"Naming The System" Speech
By Paul Potter
April 17,1965, 25,000 people marched on Washington to end the war in Vietnam.
After hours of picketing the White House, the President of SDS, Paul Potter,
spoke in front of the Washington Monument.
Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but
humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only
reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and
other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This
was a nation with no large standing army, with no design for
external conquest, that sought primarily the opportunity to develop
its own resources and its own mode of living. If at some point we
began to hear vague and disturbing things about what this country
had done in Latin America, China, Spain and other places, we
somehow remained confident about the basic integrity of this
nation's foreign policy. The Cold War with all of its neat
categories and black and white descriptions did much to assure us
that what we had been taught to believe was true.
But in recent years, the withdrawal from the hysteria of the Cold
War era and the development of a more aggressive, activist foreign
policy have done much to force many of us to rethink attitudes that
were deep and basic sentiments about our country. The incredible
war in Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting
edge that has finally severed the last vestige of illusion that
morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American
foreign policy. The saccharine self-righteous moralism that
promises the Vietnamese a billion dollars of economic aid at the
very moment we are delivering billions for economic and social
destruction and political repression is rapidly losing what power
it might ever have had to reassure us about the decency of our
foreign policy. The further we explore the reality of what this
country is doing and planning in Vietnam the more we are driven
toward the conclusion of Senator Morse that the United States may
well be the greatest threat to peace in the world today. That is a
terrible and bitter insight for people who grew up as we did--and
our revulsion at that insight, our refusal to accept it as
inevitable or necessary, is one of the reasons that so many people
have come here today.
The President says that we are defending freedom in Vietnam. Whose
freedom? Not the freedom of the Vietnamese. The first act of the
first dictator, Diem, the United States installed in Vietnam, was
to systematically begin the persecution of all political
opposition, non-Commumist as well as Communist. The first American
military supplies were not used to fight Communist insurgents; they
were used to control, imprison or kill any who sought something
better for Vietnam than the personal aggrandizement, political
corruption and the profiteering of the Diem regime. The elite of
the forces that we have trained and equipped are still used to
control political unrest in Saigon and defend the latest dictator
from the people.
And yet in a world where dictatorships are so commonplace and
popular control of government so rare, people become callous to the
misery that is implied by dictatorial power. The rationalizations
that are used to defend political despotism have been drummed into
us so long that we have somehow become numb to the possibility that
something else might exist. And it is only the kind of terror we
see now in Vietnam that awakens conscience and reminds us that
there is something deep in us that cries out against dictatorial
suppression.
The pattern of repression and destruction that we have developed
and justified in the war is so thorough that it can only be called
culturaI genocide. I am not simply talking about napalm or gas or
crop destruction or torture, hurled indiscriminately on women and
children, insurgent and neutral, upon the first suspicion of rebel
activity. That in itself is horrendous and incredible beyond
belief. But it is only part of a larger pattern of destruction to
the very fabric of the country. We have uprooted the people from
the land and imprisoned them in concentration camps called "sunrise
villages." Through conscription and direct political intervention
and control, we have destroyed local customs and traditions,
trampled upon those things of value which give dignity and purpose
to life.
What is left to the people of Vietnam after 20 years of war? What
part of themselves and their own lives will those who survive be
able to salvage from the wreckage of their country or build on the
"peace" and "security" our Great Society offers them in reward for
their allegiance? How can anyone be surprised that people who have
had total war waged on themselves and their culture rebel in
increasing numbers against that tyranny? What other course is
available? And still our only response to rebellion is more
vigorous repression, more merciless opposition to the social and
cultural institutions which sustain dignity and the will to resist.
Not even the President can say that this is a war to defend the
freedom of the Vietnamese people. Perhaps what the President means
when he speaks of freedom is the freedom of the American people.
WHAT IN FACT has the war done for freedom in America? It has led to
even more vigorous governmental efforts to control information,
manipulate the press and pressure and persuade the public through
distorted or downright dishonest documents such as the White Paper
on Vietnam. It has led to the confiscation of films and other
anti-war material and the vigorous harassment by the FBI of some of
the people who have been most outspokenly active in their criticism
of the war. As the war escalates and the administration seeks more
actively to gain support for any initiative it may choose to take,
there has been the beginnings of a war psychology unlike anything
that has burdened this country since the 1950s How much more of Mr.
Johnson's freedom can we stand? How much freedom will be left in
this country if there is a major war in Asia? By what weird logic
can it be said that the freedom of one people can only be
maintained by crushing another?
In many ways this is an unusual march because the large majority of
people here are not involved in a peace movement as their primary
basis of concern. What is exciting about the participants in this
march is that so many of us view ourselves consciously as
participants as well in a movement to build a more. decent society.
There are students here who have been involved in protests over the
quality and kind of education they are receiving in growingly
bureaucratized, depersonalized institutions called universities;
there are Negroes from Mississippi and Alabama who are struggling
against the tyranny and repression of those states; there are poor
people here-Negro and white-from Northern urban areas who are
attempting to build movements that abolish poverty and secure
democracy; there are faculty who are beginning to question the
relevance of their institutions to the critical problems facing the
society. Where will these people and the movements they are a part
of be if the President is allowed to expand the war in Asia? What
happens to the hopeful beginnings of expressed discontent that are
trying to shift American attention to long-neglected internal
priorities of shared abundance, democracy and decency at home when
those priorities have to compete with the all-consuming priorities
and psychology of a war against an enemy thousands of miles away?
The President mocks freedom if he insists that the war in Vietnam
is a defense of American freedom. Perhaps the only freedom that
this war protects is the freedom of the warhawks in the Pentagon
and the State Department to experiment with counter-insurgency and
guerilla warfare in Vietnam.
Vietnam, we may say, is a laboratory ran by a new breed of gamesmen
who approach war as a kind of rational exercise in international
power politics. It is the testing ground and staging area for a new
American response to the social revolution that is sweeping through
the impoverished downtrodden areas of the world. It is the
beginning of the American counter-revolution, and so far no
one-none of usnot the N.Y. Times, nor 17 Neutral Nations, nor
dozens of worried allies, nor the United States Congress have been
able to interfere with the freedom of the President and the
Pentagon to carry out that experiment.
THUS FAR the war in Vietnam has only dramatized the demand of
ordinary people to have some opportunity to make their own lives,
and of their unwillingness, even under incredible odds, to give up
the struggle against external domination. We are told, however,
that the struggle can be legitimately suppressed since it might
lead to the development of a Communist system, and before that
ultimate menace all criticism is supposed to melt.
This is a critical point and there are several things that must be
said here-not by way of celebration, but because I think they are
the truth. First, if this country were serious about giving the
people of Vietnam some alternative to a Communist social
revolution, that opportunity was sacrificed in 1954 when we helped
to install Diem and his repression of non-Communist movements.
There is no indication that we were serious about that goal-that we
were ever willing to contemplate the risks of allowing the
Vietnamese to choose their own destinies. Second, those people who
insist now that Vietnam can be neutralized are for the most part
looking for a sugar coating to cover the bitter bill. We must
accept the consequences that calling for an end of the war in
Vietnam is in fact allowing for the likelihood that a Vietnam
without war will be a self-styled Communist Vietnam. Third, this
country must come to understand that creation of a Communist
country in the world today is not an ultimate defeat. If people are
given the opportunity to choose their own lives it is likely that
some Of them will choose what we have called "Communist systems."
We are not powerless in that situation. Recent years have finally
and indisputably broken the myth that the Communist world is
monolithic and have conclusively shown that American power can be
significant in aiding countries dominated by greater powers to
become more independent and self-determined. And yet the war that
we are creating and escalating in Southeast Asia is rapidly eroding
the base of independence of North Vietnam as it is forced to turn
to China and the Soviet Union, involving them in the war and
involving itself in the compromises that that implies. Fourth, I
must say to you that I would rather see Vietnam Communist than see
it under continuous subjugation of the ruin that American
domination has brought.
But the war goes on; the freedom to conduct that war depends on the
dehumanization not only of Vietnamese people but of Americans as
well; it depends on the construction of a system of premises and
thinking that insulates the President and his advisors thoroughly
and completely from the human consequences of the decisions they
make. I do not believe that the President or Mr. Rusk or Mr.
McNamara or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil men. If asked
to throw napalm on the back of a ten-year-old child they would
shrink in horror-but their decisions have led to mutilation and
death of thousands and thousands of people.
What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds
of decisions? What kind of system is it that justifies the United
States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese
people and using them callously for its own purpose? What kind of
system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves
millions upon millions of people throughout the country
impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and promise of
American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies
and makes those the place where people spend their lives and do
their work, that consistently puts material values before human
values-and still persists in calling itself free and still persists
in finding itself fit to police the world? What place is there for
ordinary men in that system and how are they to control it, make it
bend itself to their wills rather than bending them to its?
We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it,
understand it and change it. For it is only when that system is
changed and brought under control that there can be any hope for
stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a murder
in the South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innumerable more
subtle atrocities that are worked on people all over--all the time.
How do you stop a war then? If the war has its roots deep in the
institutions of American society, how do you stop it? Do you march
to Washington? Is that enough? Who will hear us? How can you make
the decision makers hear us, insulated as they are, if they cannot
hear the screams of a little girl burnt by napalm?.
I believe that the administration is serious about expanding the
war in Asia. The question is whether the people here are as serious
about ending it. I wonder what it means for each of us to say we
want to end the war in Vietnam--whether, if we accept the full
meaning of that statement and the gravity of the situation, we can
simply leave the march and go back to the routines of a society
that acts as if it were not in the midst of a grave crisis. Maybe
we, like the President, are insulated from the consequences of our
own decision to end the war. Maybe we have yet really to listen to
the screams of a burning child and decide that we cannot go back to
whatever it is we did before today until that war has ended.
There is no simple plan, no scheme or gimmick that can be proposed
here. There is no simple way to attack something that is deeply
rooted in the society. If the people of this country are to end the
war in Vietnam, and to change the institutions which create it,
then the people of this country must create a massive social
movement-and if that can be built around the issue of Vietnam then
that is what we must do.
By a social movement I mean more than petitions or letters of
protest, or tacit support of dissident Congressmen; I mean people
who are willing to change their lives, who are willing to challenge
the system, to take the problem of change seriously. By a social
movement I mean an effort that is powerful enough to make the
country understand that our problems are not in Vietnam, or China
or Brazil or outer space or at the bottom of the ocean, but are
here in the United States. What we must do is begin to build a
democratic and humane society in which Vietnams are unthinkable, in
which human life and initiative are precious. The reason there are
twenty thousand people here today and not a hundred or none at all
is because five years ago in the South students began to build a
social movement to change the system. The reason there are poor
people, Negro and white, housewives, faculty members, and many
others here in Washington is because that movement has grown and
spread and changed and reached out as an expression of the broad
concerns of people throughout the society. The reason the war and
the system it represents will be stopped, if it is stopped before
it destroys all of us, will be because the movement has become
strong enough to exact change in the society. Twenty thousand
people, the people here, if they were serious, if they were willing
to break out of their isolation and to accept the consequences of a
decision to end the war and commit themselves to building a
movement wherever they are and in whatever way they effectively
can, would be, I'm convinced, enough.
To build a movement rather than a protest or some series of
protests, to break out of our insulations and accept the
consequences of our decisions, in effect to change our lives, means
that we can open ourselves to the reactions of a society that
believes that it is moral and just, that we open ourselves to
libeling and persecution, that we dare to be really seen as wrong
in a society that doesn't tolerate fundamental challenges.
It means that we desert the security of our riches and reach out to
people who are tied to the mythology of American power and make
them part of our movement. We must reach out to every organization
and individual in the country and make them part of our movement.
But that means that we build a movement that works not simply in
Washington but in communities and with the problems that face
people throughout the society. That means that we build a movement
that understands Vietnam in all its horror as but a symptom of a
deeper malaise, that we build a movement that makes possible the
implementation of the values that would have prevented Vietnam, a
movement based on the integrity of man and a belief in man's
capacity to tolerate all the weird formulations of society that men
may choose to strive for; a movement that will build on the new and
creative forms of protest that are beginning to emerge, such as the
teach-in, and extend their efforts and intensify them; that we will
build a movement that will find ways to support the increasing
numbers of young men who are unwilling to and will not fight in
Vietnam; a movement that will not tolerate the escalation or
prolongation of this war but will, if necessary, respond to the
administration war effort with massive civil disobedience all over
the country, that will wrench the country into a confrontation with
the issues of the war; a movement that must of necessity reach out
to all these people in Vietnam or elsewhere who are struggling to
find decency and control for their lives.
For in a strange way the people of Vietnam and the people on this
demonstration are united in much more than a common concern that
the war be ended. In both countries there are people struggling to
build a movement that has the power to change their condition. The
system that frustrates these movements is the same. All our lives,
our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to
overcome that system.
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