Contra aid cut off

This is the time of the year when Americans, famous or only marginally famous, people like politicians and corporation presidents, rock stars, movie stars, even commentators, are receiving the last flurry of invitations to go in June to some college or other and receive an honorary degree and make a speech.

I have yielded only once, in this country anyway, to this actual flattery and that was because the president of the college was an old and close friend I couldn't turn down. My reluctance to prepare an inspiring speech to the young is due mainly to the recognition long ago that people going downhill are the last people to be able to tell the climbers what lies over the next hill.

However, many of the distinguished and not-so-distinguished men and women have yielded to the flattery of a commencement address and they will undoubtedly be telling the assembled students what to think about the issues that burn or, like that of the Holocaust, have smouldered for years and taken fire again.

Nicaragua is a case in point on how to behave in Central America, what his country's policy ought or ought not to be and that's bound to come up everywhere. Vietnam, the legacy of it, the shame of it, the truth of it, whatever, is amazingly hotter than ever, ten years after Saigon fell and the Americans, all but 56,000 of them came home after the humiliation of the first defeat in their history.

Looking at television, at the news and the follow-up documentaries, every night last week and this week, I wondered, did German television in 1955, did the Germans spend 50, 60 hours commemorating the tenth anniversary of their defeat? Did they send their camera crews and crack commentators to London and New York and Paris and, at racking length, show the populations of those cities cheering victory parades, talked to the people, have interviews with the victors and invite the British and the French and the Americans to say how pathetic, how cowardly, how wrong, the Germans were?

Well, I'm pretty sure – and subject to correction from listeners in West Germany – that no such orgy of masochism was staged by German television, but it's been going on for weeks here now. American television has sent hundreds of technicians and every top commentator from the four networks and from independent stations and they've been joined by an army of newspaper correspondents who were there WHEN?

Apart from covering the Ho Chi Minh City victory parade as elaborately as if it were a presidential inauguration, I mean here, the networks have allowed us the extraordinary sensation of sitting in with obedient American interviewers on conversations with the Communist leaders of Vietnam – the foreign minister, the colonel who led the Tet Offensive – and listen to them rewrite the truth with bland, unwinking authority.

I'm not, myself, pretending to know what the truth is, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't as pat and one-sided as the Vietnam leaders now make out. That, for instance, the North Vietnamese never used torture, that neither they, nor the Viet Cong ever killed civilians by accident or design, which would be a feat unique in the history of warfare. The act of Americans putting on this enormous show on American television is, to me, an extraordinary thing, but I've not heard a single comment about it.

Of course there is in some quarters the rationale that if we learn again what happened there, we may learn and see that it doesn't happen again. Certainly, a lot of Americans, and Vietnamese, I guess, need to know, even in the most general way, what happened.

There was one special section on a network show the other evening, not filmed in Vietnam, but on several American campuses. Students were asked quite simply, what happened in Vietnam? What was it all about? Of all the young people interviewed, only one student knew that the French had been fighting there for ten years before the pause, if you like, and the Americans came in. He didn't know why. And only one other young man said that North Vietnam was a Communist country and invaded South Vietnam and that the United States decided if it didn't come to the rescue, the South would go Communist and that might be the beginning of all south-east Asia going Communist.

That was, incidentally, the decision, the policy, of the Johnson administration that committed, eventually, half a million men there and the fear, the guess, that if all of Vietnam went to the Communists, its neighbours and then Thailand and, in time, India might go too. That was the well-known or, perhaps, not so well-known by now, Domino Theory.

But most of the students might have been trying to recall Napoleon or the Wars of the Roses. One student thought the war was in Cambodia. So it was, later. A cheerful girl said, 'Well, I guess we went in to defend North Vietnam.' This was on a par with the results of a poll, a national survey about ten years ago, of high school students who were asked to say who were the two main allies of the United States during the Second World War. Most got one, but, I wince to recall, that something like 20 per cent said Germany and Japan.

This may make elders groan and wring their newspapers but anyone over 40 has to face the fact all the time that the history you live through in your youth, is to a generation 20 years later not history at all. In other words, it's not old enough to have got into their history books but it's too old to be part of their memory.

Vietnam is now in that peculiar twilight zone between recorded history and personal experience and I wondered how many thousands of students, listening next month to the politicians who deliver the commencement addresses, will have any sharp feelings at all when such men, and there'll be lots of them, say, 'No more Vietnams!'

I can only suppose that most youngsters have picked up from their parents and from the tube, the solid, stony facts that America lost in Vietnam, that the whole country has gone Communist, that the Americans who fought there had a rough and humiliating time, but what they will have picked up from the newspapers, from debates in Congress and from a swelling wave of protest marches around the country, is that if we're not careful, Nicaragua could be another Vietnam.

Nicaragua. A great majority of the Democrats in Congress hammer away at this warning, but the administration says Vietnam is not the proper analogy. The president, himself, the Secretary of Defense, Mr Weinberger, most eloquently, the recent chief American delegate to the United Nations, Mrs Kirkpatrick, they all say that the correct, the threatening, analogy is not with Vietnam, but with Munich.

Munich. I wonder what that means to Americans in their twenties and thirties. It happened nearly 50 years ago and so is in the books and maybe, therefore, is known about. I conducted a quick random challenge to various people in their twenties, thirties, by telephone at the delicatessen, at the corner lunch counter, the liquor store. Nothing thorough, nothing scientific, you understand. Only one man, well along in his forties and Jewish, said, 'My dad told me it was what brought on the Second World War. We gave in, I believe, to Hitler. Isn't that right? And the war broke out.'

Well, what the administration is saying – the president, most firmly and without reservations – is that Nicaragua has, in the Sandinistas, a Marxist dictatorship, that the guerrilla opposition,the Contras, are brave freedom fighters, very like, he said a few weeks ago, the fighters of the American Revolution, the founding fathers of this republic, that Nicaragua is armed and supplied by the Soviet Union and Cuba and means to export Communism to the neighbouring countries and that if the United States doesn't give its all in money and arms to the Contras, then Soviet-backed Communism will flow across Central America, engulf Mexico and sweep up against the borders of the United States as the Nazis swept to the English Channel.

Well, to say that this is a drastic simplification is putting it charitably. The Contras are not – God Save the Mark – made up of Jeffersons and Madisons and Adamses and Franklins. They're a very mixed bunch of disaffected Sandinistas, peasants who've been brutalised – a nucleus of the old and hideous secret police of the late dictator Somoza and genuine democrats and youngsters who were simply drafted in guerrilla country.

The Sandinista government is leftist all right and authoritarian in good measure, but 80 per cent of its business is in private hands. There is lively opposition to it from the church and from businessmen. It has a long way to go to be an iron-clad Communist dictatorship.

The contradictions in Nicaragua, from people who've been there, are many and baffling and defy being wrapped up in ribbons, in red or black or even true-blue ribbons. For the present though, most of the Congress, certainly of the House – which has the last word about handing out money – most think they see a better chance of Vietnam there than Munich. They are scared that American money, economic aid, technicians, advisers, military instructors who are there too, at the moment, about four, five thousand, most see in this the same, the fatal, steps to Vietnam.

And so, last week, the House dealt the president a thundering defeat when it voted to cut off all military aid to the Contras and rejected $14 million for so-called humanitarian aid. Mr Reagan, thereupon slapped, as he has the power to do, a trade embargo on Nicaragua. Whereupon, the Nicaraguan government's men took off for Belgrade and East Berlin and Moscow to get the solid help the administration says is already there.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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