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Leamington Letters #132: The Vietnam War

21/10/2017

7 Comments

 
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We don’t talk very much about Harold Wilson these days. For my younger readers, he was leader of the Labour Party for 13 years and prime minister for eight, winning four general elections and losing one. He presided over a turbulent period of British and international politics and history, in the form of accounts written by his successors and colleagues, has not been kind to him.
 
But whatever his failings and his record of failure, we in Britain can be grateful to him for one thing.
 
He kept us out of Vietnam.
 
Where Thatcher leapt at the opportunity to take on Argentina over the Falklands, and Blair jumped into bed with Bush to invade Iraq, Harold Wilson devoted his energies duing the Vietnam War to peace initiatives, no less than nine of them during the course of Johnson’s presidency. And if his refusal to send British troops was more practical and ‘pragmatic’ (a Wilson word) than principled, and his refusal to condemn the American position upset the Labour Left, he did ensure that our generation was not called upon to fight an immoral war in south-east Asia.
 
I was contemplating this as I watched the opening half-dozen episodes of the Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War. It is notable for its inclusion of Vietnamese voices as well as American, reminding us that this conflict was not solely or even primarily an American tragedy, despite the fact that the blockbuster movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Born on the 4th of July, Platoon) and the key texts (Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, James Crumley’s And One To Count Cadence) focus on the American experience and in so doing reflect the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ treatment of Vietnam as an abstract concept in a game of dominoes rather than a country and a people with a long history and a vibrant culture.
 
By the end, of course, Vietnam was not longer even a concept; it was a situation from which the US needed to extract itself for reasons which had more to do with US politics than any recognition of the wrongness of the initial policy and the war itself.
 
What the Vietnamese call ‘the American War’ was the backdrop to my teenage and student years: I was 15 in 1964 when the first major demonstration against the war, at Berkeley, occurred and 18 at the time of the Tet Offensive in 1967. It is a truism that the war initiated a new era of divisive politics and a breakdown in the national consensus; it is also true that the war, the resistance to the war, and the raising of black consciousness which was an essential part of both, affected many of us beyond the shores of the US profoundly and individually.
 
Certainly it was our political focus in those years, and our political philosophy was forged from it and around it. My politics in particular are defined by it to this day and watching the documentary is a form of catharsis for my generation.
 
If you are not doing so, you should.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Zappa from the Boston Music Hall, 1976. Frank’s on fire.
 
7 Comments
GraemeL
21/10/2017 09:23:55

It's a brilliant and harrowing piece of work which has brought back many memories. Like you, I was politicised by the war and understand how our generation in the UK got away with it. A poignant interview with a marine who was more frightened of what his parents and neighbours would say if he didn't go than the war itself. What would we have done?

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Paul
21/10/2017 09:30:40

You might also mention the soundtrack: Bob, Airplane, Janis et al. Crucial to positioning it all in time.

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Geoff
21/10/2017 11:00:22

It may well be time for a revaluation of Wilson. He famously said, after first elected leader, that he was trying to achieve a Bolshevik revolution with a Tsarist shadow cabinet. That would be Brown (remember him?), Callaghan, Crossland, Jenkins. Maybe our absence from Vietnam is his greatest legacy and it is not to be diminished.

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Ed
21/10/2017 15:49:16

Think he meant that figuratively rather than literally. He was certainly never a Bolshevik, not even a member of Oxford Labour Party - too left wing, he was a Liberal! But he was the last of the welfare state Labour leaders and now we have seen what came next - from Callaghan on - we should laud him.

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Allan
21/10/2017 11:18:02

You forgot Cameron and Libya.

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Max
27/10/2017 09:58:57

Just been told that the 50 minute episodes being shown on the Beeb have been cut from the original 90 minutes. I trust that we will, at some point, get to see the full cut over here.

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Rick Hough
20/11/2017 04:40:09

The Burns documentary is heartbreaking and essential even where one might take issue with its content, e.g. that they left alone the issue of falsified cables during the Tonkin Gulf hostilities.
We still do this stuff, even when we're clear of the horrendous nature of the folly.
And for that reason, i found myself repeatedly sobbing as I watched.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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