DAVID DELLINGER

Dave Dellinger a long time peace activist and a conscientious objector during World War II protested the Vietnam War vigorously. In his book, Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger, published in 1970, he refers to his exposure of US war crimes in Vietnam which he published in 1966 in Liberation. Dellinger received this information piece meal and it was easily missed because it was overwhelmed with all of the other information about the war. “Americans have been genuinely troubled by reports and pictures of brutality in Vietnam.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 29)

Dellinger understands the American dilemma of not wanting to give in or lose to the communists. He projects quite accurately that the war will have a lasting “cultural and political implications.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 30)

He expresses the anti-war comparisons of the US military atrocities to the German atrocities of World War II. American citizenry’s quietness fits Hannah Arendt’s description of the banality of evil. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 30-31)

Media descriptions of the war featured US soldiers as just the boy next door while the “depersonalization of the victims, not only as Reds, Vietcong, aggressors, and, terrorists, but bodies to be counted, like tallies in a ball game.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 32)

Critics of the war, Dellinger points out, still accept that America is the best country in the world and therefore are reluctant to criticize assumptions about the war. In addition, many of those critics criticized policies that advocated for a basic change in how America functioned. The Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee need not apply. Therefore, “even peace lovers tend to be reassured by reports of American military success and impending victory.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 33)

Dellinger notes the optimistic reports claiming the war would be over at the end of 1962, 1963 and that at the end of 1965 we were told that we had stopped losing the war which we had been winning.?! (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 33) He cites New York Times columnist James Reston’s November 14, 1965 article, “The day-to-day communiques give the impression that we win almost every encounter, but we somehow merely advance deeper into the bog. . . . Officials go on talking as if one more summer or one more winter of American action will bring the desired result, but in private they concede that this kind of war could easily go on for years.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 34)

Dellinger argues that this reliance and celebration of liberalism is misplaced as it is that that took us to “moral disaster.” The only real victory would be the defeat of the American military in Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 34)

“We are reminded that the United States is providing generous economic, educational, and medical aid, even in the midst of war, and has offered billions for development, once the war is over. Our main targets are said to be bridges, munitions depots, power plants, and supply routes. (The people just get in the way.) The administration is eager to enter into “unconditional discussions” as soon as the stubborn and aggressive Communists give a signal of a genuine desire for peace (such as abandoning their “condition” of American military withdrawal). President Johnson weeps over the deaths of American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians (as some of the Roman emperors wept over the deaths of the Christians in the Coliseum). (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 34-35)

In October 1966 Dellinger traveled to North Vietnam. On his way he met in Phnom Penh with representatives of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and opponents of the Ky regime in Saigon. “These opponents included not only Buddhist monks, students and intellectuals, but also early members of the Diem government who resigned when they became convinced that the United States insists on a policy which is the exact opposite of its public rhetoric of peace, political freedom and social justice.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 39)

In Saigon a young girl greeted Dellinger with “Ka Ka Do Americans . . . Cut the Americans’ throats.” Later Dellinger learns about prostitution and the black market. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 40-41) Although U.S. forces stationed in Saigon may believe “that they have come to help the Vietnamese,” they will find that many South Vietnamese enjoy the business opportunities more than the fight against communism. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 41)

Speaking with “The Venerable Thich Thien Hoa, President of the United Buddhist Church, explained the universal hostility tour Americans in the following manner:

“We realize that many Americans want to help us. We thank them for this. But the policy of the United States government is not to help the Vietnamese people but to help a small group which oppresses the people. The American government has been here more than ten years and it has always supported dictator government, so the Vietnamese people are against the American government.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 42)

Students opposed to the government told Dellinger, “All the present collaborators were collaborators and hirelings of France. During the Japanese occupation they collaborated with the Japanese. This tiny oppressing minority collaborates with whatever foreign power is seeking to rule over us. They profit from colonialism so they don’t want independence. They profit from the war, so they don’t want peace. But the people are against the Americans.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 42)

Dellinger spoke to South Vietnamese students leaving to study in foreign lands while Americans “die in the paddies and jungles of Vietnam.” They blamed the United States for the war and did not care who won the war. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 44)

In North Vietnam Dellinger recounts the stories from survivors of American bombings who were dismembered. Shell shocked mothers who lost three children and their own parents and siblings. A most common statement from North Vietnamese is, “We Vietnamese do not go to the United States to fight your people. Why do they come over here to kill my children?” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 44)

“Ask you President Johnson if our straw huts were made of steel and concrete” (a reference to the President’s claim that our targets in North Vietnam are military structures of steel and concrete.) “Ask him if our Catholic church that they destroyed was a military target, with its 36 pictures of the Virgin, whom we revere. Tell him that we will continue our life and struggle no matter what further bombings there will be, because we know that without independence nothing is worthwhile.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 45)

Dellinger visited the “Hate Memorial” in North Vietnam. The hate was directed toward the “American aggressors.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 45)

While American parents mourn the deaths of their sons the North Vietnamese remind the Americans that they have always repressed the Vietnamese revolution and national liberation. It happened at the end of World War II when Chiang Kai-shek’s forces crushed the Viet Minh at the behest of the United States which had promised the Vietnamese independence for helping downed US pilots and providing intelligence information to the allies during the war. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 45) The North Vietnamese continue to remind the US that with the surrender of Japan in 1945 “the Allies hastily rearmed 90,000 Japanese soldiers” to contain the Viet Minh and that during the French war “the United States supplied eighty percent of the cost . . . to preserve Western colonialism in Indochina. President Eisenhower’s refusal, in 1956, to allow democratic elections and reunification of Vietnam, as promised in the Geneva Accords, was not our first flagrant betrayal of Vietnamese independence. Most Americans are ignorant of these facts, or dimly aware of them as unfortunate mistakes committed in a confused and distant past, but there is hardly a Vietnamese family that does not measure America’s broken promises in terms of the death of one or more loved ones.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 45-46)

American warplanes bomb North Vietnamese villages day and night. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 48)

“Miss Tuyen, a twenty-year old peasant girl . . . told me that two of her brothers . . . had been killed while herding water buffalo” by bombing and machine gunning from the planes. “Miss Tuyen had been introduced to me as a village hero who had carried twice her weight in ammunition on her shoulders during an attack, transporting crates of shells through the narrow trenches to the anti-aircraft stations.” Another of her brothers was killed at Dien Bien Phu. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 48)

She expressed great anger at the “bombing and strafing” of her country. The Vietnamese shoot back but know it is difficult as most of them have only rifles. “What would young Americans think if they were living peacefully and suddenly another country came and started killing them? . . . Bombing is continuous but we never feel tired . . . the young people in my village are ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary to defend our independence.” Vietnamese hate the Americans for all the destruction they have wrought in Vietnam. She asks Dellinger to tell America the truth. She hopes to visit him in a free Saigon. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 48-49)

While villages were not military targets they were bombed nevertheless. Therefore, each hut had a bomb shelter. “Networks of trenches . . . led to larger shelters and to anti-aircraft stations.” While the people “thresh rice by hand” they have modern technology in the form of machine guns for defense. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 50)

The Vietnamese claimed that the US did everything it could to kill “anything that moved.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 50) However, Keven long time peace activist David Dellinger found himself in denial over claims that the US bombed “residential areas, schools and hospitals.” Central Hanoi did not get hit. Vietnamese considered that a temporary luxury.(Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 51)

The people of North Vietnam believe that they are bombed after the US suffers “a severe military set-back in the south.” They dismiss with anger President Johnson’s talk of peace. “He is cynical as he is barbarous . . . killing our children . . . then the next day they may drop toys and candy, and leaflets urging us to surrender?” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 51-52)

Dellinger notes that the American peace movement is easily “discouraged by its inability to reverse twenty years of American foreign policy with a few demonstrations.” However, they may have forced the Americans to stop short of leveling all cities in North Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 52)

Dellinger tried to maintain his faith that American pilots did not drop their bombs out of cruelty. However, on a tour of recently bombed villages Dellinger abandoned that belief. It was a clear that the use of fragmentation bombs targeted civilians not military installations. They were everywhere in North Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 53)

Next, Dellinger gives what the peace movement description, analysis of American culture and how and why we got into Vietnam. He wonders why we put “mother” in front of the name of a bomb? “The term itself tells us something about our culture. Do we know nothing more about motherhood than this? Or is it that we have accepted the fact that mothers produce offspring who are destined to become killers? The mother bomb explodes in the air over the target area, releasing 300 smaller bombs, typically the size of either a grapefruit or a pineapple. Each of the smaller bombs then ejects a spray of 150 tiny pellets of steel, which are so small that they bounce uselessly off concrete or steel, though they are very effective when they hit a human eye or heart.” These pellets were difficult to remove by doctors because they were so small and there are very few x-ray machines in Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 53) “According to the Vietnamese, the general pattern of most attacks is to drop heavy explosive bombs and then to follow a few minutes later with fragmentation bombs and strafing, so as to interfere with relief operations and to kill those who are trying to flee the bombed-out areas. From personal observation, I learned that the fragmentation bombs are equipped with timing devices so that they do not all eject their murderous barrage right away. When relief workers are trying to rescue the wounded, or later when the planes have departed and the all-clear has been sounded, hundreds of fragmentation bombs may explode, wounding or killing the innocent.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 53-54)

Dellinger wasn’t impressed with justifications for “the uses of fragmentation bombs” from the US government. He described the consequences as “the equivalent . . . of the practice in the South of shelling, napalming or setting fire to a village which is suspected of harboring a few guerrillas.” Americans refuse to believe what is happening in North Vietnam by the US air forces. They have accepted the government version of “sanitary and surgical” bombing operations. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 54-55) The US sends over a thousand bombers a day in Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 55)

Just south of Hanoi is the city of Phu Ly which reminded Dellinger of Guernica. “Not a building was still standing.” So much for “precision bombing. . . . Survivors told me that after the heaviest bombings planes returned at intervals of twenty to thirty minutes to strafe anything that moved.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 55)

There are more example of destruction of Vietnamese villages by the US. “The entire city of Than Hoa was wiped out in the French Resistance War of 1945 to 1954 and painfully rebuilt after the Geneva accords, only to suffer this new destruction. . . . In Than Hoa, block after block of rubble included the ruins of a Franciscan seminary, a Buddhist pagoda and the general hospital. Here again I saw damage to the dikes that protected the city. Outside the city limits, I saw the ruins of the 600-bed Than Hoa tuberculosis sanatorium, which had been attacked on five different occasions. . . . There was no conceivable military target for miles around.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 60) The Americans argue otherwise. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 61)

Dellinger cites noted British historian Arnold Toynbee’s 1965 criticism of American policy in Vietnam. Mainly ignored in America, “For the past twenty years the government and people of the United States have been acting on the belief that communism is on the march for the conquest of the world and that it is the manifest destiny of the United States to save the world from suffering this fate. . . . Americans have believed that America has practically the whole human race on her side in her ant-Communist stand. . . . This picture is not founded on the facts.

“. . . The revolt of the native majority of mankind against the domination of the Western minority - this, and not the defense of freedom against communism by the leading Western country, the United States, is the real major issue in the world today. . . . The President manifestly believes that he is speaking with Churchill’s voice - the Churchill of 1940 - but to the ears of people who have suffered Western domination in the past, his voice sounds like the kaiser’s and like Hitler’s.

“. . . The spectacle of overwhelming American military power will not impress and Englishman who has lived through two world wars. . . . If I were a South Vietnamese guerrilla fighter today, I should remember 1940 and should continue audaciously to resist the mighty United States. The American picture of aggressive ecumenical communism is a mirage, but the reality which America is up against today is something much more formidable. She is up against the determination of the non-Western majority of mankind to complete its self-liberation from Western domination.” Op. cit. Vancouver Times, May 11; reprinted from the London Observer.

The US argues that the attacks on North Vietnam is to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate. However, Dellinger claims, it has the opposite affect. The US is viewed as a “ruthless invader.” The US creates “quislings” in the areas it occupies. “Even the pro-American Japanese government recently compared the Vietcong to the anti-Nazi resistance forces during the German occupation of Europe.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 64)

Dellinger criticizes democratic socialists Michael Harrington, Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin who, while wanting an end to the war, also believe that the US has a “right to negotiate the terms and extent of its military withdrawal.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 65) This is nothing more than American “self-righteousness, an attempt to transplant in Asia the American system of parliamentary democracy and Presidential elections under which the United States has launched a pitiless economic and military aggression against Asians.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 65) The US has no right to be part of the decision making about the governance of Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 66)

Dellinger continues to cite Toynbee to support his point. “Today, President Johnson is willing to negotiate without making it a condition that America’s opponents in Vietnam shall first stop fighting. He has, however, made it a condition that South Vietnam shall remain separate from North Vietnam, whatever the wishes of the Vietnamese people may be. . . . Now the imposition of the fiats of Western governments by force is the humiliation that has been inflicted on the non-Western peoples during the last 200 years. When they got rid of the European and Japanese imperialists . . . the Americans . . . jumped in and are dictating, in their turn, to the Asians what the Asians may or may not do. In other words, the Americans, in their turn, are treating the Asians as natives, and this is infuriating to them.” Americans appear unaware of Johnson’s cynicism.(Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 66-67)

Ending the war is based on ignorance or “American ethnocentrism. . . . Failure to understand the deep-seated Asian revulsion against everything white, Western, and pseudo-democratic is compounded by the conditioning most of us have had to feel that our culture is superior.”(Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 67)

Those who promote peace as American international policy fail to see that American politics “is isolated from and running counter to the mainstream of world politics.” It is believed that our American proposals are “hypocritical or touching on matters that are none of our business. We build a peace movement that is easily maneuvered by the government into thinking that the United States has been reasonable and the National Liberation From . . . intransigent and reckless.” Non-violent peace activists are accused of supporting violence because they support the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 68-69)

By 1969 Dellinger concluded that the US gave up on winning the war. And “substituted a policy of unprecedented punishment from the air and sea, which is intended to force the Vietnamese to grant concessions in Paris that will cushion the international and domestic effects of America’s military defeat. . . . search and destroy has been replaced by probe, withdrew and bomb. The TV networks have admitted that helicopter gunships on patrol duty in the countryside are shooting down anyone who runs - on. The assumption that the fleeing peasant or a draft dodger or a V.C.” The intense bombing is meant to “strengthen America’s bargaining power” rather than win the war. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 93)

“In World War II, the United States refused to respond to Japanese peace feelers until it could first drop its terrifying new bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus strengthening its power at the peace table and in the post-world war world.” However, in Vietnam “it is not considered politically profitable to bring in nuclear weapons, because of the negative effect this could have on world public opinion. But the U.S. has intensified non-nuclear bombing and shelling to previously inconceivable levels. It would be a mistake to refer to such bombing as conventional any longer, because of the extreme sophistication and cruelty of the bombs and shells - pellet bombs, shrike missiles, new improved napalm and phosphorus. In World War II, when the U.S. dropped a thousand tons of bombs in a single night on the city of Hamburg, a wave of public indignation swept the world, causing protests among those who had no reservations about Allied war aims. Beginning in January, the U.S. has repeatedly dropped between four and five thousand tons of bombs in single raids on small areas of Vietnam. Some of the new bombs are as large as 5,000 kilograms (nearly six tons), whereas normal bombing of the North was with 500 and 750 pound bombs and the largest bomb used was 2,500 kilograms. Naval shelling in the South is ow four times higher than before the bombing halt in the North, and the use of pellet bombs has increased by about five hundred percent.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 93-94)

After the Test Offensive General William Westmoreland “demanded 206,000 additional soldiers, in order to win the war.” However, most people realized that additional forces would not change the outcome of the war. According to the New York Times “tolerance of the war had worn thin.” Dellinger wrote, “who says that the antiwar teach-ins, protests and resistance activities have had no impact?” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 94)

There were calls for negotiations but no calls to stop the “genocidal bombing and shelling.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 95)

The goal of the US is to thwart developing countries independence movements. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 95)

“The new policy is part of a public relations effort by the Nixon administration in behalf of the American system of unrepresentative government under capitalism.” There will not be discussion of foreign policy and its implications. Essentially the Johnson and Nixon administrations disregard

“popular opposition” to the war and U.S. foreign policy. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 95)

Liberals do want admit to defeat in Vietnam because they fear the reaction of the pro-war faction in the United States. “The only issues for the United States to negotiate in Paris are the time it takes to get its troops out of Vietnam and the size of the indemnity it pays that ravaged country.” Furthermore, he criticizes the liberals and wants “resistance to the war” to understand the “relationship between the war and the class society we live in.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 95-96)

1969 sees “unprecedented military escalation” including the “implementation of the Phoenix Plan for assassinating 80,000 village cadres of the M.L.F.” In reality, the US does not want to leave Vietnam without victory and, serving “the interests of American capitalism and anti-Communism.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 97)

The US lost the war in Vietnam and the political war in its own country. To this end Richard Nixon uses delaying tactics. “Now he offers phony concessions, such as the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 98)

“American troops spend most of their time holed up in tiny enclaves, vulnerable to repeated mortar and rocket attacks. They venture out only in periodic savage actions which proved psychological reassurance for the generals and lifers (feeding their machismo and careerist ambitions) but are carried out at great cost in G.I. lives, thus adding to the discontent both in the armed forces and at home. Increasingly the major U.S. aggression is being carried out by genocidal bombing and strafing of the liberated zones, the activity which so far has the least political repercussions at home because of the resulting low American but high Communist death tolls. The U.S. has given up on conquering territory or pacifying the Vietnamese but hopes to terrorize the liberation forces into yielding major concessions at Paris. So this highly publicized proof of peaceful intent and military improvement is a bummer.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 98) In addition, the soldiers withdrawn had no impact on the US military effort. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 98-99) “During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on March 27, Senator Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) reported that according to an assistant to Secretary of State Rogers, a system of gradual withdrawal could prolong the war by tow or three years. The official had asserted that the American people will be bought off with phased withdrawals.” That is exactly what happened. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 99)

However, Dellinger claims that the protests and pressure by the anti-war movement are working. But the American public in general must also demand a full and quick withdrawal from Vietnam. “The establishment is on the run.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 99) Unfortunately, the Johnson and Nixon administrations have offered “a series of palliatives and promises which are not intended to interfere with prosecution of the war. . . . First the opening to talks in Paris, then the end to bombing in the North, now the token troop withdrawal - all have aroused serious expectations of peace.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 100)

“For the first several years of the war, the antiwar movement had the crucial but unrewarding task of preventing the building of a national consensus in support of the government. Those who complain that teach-ins, massive demonstrations and nonviolent resistance had no effect because they did not lead to a negotiated peace or the withdrawal troops fail to realize the tremendous significance of what was accomplished, particularly against a background of political naïveté and non involvement, a tradition of righteous patriotism, and Cold War legacy of anti-Communist brainwashing.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 100)

South Vietnam cannot produce a government that “is both pro-American and politically respectable. . . . Thieu is hated by all and trusted by no one, and the little clique of generals and landlords who have sold themselves in turn to the Japanese, the French and the Americans are checking their escape routes and filling their foreign bank accounts with American aid money.” (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 101)

Dellinger writes that from 1965 to 1967 disparate American political groups worked together to put “the Johnson administration on the defensive.” Most Americans oppose the war and are “distrustful of Nixon.” However, “politically the U.S. is an underdeveloped country.” Example, the trust in elections and the institutions of our government. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 101-102) Not understood, is the “power structure of American capitalism. . . . which makes the drive for profits and power, at home and abroad, the dominating force in American policy.” The power elite who truly control things. The peace movement must make this connection as well. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 102)

Regarding communists in the antiwar movement Dellinger writes that it is those who want to control the movement feel threatened by communists in the movement. Communist must be listened to for their good ideas and shunned for their not so good ideas; this is true of anything and any one in society. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 198-199) Interestingly, while some in the antiwar movement demand the exclusion of communists they do not have the same feelings toward “pro-Americans.” Analysis by the liberals frustrates Dellinger as they never get to the heart of the power structure. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 200)

Dellinger laments “the willingness of the public to tolerate known lies and manipulations of the news” about Vietnam. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 256)

The Gulf of Tonkin used to justify the war in Vietnam seems to have an affect only on Americans. Southeast Asians do not want to be dominated by Americans, however. (Revolutionary Nonviolence: essays by Dave Dellinger. 257)

Dellinger predicts the war will get out of hand for the power structure and the peace movement should be ready to take the lead in confronting the issues confronting the country.