Harvest of Fear

Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia's Vietnam War

By John Murphy

Allen & Unwin, 1993. 335 pp., $19.95 (pb)

Reviewed by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/5393

When the first Australian troops were sent to Vietnam in 1965, there was little public protest and little private disquiet. The Cold War, it seemed, had frozen the political pulse in Australia. Yet a mere five years later, the huge Moratorium marches and the vibrant campaign against the war by draft resisters, radicalised students and parts of the union movement came to be seen as both reflection and cause of the collapse of support for the war and Liberal dominance of politics.

John Murphy faithfully captures this political upheaval. Murphy's is not one of those narrow books about the "inner life and everyday experience of soldiers, nor an operational account of battles and strategy", nor a limited diplomatic history. Instead, Murphy brings to centre stage the main political actors — the Vietnamese who suffered and resisted the Australian invasion, and the domestic social and class forces that battled out the war in Australia.

Murphy dispatches the lies of the standard conservative account of the war. The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and the broad liberation fronts it initiated (the Viet Minh in 1941, and the NLF in 1959) were not "alien and illegitimate forces" that ruled through terror. The CPV had a "genuine purchase" on the sentiment for national independence and social revolution of the vast majority of Vietnamese, north and south (for this reason they were denied free elections and saddled with a terror regime in the south by the US in 1954). The CPV "established ideological and organisational leadership" of the anti-colonial struggle in the 1930s by linking the "material concerns" of the impoverished peasant with national independence.

By the time of direct US and Australian intervention in the early '60s, the "vital political roots" of the NLF in the rural population were strong and deep. US and Australian forces attempted to sever the links between guerillas and peasants through "counterinsurgency" tactics such as forcibly removing whole villages to "strategic hamlets" guarded by soldiers, barbed wire and land mines.

In 1966 in the Australian theatre of action, Phuoc Tuy province, troops emptied one village (Long Phuoc), using acetylene gas explosions and bulldozers to demolish 537 houses and all its agriculture. This, however, only enhanced the villagers' support for the NLF.

Murphy avoids the common mistake of seeing Australia's intervention as mere obedience to US wishes. Australian policy on Vietnam was driven by "a concern to encourage American 'responsibility'" in the region to suit Australian needs once Britain had left the scene as the strong-arm power. Australia took the lead in arguing for a military commitment to Vietnam.

However, Murphy does not delve into what these needs of Australia were beyond a visceral anti-communism. In fact, as usual, economic cogs turned the wheel of Australia's defence and foreign policy.

Australian business desired commercial expansion in South-East Asia as a means of diversifying markets and commodities from over-reliance on primary exports to British-European markets. This is why Australia's "fear of China, and, more generally, social turmoil in Asia" led to the "attempt to thwart revolution in Vietnam" with such energy and enthusiasm. "Security concerns" turn out to be concerns over the security of profits.

On the domestic opposition to the war, Murphy is generally accurate. Early opposition groups like the middle class "Save Our Sons" were "distinctly genteel", concerned with "respectability", and they had a strong faith in "liberal democracy and the piercing light of rational argument". Politics was subordinated to electing an ALP government. When this parliamentary strategy fell in a heap with the Liberals' landslide victory in the 1966 election, many gave up in disillusionment.

Disenchantment with the ALP, however, pushed a large, desperate minority to explore bolder, extra-parliamentary options. The anti-conscription movement, for example, swung from an emphasis on "liberal conscience and the defence of rights" to "active non-compliance" as they set out not to oppose conscription but to "wreck it". Between 1965 and 1972, more than 12,000 young men refused to register. Some went underground and led federal police a merry and humiliating dance.

Occupations, sit-down demonstrations, paint-bombing LBJ's touring processions, collecting money for the "enemy" (the NLF) and other militant actions quickened the pulse of the antiwar movement and swung the mainstream peace organisations to the left, shifting public opinion dramatically against the war. Trade unions boosted their antiwar strike activity and bans.

This activity was stimulated by the 1968 Tet mobilisation by the Vietnamese resistance, which "triggered demoralisation of the American ruling class", the exposure of the My Lai massacre in 1969, the shooting of the Kent State students and a cultural rebellion against the square-jawed social conformity of the Cold War.

By the time of the huge moratorium marches of 1970, the antiwar movement had gone "well beyond Labor's control" (with only Cairns able to ride it) as "the centre of political gravity moved outside the parliamentary system". The ALP either opposed the marches (Whitlam and others on the ALP right) or stood aloof, and was only able to reap the benefits after the withdrawal of Australian troops in 1971 "defused, if not satisfied" the antiwar movement.

Murphy could, however, be criticised for some questionable interpretations of what he terms the "ultraleft" for its "radical posturing", its "secretive and elite organisation" and its lack of theoretical rigour. Whilst some student groups did deviate towards these practices, particularly the Maoists, on balance their radical thought and actions compared favourably to the caution of the "moderate left" which Murphy also acknowledges.

Murphy is also condescending towards the New Left for its "romance of the Third World", its "romantic ardour for 'national liberation'", its "romance of insurrection" and its "romantic, millennial idea that '68 was the beginning of the end for capitalism". This is the judgment of hindsight — not a few ruling classes in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and Melbourne trembled for the safety of their social order during the late '60s. Santamaria's Newsweekly was right for once in fearing the "power of the streets".

Finally, Murphy's judgment that the antiwar movement did not stop the war needs qualification. Although the recognition by business and the military/government establishment that the war could not be won was fundamental, their decision to bail out was not wholly based on economic costs alone — the political and social costs of the war loomed large in their minds (as the Pentagon Papers revealed). Without the antiwar movement raising these costs substantially, the war might have dragged on much longer.

So, although not "the most complete account" of Australia's war in Vietnam as the blurb claims, the book is highly recommended for an account of how struggle outside the swamp of parliament helped to end one of the worst crimes of modern capitalism.