You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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“Sometimes to Be Silent Is to Lie”: Vietnam

I was witness in the summer of 1964 to a dramatic encounter between the black Southern movement and the war in Vietnam. In early August, many of us in the movement drove from Jackson, Mississippi, into Neshoba County to attend the memorial service for James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Their bodies, horribly beaten with chains and then riddled with bullets, had been found about five weeks after they had disappeared from sight near the town of Philadelphia.

The memorial service took place over a pile of rubble, all that was left of the Mount Zion Baptist Church, whose burning the three young men had gone to investigate. It was a quiet, sunny glen, and our thoughts were turned to Mrs. Chaney, clad in black, mourning her teenage son.

Bob Moses spoke at the service, and we could see that his usual calm was missing. He held up that morning’s newspaper from Jackson, and read the headline: “President Johnson Says ‘Shoot to Kill’ in the Gulf of Tonkin.”

Bob spoke with a bitterness we were not accustomed to seeing in him. The government of the United States, he said, was willing to send armed forces halfway around the world for a cause which was incomprehensible, but it was unwilling to send marshals into Mississippi, though asked again and again, to protect civil rights workers from inevitable violence. And now three of them were dead.

The Tonkin incident—the supposed attack on American destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats near the coast of Vietnam—became the excuse for the swift American escalation of the colonial war that the French had lost in 1954 and that the United States had taken over.

The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public—there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions. However, Congress and all the major newspapers and television networks accepted the story without question. Congress immediately passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Johnson a blank check for massive intervention in Vietnam.

That fall, preparing to teach at Boston University, I felt immediately that military involvement in Indochina would be disastrous—for the people there, and for us in the United States.

As a schoolboy I had been taught to be proud of our nation’s march across the continent—it was always labeled “Westward Expansion.” Expansion—it seemed almost biological. We just grew. The map that showed it was bright and multicolored: green for the Florida Purchase, blue for the Louisiana Purchase, red for the Mexican Cession. All purchases and cessions! So benign.

A little study of history was instructive. To make the country ours, before and after the American Revolution, we had to displace or annihilate the indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years. We had expanded by using deception and force, by military forays into Florida to persuade Spain

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