The campaign against the Vietnam War here developed in similar ways to the movement in the US. Of course Australia was a junior partner, and tagged along behind the US. But the Australian ruling class had its own aims and ambitions and interests in South-East Asia. In 1964 the Australian government introduced conscription to provide the cannon fodder – the “death lottery”: birth dates were balloted to determine who would be called up. In 1965 they sent the first contingent of troops to Vietnam.

“When the ‘Socialist’ leaders entered a bourgeois Cabinet, they invariably proved to be figureheads, puppets, screens for the capitalists, instruments for deceiving the workers,” Lenin wrote in 1917.¹

And when they have outlived their usefulness, it might be added, they are generally tossed aside like so many squeezed lemons.

Three months after the victorious liberation forces marched into Pnompenh, Cambodia remains cut off from the rest of the world. No foreign journalists were allowed to stay in the country. The only sources of news are the broadcasts of the official government radio station or the reports of refugees who have made their way across the border into Thailand or Vietnam.

Apparently even Peking is cut off. The only reports on Cambodia appearing in the Chinese news agency bulletin, Hsinhua, have been based on Cambodian radio broadcasts.

What is happening in Saigon? Two months after the liberation from imperialist domination, confusion still exists over the intentions of the new regime. Will there be rapid reunification with the North, or will the South retain an independent existence for an indefinite period? Who is actually running things in the newly liberated areas? Will the new regime move to introduce a planned economy in the South?

Washington’s last “humanitarian” mission in Vietnam began with a great fanfare. Both sides of Congress joined hands in granting Ford $405 million to provide a safe haven in the United States for the estimated 150,000 “loyal” Vietnamese who fled their country with the final defeat of American imperialism and its puppet regime.

But more than a month after their evacuation, most of the refugees are still crammed in makeshift tent cities or hastily patched army barracks at camps scattered from Florida to Guam.

For years the warmongers in the Pentagon advanced the myth of a “Communist bloodbath” that would follow the liberation of Vietnam. The aim was to justify their own bloody aggression. Now, with that myth exposed as just one more of the many lies spun by imperialism, they have dummied up.

Not so the Western correspondents in Saigon, however. Many of them have filed glowing reports of the new regime and the liberation forces.

The real story of the Mayagüez incident is beginning to emerge. Although all the details are still not known, contradictions and cover-ups in the official account are coming to light. The May 18 New York Times had to concede that there was some evidence “the Administration was either confused in reporting what went on, less than candid, or both.”

The truth is that the Mayagüez incident was a cold-blooded provocation.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free....”

These words are part of the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Ford referred to the “philosophy symbolized” in that statue in appealing May 1 for more money to cover the cost of bringing in refugees from Vietnam.

Ford’s view of the “poor” and of “huddled masses” hardly corresponded with the reality.

Three and a half hours after the last American marines were lifted from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon by helicopter April 30, the liberation forces marched into the city in triumph.

The curtain came down on American imperialism’s thirty-year intervention in Vietnam April 29. The last American officials and military advisers were being plucked out of Saigon by a fleet of helicopters as angry Saigon troops threatened to swamp their final exit.