Vietnamese people, US anti-war
fight stopped Washington’s war

Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead is one of January’s Books of the Month. Halstead, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and of the international campaign against the war, covers events from 1960 to 1975. He describes how youth radicalized in support of the Cuban Revolution and the mass working-class struggle for Black rights gave impetus to what became a powerful movement against Washington’s growing war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. U.S. imperialism was defeated thanks to the perseverance of the peoples of Indochina and the solidarity and anti-war resistance of tens of millions around the world. This excerpt is from the afterword. Copyright © 1978 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FRED HALSTEAD
The Second Indochina War was the first in the epoch of American imperialism in which the United States went down to defeat. After emerging victorious from the Spanish-American War and two world wars, then encountering a stalemate in Korea, the Pentagon’s military machine was ignominiously evicted from Vietnam, thanks to the persevering struggle of the Indochinese plus the antiwar resistance of the American people. This was the most sustained and, except for Russia in 1905 and 1917, the most effective antiwar movement within any big power while the shooting was going on.

The official propagandists cooked up various formulas to justify their military intervention. It was depicted as a crusade for democracy and freedom against the threat of communist totalitarianism and for the defense of the independence of the South against invasion from the North. The U.S. was there, it was said, to fulfill treaty obligations to the client Saigon regime and thwart the expansionism of China and the Soviet Union. Toward the end the excuses became exceedingly thin: to assure the return of the POWs; to prevent a bloodbath in the South if the NLF should take over completely; to protect U.S. troops as they were withdrawn. All this was demagogy.

In reality, U.S. intervention had a thoroughly imperialistic character. The colossus of world capitalism hurled its military might without provocation against a small and divided colonial nation thousands of miles away struggling for self-determination and unification. A series of American presidents sought to do what King George III’s empire failed to do against the rebel patriots of 1776.

On one side was a state armed to the teeth promoting the strategic aims and material interests of the corporate rich on the global arena; on the other was a worker and peasant uprising heading toward the overthrow of capitalist power and property, despite the limited political program of its leadership.

These underlying anticapitalist and antilandlord tendencies were eventually clearly expressed in the reunification of Vietnam in 1976 and the process of eliminating capitalist property relations in the South. The prolonged civil war in South Vietnam thereby proved to be an integral part of the international confrontation between the upholders of capitalism and the forces moving in a socialist direction that has been unfolding since the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution. …

The antiwar movement began with people who were already radicalized: pacifists, socialists, communists, rebellious students, and a scattering of morally outraged individuals. At the start these were a small minority, convinced of the justness of their cause and ready to face unpopularity for their stand. The energy, resoluteness, and fortitude of this vanguard brought the movement into being and remained its prime mover.

The most paradoxical aspect of this profound and unforgettable chapter of American history was the central and decisive role played by the left-wing elements, which included the radical pacifists. When it began, it was almost unthinkable that they could set in motion and head a movement of such vast scope. They themselves did not really expect such a development. They just felt obliged to do whatever they could.

At the beginning of the sixties the American left — old and new — was looked upon as an esoteric fringe with virtually negligible influence. So far as numbers in radical organizations were concerned, this was close to the truth. The cold war and the witch-hunting atmosphere, in conjunction with the prolonged prosperity of the 1950s, had decimated their ranks. Even after their numbers increased manyfold during the sixties and early seventies, the tens of thousands directly supporting the various radical groupings were not very large compared to the entire population.

Yet this unrespectable, “irrelevant,” and by no means homogeneous band became “the saving remnant” as it moved into the vacancy left by the established educational, religious, labor union, journalistic, and political institutions. These were tied in with the two-party system and went along with the generals and the State Department, supporting a perfectly obviously illegal and unjust war to one extent or another. …

Insofar as the Democratic and Republican doves contributed to the spread of antiwar sentiment — and some of them did by lending their authority occasionally to antiwar activities, publicizing certain facts about the war, and so on — their activities were contradicted by their steering people toward the two parties that supported the war and by their effective votes in Congress.

The issue was not resolved, or even ameliorated, through the two-party electoral process. On the contrary, the election periods were used to precisely the opposite effect. They served to hoodwink the antiwar feelings, defuse antiwar protests, and give the war-makers some extra maneuverability in their pernicious and ill-fated plans. That happened with every congressional and presidential election from 1964, when Johnson ran as a “peace” candidate, to 1972, when the Nixon administration announced that “peace is at hand” and then, after the election, went ahead with another “brutalization” of the Vietnamese population.

Those who retain or preach faith in the reformability of the capitalist two-party system must reckon with the fact that the American movement against the Vietnam War — the greatest moral resurgence in the U.S. since the struggle to abolish slavery — had to arise and maintain itself apart from and in defiance of both parties.

Vietnamese people, US anti-war fight stopped Washington’s war

Vietnamese people, US anti-war
fight stopped Washington’s war