| AsianDivaGirlsWebDude |
02-05-2014 01:36 PM |
http://www.humorgazette.com/images/history_logo390.jpg
Quote:
In a recent diatribe, Adam Garfinkle, author of a critical book on the Vietnam-era Peace Movement (Telltale Hearts, 1995) unleashed a verbal blitzkrieg against the antiwar movement of the 1960s.
The protests, he contends, actually "lengthened the war and . . . more people were killed on account of them."
Why is that so? Garfinkle tells us, or at least tries: "the obscenity, illegality, and raging anti-patriotism of the antiwar protestors made them the most hated group in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s."
The movement provoked a backlash, Garfinkle assures us, that provoked a militant black power movement, gave George Wallace the credibility to become a mainstream candidate, prevented Hubert Humphrey from being elected in 1968, and actually elected Richard Nixon to the White House twice. Do Mulder and Scully know about all this?
I wish we could give Garfinkle's ideas the summary dismissal they so richly deserve, but, alas, there are others who feel likewise, and they hold political office, have radio programs, and "teach" young students their own sordid versions of this history.
These conservative and reactionary revisionists, by focusing on the movement against the war and holding it responsible for the horrors of Vietnam, offer an ahistorical and chauvinistic, not to mention amoral, view of the whole period.
They ignore the context of Vietnam, in which the United States, as it did so often in the Cold War era, violently intervened against a nationalist-Socialist movement that had the temerity to question Washington's hegemony.
Their work absolves the American leaders, from Roosevelt to Nixon, who made the critical decisions to deny self-determination to the Vietnamese and stole independence and unification from them in 1946 and 1954, who created a fictive puppet state in 1956, who waged a destructive war against the people of Indochina, who lied to the American people, who usurped power in the name of national security, who rejected democracy at home and abroad, and instead blames protestors for the death and mayhem.
These revisionists also assume that the war was noble and somehow could have succeeded (Garfinkle would have done well to look at my book Masters of War, which demonstrates just how deeply reluctant and opposed to involvement in Vietnam most military leaders were in the 1950s and 1960s, and points out the unwinnability of the war there).
They present--no surprise here--a monolithic view of the movement against the war that makes no distinction between the Weathermen, Joan Baez, Gold Star Mothers, Senators Frank Church or John Stennis, General Matthew Ridgway, the Berrigans, housewives, ministers or soldiers; all, we are told, were engaged in actions that were obscene, illegal and anti-patriotic.
In the end, though, Garfinkle's views consist precisely of the words he uses to deride the movement?ego and pure wind. It is not history.
The Peace Movement of the 1960s constituted the largest mass people's movement in U.S. history. It cut across lines of class, race, sex, religion, and other social characteristics. It forced the American people to confront, morally and practically, their government's role in the world and specifically its behavior in Vietnam.
It offered a systemic analysis of the antidemocratic nature of American politics and economy based on the concept of corporate liberalism, an outlook that helped shake the foundations of the system in 1968 and after. The Movement led to demands for accountability from political leaders and a general distrust of authority, calls for popular empowerment and participatory democracy.
It forced the media to report more truthfully and critically about an American war than it ever had before. It changed the American political landscape, providing the space for figures such as Senators Frank Church and George McGovern, or Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to speak out against the war.
It gave rise to larger oppositional forces that would create a counterculture since, young people in the 1960s reasoned, the individuals and the system which unleashed war in Vietnam could probably not be trusted to tend to society at home. And, most importantly for my purposes here, it has provided millions of activists with a legacy and a model for protests that has fueled social movements over the past three decades.
The movement against the Vietnam War should be celebrated and emulated.
Say it loud: I marched and I'm proud!
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Funny to hear conservatives expound on what they contend liberals "really" think, when they are mostly just making shit up to suit their bias. :1orglaugh
:stoned
ADG
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