Nathan
>Why should anyone be impressed with an antiwar movement that had
>two-thirds of the populations' support for ending the war in 1971, yet
>couldn't stop the carpet bombing and mass murder in Cambodia in 1973?
-Gimme a break. That question is so loaded it can't even step up out of -the gutter. -Any the people win a major victory (like both the civil rights movement -and the anti-vietnam war movement did) the mainstream propagandist will -give the standard line: "Oh you people had nothing to do with it."
Sorry-- whatever you think I am not a mainstream propagandist. I'm a leftist questioning the retrograde tactics of babyboomers justified by a "success" that seems rather limited.
>The anti-Vietnam movement could not end the bombing of Cambodia in 1972?
>Remember they had just won popular support. I think 1971 was pretty
>close to first year there even an an antivietnam majority.
No- that was 1968 after Tet. By 1971, the numbers were two-thirds saying the war had been a mistake.
Part of left mythology is their righteousness as the only ones who saw that the war was fucked. They got their earlier but by surprisingly early, the American people had joined them. The political class made up the rear, but remember both Humphrey and Nixon were promising to end the war in 1968, bowing to that majority will against the war.
>But they played a huge part in ending the Vietnam war. Pick the memoir
>of your choice by an leading establishment figure who supported the
>Vietnam war and then turned against it.
Tip O'Neill, who was one of the first major Democratic leaders to turn against the war by early 1968. He said the local peace protesters were not what turned him against the war, but letters and meetings with working class families who denounced a war killing their children.
Look, I'm not anti-demonstrations per se, but narrow fringe rallies do little good. And marches in general are very overrated. They are mostly pep rallies -- which are useful if they lead to follow up organizing.
So let me backtrack-- I think the early antiwar movement did some very good work in public education, in town meetings, in organizing people to write their Congresspeople denouncing the war. But after 1968, much of the antiwar movement became obsessed with big rallies and public actions, rather than the grubby door-to-door organizing. And that is the failure that we should not emulate today.
-- Nathan newman