Tuesday,
August 11, 2015
Where Did
the Antiwar Movement Go?
Or What
It Means When You Kill People On the Other Side of the Planet and No One
Notices
Protesters
demonstrating against the Vietnam War as they march through downtown
Philadelphia on March 26, 1966. (Photo: AP/Bill Ingraham via Flickr)
Let me
tell you a story about a moment in my life I’m not likely to forget even if,
with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It involves
a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only seemed to come
closer as time passed.
My best
guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate school where I
had been studying to become a China scholar and was then working as a
“movement” printer -- that is, in a print shop that produced radical
literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists. It was, of
course, “the Sixties,” though I didn’t know it then. Still, I had somehow
been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life trajectory
-- and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War.
Don’t get
me wrong. I wasn’t particularly early to protest it. I think I signed my first
antiwar petition in 1965 while still in college, but as late as 1968 -- people
forget the confusion of that era -- while I had become firmly antiwar, I still
wanted to serve my country abroad. Being a diplomat had been a dream of mine,
the kind of citizenly duty I had been taught to admire, and the urge to act in
such a fashion, to be of
service, was deeply embedded in me. (That I was
already doing so in protesting the grim war my government was prosecuting in
Southeast Asia didn’t cross my mind.) I actually applied to the State
Department, but it turned out to have no dreams of Tom Engelhardt. On the
other hand, the U.S. Information Agency, a propaganda outfit, couldn’t have
been more interested.
Only one
problem: they weren’t about to guarantee that they wouldn’t send a guy who had
studied Chinese, knew something of Asia, and could read French to Saigon.
However, by the time they had vetted me -- it took government-issue months and
months to do so -- I had grown far angrier about the war, so when they offered
me a job, I didn’t think twice about saying no.
Somewhere
in that same year, 1968, I joined a group called the Resistance and in an
elaborate public ceremony turned in my draft card to protest the war. For
several years, I had been increasingly involved in antiwar activism, had
marched on the Pentagon in the giant 1967 processional that Norman Mailer so
famously recorded in Armies
of the Night, and returned again a year or two later
when, for the first time in my life, I got tear-gassed.
For a
while, I had also been working as a draft counselor with a group whose
initials, BDRG, I remember. A quick
check of Google tells me that the acronym
stood for the Boston Draft Resistance Group. Somewhere in that period, I
helped set up an organization whose initials I also recall well: the CCAS. Though
hardly an inspired moniker, it stood for the Committee of Concerned Asian
Scholars. (That “concern” -- in case it’s not clear so many years later --
involved the same war that wouldn’t end.) With a friend, I designed and
produced its bulletin. As one of those “concerned scholars,” I also
helped write a group antiwar book, The
Indochina Story, which would be put out by a mainstream
publishing house.
Of
course, there’s much that I’ve forgotten and I can’t claim that all of the
above is in perfect order. Even at the time, life was a blur of
activism. Nearly half a century later, I’m a failing archive of my own
life and so much seems irretrievable.
My
intention here, however, is simply to offer a sense of how so many lives came,
in part or in whole, to revolve around that war, while other things went by the
wayside. It’s true that our government hadn’t mobilized us, but we had
mobilized ourselves. Though much has been written about “dropping out” in
the 1960s, this antiwar form of it has been far less attended to.
Images of
War
So much
of what I’m describing must seem utterly alien today. At a time when
America’s endless wars might as well be millions of miles from our shores (and
the national security state desperately
needs a few “lone-wolf” Islamic terror types to
drive home how crucial it is to our protection), it’s hard to remember how
large the Vietnam War once loomed in our national life. In this age in
which Americans have
been demobilized from the wars fought in our name, who
recalls how many people took to the streets how repeatedly in those Vietnam
years, or how much the actions of our government were passionately debated from
Congress to kitchens, or how deeply plagued and unnerved two
American presidents were by the uproar and fuss? Who remembers how little
the antiwar movement of that moment was a weekend operation and how central
throwing some kind of monkey wrench into that war became to so many lives?
Much of
the tenacious antiwar opposition of that era, when thought about now, is
automatically attributed to the draft, to the fact that young men like me were
subject to being called up and sent thousands of miles from home to fight in a
conflict that looked more brutal, despicable, and even criminal by the
second. And there is, of course, some truth to that explanation, but it’s
a very partial, dismissive truth, one that, for instance, doesn’t explain the
vast number of young women who mobilized against the war in those years.
While the
draft was a factor in the growth of war consciousness, it was hardly the only
one. It’s easy to forget that a generation raised in the Golden Fifties
believed the American system would work for them and that, if it didn’t, it was
the obligation of the citizen to try to fix it. Those young people were
convinced that, if you spoke up loudly enough and in large enough numbers,
presidents would listen. They also believed that you, as an American, had
an obligation to step forward, to represent the best in your country, to
serve. Hence my urge to join the State Department. In other words,
I came from a generation primed -- in part by the successes of the Civil Rights
Movement (when it seemed that presidents were listening) -- to believe that, in
a democratic country, protest worked.
Of
course, by the time the antiwar movement took off, it was hardly stylish to
admit to such sentiments
of service, but that didn’t make them less real.
They were crucial to a passionate protest that began mainly with students but
grew to include everyone from clergy to businessmen, and that, in its later
years, would be led by disillusioned military veterans home from the country’s
Southeast Asian battlefields.
The
importance of an antiwar movement that refused to stand down, that -- while two
administrations continually escalated the killing in Vietnam and spread it to
Laos and Cambodia -- never packed up its tents and went home, can’t be
emphasized too strongly. Its refusal to shut up brought Vietnam, both
literally and figuratively, to America’s doorstep. It made that grim war
a living (and dying) presence in American lives -- and no less important was
what it made present.
Somehow,
from so many thousands of miles away, we were turned into witnesses to repeated
horrors on a staggering scale in a small, largely
peasant land: free-fire zones, the body count, torture, assassination, war
crimes, the taking of trophy body parts, and above all the feeling that a
spectacle of slaughter was occurring and we were responsible for it. We
here at home had a growing sense of what it meant for the U.S. military to
fight a war against guerilla forces (which, at least on the left, came --
unlike the Islamic insurgents of the twenty-first century -- to look ever more
heroic and sympathetic), with every means available short of nuclear
weapons. That included bombing campaigns that, in the end, would outdo
in tonnage those of World War II.
The
images of that time still remain with me, including Ron Haeberle’s horrific
photos of the My Lai massacre, which appeared in LIFE
magazine in December 1969, and Associated Press photographer Nick Ut’s iconic
1972 shot of a young Vietnamese girl napalmed
by a South Vietnamese plane and caught in pain and terror running naked down a
road.
If you
were in the antiwar movement in those years, you couldn’t help coming across
testimony by American soldiers who had been in Vietnam and were ready to paint
a nightmarish picture of what they and their companions had seen or done
there. In the growing alternative or (as it was romantically termed then)
“underground” press of those pre-Internet days, snapshots of unbearable
atrocities were soon circulating. These undoubtedly came directly from
soldiers who had snapped them, or knew those who had, or were like the
servicemen -- stirred to action by a growing military antiwar movement -- who
appeared at the Winter
Soldier Investigation in 1971. There, they essentially
testified against themselves on the commission of war crimes. Others
similarly moved handed such photos over to alternative publications.
I’ve
never forgotten, for instance, a trophy shot I saw in those years, of an
American soldier proudly holding up a severed Vietnamese head by the
hair. (If you want to imagine the impact such photos had, click
here to see one that circulated in the
alternative press at that time.)
In those
years, thanks to the efforts of the antiwar movement, the Vietnamese -- the
dead, the wounded, the mistreated, as well as “the enemy” (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi
Minh, NLF Is Gonna Win!”) -- seemed to come ever closer to us until, though I
was living in quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sometimes had the eerie feeling
that Vietnamese were dying right outside my window. In the post-9/11
American world, that sounds both ludicrous and histrionic. You’ll have to
take my word for it that I’m not exaggerating and that the sensation was
visceral indeed.
A
Spectacle of Slaughter
Which
finally brings me to that clunky television set. At some point in 1968 or
1969, I got an old black-and-white TV. I have no idea whether I bought it
or someone gave it to me. I do remember one thing about it, though.
In that era before remote controls, the dial you turned by hand to change
channels was broken, so I used a pair of pliers. Sometimes, I had it
running on my desk while I worked; sometimes, it was propped on a chair, just
an arm’s reach from my bed. (Remember those pliers!) And in the off
hours when old movies filled schedules on secondary channels, I began to re-watch
the westerns, adventure films, and war movies of my childhood.
I no
longer know what possessed me to do so, but it became an almost obsessional
activity. I watched at least 30 to 40 of them, no small feat in the era
before you could find anything you wanted online at a moment’s notice.
Keep in mind that those films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s -- grade
B-westerns, John Wayne-style World War II movies, and the like -- were for me
the definition of entertainment sunny side up. I had only the fondest
memories of such films, in part because they were bedrock to the American way
of life as I understood it.
You
always knew what to expect: the Indians (or Mexicans, or Japanese) would fall
in vast numbers, the cavalry would ride to the rescue in the nick of time, the
Marines -- it hardly needed to be said -- would advance triumphantly before the
movie ended, the West would be won, victory assured. It was how it was
and how it should be.
Add in a
more personal factor: my father had been in World War II in the Pacific.
It wasn’t something he generally cared to talk about. (In fact, it made
him angry.) But he often took me to such films and when we sat together
in silence in some movie theater watching Americans fight his war (or cowboys and
blue shirts fight the Indian wars), I felt close to him. In that shared
silence, I felt his stamp of approval on what we were watching. If he and
his generation were far more conflicted and less talkative about their war
experiences than we now like to remember, they really didn’t need to say much
in those days. After all, we kids knew what they had done; we had seen it
sitting beside them at the movies.
Imagine
my shock, on looking at those films again so many years later -- with that
visceral sense of Vietnamese dying in my neighborhood -- when I realized that
the sunniest part of my childhood had been based on a spectacle of
slaughter. The “Vietnamese” had always been the ones to fall in
staggering numbers just before the moment of victory, or when the wagon train again
advanced into the West, or the cowboy got the girl.
Consider
this my own tiny version of the disillusionment so many experienced with the
previously all-American in those years. Our country’s triumphs, I
suddenly realized, had been built on conquest and on piles of nonwhite bodies.
Believe
me, looking back on one of the sunniest parts of my childhood from that antiwar
moment was a shock and it led me to produce “Ambush at Kamikaze Pass,” the
first critical essay of my life, for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars. “Anyone who thinks the body count is a creation of the
recent Indochinese war,” I wrote then, “should look at the movies he saw as a
kid. It was the implicit rule of those films that no less than ten Indian
(Japanese, Chinese...) warriors should fall for each white, expendable
secondary character.” Almost a quarter century later, it would become the
heart of my book The
End of Victory Culture.
The
Spectacle of Slaughter Updated
In 2015,
the spectacle of slaughter is still with us. These days, however, few
Americans have that sense that it might be happening right down the
street. War is no longer a part of our collective lives. It’s been
professionalized and outsourced. And here’s the wonder of it all: since
9/11, this country has engaged in a military-first foreign policy across much
of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, launching an unending string of
failed
wars, conflicts, raids, kidnappings, acts of
torture, and drone
assassination programs, and yet Americans have remained remarkably
unengaged with any of it.
This is
not happenstance. There is, of course, no draft. President Richard
Nixon ended
it in 1973 with the demobilizing of the antiwar
movement in mind. Similarly, the military high command never again wanted
to experience a citizen’s army reaching an almost
mutinous state and voting with its feet or its antiwar
testimony or its medals.
Ever since Vietnam, the urge of successive administrations and an
ever-expanding national security state has been to fight wars without the
involvement of the American people (or the antiwar version of democratic
oversight). Hence, the rise of the warrior
corporation and the privatization of war.
Especially
after 9/11, a kind of helplessness settled over Americans left out
in the cold when it came to the wars being fought in
their name. In some sense, most of us accepted our newly assigned role as
a surveilled and protected populace whose order of the day was don’t
get involved.
In other
words, amid all the military failures of this era, there was a single hardly
mentioned but striking victory: no antiwar movement of any significance proved
to have staying power in this country. Osama bin Laden can, at least in
part, be thanked for that. The 9/11 attacks, the shock of the apocalyptic-looking collapse
of those towers in New York, and the loss of almost 3,000 innocent civilians
inoculated America’s second Afghan War -- launched in October 2001 and still
ongoing -- against serious protest.
The
invasion of Iraq would prove another matter entirely. That act of Bush
administration hubris, based on kited
intelligence and a full-scale White House propaganda
campaign filled with misinformation, brought briefly
to life something unique to our era: a massive antiwar movement that preceded
the launching of the war it was protesting. Those prewar demonstrations,
which stretched worldwide, ran into the hundreds
of thousands and were impressive enough that the New
York Times front-paged “public
opinion” as the other “superpower” in a post-Cold War world.
But as
soon as the Bush administration launched its much-desired invasion, the
domestic movement against it began to crumble. Within a couple of years
-- with the exception of small
groups of antiwar veterans -- it was essentially
dead. In the end, Americans would generally live through their
twenty-first-century wars as if they weren’t happening. There would
neither be an everyday antiwar movement into which anyone could “drop out,” nor
a population eager to be swept into it. Its lack would be a modest
tragedy for American politics and our waning democracy; it would prove far more
so for Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and others.
For the
spectacle of slaughter itself continued, even if few in this country were
tuning in. Don’t consider it a fluke that the war culture hero of the
period -- on the bestseller
lists and in Hollywood -- was
an American
sniper whose claim to fame was that he had created
his own singular body count: 160 “confirmed” dead Iraqis. Skip the
unknown number of casualties of every sort (ranging from Iraq Body Count’s 219,000 up to a million dead)
that resulted from the invasion of Iraq and the chaos of the occupation that
followed or the tens of thousands of civilian
dead in Afghanistan (some at the hands of the
Taliban and their roadside bombs, some thanks to U.S. efforts). Consider
instead the slaughter that can be connected to this country’s much-vaunted “precision” air
weaponry, which -- so the claim has gone -- can strike without causing what’s
politely termed significant “collateral damage.”
Start
with the drone, a robotic machine that guarantees one thing in the ongoing
spectacle of slaughter: no American combatant will ever die in its operations,
no matter how many Afghans, or Yemenis, or Iraqis, or Syrians, or Pakistanis,
or Libyans, or Somalis may die when it releases its aptly named Hellfire
missiles. From that heroic investigative crew, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, we have
an approximation of the casualties on the ground from Washington’s drone
assassination campaigns across the Greater Middle East, and they run
into the thousands
(including hundreds of children) and lots of what might be called the mistaken
dead. Keep in mind that the most basic
drone attack of Washington’s wars in the Greater Middle East has been the “signature
strike,” as it’s euphemistically known. These
target not specific individuals, but groups on the ground that seem to fit
certain behavioral patterns suspected of being telltale marks of terror outfits
-- particularly young men with weapons (in regions in which young men are
likely to be armed, whatever their affiliations).
Or
consider U.S. air strikes targeting the Islamic State’s forces in Iraq and
Syria. Again, with the grim exception of one
Jordanian pilot, there have, as far as we know, been no
casualties among American and allied combatants. That shouldn’t be a
surprise, since the Islamic State (like just about every group the U.S. Air
Force has faced in the twenty-first century) is incapable of bringing down a
fighter jet. In the last year, according to a recent
report, the U.S. and its allies have launched more
than 5,700 strikes against Islamic State operations, claiming at least 15,000
dead militants. (Such figures, impossible to confirm on the ground under the circumstances,
are undoubtedly fantasies.) The Pentagon has acknowledged only two
civilian deaths from all these strikes, but a new
study by Airwars of what can be known about just
some of them indicates that hundreds of civilians have died, including more
than 100 children.
To offer
one more example, since December 2001 U.S. air power has obliterated at
least eight wedding parties in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Yemen). According to my count (and as far as I know there are no others),
just under 300 people died in these eight strikes, including brides, grooms,
and celebrants of every sort. Each of these incidents was reported in the
western media, but none had the slightest impact here. They went
essentially unnoticed. To put this in perspective, imagine for a moment
the media uproar, the shock, the scandal, the 24/7 coverage, if anyone or any
group were to knock off a single wedding party in this country.
And this
just scratches the surface of Washington's long “global war on terror.”
Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and slaughter that has
been at the heart of that war has passed largely unnoticed here. Unlike
in the Vietnam years, it’s never really come home. In an era in which
successes have been in short supply for two administrations, consider this a
major one. War without an antiwar movement turns out to mean war without
pause, war without end.
Admittedly,
American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century equivalents of
the movies of my childhood. Such films couldn’t be made. After all,
few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines advancing amid a
pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the horizon, or the cowboy
galloping off on his horse with his girl. Think of this as onscreen
evidence of American imperial decline.
In the
badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of slaughter never
ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes
unnerved drone video analysts. Could there be a
sadder tale of a demobilized citizenry than that?
© 2014
TomDispatch.com
Tom
Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs
the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His
latest book is, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State
in a Single-Superpower World (with an
introduction by Glenn Greenwald). Previous books include Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (co-authored
with Nick Turse), The
United States of Fear, The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, The
End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well
as of a novel, The
Last Days of Publishing. To stay on top of important
articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email:
mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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