Lessons of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
We present this, and the following article about the history of the massive Vietnam Antiwar Movement which ended in defeat for the U.S., forcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and the region. Both articles are written by participants of the movement at the time. Understanding the success of this movement—how it was organized to involve millions of people including the troops themselves—can help us to move forward in the fight against the fascist trajectory of world capitalism today.
—Socialist Viewpoint
Introduction
I begin with a quote from the Vietnamese declaration of independence from France delivered in a speech by Ho Chi Minh in 1945.
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples of the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: ‘All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.’
“Those are undeniable truths.
“Nevertheless, for more than 80 years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
“In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
“They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
“They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood.
“They have fettered public opinion; they have practices obscurantism against our people.
“To weaken our race, they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
“In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land.
“They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade.
“They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.”1
Much of what the Vietnamese were revolting for are the things people want for themselves and their children throughout the world, but to get these things, the Vietnamese were forced to make a social revolution. And their revolution could not be one like the U.S. revolution they hoped to model their revolution upon, because capitalism had exhausted all its progressive character, its ability to develop the productive capability that could improve life for the workers. They were forced to fight against the world’s most powerful capitalist countries—imperialist powers—especially the United States. They were forced to go beyond capitalism.
The Vietnamese revolution and the international response to the U.S. government’s efforts to smash it is an event full of rich lessons for people who want to learn from history with the idea of changing the world, especially those with the idea of ridding the world of its brutal wars and brutal capitalist system of oppression.
Background to the revolution
Vietnam gained independence from China in the 10th Century A.D. and took its present geographical shape early in the 19th century. Vietnam fought China six different times over its first 800 years and had a strong national identity as a people.
The modern 20th century Vietnamese Revolution and war take place during a century of war and revolution—all a result of the world capitalist system’s inability to solve the problems of humankind.
French colonial, and then imperialist, rule consolidated in 1913, treated Vietnam, and the other countries of formerly French Indochina, as a servile colony, extracting minerals and rubber and later developing and investing capital in the rubber industry and manufacturing. The great Russian Revolution, arising in part out of the First World War, is very much a part of the background to the Vietnamese Revolution, whose leaders were inspired by the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and later, very negatively influenced by the Stalinist leadership of both the Soviet Union and China.
The Second World War, and its re-division of the world’s markets between the great imperialist powers saw the French colonial regime in Vietnam, when France was defeated and occupied by Germany, and declare its allegiance to the Vichy, Nazi-occupation government. Japan occupied Indochina in 1940 and ruled Vietnam through the old French colonial administration, but when the German armies were thrown out of France, Japan ousted the French administration from Vietnam and declared Vietnam independent, under Emperor Bao Dai, who cooperated with the Japanese.
That year, 1940, marks the beginning of indigenous guerrilla resistance in Vietnam to both the French Vichy colonialists and the Japanese invaders. Ironically, the Anglo-American Allies actually helped supply the Vietminh, which was a front of the Communist Party and nationalist forces in Vietnam lead by Ho Chi Minh, who was the leader of the underground Indochinese Communist Party. It was a popular front of workers, peasants and capitalist forces. During the anti-colonial struggle, the Vietminh succeeded in gaining control of most of the countryside and then, with the surrender of the Japanese to the Allies, a popular revolution swept the cities of Vietnam on August 19, 1945, and brought the Vietminh to power.
Ho Chi Minh issued a declaration of independence—quoted above—modeled on the U.S. declaration of independence of 1776 and set up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
At the end of World War II, the Potsdam Agreements provided that British troops were to occupy Vietnam. The Vietminh government, under the influence of the Stalinist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) welcomed the British soldiers into Saigon. Revolutionary forces, including Trotskyists, with influence in important sections of the mass movements of workers and peasants, mostly in the South of Vietnam opposed the British troops coming in and warned that they would come as conquerors, not allies.
Vietnamese Trotskyists wrote advocating a revolutionary policy of opposition to imperialism and support for world revolution, a worker-peasant united front, the creation of people’s committees (soviets), establishment of a constituent assembly, arms for people, seizure of land by the peasants, nationalization of factories under workers’ control, and the creation of a workers and peasants’ government.
Second betrayal
The Communist Party of Vietnam ordered the disarming of the revolutionary Trotskyists, many of whom were then shot without trials, and the revolutionaries’ prediction about the intentions of the British came true. The Brits attacked the independence forces and handed power in the Southern part of Vietnam back to the French colonists (now under the DeGaulle government in France). The French and the Vietminh signed an agreement in which France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) government as a semi-autonomous part of the French Union, but only in the Northern part of the country, and then only for a short time.
The same agreement allowed the French to land troops in Hanoi, from which they launched a massive bombing of Haiphong Harbor and drove the Vietminh into the countryside from which they launched a prolonged guerrilla war against the French.
U.S. involvement against the Vietnamese revolution began during the Truman Administration when the U.S. started to provide military aid to the French in their colonial war of aggression to reconquer Vietnam for its colony.
With the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, the U.S. stepped up its aid to the French, but the Vietnamese defeated the French during this eight-year war culminating in the decisive battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
The Geneva Accords of 1954 were the formal agreements for ending the war with the French, and they constitute another major betrayal of the Vietnamese revolution. The Accords, although requiring free elections to reunify the country in 1956, also established a line of demarcation, the 17th parallel, both sides of which the French (to the South) and the Vietnamese nationalists and communists (to the north) were to withdraw troops. This division was supposed to be a temporary measure, with elections to be held in 1956 to reunify the country. Why, we may ask, would the victorious Vietnamese concede territory again to foreign influence?
The Pentagon Papers reveal that this disastrous concession was “the result of heavy pressure on the Vietnamese delegation at the Geneva Conference from Molotov and Chou En-lai, the two representatives respectively of the Soviet Union and China!”
France did withdraw from Vietnam, but, in violation of the Geneva Accords, the U.S. came in and set up a brutally murderous, repressive, puppet dictatorship government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, south of the 17th parallel. Diem, under the tutelage of the U.S., refused to hold elections as agreed to by the Geneva Accords for 1956. The South Vietnamese proxy government proceeded to undo the results of the war against the French in which the peasants had taken over much of the land from which the French-supported landlords had fled. New guerrilla fighting broke out and spread.
The war waged by the U.S. against the people of Vietnam mobilized the men and material of the wealthiest and militarily strongest state in the world against a small, war-torn poverty-stricken nation. Does this sound familiar?
The succession of proxy puppet governments set up by the U.S. in the South were so isolated from the people of Vietnam, they were chosen from among the Vietnamese mandarin class2 who had been part of the French colonial administration, like Diem, or had even fought on the French side during the anti-colonial war. The U.S. and South Vietnamese puppets (the first of who was Diem) violated the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords, which were supposed to unite Vietnam under the Vietminh government. The Vietminh was a coalition of the Vietnamese Communist Party and nationalists. It was a popular front of several classes. It enjoyed the popular support of the population of all of Vietnam. Even early U.S. government documents (as the publication of the Pentagon Papers3 proved) show U.S. political and military leaders acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh would have won the leadership of a united Vietnam if free elections were held in 1956.
The Geneva Accords, with U.S. maneuvers, turned the unqualified victory of the Vietnamese over the French into a defeat for the Vietnamese, in that it allowed time and territory for the U.S. to gain a foothold in the South of the country and build a small, privileged group of Vietnamese Catholics into a support base for the puppet government by giving them land and special economic incentives.
By 1959, American combat soldiers, called “advisers” to the South Vietnam army, were dispatched to Vietnam and in response, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), based in the north, began to help the resistance movement in the South. In 1960, the National Liberation Front was formed.
The U.S. War against the people of Vietnam lasted 15 years. By its end in 1975, the Vietnamese had won against the mightiest state of all time at a cost of over four million dead, millions wounded, the countryside poisoned, the economy destroyed. The U.S. lost over 58,000 killed; hundreds-of-thousands wounded; at least one-half-million veterans who suffer from postwar psychological trauma, chemical poisoning, hundreds-of-thousands drug-addicted and imprisoned, and an economy which had provided both “guns and butter” for the last time. In 1971, before the Vietnam war ended, a post-World War II trend of steadily-improved standards for American workers was permanently reversed.
Unprecedented U.S. brutality
To provide a small inkling of the brutality the U.S. government unleashed against the people of Vietnam here are a few statistics about the air war: During World War II the U.S. dropped two million tons of bombs on all theaters of war put together.
- By the end of 1971—and this is before the U.S. had stopped bombing Vietnam—the U.S. had dropped 6,300,000 tons of bombs in Indochina.
- In the two-year period of 1968-69 the U.S. had dropped over one-and-a-half more tonnage of bombs in South Vietnam than all Allied Forces dropped on Germany throughout World War II.
- By 1969 North Vietnam was being hit each month with bombs, the explosive force of which equaled two atomic bombs.
- In the 1972 Christmas bombing alone, the U.S. dropped more tonnage on Hanoi and Haiphong than Germany dropped on England from 1940 to 1945.
- From 1965-69 the U.S. dropped bombs with the equivalent of 50 pounds each for every man, woman, and child in Vietnam.
- The U.S. created 21 million bomb craters in South Vietnam alone.
- In the Northern part of Vietnam, the target of U.S. bombing was the economy, such that almost the entire modern industrial output was halted. Hospitals, schools and churches were especially targeted as well.
In the South, the U.S. targeted villages in order to force the peasant populations into eroded concentration camps, called strategic hamlets, or the Pacification Program. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy authorized massive chemical warfare, Operation Ranch Hand, which lasted over ten years.4 In South Vietnam alone the U.S. sprayed 18 million gallons of poisonous chemicals including Agent Orange and napalm, to defoliate the land, poison the crops, farm animals, and the people, including American soldiers, and causing birth defects (through generations!), among other horrendous results.
My Lai
To cite only one specific event and give an idea of what the U.S. perpetrated in Vietnam, consider the village of Xom Lang—(the U.S. military mistakenly called it My Lai). U.S. Charlie Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry, Americal Division went into the village Xom Lang. They were completely unopposed. They saw no soldiers of the National Liberation Front, no weapons at all, but they proceeded to massacre 504 villagers, mostly old men, women and girls (some of whom were gang-raped before being murdered), and children, including babies in arms. It was a racist slaughter against unarmed civilians. The massacre, which was not an exception to U.S. war policy in Vietnam, was a holocaust which, in its cruelty, rivals the slave trade and the Nazi death camps.
Another example of the extreme heartless brutality of the American side was revealed by television producers and reporters April Oliver and Jack Smith, fired from CNN for telling the story of a top-secret U.S. mission into Laos (where supposedly the U.S. never went,) to drop poison gas on American defectors and Indochinese revolutionaries and kill them. This story was revealed for the first time 28 years after the fact. Not only has the U.S. government again been caught in lies, because yes, it did make sarin gas weapons (30,000 of them during the Vietnam war), but it has been caught carrying out a secret war against another country, Laos. It has been caught using weapons of mass destruction that all international peace conferences have banned, using weapons which it accused Iraq of having, that it used for its reason for sanctions against Iraq that were responsible for killing hundreds-of-thousands of Iraqi children and other civilians.
These few facts indicate a most important lesson of the Vietnam war: the brutality of the U.S. ruling class, the lengths to which they are willing to go to get their way. This is a fundamental truth that those who want to change society must know and teach. This is a society that cannot be meaningfully reformed. To end this kind of brutality, power must be wrested from the U.S. ruling capitalist class and its government and state and taken over by those who have no reason to do violence against other peoples.
Vietnam was no mistake. The policies that led to these brutalities were the conscious policies of a capitalist system willing to use any and all means to maintain that system at any price. The beauty of the antiwar movement that developed in the U.S. is that it made the price to pay too high at home while the Vietnamese made the price to pay too high in Vietnam.
Many of the people in the antiwar movement against the war in Iraq (and subsequent antiwar movements) participated against the Vietnam War and were deeply and personally affected by it—especially the young men who were drafted to fight on the U.S. side. Some became socialists during the course of the war. Some veterans of the war became antiwar and revolutionary socialists. Some of the people who were born and grew up after the Vietnam war and revolution have also been effected because that war and all the events surrounding it changed the course of history in many ways.
Lessons from the antiwar
movement
The age of war and revolution affected the U.S. directly. Just ten years after the end of World War II, the Black Civil Rights Movement burst out throughout the South and spread throughout the whole country, winning majority support, forcing a division in the ruling class with the decisive sector moving to partially end the Jim Crow system of legal segregation in the South and granting civil rights for the Black population. The Civil Rights Movement dealt the decisive blow to McCarthyism and created the openings for a militant student antiwar movement and the student radicalization of the 1960s. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was also a main inspirational source of the nascent radicalization in the United States. The spread of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. accounts for the different reaction of students, and later, the working class in its majority, to the war against Vietnam, in contrast to the response to the U.S. war against Korea.
From the very beginning of the movement against the Vietnam war in 1964 (which was five years after the U.S. had begun its direct military intervention) the various people and groups who participated in the movement engaged in sharp debates over the course, strategy, and tactics for the movement. Some of these debates had decisive consequences for the movement and the war itself. During the ten years of the antiwar movement from 1965 to 1975, the working-class revolutionary, Marxist wing of the movement, went from being a small minority within a small movement to becoming part of the leadership of a movement of millions, a movement which came to have a decisive impact on the course of the war itself. Not only that, but the impact of the Vietnamese Revolution on the U.S. population while it could not, at that time, lead to the U.S. workers coming to power here, contained within it many of the seeds of a future socialist revolution in the U.S. itself.
Likewise, the debates in the developing antiwar movement mirror in many ways the elements necessary for a change in the entire class structure of the U.S. This may sound far-fetched, but I don’t think it is and I will try to make the case for it.
The main task
Underlying the approach of the left wing of the antiwar movement, (which began as a mostly student movement), was the Marxist view that the class struggle is the engine of society, and that the working class is the only class with the potential and actual power to transform society. That fundamental, basic idea informed the whole approach of revolutionaries to the developing antiwar movement. Related to that idea is that masses of people generally only move into action, political action, as they perceive their self-interest is affected. Therefore, the task for the antiwar movement was to appeal to the masses of American people. This is true for the new Antiwar movements too.
Our strategy had these components: mass action; independence from ruling class politics and parties—Democrats and Republicans; organized on the basis of principled demands on the government that respect the rights of the Vietnamese people for self-determination. Our strategy was internationalist, that is, we sought to link the interests of the Vietnamese revolution with the interests of American people and ordinary people all over the world. Each aspect of this strategy is based on the idea that only a mass working class movement could force the U.S. out of its war.
Mass action provides the alternative to the government, independence from the Democratic and Republican Parties, and principled demands keep the movement from being co-opted by the ruling class. Mass action is a working class strategy, as opposed to say, petitions, letter writing, lobbying, electoral projects (though all of these could be useful tactics from time to time) because it involves the main strength that the working class has—its numbers, its relation to the functioning of society in industry, and the potential to rule society in its own name (though the Vietnam antiwar movement never developed to that point.)
The most effective tactics flowed from this basic strategy. The mass actions were street demonstrations called by united fronts of all who could agree to come together in common antiwar actions. We organized them to be peaceful and legal demonstrations with permits. (It’s important to remember that the early and mid-sixties were not that far removed from the Joe McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s.) Demonstrations in opposition to U.S. foreign policy at that time were not that common. In the beginning of the Vietnam antiwar movement there was a significant amount of red-bailing, intimidation, and even physical attacks on the antiwar movement. It was important to make it as easy as possible for people to take their first tentative steps into opposition to their government. Thus, the revolutionaries of the Socialist Workers Party promoted the tactic of peaceful, legal street demonstrations because we had the confidence that in fact the movement would be able to win a majority to the antiwar cause and this method would put no roadblocks in the way of that goal.
The strategy of independence was tactically implemented through the creation of independent, single issue, antiwar committees and single issue united front coalitions, usually organized to build a specific action with a date, time, and place. Some coalitions lasted for more than one action, others were so tenuous that they were really ad hoc coalitions that could only stay together for one event, then the political differences between the organized participants drove them apart.
The student movement, having organized first, and being the most supportive of self-determination for the Vietnamese, generally played the role of left-wing in the broad coalitions that formed to carry out city-wide, regional or national demonstrations. They were the left-wing because they were the most resistant to the electoral aspirations of the organized reformists in the peace movement—the Communist Party, the Social Democrats, and assorted liberals, who, every time an election campaign came around tried to get the movement to support the “lesser of two evils” candidates instead of demonstrating against the war. This problem got more difficult as the movement got bigger. At first there weren’t any antiwar candidates, but later, as the movement got massive, there were lots of “peace” candidates, and, when the American casualties started to become unacceptable to larger numbers of the American people, even Presidents Lyndon Johnson (Democrat), and Richard Nixon (Republican) ran for president on promises to de-escalate the war.
The slogans the revolutionaries advocated for the movement likewise reflected our strategic orientation to the working class. “End the War in Vietnam, Bring our troops home now!” was the central demand of the left wing in the antiwar movement. Believe it or not, it took several years before the majority of the organized antiwar movement came to agree with that slogan. After all, the conscious reformists, who played a big role in the organized movement, were opposed to that solution to the war. Many sought to compromise with the U.S. government and proposed calling for a negotiated solution to the war. The left wing said that the U.S. had no right to negotiate for anything in Vietnam and that the only demand on the U.S. government that honored the right of the Vietnamese people to determine their own destiny was for the U.S. and all foreign powers to withdraw.
The “Out Now!” slogan was the most important slogan because the biggest obstacle to real Vietnamese self-determination was the U.S. To withdraw U.S. troops, bombs, and bases was to guarantee the reunification of Vietnam and the carrying out of their social revolution. The conscious revolutionary wing of the U.S. antiwar movement understood this. But there was another important reason for the slogan to bring our troops home now, and that was the strategy of building the movement into a working-class movement with the social power to effect the actions of the U.S. government. Calling for bringing the U.S. troops home, was a concrete way of reaching out to the soldiers themselves and their families, friends, and loved ones at home with the message that the antiwar movement is not a movement to hurt the soldiers, but a movement that, if successful, would save their lives too.
The U.S. government and the capitalist media did everything in their power to convince the public, the workers, and the soldiers that the student demonstrations were against the soldiers, against “our boys,” would harm them and lead to their deaths. This was a cranked up, powerful propaganda machine coming out of the reactionary patriotic 1950s (an era which could produce soldiers who could go along with officers in carrying out brutal war crimes against civilians like the My Lai massacre). So, the far-sightedness and optimism of those in the antiwar movement who fought for this “Out Now!” slogan that could actually reach out to the soldiers themselves is quite amazing. The fact is that the impulse came from the revolutionaries who knew that historically, during great revolutionary developments, that masses of working people, even those serving in the armed forces of the capitalist state, could come over to the side of the revolutionaries, that they could change. And that happened.
The Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance were so serious about this orientation and the possibility that antiwar agitation could develop among the soldiers, who were overwhelmingly working class men, and disproportionately (to their numbers in the population as a whole) Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian, that they made a conscious campaign of educating the movement by publishing a pamphlet and touring the author of it, Mary Alice Waters, called “GIs and the Fight Against War.”
The subject of this tour and pamphlet was the actual events following World War II in 1945 and 1946 (but not written about in U.S. history books, a real hidden chapter). Then, a large-scale “Bring Us Home” movement developed among U.S. soldiers in the Pacific Theater who were being used to intervene in the Chinese civil war on the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist revolutionaries. This movement was suppressed but it probably played a role in demobilizing U.S. troops more quickly than the U.S. would have liked, which probably advanced the Chinese Revolution, which the U.S. would definitely have liked to stop.
The Bring Us Home Movement was organized within the armed forces with meetings, leaflets, and propaganda. Our point was that it could happen again and that the U.S. antiwar movement could, with an orientation toward the soldiers, help it to happen.
Fred Halstead’s book Out Now! A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War5, quotes a speech by James Johnson, one of the Fort Hood Three, soldiers who were among the very first to speak out publicly against the war and announce that they were refusing orders to go to Vietnam. Private first class (Pfc.) James Johnson said:
“Now there is a direct relationship between the peace movement and the civil rights movement. The South Vietnamese are fighting for representation like we ourselves…. Therefore, the Negro in Vietnam is just helping to defeat what his Black brother is fighting for in the United States. When the Negro soldier returns, he still will not be able to ride in Mississippi or walk down a certain street in Alabama. There will still be proportionately twice as many Negroes as whites in Vietnam….
“It is time that the Negro realizes that his strength can be put to much better use right here at home. This is where his strength lies. We can gain absolutely nothing in Vietnam. All this is leading to the decision I have made. I know it is my right to make this decision.” [p. 182]
Another one of the Fort Hood Three, David Samas, made a speech in which he urged the peace movement to:
“Give the G.I. something to believe in and he will fight for that belief. Let them know in Vietnam that you want them home, let them know that you are concerned about their lives also. Tell them you want them to live, not die. Bring home our men in Vietnam!….
“In the end we depend entirely upon the public. We have placed ourselves in the hands of the people of the United Staes, and all of our hopes lie with them….” [p.183]
These speeches and the signs of GI resistance to the war were early signs of what was to come later, when antiwar sentiment and opinion became so strong amongst the soldiers that the strongest military machine in the world became an unreliable fighting force in Vietnam!
In 1971, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. wrote an article in the Armed Forces Journal entitled the “Collapse of the Armed Forces (1971).”6 He wrote:
“The morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few silent exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
“By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited when not near mutinous.
“Elsewhere than Vietnam the situation is nearly as serious.”
In the same article Heinl wrote that the “conditions among American forces in Vietnam have only been exceeded in this century [the 20th Century] by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.” He documents the existence in 1971 of 144 underground newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases [having increased 40 percent from the previous year]; the existence of at least 14 GI dissent organizations including two made up solely of officers; the existence of 11 to 26 off-base antiwar GI coffee houses, and more.
These conditions of breakdown in the military, which constitutes a breakdown in a pillar of the capitalist state apparatus, had their roots in the war itself, the many casualties, the fact that politically the war could not be justified to the U.S. soldiers and, the alternative of peace presented by the civilian antiwar movement.
But just as significant, and in fact fundamental, was the effect of the Civil Rights Movement, the growth of Black nationalism, and the role of the conscious Black leadership in opposing the Vietnam War as well as exposing the disproportionate deaths and wounding of non-white soldiers in Vietnam, due to the disproportionate numbers of these soldiers in combat.
A pivotal turning point for the growth of Black GI resistance to the war and the antiwar movement as a whole was a speech made by Reverend Martin Luther King in 1967 at Riverside Church in NYC. This was a thoroughly revolutionary speech that defends the right of the Vietnamese people to revolt against their puppet dictators and the U.S.
King laid out all the key arguments against the war from the point of view of Black people. That “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and attack it as such.”
King pointed to the irony of sending “young Black men who had been crippled by our society 8000 miles away to [supposedly] guarantee liberties which they hadn’t found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” He pointed out the irony of the country sending Black and white soldiers to kill and die together but unable to seat them together in the same schools. “So, we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”
King said, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” What a bombshell this speech was—calling the U.S. government the greatest purveyor of violence in the world!
In 1970 Commander George L. Jackson, writing in the Naval War College Review acknowledged that the effect of Martin Luther King’s speech “was of profound significance on the national scene.” To quote:
“The growing public disillusionment with the Vietnam war, of which Dr. King’s declaration was an essential part, made it more difficult for the military…by reducing its ability to generate effective military-political pressure….Just as the civil rights movement has served as a restraint upon the ability of American forces in Vietnam…so it has altered and restricted the use of military resources….”
“The most apparent effect that the civil rights movement has had upon military force employment has been the necessity of using troops to quell civil disturbances. The National Guard has traditionally been used for this purpose. During the fiscal year 1968, 104,665 National Guardsmen were called to quell civil disturbances, many of which were precipitated by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King….”
In this same article the author states that the most important constraint on the military introduced by the civil rights movement “is that produced by the coalition of civil rights organizations and the antiwar organizations. This coalition has spearheaded the shift of public opinion away from support of the Vietnam conflict.”7
The Pentagon Papers confirm that the U.S. government agreed with just this analysis. One recommendation from the Secretary of Defense to President Nixon acknowledges that “In dealing with public opinion and congress, the administration would have to prove that the administration would have the resources ‘for the ghetto fight’ in order to justify continued intervention in Vietnam.”
While objective factors of the body bags and the experience of being part of an invasion force against a popular revolution played a giant role in shaping the attitudes of soldiers and working people in general toward the Vietnam War, the actions of the antiwar movement helped the objective factors to become part of the conscious response to the war.
One of the biggest debates in the antiwar movement, a debate held almost twice a year for ten years, was whether or not to call another mass street demonstration nationally. The left wing of the movement was consistent in calling for escalating street demonstrations. This was the form that made it possible to reach more and more workers, as objective events changed their minds, and more and more soldiers as well.
In 1969 almost 1000 Marines participated in an antiwar march in Oceanside, California. An anti-racism rally in Heidelberg, Germany in 1970 drew over 1000 GIs. One thousand sailors out of a crew of 4500 on the Naval Attack Carrier USS Coral Sea, scheduled to sail to Vietnam for a bombing attack tour in the Fall of 1971 signed a petition circulated secretly on board the ship stating that “We do not believe in the Vietnam War,” and that the ship “should not go to Vietnam.” Three hundred men from this ship led the antiwar demonstration November 6th in San Francisco.
During the debates over whether or not to call another mass demonstration, there were those who argued that the government ignored the antiwar movement, so what was the point? The publication of the Pentagon Papers proved once and for all that the government only pretended to ignore the movement. The movement, and its steady growth, its growth in the Black and Chicano communities, its impact on the armed forces, all these were watched and carefully gauged by the government. At the same time, the government decided to give up its effort to win the war. They calculated that the system would have more to lose vis a vis the American population than if they persisted in escalating and trying to militarily defeat the Vietnamese people.
While it is true that the Vietnam antiwar movement didn’t develop into the kind of a movement that could prevent the next series of U.S. imperialist interventions into the affairs, and revolutions of other countries—Chile, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Afghanistan—it did alter and narrow the U.S. government’s prerogatives in future ventures.
In order to deprive U.S. imperialism of the ability to use its military might against other countries and revolutions, we need a massive antiwar movement. But, for a permanent end to war we also need a self-conscious, organized working class who will take control and run society democratically in its own name for its own benefit.
During the Vietnam War the U.S. working class was at a very low ebb of class-consciousness, though probably most of the participants in the antiwar movement, at least at its height from 1968 on, were working class people. Most, however, were not there with the support of their unions or other working class organizations. The unions themselves never joined in the antiwar actions in a major way, with some exceptions among hospital workers, teachers, and other progressive unions. That is the major reason that the antiwar movement couldn’t go beyond its single issue of ending the war, to ending the U.S. war machine permanently. That will take more than a movement. That will take a revolution.
Postscript
The conscious intervention of a working-class Marxist organization—the Socialist Workers Party8—had a strong influence on the antiwar movement. Many people became converts to Marxism and revolution in the course of participating in the antiwar movement. That is the strongest reason for continuing to build and recruit to the socialist movement now, while a new mass movement is developing in response to the government’s attack on immigrants—fellow workers. The success of a social revolution in this country depends on building a strong revolutionary political party before, and in the course of, the development of a social revolution.
I hope that this talk/essay has proven that a consciously organized movement, serious about reaching out to ordinary people in great numbers can affect the war aims and the attacks on working people here and abroad of even the most powerful country in the world.
Talk given at a Socialist Action Educational Conference August 1998.
1 Vietnam Declaration of Independence, September 2, 1945, prepared and read to a massive crowd win Hanoi by Ho Chi Minh.
2 The Vietnamese mandarin class refers to the Confucian scholar-official bureaucracy that historically managed state affairs, often characterized as conservative, intellectual elites. During the era of the Vietnam War (specifically the 1950s-60s), this traditional, authoritarian governing style was embodied by South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, described as a “Cold War Mandarin” whose autocratic, centralized approach alienated the population.
3 “Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Robert McNamara] Vietnam Task Force,” is a 7,000-page top-secret history of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
4 1961—1971
5 “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War” By Fred Halstead, 1978, Monad Press for the Anchor Foundation, Inc.
6 Published in “Vietnam and America, A Documentary History” edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, 1985, Grove Press, Inc.
7 p. 318 in “Vietnam and America, A Documentary History”
8 The SWP is no longer a revolutionary organization, having completely abandoned its support for Palestinian self-determination and adopting a position of support to Zionism and the Israeli and U.S. assault on Gaza and the West Bank.