Negative U.S. View on Vietnam Baffling to Anti-War Activist Dellinger

More than a decade after he tried to mold American public opinion against the war in Vietnam, David Dellinger says he finds it hard to understand why Americans are so negative about that Communist state.

“Except for Nicaragua, it’s the most liberal and non-Stalinist form of Communist society,” contended the 69-year-old pacifist, who was here to attend last week’s festivities marking the 10th anniversary of North Vietnam’s conquest of U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

In an interview, Dellinger contended that Americans should not dismiss the Hanoi regime as a hard-line client of the Soviet Union, which supplies Vietnam’s military and props up its sagging economy with $2 billion in aid each year.

“Although I have disagreements and problems with (Vietnam), it has a degree of flexibility you don’t find in the Soviet Union or the East Bloc. . . ,” he said. “I see it as a society which is midway between being a free society and an authoritarian society.”

Still active in protests, Dellinger was one of the Chicago 7 defendants tried on charges of fomenting anti-war riots during the 1968 Democratic national convention. (He and four of his co-defendants were found guilty of incitement to riot, but all defendants were acquitted of conspiracy charges.).

He said he believes that Americans today have “an overly cynical view about the repressiveness” of the Vietnamese government.

Most Western democracies, the United Nations and human-rights watchdog groups, such as Amnesty International, have rebuked Hanoi for its six-year-old occupation of Cambodia and charged it with human rights abuses at home. But Dellinger, while admitting discomfort with Vietnam’s Cambodian occupation and mass jailing of political prisoners, said Vietnamese intentions and actions have been much misunderstood.

In the decade since the war ended, he has kept close ties with Vietnamese leaders and friends at a time when many other leaders of the anti-war movement have let their links atrophy. Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Dr. Benjamin Spock and several other well-known American activists were invited by Vietnamese officials to attend the anniversary celebrations, but the only ones who came were Dellinger and John McAuliff, director of the Philadelphia-based U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project.

In return for their longstanding support, the Hanoi government gave the pair gold-and-red medals adorned with pictures of Communist Party founder Ho Chi Minh and seats in the reviewing stand at last Tuesday’s anniversary parade.

During his visit, Dellinger said he planned to ask Vietnamese leaders to free thousands of military officers and government officials of the old regime still held without trial in “re-education camps.” He also said he would press Hanoi authorities to withdraw their estimated 160,000 troops from Cambodia.

While not condoning the Cambodian invasion, Dellinger said he could understand why Vietnam felt threatened by its neighbor, whose genocidal Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot was backed by China.

“I’m against military methods,” continued Dellinger, who was jailed as a draft resister in World War II. “But how would you get rid of a Hitler? Go in and get him out militarily. How would you get rid of Pol Pot and the ‘killing fields’?”

The Reagan Administration has balked at upgrading relations with Vietnam until the Hanoi government pulls out of Cambodia and provides more help in the search for remains of American servicemen missing and presumed dead from the Indochina war. But Dellinger believes that Washington has an obligation to normalize relations and resume aid.

“We came over here and we killed I don’t know how many of their people and we left a heritage of unexploded bombs and chemical defoliants,” he said. “We did everything we could to destroy the country. After World War II, we became friends with the Germans and the Japanese, and we weren’t even as responsible for the damage they suffered.”