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Happy year for Vietnam

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(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

16.12.1967

During the year there was a noticeable change in the Norwegian people's attitude to the Vietnam War. There is hardly a Norwegian who is not concerned about the war in one way or another today, and most people have this attitude: This is a meaningless war and we must hope that it will end soon!

Others have a more active involvement. They appeal to Americans' common sense and their decency. They view US foreign policy as basically good and well-meaning, but in Vietnam they have made a mistake. For they use violence against poor people. They chase the people from their homes and gather them into camps, they bomb, torture, burn farms, poison rice fields, blow up dams – these are acts that, in raw brutality, make the German ravages in Finnmark become the pure sunshine story. One witnesses that the world's strongest military force with half a million soldiers and with the world's most developed air force bombs a poor country and together – all this you can see and preferably turn your face away. For this is violence, and most people do not like violence. They want peace – they want everything to be as before.

But the question is: How was it before? In Vietnam, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And how is it today where there is no Vietnam warrior? Where the crimes of imperialism have not been brought to light?

It is in response to this question that this year the Solidarity Committee for Vietnam has taken up a new parole, and it reads: Fight US imperialism!

The colonial powers and the United States plundering the poor countries' commodities, exploiting their labor, mental and physical oppression – are in themselves an act of violence that is in many ways as inhumane as the open violence expressed in Vietnam today.

In Latin America, for example, there are between 200 and 300 million people living. Here, something like 5500 people per day die. 2 million per day year, 10 million every five years. They die from hunger and exhaustion, from curable illnesses, of premature aging. Two-thirds of the population lives under a constant threat of death. Over the course of 15 years, hunger and misery have cost twice as many deaths as the First World War.

Meanwhile, from Latin America to the United States, there is a steady flow of wealth – about $ 4000 a day. 5 million per minute per day and 2 billion per day. year. For every $ 1000 that goes out of the country, one person dies. One thousand dollars per death – that's the price Latin America has to pay for what is called imperialism.

It was to end this violence that Che Guevara gave his life in the Bolivian mountains. It is to end this violence that the Vietnamese people are fighting, that is why one liberation movement after another emerges to fight their enemy – the United States and their capitalist accomplices. The oppressed will no longer find themselves being exploited, humiliated, trampled upon. They will no longer bow to the International of Crime and Treason. They rebel against this bandit balance, which consists in the fact that the gunman can take whatever he wants, because the other party does not have weapons.

In this bandit balance our country stands on the side of the bandit – on the looters' side. Through NATO, we have integrated ourselves into the United States' global military strategy. We have made ourselves brothers of arms with the oppressors. We make submarines for Greece, we carry out weapons exercises with Greek and West German and Portuguese war criminals. We manufacture weapons and send aircraft to be used against the civilian population in Vietnam, we refuse to connect with poor nations such as North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba, while boycotting the poor countries with our shipping. We act and walk with fascist regimes, while our politicians speak of freedom and human dignity and express their concern at what they call the tragic and meaningless war in Vietnam. Johnson and Westmoreland also talk about the meaningless and tragic war, but what right does the killer have to say: What a meaningless murder! And what right do the killer's assistants have to wail over the bloodshed while filling the killer's cartridge cases? For the Vietnamese people, the struggle is not meaningless, because they are fighting for their lives and their freedom.

We no longer march to the US Embassy because we know that the Vietnamese people's enemies are not just in the Pentagon – they are in the Norwegian parliament. The Vietnamese people's enemies are not just Johnson and Westmoreland – it's Lyng, it's Garbo and Røiseland – it's Bratteli and Gutorm Hansen. These politicians who want our country to remain a piece of America's imperialist suppression policy, which is the fear of death to express an opinion that can be perceived as criticism by the United States.

Our country has become like a car with engine stops, being towed by a bigger and stronger car. We are still sitting at the wheel, but the driver in the front car decides the course. If we come to a crossroads and see the front car driving wrong, then it is no use blowing the horn and showing with the direction indicator. It is of no use, because our own will is tied to the tow rope, and whether it goes wrong and dangerous, we must willingly follow.

That is why we help the Vietnamese people best by fighting here in our own country, so that we can cut the rope to the trailer of imperialism, regain our own national freedom and support all the oppressed who today are fighting a life and death battle. Let's never forget this: It is here in our own country that we can make an effort.

Just a few months before Che Guevara died, he sent a message to the world's oppressed people. He writes, "How great and glorious will our future be if two or three or many Vietnam wars flourish out of the hatred of our earth!" We must also make our country a Vietnam, as the students at the University of Berlin are doing these days, as American Patriots have done this fall. They are beaten with police clubs, parachute troops are placed against them. But they are struggling with the means at their disposal: by refusing to be the co-conspirators of the criminals.

The war in Vietnam continues. But we must not be despaired, because the Vietnamese people stand and continue to fight.

In Norway, the Gallup shows that 44% of the Norwegian people support the demand for US withdrawal. We must make sure there are more in the coming year.

More and more American soldiers are deserting. This number, too, will grow in the coming year, and we must be prepared to give them help and support.

Let us emphasize the importance of declarations of solidarity – but let's never forget that the most important help we can give them is to add to their enemy damage here in our own country. Then we not only fight the Vietnamese cause, we fight for ourselves, our own independence and ultimately for our own lives.

also read That's how one American sees it
also read Che is dead

sigg@nytid.no
sigg@nytid.no
Hølmebakk was a writer, debater, agitator, vernacular, organizer and politician in SF.

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