25 years ago

[jacdon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

The Vietnam war ended officially 25 years ago this Sunday, April 30.
The war gave rise to an historic antiwar movement which almost turned
this country upside-down.  Considering the possibility of a resurgent
movement today, an examination of the mass movement of 1965-75 may be a
useful way to observe the anniversary.  Following is a considerably
longer version of an article that will appear in the  May 4 Workers
World newspaper.  The author  related to this movement  both as a
participant (who served a year in federal prison as a conscientious
objector to war) and as a reporter, managing editor and editor of the
Guardian independent radical weekly newspaper, which was perhaps the
foremost antiwar publication of the time.

The Mid-Hudson National People?s Campaign and the IAC

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By Jack A. Smith

For most people in the United States over age 40 today, the Vietnam War
was the defining political experience of their lives?whether they were
in the majority who opposed the war or remained with the diminishing
camp of those who advocated a wider war. For millions it was the
formative political experience of their lives, as unforgettable today as
on April 30 a quarter-century ago when the military might of U.S.
imperialism suffered its most outstanding defeat in history from a poor
agricultural country emerging from colonial subjugation in Southeast
Asia.

The struggle against the war, combined with the simultaneous fight for
civil rights and Black liberation, became the largest protest movement
the United States ever experienced. It constituted a crucial second
front of the war inside the imperial camp itself and gave heart not just
to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--the countries of former French Indochina
that Washington sought to dominate--but to movements throughout the
world.

The antiwar movement enjoyed the support of tens of millions, raised
mass political consciousness and helped build a stronger left opposition
to imperialism and capitalism. Demonstrations of hundreds of thousands,
even a million, shook the bourgeois political system to its foundations.

By the late 1960s, pro-war politicians were ducking for cover. President
Lyndon Johnson, who inherited the war from President John F. Kennedy,
wouldn?t run for a second term because he feared it would lead to
rebellion. (The refrain echoed throughout the movement: Hey, hey,
LBJ?how many kids did you kill today??) During the years of antiwar
growth, many participants metamorphosed from pacifism and liberalism to
anti-imperialism and support for the South Vietnamese National
Liberation Front (NLF).  In time, scores of thousands of GIs and
veterans enlisted in the ranks of this extraordinary manifestation of
opposition to official government policy.

The war gave rise to the largest, most assertive left student movement
the country, which became known as the  ?New Left,? to signify what was
thought to be a departure from left-wing politics of earlier periods.
In one day, after the bombing of Cambodia, students occupied more than
700 college administration buildings?no small achievement for a movement
that had started a few years earlier quietly campaigning against the
concept of the university as surrogate parent and seeking a new politics
for American society.  Before it imploded in the early 1970s, Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) grew in several years from a relative
handful of social-democrats into a combative movement with 100,000
members and several revolutionary communist currents.

The war and the antiwar movement had their roots in the mid-1950s, a
period of extreme domestic political reaction orchestrated from
Washington to accompany the Cold War against the USSR and other
socialist countries. It was a time when being a known communist would
almost certainly cost you a job, if not a ruined reputation and possibly
time in jail, and  when school children participated in civil defense
drills by crouching under their desks in preparation for an H-bomb
attack. At that time a relatively small antiwar movement focused
primarily on the danger of nuclear war. It was composed of pacifists and
liberals but included anti-Cold War progressives and communists who
generally concealed their affiliations in those witch-hunting times.
Left political organizations were not welcome in this movement.

As the Cold War developed at the end of the     1950s, radical pacifist
groups, mainly the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), began
engaging in direct action against the war machine; others supported
conscientious objection to military service.   The actions were small
but vivid.  Boats illegally and bravely entered bomb-testing areas of
the Pacific. A campaign was waged to stop Polaris missile submarines. A
transcontinental peace march took place from San Francisco to Moscow;
another march was from Knoxville, Tenn., to Washington, D.C.; another
from Bridgeport, Conn., to New York City.  Civil disobedience on a small
scale took place against annual civil defense drills in some cities.
Groups such as the War Resisters League, SANE, Women Strike for Peace,
Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Peace Committee of the Society of
Friends (Quakers) were in the forefront of this movement.

By the early 1960s the antiwar forces were slowly growing in size and
creative tactics, inspired in part by the nonviolent campaign to end Jim
Crow segregation in the South, where separate drinking fountains were
still designated for blacks and whites. In general, this movement was
not paying attention to what was happening in Vietnam, the next focus of
action which soon would dominate the political life of the United States
for the next decade.

Vietnam had been a French colony for a century. The French were pushed
out by the Japanese, who were pushed out by the Vietminh, the
anti-French/anti-Japanese liberation army led by Ho Chi Minh and the
Indochinese communist movement. France returned in 1945 and the
anti-colonial war resumed, resulting in the historic French defeat at
the battle of Dienbienphu in 1954. An armistice divided the country into
north and south at the 17th parallel until nationwide elections
scheduled for 1956.   Most pro-socialist forces, which led the
anti-French struggle, were grouped in the north, while most
pro-capitalist forces were in the south, backed by France and the U.S.
The elections were intended to unite the country.

With support from Paris and Washington, the south declared
?independence? and canceled national elections. This was to avoid a
victory by Ho Chi Minh, who everyone, including President Dwight
Eisenhower judging by his memoirs, knew would win.  The situation was
not unusual.  Washington frequently engineered right-wing coups against
democratically elected leftist or nationalist leaders during the Cold
War.  (The first big one was in Iran in 1954, an action duplicated in
Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile and other countries.)

The French pulled out and the U.S.?which had been financing the war for
a decade?entered, first with money and civilian advisors, then with arms
and military advisors. The ?advisors? ran the show on behalf of
Washington. By the end of 1959, the north, by now called the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and governed by the Vietnamese Communist
Party, called for reunification of the country, as stipulated in the
accord with the French.  The U.S. responded by instructing the puppet
government in Saigon to reject any such possibility and by enlarging its
presence in the country.  Official U.S. doctrine at the time was based
on the so-called ?domino theory,? which held, in effect, ?If the
communists were allowed to win one country, neighboring countries will
fall to communism one by one,? the way standing dominos in a line would
fall if one were pushed.  The theory was proven false in practice after
millions had died, largely from U.S. bombings.

The overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. had no knowledge of what
was happening in Vietnam.  The corporate media concealed the truth, then
as now.  The left depended on the Australian journalist Wilfred
Burchett, who?s reports from Indochina starting in 1954 were published
regularly in the now defunct Guardian newsweekly and helped to educate
the antiwar generation.  Writing in the early 1960s ?from the liberated
zones of South Vietnam? as bullets whizzed over his head, Burchett
pounded  out the thesis that no matter how many troops and bombs U.S.
imperialism brought to Vietnam, the Vietnamese would win the war
because  they were prepared to fight 100 more years for independence,
and the U.S. wasn?t. Burchett kept writing weekly articles from the
frontlines and the peace talks throughout the conflict and provided the
U.S. movement with real knowledge of what was going on. His continual
theme for 15 years was, ?Vietnam will win.?  He knew whereof he spoke.

Eventually, the U.S. military buildup became too big to ignore. The
first U.S. demonstration against Pentagon involvement in Vietnam was
organized by Youth Against War and Fascism, an arm of Workers World
Party in August 1962. The party supported the socialist revolutions that
had swept Asia at the end of World War II, and saw the reconquering of
Asia as a major objective of U.S. government strategy. It had no
hesitation in declaring U.S. intervention in Vietnam imperialist.

By 1963, when the body bags started coming home, established liberal
antiwar groups like SANE began to embrace the Vietnam issue, but called
only for negotiations?not the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Massive bombing
of Vietnam started in 1964 (?We?ll bomb them back to the stone age,?
said the commanding Air Force general) and American ground troops
arrived in force the next year, eventually totaling over  545,000 at one
time.  The U.S. military consisted of very young working class
draftees.  (After a few years, many young people went to jail or left
the country in opposition to the draft.)

The socialist countries, led by the USSR and China, had by now taken up
the fight against U.S. intervention politically and in terms of sending
military supplies, anti-aircraft guns and the like to their Vietnamese
allies.  The USSR began organizing international conferences attended by
peace groups from around the world to alert them to the need to fight
against U.S. intentions to expand the war.  During one such conference,
in Helsinki in 1965, I listened as a representative of the National
Liberation Front explained the meaning of the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
described by the Pentagon as a virtual six-lane highway from North
Vietnam through Cambodia bringing supplies to the liberation forces in
South Vietnam.  ?The Ho Chi Minh Trail,? he responded to a question with
soft eloquence, ?is the people of Vietnam.? Years later, it proved to be
a quite narrow jungle trail over which heroic fighters in shorts and
sandals?their rations, a bag of rice tied to a rope belt?carried
backbreaking supplies of munitions and food to the front lines while
U.S. bombers and helicopter gunships screamed and whirled overhead
spewing napalm and showering bullets.

By 1965, the outlines of a mass movement could be discerned. That April,
SDS organized the largest antiwar demonstration to date in Washington.
It drew 25,000 people. Just as important, the action was
?non-exclusionary.? Heretofore, left and anti-imperialist groups had
been largely excluded from formal participation in the antiwar movement.
Many, but not all, leaders of the pacifist and liberal antiwar
organizations applied heavy pressure on SDS not to include socialist and
communist groups as co-sponsors; some even wanted to exclude left
banners, signs or heaven forbid, NLF flags.  They went public with their
anti-left complaints in the corporate press. SDS held its ground. Some
of the peace groups openly criticized the upcoming rally and refused to
participate; others quickly or gradually went along.

In this struggle a new type of antiwar movement was born as the left
began to shape its direction.  Before long, it moved from criticizing
the war as merely a ?failed policy? to a naming it a manifestation of
imperialism to, in many cases, identifying capitalism as responsible for
dragging the people into a war whose goal was not ?freedom and
democracy? but to expand U.S. corporate control and profits.  It became
an angry and militant movement, with large sections insisting that the
only solution to the conflict was for the U.S. to get out of Vietnam
immediately, voluntarily or in defeat. Radical pacifist groups continued
to play an important role throughout the development of a left-leaning
mass movement and liberal-thinking people continued to enter the broad
movement in huge number, even if some of their organizations remained
somewhat aloof.

Left organizations of many kinds and tendencies were now taking major
part in the mass movement.  The Communist Party and the Socialist
Workers Party each played big roles in huge, respective, antiwar
coalitions that brought tens of thousands into the streets for
mobilizations.  Occasionally, these two parties would  bloc with the
liberal forces against the more anti-imperialist elements of the
movement, to the consternation of the revolutionary left.  Workers World
and YAWF, were constantly in the streets with their unforgettable bright
banners and chanted slogans??End the war in Vietnam, Bring the troops
home!?  SDS chapters were organized around the country, all arguing
against the war.  Progressive Labor was active as a faction within SDS,
which was developing several strong anti-imperialist and communist
currents of its own in opposition to PL.  Out of these student currents,
several years later, emerged such organizations as the adventurist
Weatherman (the name came from its position paper at an SDS conference,
?You Don?t Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind in Blowing,?
after the Dylan song), which soon went underground, and two
Maoist-oriented parties: the Revolutionary Communist Party and the
Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (the latter folded in the 1980s).
Other left groups, from small parties to direct-action anarchists to
Lincoln Brigade vets, were marching in common cause against the war.

A phenomenon of the time was the underground press--several hundred
low-budget weekly newspapers reflecting the cultural and radical
political views of the period.  (Today there are the technically more
efficient Email resources,  but the vibrant underground press was a
magnificent, in-your-face lifeline from the broader political and
cultural world to the individual.)  These papers played a big role in
helping build the antiwar movement around the country, as did the left
press including the Daily World (CP), the Militant (SWP), Workers World
(WWP), and Challenge (PLP), among others.  The Guardian, an independent
left weekly which gravitated to Marxism and revolution, saw its size and
circulation double during the war.  The paper attained a 24,000 paid
circulation and 24-tabloid pages a week, supplemented by thousands of
street sales by SDS chapters and others.  With pass-along readers, it
reached some 75,000 people a week, and with Burchett as a regular
columnist, it had considerable influence in the antiwar and youth
movements.

The NLF?s Lunar New Year (Tet) offensive in early 1968 was the turning
point of the war. The Pentagon termed the offensive a failure, costing
many Vietnamese lives for the temporary acquisition of U.S. bases and
sectors of South Vietnam?s capital, Saigon. But what the American people
saw was that the mighty U.S. military could be overrun by a poor but
motivated peasant army prepared to fight indefinitely to gain national
liberation and political sovereignty.

No activist of the time will ever forget 1968. It began with Tet. Then
Johnson announced he wouldn?t seek reelection. Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., with his powerful voice opposing the war, was murdered. Cities were
in flames. Robert Kennedy was shot. The Democratic convention was a
debacle as cops and protesters ran wild in the streets. Richard Nixon
was elected on the promise that he would find a way to end the war.

The next year was likewise extraordinary.  It was the time of the
Stonewall Rebellion, which saw the beginning of the movement for
gay/lesbian liberation.  The women?s movement was moving into gear.
Radical Latino organizations were surfacing.  The Black Panthers were a
force.  ?Johnson?s War? became ?Nixon?s War,? and the new president
tried to undermine the protest movement by promising to begin
withdrawing some troops.  The NLF submitted a 10-point peace proposal,
which most of the movement supported, but was rejected by the White
House. The venerated Ho Chi Minh died.  The Mayli Massacre broke into
the headlines, prompting the Guardian to editorialize:  ?This calculated
slaughter of the innocents...is neither a mistake nor an aberration,
neither a temporary moral lapse of weary GIs nor the debased sadism of a
few perverts. The murder of more than 500 civilian residents--children
in arms, women and men?is the quintessential expression of American
imperialism and racism directed toward one hamlet in ravaged South
Vietnam.?

GIs were turning against the war in large numbers. Workers World and
YAWF helped GIs form the American Servicemen?s Union, which soon had
30,000 active-duty members on bases and ships around the world. GI
antiwar coffeehouses were opening outside scores of military bases in
the U.S. Vietnam veterans, some handicapped by terrible wounds,
demonstrated by tossing away their medals at large rallies.  These guys
were unforgettable, the salt of the earth.

On the frontlines, many antiwar GIs stopped aiming at the ?enemy.? Some
aimed at their own junior officers. The term ?fragging? entered the
vocabulary to describe the act of tossing a fragmentation grenade into
an officer?s tent.

The mass antiwar movement had reached its peak and antiwar opinion was
now the majority. The diehards were sharply reduced in number.  Sections
of corporate and finance capital, the far right, the AFL-CIO, and the
mass media continued to support the war, as did an ever diminishing
number of citizens manipulated by government propaganda into believing
the war was patriotic or would somehow save the United States from being
overrun by hoards of Soviet or Chinese soldiers.   But from the point of
view of the ruling class, the country was falling apart. Washington had
to win fast or get out before the U.S. became ungovernable.   Cambodia
was bombed. Laos was bombed. The draft was ended--to neutralize the
student movement. Bombing was suspended to dampen the antiwar movement.
It was resumed and suspended again. Peace talks began in Paris and
dragged on for years as Washington procrastinated.

Finally the pressure became so great that the White House declared South
Vietnam was now ?strong enough to defend itself,? the rationale for
reducing the number of U.S. troops substantially.

This writer was in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in late 1974 and
early 1975, a few months before the war ended. The country was in ruins
from terror bombings and the U.S. had killed and wounded millions of
people. But morale was high and everyone was confident of victory.  We
went to the Hanoi Zoo.  Most of the animals had been killed and cages
were empty.  The biggest outdoor cage, formerly for elephants, had a
sign reading, ?The Most Dangerous Beast in the World.?  Inside was the
wreckage of a U.S. jet plane.  I was given a handbag as a gift, composed
of many different colored thin wires, woven together.   The Vietnamese
produced and sold the item.  They were called ?McNamara Bags? after the
U.S. Defense Secretary who created the ?impregnable? McNamara Line
across the narrow width of Vietnam composed of communications works,
guns, trenches, barbed wire, anti-tank obstacles, command posts,
military bases and what must have been a million miles of telephone
wires, now made into something useful by resourceful Vietnamese workers
after the barrier was obliterated.  It was safe now to bring foreign
journalists south of the 17th parallel. The muffled roar of cannon could
still be heard, but far, far off to the south.

By April, the remaining U.S. soldiers and hoards of CIA agents began to
flee. The last of them made it aboard helicopters as the liberation army
penetrated central Saigon. What a day that was, April 30, 1975.  Few
indeed who fought against that terrible war throughout the years  could
refrain from shedding tears of sheer joy.  To this day, many of us look
back with great pride at what this people?s movement accomplished, and
with great respect and tenderness toward Vietnam.

Many veterans of the 1960s youth movement have remained with the
struggle. They can be found on the front lines with older antiwar
veterans and with the youth of today?opposing the U.S.-NATO war against
Yugoslavia, demanding an end to sanctions against Iraq, supporting Cuba
against embargo and subversion, watching carefully that Colombia does
not become the next ?Vietnam,? fighting the good fight against racism,
police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, women?s and
lesbian/gay/bi/trans oppression, the WTO, World Bank, IMF, imperialism
and capitalism.

The powerful antiwar movement of the 60s-70s was then?and this is now,
the era of triumphal global capitalism, of increasing disparities
between rich and poor in the industrialized countries and between the
industrialized countries and the multitude of poor nations throughout
the world.  The struggle, obviously, continues.

(end)