An Interview With Rennie Davis

January 30, 1973, Paris.

Rennie Davis has been a leading figure in the Peace Movement in the United States. He was one ofthe defendants in the Chicago Seven Trial, and has acted as a spokesman for almost all the major national anti-war demonstrations in the U. S. Many Americans read his correspondence in the New York Times from Paris where he went to celebrate the signing of the Peace Accords with the North Vietnamese negotiators and Madame Binh. We spoke to him there.

I think by now, Rennie, Vietnam is in your blood?

I have been breathing and acting out this nightmare now non-stop for fivve years. I've been in and out of Paris perhaps a dozen times meeting the representatives of North Vietnam in 1967 and again in 1969, when I went to Hanoi to bring home three American POWs. And each time, Vietnam forces me to shed some more of my preconceptions about her.

In 1969, I went from Hanoi right down to the 17th parallel and back again. I saw more of North Vietnam than any other American during this war. And I would need poetry and music to tell you properly about the people I met in every hamlet, every mile I went. When Ramsey Clark went to

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Hanoi last fall, he totally fell in love with the people. And he used to be Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General. The beauty of the Vietnamese people just turns people's heads upside down.

A 3000-pound bomb rips a hole 150 feet across and 50 feet deep in a rice paddy, and the people don't use huge huge earth-moving equipment to fill it, they use two baskets filled with dirt suspended on a pole. A thousand people, men, women and children, will bring enough dirt to a hole in one hour. And then they will fill another, and another, hour after hour, month after month, year after year. And still they are singing.

Or it's like this. There's a raid, and one young girl sees her mother burned alive as she runs for shelter. A cultural group from the village immediately writes a play for the daughter, and in the play the village schoolchildren sing about the beautiful flowers that will grow from her mother's body, flowers that will bring joy to the daughter as she continues to live in her mother's spirit.

The Vietnamese have this idea that if I lose my life, my children pick up the thread where I left off. And when I eat rice from a field I have tilled, I am nourished by the service of my father, and his father and mother before him. I am eating the fruits of four thousand years of human toil and service. So you see, the Vietnamese have a sense of time, and a patience that is very much in contrast with the Americans and their instant coffee.

Vietnamese peasant will say: "A man who has walked 4000 kilometers does not give up when he has twenty more kilometers to go." Vietnam has been struggling for independence for 4000 years now. The last time there were half a million invaders in the country was in the 13th century, when the Mongols had overrun all of China and most of Europe, and decided to turn their attention to Vietnam. It took the Vietnamese people thirty years to defeat the Mongolian army. And the Vietnamese are drawing strength from that victory today.

The Vietnamese are very gentle in their strength, but they have stopped America's long march westward. They have blunted the momentum of America, and America can only die or be transformed. I think now there will be an incredible loss of confidence, a plague of doubt and America will be turned inside out trying to discover wht has gone wrong. But at the same time, remember Nature has a way of working in opposites. One thing grows dark as another grows in light, and I see this as a very hopeful time. While one part of America is dying, another part is being born. It's very beautiful.

What will the people who have been making this war do with their energy now the war is over?

I think that for the men who made the Vietnam war, one age has ended and another begun. The industrial age has ended, and we are watching the start of the technological age. The Nixon Administration introduced a new type of warfare in Indochina known as the automated battlefield, and Senator Goldwater called it the most important discovery since gunpowder. What it means is that the ground is covered with sensors that can pick up anything that walks, that perspires, or that carries metal - a water bufffalo, a woman, a soldier - and these sensors flash a signal to an EC 121 plane, which relays the signal to a giant 360-65 IBM computer in Thailand. The computer relays the coordinates of the movement to a pilot in the air, who plugs the coordinates into a TPQ navigational computer aboard his plane and lets a computer fly the plane to the target. As the coordinates come together in the computer, the plane automatically drops its bombs on the soldier, or the woman, or the water buffalo. The computer system can't really tell the difference.

So you see, the Vietnam war has taught America that any problem can be solved by technology. Only the more you use technology to solve problems, the greater the problems become. More technological solution, more problem. The peak will be reached when the people in power try to make all nature and all humanity fit the perfectness of the machine.

What about the Peace Movement? Where will its energies go now?

People think the war is over, but it's not. Our responsib11ity to the Viemamese people has not finished with the signing of the Accord. Our first task is to see that American funds are shifted from the making of war materials to the rebuilding of the schools, hospitals and homes which we have bombed. For instance, we must rebuild the Bach Mai Hospital. And we must stop all support for the Thieu regime which we imposed, in our contravention of all natural law and the Geneva Conventions, on the People of South Vietnam.

What is peace?

Well, my ideas on that are changing as I go along. I used to think it was the absence of war, but then I went to Vietnam, and I found more peace in Hanoi while the bombs were falling than in Washington D.C. where I live. Peace must start with the absence of war, but it doesn't stop there. It also means rearranging those institutions that are based on personal greed rather than social need. And that means changing our basic motivations. Some people say the work for peace must start with ourselves and work outwards. Others say we must start with the world and work back in. I think we must deal with both.

I have heard people call the Vietnamese the most forgiving people on earth.

When the Vietnamese defeated the Mongols in the 13th century, suitcases full of the names of Vietnamese who collaborators was brought to the King of Vietnam, and he was asked what he wanted done to the traitors. He said, "The first thing we must do is to burn these suitcases, so that every man, woman and child can help in the reconstruction of our country." I think we all need to work with that spirit.

You know, the Vietnamese make rings from the melted-down wings of American aircraft and give them to friends from the U.S.A. as tokens of good-will. They make unexploded bomb cannisters into flower-pots, and they often build really beautiful gardens in bomb craters and thank Mr Nixon for the nitrate from the bombs because it fertilizes the ground. They have a fantastic sense of humor.

I remember the first day I was in Hanoi, I went out by myself into the center of the city, and this young woman passed me, and I glanced at her and smiled. And as I looked away, I noticed she had a submachine gun on her back, so I looked at her again and smiled extra hard. She came over to me and indicated that I should stay right where I was, and she ran to the edge of the lake and picked this flower and brought it to me. And I was just very moved. I took the flower, and our eyes met for a moment or two, and the passers-by noticed us during that moment, and began to gather round. And they were all smiling as though something wonderful had just happened.

First there were twenty-five people, then fifty, then a hundred, three hundred, and I began to get a little nervous about the size of the crowd. So I stood on the park bench and asked if anyone there spoke English. I tried a little French and even a littl Russian. But the people just kept on smiling. Finally I pointed to myself, and with two or three Vietnamese words I knew then, I told them I was American. And at that point, my mnd flipped right over. Suppose I'm in Chicago,and I'm surrounded by four hundred people, and everyone in the crowd has lost a father or a friend because of a country called Vietnam that bombed Chicago ever day, and I point to myself and I say "Vietnamese" - and I had a flash of panic. But those Vietnamese people just broke into spontaneous applause, and people came up and shook my hand and gave me more flowers and embraced me.

When a Vietnamse truck driver takes the treacherous route down the Ho Chi Mlnh trail from Hanoi to the south he carries a picture of an American in his cab, and that American is Norman Morrison. When the Buddhists were burning themselves in Saigon in protest against Diem's regime, Norman Morrison burned himself at the Pentagon to protest the war. There is probably not one school child in North Vietnam who cannot recite a a poem about Norman Morrison. When you ask someone in Vietnam what Norman Morrison means to him, he'll say, "Norman Morrison taught me to make a distinction between the American government and the American people."

Really, I believe Vetnam must be one of the most precious civilizations in the world.

This interview took place in Paris in January. Two weeks later we spoke with Rennie Davis again in New Delhi. He had been to see Guru Maharaj Ji and had received Knowledge. We asked him if he had anything to add to the interview he gave us in Paris and this is what he said:

To tell it as straight as I can. Guru Maharaj Ji is now putting together the only truly effective social movement capable of ending war, poverty and hunger. He has already assembled the most incredible human talent I know of in any organization, and His movement is working with more harmony than the Black movement, the Peace movement or the Women's movement ever believed possible. At the age of fifteen, Guru Maharaj Ji is already the brightest event in the history of the world.

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