Editorial
June 2000

Legacy of war in Vietnam and at home

The passage of 25 years since the Vietnam War ended in a debacle for U.S. imperialist war policy provided a rare opportunity for widespread reflection on that longest of foreign wars. One theme repeated in public forums or radio call-ins around the anniversary was Vietnam veterans pinpointing when they themselves began to oppose the war. The Vietnam War, which ultimately five presidents had a hand in waging, cannot be recalled apart from resistance to it, and in particular the decade of mass demonstrations against all-out war.

We are a generation removed from actual fighting in Vietnam, and a decade since the Cold War rivalry underlying the war seemed to be replaced by Pax Americana with the crumbling of the state-capitalist regime calling itself Communism in Russia. But demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle testify that global capitalism survived opposition to the war and remains the main enemy of the masses in each country. It still must be confronted and brought down.

In 1956, President Eisenhower encouraged Ngo Dinh Diem to ignore scheduled elections to decide the fate of a unified Vietnam and instead run South Vietnam as an American client. With U.S. policy anchored to subsequent military rulers, in 1961 the U.S. responded militarily to the inevitable revolt in South Vietnam with Orwellian jargon like calling soldiers "advisers." Lyndon B. Johnson even ran as a "peace" candidate in 1964 against Goldwater.

Just two months later LBJ began pursuing war without limits, committing troops till more than half a million were in the field and dropping more bombs on Vietnam than the Allies used on Germany in World War II.

GROWING ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

New layers of anti-war opposition emerged immediately, responding with teach-ins, marches, and draft resistance. Over ten years, the battle of ideas within that movement proved so vigorous that it became fertile ground for the rise of the women's liberation and gay movements.

Development of the anti-war movement, incorporating the passions of youth and rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, posed enough of an obstacle to warmongers that LBJ dared not run for reelection and Nixon in 1968 ran with a "secret plan for peace." Even in 1972 Nixon created a cease-fire to run for reelection, one he broke days after the election.

At the pivotal moment of the war, confrontations with protests that exploded against Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970 had turned murderous. The National Guard killed four demonstrators at Kent State. Students at over 400 schools shut down campuses or otherwise protested the killings, including Jackson State, where police killed two Black students. Unfortunately, fewer campuses memorialized the students killed there.

By expanding the ground war into Cambodia, Nixon and his Secretary of State Kissinger had intensified the war at home. Since invading Cambodia had only sunk the U.S. deeper, he needed help to extricate himself from Vietnam and ward off the threat of revolt at home. Nixon turned to Mao Zedong who had launched the Cultural Revolution to divert a similar revolutionary opposition in China.

LINKS TO TODAY

Counter-revolutionary alliances carried out after Nixon and Kissinger played the China card have survived. What links the anti-Vietnam War movement most strongly to today are the rising struggles of youth and workers which oppose the same enemy, global capitalism. The war at home likewise has a link to today in the movements against police abuse and prisonization of a generation of restive youth. These movements and more take inspiration, not uncritically, from the earlier anti-war struggles, resuming the goal of putting this system out of its misery.