should "suddenly" become news. It is a shameful condemnation that socialists should turn out appalling moralistic prose to berate US aggression while at the same time appearing to begrudge the coverage that My Lai has received as if they were jealous of the media for pinching their story. Unable to grasp the way the press can be used, the left fails to see how adverse publicity, at the same time that it is a genuine, if limited freedom, is an integral part of the class role of the media under capitalism. The publicity of My Lai calls both for an analysis of the nature of the war, and for an understanding of how the ruling class in the West is now manoeuvring to cut its losses.
Capitalism has always enforced genocide. Its ruthless and rapacious expansion destroys all cultures and all social organisations which stand in its way. It has sacrificed, and will always be to sacrifice, millions of lives to ensure commodity producuon and une accumunon of capital. From the slave trade to apartheid, labour power has been consumed by capital; while the social forces which threaten to deny it access to labour power, and to potential markets, have been amashed. Capitalism respects no civilisation, not even its own. It distinguishes between civilians and the military only to treat its soldiers better than its working men. It exercises no colour bar, it is free from all prejudice: blacks, browns, yellows, and whites, Catholics, Buddhists. Jews. and muslims, capitansm nas slaughtered them all.
George Brown is right! My Lai is not exceptional. If we "knock" the US for one atrocity, then we will have to attack Britain, France, taly. Germany, Japan ... Ies, everyone las done it. This bitter truth is turned into a frightful lie. It is turned against mankind. Human "nature" itself is expropriated from the peoples of the world. Massacres we are told (usually by those odious valets who accompany and profit from all imperialist wars: priests), massacres are tragically human. And then, if that does not exculpate the US, we are also told, and without a trace of self contradiction, that, anyway, communiss massacres are worse.
The bourgeoisie have always felt it their right to exterminate their opponents, and utilise tically on the contradictions within the US rulthe latest industrial and techmcal advances against the oppressed. From Thier's use of petrol against the Paris Communards to the napalm of Kennedy's helpful advisors; from the annihilation of the Red Indians to that of the citizens of Hiroshima, from Britain's South African concentration camps to those of Germany, no scru- The Leak ples have restrained, no mercies softened, the expansion of capitalism's political oppression But it is very rare for the bourgeoisie to cele- the publicity about My Lai come from? brate this essential feature of their civilisation. On the contrary, they use the crimes that have been committed in the name of socialism to wax horrified and prance their hypocrisy before the working classes of their own countries. They suppress and distort the news of their own world-wide class oppression. The proof is this-that My Lai occurred in March 1968, and that many massacres like it have taken place. The ideology of the bourgeoisie turns the world upside down as they do everything in their power to convince Enemserves that violence Is foreign to their system and is threatening imare preserved and then strengthened. The use of the Atomic bomb is justified on the grounds that it saved American lives, when, as it has ben: shown, it was used to prevent the Russians from participating inehe occupation of Japan. Now we are told that Vietnam is being protected from external aggression. The tale is familiar; but something has changed-My Lai is there to be seen in the papers of the bourgeos e Enemse ves.
Why?
The simple answer comes first-the US are losing. The political question is to know how they are losing. And how, and this follows, this opportunity can be used to inflict upon imperia alism the greatest possible polii cal defeat.
If these questions could force us to think through the specific contradictions within the world captanst system at tae present moment, then the anti-war movement would be achieving a degree of political maturity. As it is, it is ouly possible to speculate on these questions. A dangerous but vital task-dangerous, because we could easily get the wrong idea about what is going on within the US ruling class; vital, beunderstanding of the nature of imperialism, it will fail to turn egainst the progenitor of imperialist war-capitalism iteelf-and will become a means whereby masses of youth and the middle classes can excuse themselves from its results.
The coverage given to My Lai is an opportunity to start on three tasks: 1. to speculate poliing class, contradictions which may have an important effect on the way the war ends; 2. to look at the way the press is manipulated as an independent but subordinate agent of the bourgeoisie; 3. to glance at the odious ideology of US British impenalism.
All three start with one question. Where did The news that the US Army had acknowledged the massacre at Mv Lai was leaked bv an inside inrormant. i nere is also evidence to sug gest that the leak was a deliberate and calculat ted move to expose the Army to political scrutiny.
The story first went to Seymour Hersh, a freelance reporter who had worked with Eugene McCarthy. Hersh is known as an independent, ana inorougn, noera Journalst wno nas already written a book about Chemical and Biological Warfare and is at present writing one about the Pentagon. He does not flinch from subjecting held on a charge of murdering 70 to 75 Vietnamese civilians." Whether or not Time is right in quoting those actual words, Hersh's source must have had something more. For Hersh was able to locate the members of C Company and bankrole his expensive investigation with great speed. He must have been assured that he was onto an important story In less than two weeks, also according to Time, the first paper to carry the story, the Alabama Journal, of all papers, had "received a tip". Then, three days after the Alabama, the New York Times, the major national able to print anti-Army copy, got the copy. My Lai went to print on November 13th. Hersh, using the Dispatch News Service, placed it into 35 papers. Again, although it was Washingtonbased, the Dispatch News Service had no loyalty to the Army; it had only been in existence for a few months and was run by a young and "leftish" staff.
The press notice which announced the charges against Calley gave no figures for the murdered. Only an insider, or someone with inside cause unless the anti-war movement develops an information, would have known the significance ol the charges. Inis secret lay dormant for two months and then turned up in a peripheral newspaper and with a marginal but vigorous and independent anti-Army reporter. Neither relied on the patronage of the military. Their publicity was followed by a transatlantic blast from the British press. A press dedicated to the political leadership of the US but again independent of the huge patronage of the Pentagon.
There are three possible sources within the US ruling class who could have leaked the story and who will profit by its publication. All three share certain common values: they will sanction the death of communists provided they can get away with it; they favour political control over the military; they are now against the war in Vietnam. These three sections are: the East Coast Ruling Class, the CIA, and part of the military itself. Probably the leak came from an individual or a group who represent a combination of these interests.
The Military The military is suffering badly from the collapse of morale and internal discipline. Black Power is now an independent force in the Army which has become a training ground for Negro militants. Desertion is rife, there are now more than fifty GI anti-war papers being published, malingering and self-inflicted wounds are norThe only US casualty, a Black GI shoots himself in the foot rather than kill NIF women and children Force from its huge and useless losses over North Vietnam. For the Army, every day that it stays and tries to fight in Vietnam threatens disintegration, not just in Vietnam where it simply faces defeat, but in Washington where a defeat will turn into a purge of the personnel who have served the US so badly. The officers who just managed to get Calley charged show that there are men within the military itself who want to end the war before it is too late. The CIA Since the bombing of the North, the CIA have been doubtful about the value of the war. Their information on the real balance of power in Vietnam has always been better than the Army's. With their world-wide intelligence network they have been able to calculate the global political losses entailed by the war. (From Peru to Pakistan, it is to their CIA advisors that puppet officers first turn to ask that threatening question: "Can the US really be defeated?") The hostility of the CIA was sharply exacerbated by General Creighton Abrams, commanding officer in Vietnam who ordered the arrest of the leading officers of the Green Berets, the CIA's own army. The Green Berets, unlike th
eactionary christian socialists,among oisie, only horror and fright, s, to bloodshed, death etc then always has been horror without end on centralising his command. When the Green Berets resisted, he arrested and humilitated their leading officers. The leak of My Lai may have been the return blow. Not out of spite, but a calculated risk to ensure that the army does not make the same strategic mistake again.
The East Coasters The third possible source is civilian and political and undoubtedly has allies within the military Its interests would be followed both by the CIA as well as by the more intelligent officers, for it represents the traditional direction of US foreign policy.
The secret of US imperialism has been that it is indirect. Historically, acting under the banner of "freedom", it has exploited other imperial isms (British, Japanese, France, the UN). The war in Vietnam has bust this. The US has had to fight it on its own; and indirect control has wreaked a havoc of conflicting orders, corruption and incompetence. The tricky and difficult task of imposing imperialism against the wishes of the local population (injection of some stable capital and a puppet ruling class) de mands centralised political direction over both the Army and the indigenous people. The US has failed to manage either. The war in Vietnam has gone out of its control.
Not that some declassed military colossus has taken pver: On the contrary, the Army is in for a drumming. The fact that the troops were put in on the advice of the military does not mean that the Pentagon has taken over. What went wrong was that its advice was militarily incompetent and that is the mistake which must not be repeated. The US ruling class are not opposed to military victory in Vietnam, even at the cost of millions of Vietnamese lives. But they want a victory in Vietnam; and if they can't get that, then they want to be able to lose, like the British, as best they can, controlling and containing the after-effects. They know, for example, that they could have had a neutral Vietnam five years ago, that they could have engineered an uprising there which would have been put down to cries of "murder" etc. in the bourgeois press. The last thing they want, however, is a defeat of the US forces there. But that is what has happened. Now the Army must be disciplined and more tightly controlled.
Having militarily lost the war, powerful US imperialists have unloosed the story of My Lai in the interests of imperialism itself. How else can the fact be explained that high ranking political and military personnel have struck a blow It is certainly no accident, nor, as it is easy to show, is it a result of the fearless search for truth set in train by the leading organs of the US free press. They are not totally unable to achieve such a task, but at this moment, on this issue, they did not succeed in doing so.
Certainly the leak need not have been the result of a Machiavellian conspiracy. (Although it is difficult to know what else Washington is good for.) For it is clear that whereas two years ago, such a treasonous charge as: "The civilian inhabitants of My Lai were murdered in cold blood by Gis acting under the orders of the US command in Vietnam" would have been dismissed out of hand as unthinkable. Now, the unthinkable has happened. The US has lost the war. Slowly the hegemony that the military exercises when the boys are fighting and dying, crumbled and failed to hold. For the boys were dying for nothing. Gradually, Congressmen, service personnel, Washington public relations men, began to criticise the war in the most effective way they knew: they stopped supporting it. Then General Abrams publicly humiliated the Green Berets. When the boss says it's all right to take the gloves off ... then the gloves come off. So even if the leak of My Lai to Hersh, the funds which were raised for him, and the encouragement he received, even if these were not part of a discussed decision, even if, and this is a less rational and in its way a more paranoid position, they happened unconsciously as part of the war-weariness of the US ruling class, the structure of the event remains the same. What was unthinkable two years ago has happened; the American bourgeoisie is turning against the war in Vietnam. But, as always, it is doing so in its own class interests.
This can be demonstrated immediately and definitively. If the revelation of My Lai was in itself an attempt to disclose the real nature of the war in Vietnam, and if it was so treated by the press and television, then the nature of the war the US is fighting there would have been systematically exposed. Nothing of the sort has happened. In fact the opposite has happened. My Lai has been used to expose the Army, and at the same time no effort has been spared to contain it, ideologically and politically, in defence of capitalism-the fundamental cause of the massacre The question of the mass graves at Hue shows this quite clearly. Without doubt, after they stormed and occupied the City of Hue in February and March 1968, the NLF executed some of the leadine lackevs and valets who had was bombed, strafed, shelled and invaded by the US. Its defenders were napalmed, antipersonnel bombs were dropped into the heart of the old citadel. What happened to the dead? Unlike the barbaric and callous American and allied troops who leave them piled up on the roadside, the Vietnamese bury the innocent victims of the War. The US then dug up the victims of their own aggression only to shout and scream about the horrors of communism. All this is well known. The North Vietnamese and the NLF had made it known that the mass graves of Hue were the casualties of the fighting, not of execution. The Black Dwarf reported this in May 1969. As we say, we accept the fact that political executions took place, even though they shrivel to insignificance beside such US actions as Operation Phoenix. But there can be no reasonable doubt, to borrow a phrase from bourgeois justice, that a very great part of those who were buried in Hue were killed by US aggression against that city.
However, none of this was to trouble the press. They repeated and reproduced. like trained dogs, the vile lies of the US military. The Times, famed for its independence, reproduced a vast pitcure of the bones of the dead from Hue the very day after it carried the story of My Lai. There was no doubt about it. Communist massacres, The Times told us, are worse. bourgeois governments are opposed to massaMarx had a few words to say about the way the ideologists of capital protest against the resistance of their victims: "All this chorus of calumny, which The Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair to use against the plebian, while in the hands of the plebian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime."
Now we have seen a sensational advance on the barons of old. While Atom bombs, B 52 raids, and defoliation, go uncensored, when the ordinary soldier on the ground starts to implement for himself the slaughter and sadism which is the state policy of imperialism, then he too is crushed. Imperialism does not shrink from genocide but it wants it to proceed automatically under its state control. Thus both the ordinary Vietnamese and the ordinary Glare condemned for taking weapons into their own hands.
This double condemnation suits imperialism very well. No distinction is drawn between the neasant fiohtino for the collar The response of the British press when the news of the massacre "became known" demon strates how the publicity was used to cool out the population in preparation for US defeat.
The mass circulation papers all announced that the wir was lost, as if by fate or some human error. At the same time the news was slanted to contain any adverse political effects. Three years ago the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal set about considering US war crimes. It was ridiculed and dismissed by the British press and banned from Britain. No retrospective ack nowledgement enlivened the excellent job the British media did in making My Lai known. That would have been to admit their class role. My Lai was seized as an opportunity-to change line and "speak out" against the war. At the same time it was used to speak out for the US itself. Thus, when social democratic rabbit Harold Wilson praised the free press for its exposure of the atrocity, as he did in the Commons debate, he is talking into President Nixons s nal.
It was necessary for the papers to publicise My Lai. It also forced them to attempt a whole range of miserable excuses. Only one of them had any effect; that, in the unforgettable words of Peregrine Worsthorne, chief columnist and deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph:
"This is a plea for moral rigour. Atrocities are shocking. But the choice is not between atrocities and no atrocities. It is between atrocities and atrocities."
Apparently anti-imperialist atrocities can be worse either in quantity or quality. The Sunday Times reproduced the first argument in its introduction to Haeberle's colour pictures. It wrote: "Not that such atrocities are an American monopoly. The Viet-Cong have far surpassed them. " This is a straightforward lie. No attempt was made to substantiate it. Nor can it be excused by progressive journalists on the grounds that such rubric is necessary to ensure publication of the photos; which after all are what is important. For if in staring at these grotesque and gruesome pictures we are told with all authority that the Vietnamese have done worse, then the horror and fear of the NLF (not the Vietcong) grows a hundredfold. The very atrocities of imperialism are used as propaganda for the bourgeoisie.
The other line of defence is even more sickс. commus aurom nes are worse necause theirs are policy. What greater form of self-condemnation can be imagined than to excuse one's society on the grounds that it does not de deliberately massacre people, it just breeds and trains men who do so on their own accord without even receiving orders. "If I don't kill him someone else will, so what's the difference? How many Vietramese have died to that stupefying thought vaguely echoing through the drugged mind of a GI?
It could be argued that conscious genocide, the deliberate and responsible decision made in a specific situation, is better than the US's mindless killing of Vietnamese. But this would condone, if only slightly, the decision to bomb the North and to defoliate and napalm the South.
Epoch of Atrocities The fact is that the US does not need to make atrocities part of its policy. It has always committed atrocities. The torture and death o civilians, especially women and children, form an integral part of capitalism itself. The implacable contradiction in capitalism is manifest in Vietnam. It is the fundamental contradiction which spells its doom, even though it will only be overthrown by those who, like the Vietnamese, have learned to read. The West's billiondollar war machine, its gigantic productive force, is used to impose its narrow and restricted relations of production. It will destroy a nation in the name of freedom for capitalism.
The excuse that formally juridically, the cres is a mystification. For they represent an entire order of society, they implement the policies of a class whose rule has seen an epoch of uninterrupted atrocities.
The vicious psychology of capitalism, the psychology of competitive destruction, is excused by apologists as an unchangeable aspect of human nature-they are wrong. It is no longer necessary. As they retreat to the most bankrupt and superficial ideology they expose this to the entire world. The US has publicly admitted responsibility for the greater part of the deaths of 300,000 Vietnamese civilians. In what possible way could this be considered either natural or an aberration, unless the dynamic structure of the US itself is the cause?
It is argued that the war does not pay, that the US do not have a rational financial interest in spending millions of dollars to force Vietnam into the capitalist world. This misses the point. Capitalism is not a simple system of rationally calculated self-interest. It is economism to assume that war is decided on the basis of a single balance sheet. Capitalism is a political system; bourgeois rule in the citadels, imperialism and
EDITOR'S NOTE: The last few months have seen an intensification of the repression against the Black Panthers in the United States and many leading A tants have been shot dead by the American police. The killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago on December 4, 1969 brought the number of slain Panthers up to twenty-eight, many others have been wounded, and the best known survivors are either in prison or in exile. The Black Dwarf (Vol. 13, No. 8) was the first to report on the Panthers for the revolutionary left in Britain. Since then the American ruling class has embarked on a campaign to annihilate the Black Panthers. The reason for this: the Panthers present a serious potential threat to the social structure. In the words of their leader Huey Newton: "The Black Panther Party's position is that the Black people in the country are definitely colonised, and suffer from the colonial plight more than any ethnic group in the country. Perhaps with the exception of the Indian, but surely as much even as the Indian population. We too, realise that the American people in general are colonised. And they're colonised simply because they're under a capitalistic society, with a small clique of rulers who are the owners of the means of production in control of decision making. that takes the freedom from the American people in general. And they simply work for the enrichment of the ruling class ...
While we may disagree with some of the formulations expressed below, we are in no doubt that at this moment it is the duty of all revolutionary socialists to express their solidarity with the Panthers. We print below a letter from the Black Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale, imprisoned in the United States. Details on Black Panther The Black Dwarf 16th January 1970 Page 8 solidarity campaign in Britain can be obtained from Scott Anderson, Ruskin College, Oxford. Therefore