
costs about 3,500. dollars a year
these days (14,000 dollars in cold
cash as a bare minimum for the

four-year hitch), and a GI can

get it free.”

As for why the Americans are
in Vietnam anyhow, Mr. Harvey
(no dove, no hawk), has all the
answers too, and they don’t in-
clude allowing Bernard Bevin to
go to Covent Garden operas,
watch television, play the piano,
etc.

“We are there to establish a
permanent power base in South-
East Asia. against the Chinese.
. .. We are prepared to fight if
necessary to hold on. to what
_we’ve got and get more. In Viet-
nam, in South America. Any-
where. We are a Have nation
and we intend to continue to be
a.Have nation.” Thanks, Frank.

Sam Russell
Morning Star

Garaudy packs
Montreal meet

PACKED auditorium at the

University of Montreal re-

cently, heard the renowned
Professor Rober Garaudy of Poi-
tiers University, France, define
Marxism of the Twentieth Cen-
tury.

For an hour the crowded audi-
torium sat silently while Profes-
sor Garaudy delivered in rapid
lucid phrases his brilliant con-
cept of the necessity for an un-
derstanding of Marxism of the
Twentieth Century as distinct
from Marxism in the Twentieth
century.

All sciences, Garaudy pointed
out, change as they change the
environment which gave them
birth; the chemistry of today is
not the chemistry of the nine-

MARCH 1, 1968—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 10

18 gat - 24UGIAT HA

teenth century. Leninism. was
not merely a parrotting of what
Marx had written, but Marxism
of the period of imperialism,
which did not exist at the time
of Marx. ;

The socialist concept and great
socialist thinkers existed before
Marx, but the genius of. Marx,
his method, elevated socialist
thought to the level of a-science.
His approach was critical, histor-
ical and anti-dogmatic, and in-
cluded the concept of pluralism.
There was in all events both the
universal and the specific; social-
ist change in various countries
therefore are all at the same time
identical in the universal sense
and distinct in the specific form.
Fundamental to Marxism there-

TTT TT WT

HE Honorable L. R. Peter-
son, Q.C., Minister of
Labor and Minister of

Education in the B.C. Socred
government, sent me_ ten
pages of typewritten material
this week, entitled ‘Excerpts
From an Address During De-
bate On The Speech From The
Throne’. The B.C. ‘Throne’
that is.

Now these ‘excerpts’ of
Minister of Labor Peterson
are not what might be termed
of ‘national import’. Then
again they are primarily be-
cause they reflect the same
ideas from the same source,
and are echoed by every so-
called ‘Minister of Labor’
from the bumbling federal
Jack Nicholson down to the
latest provincial appointee,
selected by big monopoly and
its obliging political Joe Boys
to do a coast-to-coast ball-
and-chain job on organized
labor.

In his ‘address’ Mr. Peter-
son is not sparing with words.
Fine words, all about the ne-
cessity of labor “being real-
istic in their (wage) negotia-
tions this year”; the need to
“increase our output per
head’, quoting Canada’s top
banker Louis Rasminsky, to
bear down more on the pro-
duction pedal, etc. and etc.

The minister rolls up an im-
pressive mass of statistics on
the need “to develop a highly

lar value comparison between
a worker with a Grade 8 educ-
ation and that of a university
degree, ably confirming the
old adage that “figures don’t
lie, but liars sure can figure.”
All this wordy guff about
skills, efficiency, greater pro-
duction and labor ‘realism’ in
wage negotiations — only a
few blocks away from a per-
manently closed down ship-
building industry, efficient
shipbuilders thrown on the
non-productive- scrapheap in
hundreds — and- the. best of
them ‘selected” by.an Ame-
rican “efficiency” team to
build ships—in the USA!
That of course doesn’t af-

son. His main aim — pretty
well buried in a diarrhea of
words — but not quite, is to
put. a. freeze on wages—the
universal capitalist “cu?e” for
a current disease of its own
‘making — inflation; its sky-
‘rocketting of prices, pelf and
profits, the continuity of
which can only be assured by
loading the full burden onto
the backs of labor and the

-on school construction af

effiicient work force”; the dol--

fect Minister of Labor Peter- |

common people.

Having achieved some tem:
porary success as Minister of
Education in putting a freezé

financing, which in the ne
18 months or so will havé |
condemned fifteen to twenty
thousands B.C.’s children 10
a swing-shift ‘education’ an
close college and university
doors to a similar number ©
high school graduates, all of
which exposes the Ministers
wordy froth for what it is: the |
aim of he and his government
to clamp a like freeze 0”
labor.

Well, om to the end of the
Minister’s frothy dissertation,
which includes a Gallop PoP
presumed to show that “moré
Canadians are apprehensivé
about industrial disputes 0~
curing in Canada this year...
we get to the nub of the ques
tion in the Minister’s chora! |
lullaby on the Throne speech. |

“While it would not be de ©
sirable, in my view, to remove
the primary responsibility _
from the parties (labor an
management—Ed.) to resolve |
their own differences, it is the >
objective of your Government
to devise a system of labor-
management relations which
will take into account not
only the welfare of the pal
ties, but the economy as 4
whole. These are changing
dynamic times which this ©
Government helped to create. ;
(And -how?) Therefore, labor ©
legislation and our ways 2
doing things must also changé
with them”.

Obviously the epidemic of
ex-parte injunctions, the im-
prisonment of trade union.
leaders, which “this govern:
ment helped to create”, hasn't ||
solved the problem for thé
political watchdogs of mono:
poly profits. (The leaders of
the United Fishermen and
Allied Workers Union, Pres! |
dent Steve Stavenes and ~
Secretary Homer Stevens are
still in prison).

So now, crudely hidden in
the Throne Speech and in thé
frothy bilge of Labor and
Education Minister Peterson,
an advance notice of increas:
ed - government interference
in free collective bargaining;
such interference ultimately |
designed to achieve compul- |
sory arbitration — and in the
Social Credit mentality, the
Hitlerite corporate state.

This threat hangs over B.C:
labor — but is nation-wide in
its scope. What’s that about
being ‘later than you think’? [

———

fore are: (1) historic difference,
(2) pluralism, (3) new forms of
the contradictions of capitalism,
(4) new problems. Marxism, he
pointed out,;-is the. exacting

search for the precise determina- ~

tion of what is possible in the
conditions of the contradictions
of the present.

Garaudy exposed the falseness
of the charge that Marxism saw
man as the passive creation of
changing environment, as “‘deter-
mined” economically, or other-
wise. On the contrary, it called
upon people to take the highest
form of responsibility for social
change, that of the social scien-

- tist, without whose activity so-
ciety can fall into degeneration

and self-destruction. “If we do
not win socialism,” he pointed
out, “history will degenerate io
disaster. The. future is our Ve
special responsibility.”

He saw in state-monopoly C#’.
pitalism the ante-chamber of 5
cialism, and the eve of the da.
when capitalist alienation wil
give way to free, mutually e?
riching human social relations

The address, an outstandi
example of lucid definition a?
ease of delivery, has been ta)
and will be transcribed and mad
available. Those interest
should write to The Montre
Centre for Marxist Research
P.O. Box 127, Station “B,” Mont’

‘real, Cc. Vane