Revolutionaries (31 page)

The means by which the illusions are to come true is terror, mostly – in the nature of things – against noncombatants. There is the old-fashioned terror against civilians by frightened
soldiers, demoralized by the fact that in this kind of war any civilian may be an enemy fighter, and culminating in the infamous mass reprisals – the razing of villages, such as the Nazis' Lidice and Oradour. Intelligent anti-guerrillas will discourage this, since it is apt to make the local population totally hostile. Still, such terror and reprisals will happen. Furthermore, there will be the more selective torturing of prisoners for information. In the past there may have been some moral limitation on such torture, but not, alas, in our time. In fact, we have so far forgotten the elementary reflexes of humanity that in Vietnam we photograph torturers and victims and release the pictures to the press.

A second kind of terror is that which is at the base of all modern warfare, whose targets nowadays are essentially the civilians rather than the combatants. (Nobody would ever have developed nuclear weapons for any other purpose.) In orthodox warfare the purpose of indiscriminate mass destruction is to break the morale of population and government, and to destroy the industrial and administrative base on which any orthodox war effort must rest. Neither task is as easy in guerrilla war, because there are hardly any cities, factories, communications or other installations to destroy, and nothing like the vulnerable central administration machine of an advanced state. On the other hand, more modest success may pay off. If terror convinces even a single area to withhold support from the guerrillas, and thus to drive them elsewhere, this is a net gain for the anti-guerrillas. So the temptation to go on bombing and burning at random is irresistible, especially for countries like the United States which could strip the entire surface of South Vietnam of life without dipping too deeply into its supply of armaments or money.

Lastly, there is that most hopeless and desperate form of terror, which the United States is at present applying: the threat to extend the war to other nations unless they can somehow get the guerrillas to stop. This has no rational justification at all. If
the Vietnamese war were really what the State Department pretends, namely an ‘indirect' foreign aggression without ‘a spontaneous and local rebellion', then no bombing of North Vietnam would be necessary. The Vietcong would be of no more importance in history than the attempts to set up guerrilla warfare in Spain after 1945, which faded away, leaving few traces except some local newspaper stories and a few publications by Spanish policemen. Conversely, if the people of South Vietnam really were on the side of whatever general at present claims to be their government, or merely wanted to be left in peace, there would be no more trouble in that country than in neighbouring Cambodia or Burma, both of which had or still have guerrilla movements.

But it is clear by now, and should always have been clear, that the Vietcong will not go away quietly, and no miracle will transform South Vietnam into a stable anti-communist republic within the foreseeable future. As most governments in the world know (though one or two, like the British, are too dependent on Washington to say so) there can be no military solution in Vietnam without at least a major conventional land war in the Far East, which would probably escalate into a world war when, sooner or later, the United States discovered that it could not win such a conventional war either. And it would be fought by several hundreds of thousands of American troops, because the allies of the Unites States, though doubtless willing to send a token battalion or ambulance unit, are not fools enough to involve themselves seriously in a conflict of this kind. The pressure to escalate a little further will mount, and so will the Pentagon belief in the most suicidal of all the many Vietnamese illusions – that in the last showdown the North Vietnamese and Chinese can be terrorized by the prospect of nuclear war into defeat or withdrawal.

They cannot, for three reasons. First, because (whatever the computers say) nobody believes that a United States government,
which is genuinely interested in a stable and peaceful world, will actually start a nuclear war over Vietnam. South Vietnam is a question of vital importance for Hanoi and Peking, just as Soviet missiles off Florida were regarded as a vital issue in Washington; whereas the Vietcong are merely a matter of saving face for the United States as Cuban missile bases were of marginal urgency for Khruschev. The Russians backed down over Cuba because to them it was not worth any kind of world war, nuclear or conventional. For the same reason the United States can be expected to back down in South Vietnam, provided it is interested in world peace, and provided, presumably, some sort of face-saving formula can be found.

Second, and on the supposition that the United States really is not prepared for any realistic settlement in South Vietnam, its nuclear threat will not work in the long run because North Vietnam, China (and quite a few other countries) will conclude that nothing is to be expected from concession except further United States demands. There is so much talk about ‘Munich' in Washington these days that it is often forgotten how much like Munich the situation must look to the other side. A government which regards itself as free to bomb a country with which it is not at war can hardly be surprised if China and North Vietnam refuse to believe that this is the last concession they will be asked to make. There are, as the United States government is aware, situations today in which countries are willing to face the risks of world war, even nuclear war. For China and North Vietnam, South Vietnam is one such situation and the Chinese have already made that clear. It is dangerous daydreaming to think otherwise.

Third and last, the threat of nuclear war against China and North Vietnam is relatively ineffective, because it is more appropriately a threat made against
industrialized
belligerents. It assumes that in modern warfare there comes a moment when a country or a people must give up because its back is broken.
That is a certain outcome of nuclear war for small and medium-sized industrial states and a probable one for large ones (including the United States), but it is
not
the necessary outcome for a relatively undeveloped state, especially one as gigantic as China. It is certainly true that China (without the
USSR
) has no chance of defeating the United States. The strength of its position is that neither can it be defeated in any realistic sense. Its token nuclear bombs can be destroyed, and so can its industries, cities and many millions of its 700 million citizens. But all that would merely put the country back to where it was at the time of the Korean war. There are simply not enough Americans to conquer and occupy the country.

It is important for American generals (and for anyone else calculating war on assumptions derived from industrial societies) to realize that a nuclear threat will be regarded by the Chinese either as incredible, or as inevitable but not decisive. It will therefore not work
as a threat
, though doubtless the Chinese will not rush lightly into a major war, especially a nuclear one, even when they believe it cannot be avoided. As in Korea, they are not likely to enter it until directly attacked or threatened. The dilemma of American policy therefore remains. Having three times as many nuclear bombs as the rest of the world is very impressive, but it will not stop people from making revolutions of which Mr McGeorge Bundy disapproves. Nuclear bombs cannot win guerrilla wars such as the Vietnamese are now fighting, and without such weapons it is improbable that even conventional wars can be won in that region. (The Korean war was at best a draw.) Nuclear bombs cannot be used as a
threat
to win a little war that is lost, or even a medium-sized war, for though the populace can be massacred, the enemy cannot be brought to surrender. If the United States can come to terms with the realities of south-east Asia, it will find itself very much where it was before – the most formidable power in the world, whose position and influence nobody wants to challenge, if only
because nobody can, but which, like all other powers, past and present, must live in a world it does not altogether like. If it cannot come to such terms, sooner or later it will blast off those missiles. The risk is that the United States, suffering from the well-known disease of infant great powers – a touch of omnipotence – will slide into nuclear war rather than face reality.
¹

¹
Though the situation has altered since this article was written, shortly after the United States decision to escalate the Vietnam war in 1965, I have preferred to reprint it unchanged, partly because the general arguments remain valid, but partly also for the pleasure of recording accurate prediction.

Ever since the French Revolution all modern governments have faced the problem of the relations between civilian governments and the military. Most of them have feared a potential military takeover from time to time, and indeed Napoleon Bonaparte provided the first modern example of this phenomenon and, for a very long time, its characteristic brand-name, Bonapartism. Of course governments had problems with their soldiers before then. Guards officers were proverbial king-makers, or rather emperor-assassinators in eighteenth-century Russia, as janissaries had been in the Ottoman Empire. But, taking central and west European feudal and absolutist states, the armed forces were rarely separable from the nobility and gentry which provided their officers. In extreme cases, no conflict between civilians and military in politics could arise, because the same people, e.g. feudal nobles and country gentry, were both. Or rather, conflict might arise, but only as it were about demarcation lines. It was almost impossible for the armed (i.e. noble) rebels to conceive of any government other than that of the legitimate hereditary dynasty, or of someone who at least pretended to belong to it. They might challenge one particular member of it, or quarrel with particular arrangements within the kingdom, but constitutionally they did not set up an alternative.
In fact, as the Meiji Restoration in Japan shows very well, in the last analysis even the most inactive and nominal legitimate king or emperor had for this reason amazing reserves of political power against the most powerful nobles who ruled in his name, if he chose to exercise them.

But we are not considering traditional aristocratic and absolutist societies but modern ones, in which the armed forces are a special sub-department of public power, different in their personnel and generally in the social recruitment of their officers from other parts of it, and not necessarily owing the civilian part a traditional, almost ritual, loyalty. We do sometimes find survivals of the older relationship, as in nineteenth-century Prussia and imperial Germany, where the corps of army officers (but not the naval ones) consisted largely of junkers, who would have found rebellion against the king, who was the very keystone of their class, hardly conceivable; at least as long as he behaved as they thought a king ought to. In more attenuated form we find it even in Hitler's Germany, where the fact of having sworn a personal oath of loyalty to the chief of state undoubtedly meant much to officers. But such phenomena are increasingly marginal to modern states, which have increasingly tended to be republics, where loyalty is formally due not to a dynasty or even a person, but to a concept (‘the people', ‘the republic', ‘the constitution', etc.), and to particular groups of individuals such as governments only in so far as they represent these concepts. It is quite easy to decide that one is loyal to the republic, people or (if vaguely enough defined) constitution, whereas the government is not. Plenty of soldiers have decided in this manner, and in a number of countries, notably the Iberian and Latin American ones from the early nineteenth century, soldiers have claimed a permanent right to make coups by virtue of being the
ex-officio
guardians of people, republic, constitution and the basic ideological or other values of the state.

Now virtually all modern states have taken the view, at least
since Napoleon, that the ideal relation between civilian governments and the military is the subordination of the latter to the former. A great deal of thought has been expended in some countries to ensuring this subordination, and nowhere more so than in the states deriving most directly from the revolutionary tradition, those under the government of communist parties. Their problem was always particularly acute, since revolutionary governments deriving from insurrection and armed struggle are vulnerable to the men who wage it. As the debates of the 1920s in Soviet Russia bear witness, they were extremely sensitive to the possible dangers of ‘Bonapartism'. Their determination that army must be subservient to party has been unqualified, and even the Chinese, who during the ‘Great Cultural Revolution', appeared to diverge from this tradition, seemed to return to it in 1971. Until now communist regimes have been remarkably successful in maintaining civilian supremacy – we need not venture in prophecy – though it may be argued that in concentrating on the dangers of a military takeover they somewhat neglected another danger, at least until 1956. This was the risk of a
de facto
takeover by the police, open or secret, against which the history of the French revolution provided no warning example. The term ‘police' is here used not of the traditional and relatively modest apparatus of public order and internal espionage, but of the phenomenon, for which the nineteenth century provides little precedent, of large and increasingly powerful parallel centres of armed force, administration and power, such as the German SS. Still, by and large communist-governed states have been passionately civilian-minded, as even acknowledged heroes of the nation like Marshal Zhukov were to discover.

Western parliamentary democracies have not, on the whole, denied themselves the publicity value of military glory. It was not only the Weimar Republic which elected its most eminent general to the presidency. Marshal MacMahon and General de
Gaulle in France, the Duke of Wellington in Britain, and a remarkably long list of presidential generals in the United States ending (for the present) with Eisenhower, testify to the political appeal of a highly decorated uniform. And, incidentally, to the self-denial of communist governments. In general, however, the typical western states – the term is sufficiently understood not to require pedantic definition – have not had much of a problem of militant takeover. Soldiers have sometimes been very influential in them, and have changed governments or provided the conditions under which governments could change – but – and this is not widely recognized – they rarely governed
themselves
or regarded themselves as possible rivals to civilian government, or its controllers.