Gary writes: << Lou and Dan are arguing about the correct attitude towards the soldiers who
fought in Vietnam. Here in Australia the Left heckled and jeered and
demonstrated against returning soldiers - calling them murderers etc. The
Right have lived off this mistake ever since. They never cease to remind
us how the "poor soldiers" were attacked by the Left.
>> Not quite. I merely took exception to Lou's statement that Vietnam-era GI's were victims rather than killers and pointed out that they were both. This was not meant as a justification for heckling returning soldiers or other feel-good moralistic exercises. Yes, agitate among the soldiers, fraternize, etc., but don't play down the fact that it wasn't just U.S. bombs and bullets that were killing millions of people in Southeast Asia, but U.S. soldiers.
By the way, Louis's celebration of the SWP's single-issue approach in the antiwar movement of the 60s and early 70s is a bit rich. The strategy was actually quite scandalous. By insisting that antiwar demos stick to the war issue and nothing else, the party found itself opposing anyone wishing to draw connections between imperialism and racism, urban decay, and so forth. Rather than using the antiwar movement to broaden political consciousness, the single-issue strategy did the opposite. As a result, the SWP managed to alienate every budding radical in existence, while finding itself in bed with bourgeois liberals like Birch Bayh. This was not Trotskyism, but a profound perversion.
While LP mourns the "sectarianism" of the Marxist left in those days, it was to some extent to be expected. The left by the late 60s was a formless void in the U.S., totally lacking in ideology and party structure. The various groups that rushed to fill the void were all playing catch-up, all struggling to answer questions and solve problems that had been left hanging in the late 40s and early 50s. It was inevitable that the competition would be fast and furious. The real tragedy is not that it occurred, but that it was cut short by the collapse of the American left in 1970-72.
Once again, it wasn't our fault. It was all the fault of ... history.
Dan Lazare.