Dennis wrote:
>
> Forwarded by Carrol Cox:
>
> >
> >
> > There are no Vietnamese victors on the Vietnam Wall, yet
> > millions of them died -- and changed the world.
>
> While I agree with the class analysis earlier in the piece, I'm not so sure
> about the above. I lean to the Chomskian view of the war, that the US did
> indeed win,
Yes and no. One could say the same of all the struggles of the last 200 years, from those of Simon Bolivar and Toussaint L'Ouverture to those of Mao and Martin Luther King (or the struggles symbolized by those names). And we who built the anti-war movement in the U.S. clearly failed too in a double sense. We did not stop the war before the savagery of which you speak had done its work. And we did not make our case strongly enough -- establish a strong enough tradition on the left -- to prevent the appearance on a left maillist 30 years later of a defense of the racist politics of the MIA/POW movement.
But for all that, these were all victories. Without these catastrophic victories or victorious defeats this list, for example, would not be here. A small thing, perhaps, but it counts for more than nothing -- one sign among many that the struggle is not over, and that we owe much to the past. Solidarity extends vertically in time as well as horizontally in space.
Carrol