I Ain't Got No Quarrel with Them Vietcongs Neither -Peter Nagy

A vast majority of people are mourning the death of Muhammad Ali, one of the most remarkable people who ever lived. A few, however, mostly “conservative” whites are excoriating him yet again for an episode that played out nearly fifty years ago, when Ali, famously said, “I ain't got no quarrel against them Vietcongs,” and refused induction into military service. These people call him a draft dodger, a coward, and a traitor, even though the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

The Vietnam War served no legitimate American end, just fattened the coffers of the military-industrial complex. During the ten year apex of the war (1964-1974) the US war machine killed three or four million Vietnamese people, but made no serious attempt to win the war. This could have been done by crippling the North Vietnamese military institutions, or destroying their political nerve center, but the US chose only to kill indiscriminately as many people as it could. Policy makers euphemistically called this “attrition.” It is more correctly called institutional mass murder.

When victory was at hand after the US destroyed the Vietcong in the Tet Offensive, America with its leaders included, treated the event as a loss. Any who choose to distort the historical record by claiming the Vietnamese won a military victory have either not read or are deliberately ignoring the statements of both Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese head of state, and Vo Nguyen Giap, their defense minister, which acknowledged Tet as a crushing American victory. Could the Johnson administration have been dense enough not to recognize victory? That would be like a boxer who had just scored a terrific knockdown thinking that he was irrevocably on the verge of defeat. It is not clear if American political and military leaders were just not resolute enough to even try to overcome the media-induced public misperception of Tet, or mendacious enough to keep the war going indefinitely for the profit of the defense contractors.

What is clear is that fighting in this war not a patriotic act and did nothing good for either side. It was just unwitting complicity in the nefarious policies of the military/political/industrial complex. If the legal principles introduced during the Nuremberg Trial applied not just to losers, but to the victors, all the American soldiers who killed Vietnamese people, like all the Nazis claiming to be following orders, would be without excuse for their participation in an egregious war crime.

Avoiding involvement in this war -call it draft dodging if you must- was the preferable choice, whether on the basis of self preservation, cowardice, religious, philosophical, or moral objection. It is morally superior to and far more patriotic than mindlessly murdering millions on the orders of Johnson, Nixon, and William Westmoreland for the profits of H. L. Hunt and other plutocrats. Ali did not run to Canada to avoid military service. He was no coward, nor did he need to be. He could have had a safe public relations assignment, like Joe Louis in World War II, but that would have been abetting American war crimes. He followed the dictates of his convictions, rather than doing what would have made him popular. In lectures on college campuses he denounced a policy that killed millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans without justifiable cause. He lost more than three years of his prime for his courageous stance. Now, even after he has died, he continues to take verbal beatings from those who confuse murdering third world natives with protecting our freedom and serving the country. In 1967 few Americans would have been able to match his courageous stance against the Vietnam War. Decades later it is time for the last holdouts to acknowledge that we should not have had a quarrel against the Vietcong, either, at least not enough to justify genocide. Beating a dead horse or a dead man will never sanitize what the US did in Southeast Asia.