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Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2002 18:26:16 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget
This article is from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com)from the issue dated October 20, 2000:
The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget
By H. BRUCE FRANKLIN
Visualize the movement against the Vietnam War. What do you
see? Hippies with daisies in their long, unwashed hair yelling
"Baby killers!" as they spit on clean-cut, bemedaled veterans
just back from Vietnam? College students in tattered jeans
(their pockets bulging with credit cards) staging a sit-in to
avoid the draft? A mob of chanting demonstrators burning an
American flag (maybe with a bra or two thrown in)? That's what
we're supposed to see, and that's what Americans today
probably do see -- if they visualize the antiwar movement at
all.
We are thus depriving ourselves -- or being deprived -- of one
legitimate source of great national pride about American
culture and behavior during the war. In most wars, a nation
dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost
the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Countless
Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against
U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated.
Tens of millions sympathized with their suffering, many came
to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence,
and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.
But in the decades since the war's official conclusion,
American consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its
potential for healing and redemption, has been deliberately
and systematically obliterated. During the first few years
after the war, while the White House and Congress were
reneging on aid promised to Vietnam, they were not expressing
the feelings of most Americans. For example, a New York
Times/CBS News poll, published in July 1977, asked this
question: "Suppose the President recommended giving assistance
to Vietnam. Would you want your Congressman to approve giving
Vietnam food or medicine?" Sixty-six percent said yes, 29
percent said no. Ironically, it was only after the war was
over that demonization of the Vietnamese began to succeed. And
soon those tens of millions of Americans who had fought
against the war themselves became, as a corollary, a truly
hateful enemy as envisioned by the dominant American culture.
The antiwar movement has been so thoroughly discredited that
many of the people who were the movement now feel embarrassed
or ashamed of their participation -- even such prudent and
peripheral participants as William Jefferson Clinton. One
would never be able to guess from public discourse that for
every American veteran of combat in Vietnam, there must be 20
veterans of the antiwar movement. And there seems to be almost
total amnesia about the crucial role that many of those combat
veterans played in the movement to stop the war.
When did Americans actually begin to oppose U.S. warfare
against Vietnam? As soon as the first U.S. act of war was
committed. And when was that? In 1965, when President Johnson
ordered the Marines to land at Da Nang and began the nonstop
bombing of North Vietnam? In 1964, when Johnson launched
"retaliatory" bombing of North Vietnam after a series of
covert U.S. air, sea, and land attacks? In 1963, when 19,000
U.S. combat troops were participating in the conflict and
Washington arranged the overthrow of the puppet ruler it had
installed in Saigon in 1954? In 1961, when President Kennedy
began Operation Hades, a large-scale campaign of chemical
warfare? In 1954, when U.S. combat teams organized covert
warfare to support the man Washington had selected to rule
South Vietnam? Americans did oppose all of those acts of war,
but the first American opposition came as soon as Washington
began warfare against the Vietnamese people by equipping and
transporting a foreign army to invade their country -- in
1945.
Those Americans who knew anything about Vietnam during World
War II knew that the United States had been allied with the
Viet Minh, the Vietnamese liberation movement led by Ho Chi
Minh, and had actually provided some arms to their guerrilla
forces, commanded by Vo Nguyen Giap. American fliers rescued
by Giap's guerrillas testified to the rural population's
enthusiasm for both the Viet Minh and the United States, which
they saw as the champion of democracy, antifascism, and
anti-imperialism. American officials and officers who had
contact with Ho and the Viet Minh were virtually unanimous in
their support and admiration. The admiration was mutual. In
September 1945 the Viet Minh issued the Vietnamese Declaration
of Independence, which began with a long quotation from the
U.S. Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the
establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The
regional leaders of the O.S.S. (predecessor of the C.I.A.) and
U.S. military forces joined in the celebration, with General
Philip Gallagher, chief of the U.S. Military Advisory and
Assistance Group, singing the Viet Minh's national anthem on
Hanoi radio.
But in the following two months, the United States committed
its first act of warfare against the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam. At least 8 and possibly 12 U.S. troopships were
diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from
World War II and instead began transporting U.S.-armed French
troops and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize
Vietnam. The enlisted crewmen of these ships, all members of
the U.S. Merchant Marine, immediately began organized
protests. On arriving in Vietnam, for example, the entire
crews of four troopships met together in Saigon and drew up a
resolution condemning the U.S. government for using American
ships to transport troops "to subjugate the native population"
of Vietnam.
The full-scale invasion of Vietnam by French forces, once
again equipped and ferried by the United States, began in
1946. An American movement against the war started to coalesce
as soon as significant numbers of Americans realized that
Washington was supporting France's war against the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.
The years when the United States was steadily escalating its
military presence and combat role in Vietnam -- 1954 to 1963
-- were also years when fundamental critiques of U.S. foreign
policy had become marginalized. Outspoken domestic opposition
to cold-war assumptions had been eviscerated by the purges,
witch-hunts, and everyday repression (misleadingly labeled
"McCarthyism") conducted under the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations. The main targets of that repression had been
carefully selected to include anyone in a position to
communicate radically dissenting ideas to a large audience:
teachers, union leaders, screenwriters, movie directors, radio
and print journalists. So by the early 1960's, the aftershocks
of that earlier political hammering, combined with the
stifling of foreign-policy debate by "bipartisanship" between
the two ruling political parties and the supersaturation of
cold-war culture, had stripped the American people of any
dissenting political consciousness or even a vocabulary
capable of accurately describing the global political reality.
As the antiwar movement was becoming a mass movement, in 1965,
it was fundamentally aimed at achieving peace through
education, and it was based on what now seem incredibly naive
assumptions about the causes and purposes of the war. We tend
to forget that this phase of the antiwar movement began as an
attempt to educate the government and the nation. Most of us
opposed to the war in those relatively early days believed --
and this is embarrassing to confess -- that the government had
somehow blundered into the war, maybe because our leaders were
simply ignorant about Vietnamese history. Perhaps they didn't
remember the events of 1940 to 1954. Maybe they hadn't read
the Geneva Agreements. So if we had teach-ins and wrote
letters to editors and Congress and the president, the
government would say, "Gosh! We didn't realize that Vietnam
was a single nation. Did the Geneva Agreements really say
that? And we had told Ho Chi Minh we'd probably support his
claims for Vietnamese independence? Golly gee, we had better
put a stop to this foolish war."
Experience was the great teacher for those who were trying to
teach, a lesson lost in the miasma of so-called theory that
helped to paralyze activism in the 1990's. Teaching the
Vietnam War during the 1960's and early 1970's meant giving
speeches at teach-ins and rallies; getting on talk shows;
writing pamphlets, articles, and books; painting banners,
picket signs, and graffiti; circulating petitions and
leaflets; coining slogans; marching; sitting in; demonstrating
at army bases; lobbying Congress; testifying before war-crimes
hearings and Congressional investigations; researching
corporate and university complicity; harboring deserters;
organizing strikes; heckling generals and politicians;
blocking induction centers and napalm plants; and going to
prison for defying the draft. It is hard to convey the
emotions that inspired those actions. Probably the most widely
shared was outrage, a feeling that many came to consider
outdated in the cool 1990's.
While the repression of the late 1940's and 1950's helped
create the embarrassing naivete and innocence of the early
1960's, these very qualities fueled the movement's fervor.
People believed that the government would respond to them
because they believed in American democracy and rectitude.
Then, when the government did respond -- with disinformation
and new waves of repression -- the fervor turned to rage.
Back in December 1964, an obscure little organization called
Students for a Democratic Society issued a call for people to
go to Washington on April 17, 1965, to march against the war.
Only a few thousand were expected. But when the march took
place, it turned out to be the largest antiwar demonstration
in Washington's history so far -- 25,000 people, most neatly
dressed in jackets and ties or skirts and dresses.
What seemed at the time very large demonstrations continued
throughout 1965, with 15,000 marching in Berkeley on October
15, 20,000 marching in Manhattan the same day, and 25,000
marching again in Washington on November 27. Those early
crowds would have been imperceptible amid such later protests
as the April 1967 demonstration of 300,000 to 500,000 people
in New York, or the half-million or more who converged on
Washington in November 1969 and again in the spring of 1971.
In the nationwide Moratorium, of October 15, 1969, millions of
Americans -- at least 10 times the half-million then stationed
in Indochina -- demonstrated against the war.
Demonstrations were one form of the attempt to go beyond mere
words. Other forms appeared as early as 1965. Many of the
activists were veterans of the civil-rights movement, who now
began to apply its use of civil disobedience and moral
witness. That summer, the Vietnam Day Committee in northern
California attempted to block munitions trains by lying on the
tracks; hundreds of people were arrested for civil
disobedience in Washington; and public burnings of draft cards
began. Moral witness was taken to its ultimate by Norman
Morrison, a 32-year-old Quaker who drenched himself with
gasoline and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon; the
pacifist Roger La Porte, who immolated himself at the United
Nations; and 82-year-old Alice Herz, who burned herself to
death in Detroit to protest against the war. By 1971, civil
disobedience was so widespread that the number arrested in
that spring's demonstration in Washington -- 14,000 -- would
have been considered a good-size march in 1965.
Whether the majority of Americans at any point supported the
government's policies in Vietnam (or even knew what they were)
is a matter of debate. Certainly most Americans never
supported the war strongly enough to agree to pay for it with
increased taxes, or even to demonstrate for it in significant
numbers, much less to go willingly to fight in it. Nor were
they ever willing to vote for any national candidate who
pledged to fight until "victory." In fact, except for Barry
Goldwater in 1964, every nominee for president of both major
parties after the 1960 elections through the end of the war
ran as some kind of self-professed peace candidate.
Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by
the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today, opposition
to the war was not concentrated among affluent college
students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely
proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers
generally considered themselves "doves" and tended to favor
withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves
"hawks" and supported participation in the war were
concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata.
For example, a Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that 60
percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal
of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75 percent of those with a
high-school education favored withdrawal, and 80 percent of
those with only a grade-school education favored withdrawal.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen reports a revealing
experiment he conducted repeatedly in the 1990's. When he
asked audiences to estimate the educational level of those who
favored U.S. withdrawal back in 1971, by an almost 10-to-1
margin they believed that college-educated people were the
most antiwar. In fact, they estimated that 90 percent of those
with a college education favored withdrawal, scaling down to
60 percent of those with a grade-school education.
Opposition to the war was especially intense among people of
color, though they tended not to participate heavily in the
demonstrations called by student and pacifist organizations.
One reason for their caution was that people of color often
had to pay a heavy price for protesting the war. For speaking
out in 1966 against drafting black men to fight in Vietnam,
Julian Bond was denied his seat in the Georgia legislature.
Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title as heavyweight boxing
champion and was criminally prosecuted for draft resistance.
When 25,000 Mexican-Americans staged the Chicano Moratorium,
the largest antiwar demonstration held in Los Angeles, police
officers attacked not just with clubs but with guns, killing
three people, including the popular television news director
and Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar.
Certainly the campus antiwar movement was spectacular. The
teach-ins in the spring of 1965 swept hundreds of campuses and
involved probably hundreds of thousands of students. By the
late 1960's, millions of students were intermittently involved
in antiwar activities, ranging from petitions and candlelight
marches to burning down R.O.T.C. buildings and going to prison
for draft resistance. In May 1970, the invasion of Cambodia
was met by the largest student-protest movement in American
history, a strike that led to the shutdown of hundreds of
campuses and the gunning down of students by National
Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio (where 4 were
killed and 9 wounded) and by state troopers at Jackson State
College in Mississippi (where 2 were killed and at least 12
wounded).
There are three principal misconceptions about the college
antiwar movement. First, it was not motivated by students'
selfish desire to avoid the draft, which was relatively easy
for most college men to do and automatic for women. In fact,
one of the earliest militant activities on campus was physical
disruption of the Selective Service tests that were the basis
of draft deferments for college students; the student
demonstrators thus jeopardized their own deferments in
protesting against them as privileges that were unfair to
young men unable to attend college. (The demonstrators also
risked punishment by the college authorities and, sometimes,
physical attacks by men taking the tests.) Second, most
college students were not affluent (indeed, most came from the
working class), and some of the largest and most militant
demonstrations were at public universities that could hardly
be labeled sanctuaries of the rich, like Kent State, San
Francisco State, and the state universities of Michigan,
Maryland, and Wisconsin. Third, although college antiwar
activism did hamper those in Washington who were trying to
conduct the war without hindrance, the most decisive
opposition to the war came ultimately not from the campuses
but from within the cities and the Army itself.
To understand the antiwar movement, one must perceive its
relationship with that other powerful mass movement
hamstringing the Pentagon: the uprising of the
African-American people.
The African-American movement had been helping to energize the
antiwar movement since at least 1965, when a number of leading
black activists and organizations condemned the war as an
assault on another people of color while articulating an
anti-imperialist consciousness that would not be common in the
broader antiwar movement until 1968. In January 1965, the
month before he was assassinated, Malcolm X denounced the
Vietnam War, placed Africans and African-Americans on the same
side as "those little rice farmers" who had defeated French
colonialism, and predicted a similar defeat for "Sam." That
July, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party called on
African-Americans not to participate in the Vietnam War and
implied that their war was closer to home: "No one has a right
to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in
Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the White American can get
richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored
People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and
die without a cause." In January 1966, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee explained why it was taking a stand
against the Vietnam War: "We believe the United States
government has been deceptive in claims of concern for the
freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has
been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of the
colored people in such other countries as the Dominican
Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United
States itself." Stokely Carmichael was the main speaker at the
first rally against napalm, in 1966. In 1968, dozens of black
soldiers, many of them Vietnam veterans, were arrested and
court-martialed for refusing to mobilize against antiwar
demonstrators outside the Chicago Amphitheatre during the
Democratic National Convention. What made the convergence of
the black and antiwar movements explosively dangerous for
those trying to maintain order and sustain the war was the
disintegrating and volatile situation within the armed forces,
as pointed out by an alarming article published in the January
1970 Naval War College Review.
Very little awareness of resistance to the war inside the
military survives today. But without this awareness, it is
impossible to understand not just the antiwar movement but
also the military history of the war from 1968 to 1973, not to
mention the end of the draft and the creation of a permanent
"volunteer" army to fight America's subsequent wars.To begin
to get some sense of the relative scale and effects of
civilian and active-duty war resistance, compare the widely
publicized activity of draft avoidance with some little-known
facts about desertion (a serious military crime, defined by
being away without leave for more than 30 days and having the
intention never to return). Although draft evasion and refusal
certainly posed problems for the war effort, desertion was
much more common and far more threatening.
The number of draft evaders and resisters was dwarfed by the
number of deserters from the active-duty armed forces. During
the 1971 fiscal year alone, 98,324 servicemen deserted, an
astonishing rate of 142.2 for every 1,000 men on duty.
Revealing statistics flashed to light briefly as President
Ford was pondering the amnesty he declared in September 1974
(at the same time he also pardoned ex-President Nixon for all
federal crimes he may have committed while in office).
According to the Department of Defense, there were 503,926
"incidents of desertion" between July 1, 1966, and December
31, 1973. From 1963 through 1973 (a period almost half again
as long), only 13,518 men were prosecuted for draft evasion or
resistance. The admitted total of deserters still officially
"at large" at the time was 28,661 -- six and a half times the
4,400 draft evaders or resisters still "at large." These
numbers only begin to tell the story.
Thousands of veterans who had fought in Vietnam moved to the
forefront of the antiwar movement after they returned to the
United States, and they -- together with thousands of
active-duty G.I.'s -- soon began to play a crucial role in the
domestic movement. Dozens of teach-ins on college campuses
were led by Vietnam veterans, who spoke at hundreds of
rallies. More and more demonstrations were led by large
contingents of veterans and active-duty servicepeople, who
often participated under risk of grave punishment. The
vanguard of that Washington demonstration by half a million
people in the spring of 1971 was a contingent of a thousand
Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who
then conducted "a limited incursion into the country of
Congress," which they called Dewey Canyon III (Dewey Canyon I
was a 1969 covert "incursion" into Laos; Dewey Canyon II was
the disastrous February 1971 invasion of Laos). About 800
marched up to a barricade hastily erected to keep them away
from the Capitol and hurled back their Purple Hearts, Bronze
Stars, Silver Stars, and campaign ribbons at the government
that had bestowed them.
The antiwar movement initiated back in 1945 by those hundreds
of merchant seamen protesting U.S. participation in the French
attempt to reconquer Vietnam was thus consummated in a
movement of tens of millions of ordinary American citizens
spearheaded by soldiers, sailors, fliers, and veterans, which
finally ended the war with a recognition that Vietnam could be
neither divided nor conquered by the United States.
No, it was not Vietnam but the United States that ended up
divided by America's war. And the division cut even deeper
than the armed forces, biting down into the core of the secret
government itself. When members of the intelligence
establishment joined the antiwar movement, they had the
potential to inflict even greater damage than mutinous
soldiers and sailors. The perfidy of the Central Intelligence
Agency in Vietnam was revealed by one of its highest-level
agents in South Vietnam, Ralph McGehee, author of Deadly
Deceits: My Twenty-Five Years in the C.I.A. Philip Agee
decided in 1971 to publish what eventually became Inside the
Company: CIA Diary because of "the continuation of the Vietnam
war and the Vietnamization programme," writing, "Now more than
ever exposure of C.I.A. methods could help American people
understand how we got into Vietnam and how our other Vietnams
are germinating wherever the C.I.A. is at work." In that same
year, two of the authors of the Pentagon's own supersecret
history of the war, Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg, exposed
it to the American people and the world.
Interviewed three years after the release of the Pentagon
Papers, Ellsberg outlined the history of the Vietnam War by
tracing the "lies" told by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. "The American public was lied to
month by month by each of these five administrations," he
declared. And then he added, "It's a tribute to the American
public that their leaders perceived they had to be lied to."
The end of the war did not end the lies. Since then, both the
war and the antiwar movement have been falsified so grossly
that we risk forfeiting the most valuable knowledge we gained
at such great cost to the peoples of Southeast Asia and to
ourselves. Nor can we understand what America is becoming if
we fail to comprehend how the same nation and its culture
could have produced an abomination as shameful as the Vietnam
War and a campaign as admirable as the 30-year movement that
helped defeat it.
-----------
H. Bruce Franklin is a professor of English and American
studies at Rutgers University at Newark. This essay is adapted
from Vietnam & Other American Fantasies, published by the
University of Massachusetts Press.
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