AMERICA
21
Democrats were rejected by the natIOnal Democratic party while the
Tonkin Gulf "incident" was prompting the first air strikes on North
Vietnam. Until that time, as Jean-Paul Sartre recalled in his 1965 letter
to the anti-war movement, it was possible to envision an "imperialist
recession" in American policy and, I would add, a thaw in domestic
politics. Sartre felt the possibilities of reasoning with the U.S. Govern–
ment were canceled out by the commitment to escalate the war. Sartre
went on to suggest that a widening war might be accompanied by a
continued liberalization of domestic American society (one of the few
points on which Sartre and Lyndon Johnson agree). However, it now
seems clear that both Sartre and Johnson misjudged, for although
McCarthyism has not set in, there is a definite regression, a kind of
social poisoning, taking place with each day of continued war.
The problem is that social revolution cannot be met with napalm
in Vietnam and with positive support in the United States. The war
may not tax the economy severely but it taxes the time and imagination
of policy-makers and forces other issues into secondary importance. The
war attracts support from the most fierce anti-Communist forces in the
country; Johnson cannot antagonize the military-oriented congressmen
by urging civil rights legislation on them. In the earlier period, New
Frontier and Great Society rhetoric encouraged and supported people
who wanted to do something about poverty and civil rights; the present
period gives free rein to those who want an American empire.
2. In the context of the Vietnam War, America's internal colonial
tendencies become more pronounced. The Negro community, once an
imported colony of slaves, now is subjected to "neocolonial" control.
Virtually no one living in a ghetto has power. Business, politics and
social service originate "downtown." The dominant white attitude is
opposed to integration, or pro-integration only when the kind and
degree is determined by whites. With the preoccupation of foreign war,
the white response to Negro demands is becoming more hollow and
irritable.
It
is difficult to conceive of this society being mobilized in–
ternally for full racial equality while being bogged down abroad in
wars against nonwhite people. It is more likely that a white backlash
will grow at home when it is rampant in American foreign policy.
("These VC's are the toughest people we've fought since the Indians,"
an American commanding officer told newsmen in Vietnam this week.)
And as the American presence in Vietnam becomes completely colonial–
ist in effect, the colonial status of the ghetto is bound to be reinforced
at home. The riots and "Black Power" ideology are more like anti–
colonial movements than like the integrationist civil rights movement of
the early sixties.
