Mekong Upstream - A visit to Laos and Cambodia

Inbunden bok. Seven Seas Books. 1959. 289 sidor.

Mycket gott skick. Fint privatinbundet exemplar. Språk: engelska.

In 1962, Burchett began writing on the war in Vietnam, from the North Vietnamese side. Beginning in November 1963, Burchett spent six months in southern Vietnam with Viet Cong guerrillas, staying in their fortified hamlets and travelling underground in their network of narrow tunnels. When US President Kennedy increased funding for the war in Vietnam, Burchett wrote: "No peasants anywhere in the world had so many dollars per capita lavished on their extermination". He described Ho Chi Minh as "the greatest man I’ve ever met, with all the modesty and simplicity that goes with human greatness". He once described Saigon as "a seething cauldron in which hissed and bubbled a witches' brew of rival French and American imperialisms spiced with feudal warlordism and fascist despotism" and decried the government of South Vietnam under Ngô Đình Diệm as "an Asian neo-fascism no less dangerous for world peace than...European fascism" was during the 1930s.
During his time in Vietnam he had access to the North Vietnamese leadership and the South's Viet Cong. He tried to help the British and US governments in obtaining the release of captured American airmen. In 1967, he had a significant interview with the North Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh in which Nguyen provided the first indication that the North Vietnamese government was interested in peace talks. He played a role in trying to organise informal talks during the 1968 peace talks in Paris.
Bertrand Russell wrote that "If any one man is responsible for alerting Western opinion to the struggle of the people of Vietnam, it is Wilfred Burchett".
Burchett published numerous books about Vietnam and the war.