A lease on lives
Sir: If Geoffrey Wheatcroft's reference (12 March) to Andre Gelinas's description of Saigon under the Communists prompts any of your readers to look at the original article in the New York Review, it will have done enough. Gelinas writes of the mindless authoritarianism in terms which must prevent even Widmerpool characters like Joseph Needham, usually so forward hl exculpating Stalin and Mao, from the usual apologetics.
But Mr Wheatcroft's picture of the proVietcong is incomplete. He does not identifY the ingredient common to many (but not all) of the doves: their insincerity. What is now so striking about the British protest movement is the casual insolence with which it appropriated the suffering of an Asian people simply pour epater le bourgeois. The gaily-coloured people rolling marbles under police horses in Grosvenor Square had little sense of American foolishness in trying to bomb a subsistence agriculture into submission, but a comfortable sense of embarrassing by radicalism a British Labour government. Life in the paddy-fields was a vehicle for getting crèches in Chalk Farm. A lease was taken out on millions of American and Asian lives without thought of the force of international power, but because of the nice woozy feeling of doing something that mother wouldn't like. The proof of-this is the minimal interest shown in such reports as Gelinas's. Naturally, some of the swingers in Grosvenor Square tried to make wider politica/ connections. One of the NLF's votaries has just been writing about the Berlin Wall New Society (10 March): 'It wasn't built because the Commies wanted to be bloodYminded. It was built because American capital was making a systematic and sustained attempt to destroy the DDR econonlY —just as . . American capital made a systematic and sustained attempt to destroY the economy of Vietnam. Without the wall, the D DR's present economic health wouldn't have been possible. And if you build a wall, you have to make sure it works—which leads to the guards, the shootings and the rest'. These rascals, presumably, are those doves who Mr Wheatcroft thinks under-. stand 'moral justification' and 'national
R. P. T. Hines
12 Wilkinson Street, London SW8
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