The offensive launched by the Vietnamese Iberation forces continues unabated. On at least two different fronts -the Central Highlands, where the capital city of Kontum is under siege, and on Highway 13 in the South - the puppet army's defences continue to crumble. "Vietnamisation" has been demonstrated as an abject failure. The bombing of the North has failed to stem the offensive and Nixon now has a total of 130 B-52 bombers in the war zone, the highest figure yet in the whole war.
The North Vietnamese Workers" Party has responded to the renewal of the bombings by escalating the offensive and by carrying out, for the first time during the war, naval and air attacks on the U.S. Seventh Fleet which is stationed just off the shores of Vietnam. They have further declared that sult of the heavy air attacks, it would be strengthened and: "Each factory, each construction site, each state farm, each co-oper ative, cach government office, each school, each city street, must be a combat trench where everyone is ready to fight and to smash any military adventure of the U.S. aggressors and their henchmen!"
While the Vietnamese themselves have warned against any illusions to the effect that the latest offensive would lead to complete victory, there can be no doubt that the timing of the oftensive poses a serious challenge to the section of the American ruling class which is represented in the White House. The options before Nixon and the Pentagon warlords are very imited: either the complete destruction of the North by using nuclear weapons or a re-escalation in terms of sending more troops or, of course, withdrawal after the acceptance of a face-saving device. Time has run out for the U.S. administration and Nixon realises full well that the scale of the Vietnamese offensive and the renewed bombing of the North has already upset his chances of re-election, which appeared so bright after the visit to Peking. In that sense the latest offensive fore the NLF flag flutters over Saigon and Hue.
Despite Chou en Lai's brave talk there can be no doubt that Nixon's visit to Peking encouraged his belief that the Chinese government had now come of age and could be trusted in much the same way as imperialism has depended on Stalin and his successors since the mid-Thirties. Nixon's forthcoming visit to Moscow, which the spineless bureaucrats in Moscow refuse to call off, must have further encouraged him to think that a massive bombardment might finally cow the Vietnamese into an unsatisfactory settlement. In that sense the Vietnamese offensive is also directed against Big Power diplomacy and is one of the ways in which the Vietnamese militants have expressed their views on the recent antics of both Peking and Moscow. After all it wasn't so long ago that Maoist theoreticians" were declaring that it was "Soviet social-imperialism" which was the greatest danger to the "peace in Asia". The implication being that U.S. imperialism was only a "secondary contradiction". Fortunately the Vietnamese did not countenance Nixon is also a response to his past and future hosts.
A few weeks after bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, Nixon will be feted in Moscow, This is the measure of Comrade Brezhnev's proletarian internationalism'. Instead of aiding the Vietnamese and using the Soviet Air Force and Navy to fight against attacks on a fraternal country (of course our C.P. friends will say this is 'ultra leftism', but then why is it that imperialism can act with impunity to defend its client states while the most powerful workers' state remains passive?), all the stress is laid on the diplomatic offensive'. Soviet tanks could besent to crush the workers and students of Czechoslovakia in the name of combatting imperialism, but where imperialism really exists and is fighting, there Messrs. Brezhnev and Kosygin are satisfied with mere words in defence of the Vietnamese while they prepare to welcome Nixon to Moscow.
NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY In the face of the attitudes of Moscow and Peking, international solidarity with the Vietnamese remains an important task for all revolutionaries and socialists. Given the fact that the French and Italian C.P.s refuse to mobilise the workers in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle, the burden falls on the shoulders of the extreme left. Recently there have been big demonstrations in France and Sweden and smaller ones in other European countries. In the United States the National Peace Action Coalition mobilised thousands and thousands of people in several cities (50,000 in New York alone); in many American universities students went on strike and as The Guardian remarked, chanted an old slogan with new vigour: "A venge Hanoi, Avenge Haiphong, Victory to the Vietcong. In Britain alone the response has been marginal and restricted largely to the C.P. and the I.M.G. For opportunist groups like the I.S. and the S.L. L., Vietnam is a reminder of the fact that the colonial revolution still remains undefeated and that it is the Vietnamese who are today in the frontline of the struggle against the most powerful imperialism the world has ever known. Even though, of necessity, our solidarity with the Vietnamese can only be limited we have to re-start a process of educating ourselves and the revolutionary left as a whole in the processes at work in Southern Vietnam, so that when Saigon falls its significance is not lost on the British left. Clarissa Howard