You know, I opposed the war in Iraq, if not quite from the very beginning, at least by August of 2003. By that time I had learned that we’d been thoroughly lied to and that we were headed into a quagmire. I never claimed to be so prescient as to realize that our entire country had gone collectively insane. It took me a few months to come to grips with that reality.
The first thing I did was to apologize to my friends that had been appropriately skeptical. Then I dedicated my life to political opposition to the Bush regime. But, for all my opposition, I never advocated political violence. I merely wanted the American electorate to repudiate (at the ballot box) what had been done in their name. That has been accomplished.
I don’t know how similar this all is to the Vietnam War, but I never had any sympathy for people that resort to violent opposition.
He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. I don’t believe in political violence either but this doesn’t mean I have anything but contempt for the Republicans and for their truly despicable form of campaigning; that is, character assassination and political smear jobs.
If they stick to the record, employ facts and not innuendos, concentrate on ideas and proposals, avoid making religiosity a litmus test for approval, they would have my respect. But, when they campaign from a perspective of almost complete negativity as McCain and Palin did in this recent campaign, then, you have to wonder what is their problem, other than abusive parents at a critical stage of development.
I think sympathy for the conservatives is in order, but so is education into some of the most fundamental aspects of child psychology. For most of the Republican right, I feel it is a lost cause. They will never overcome the emotional damage they sustained
when young, and, hence, their lives will be haunted with fear and misery. What a bummer.
With no disrespect at all, BooMan, it’s not all about America and Americans. Perhaps, instead of apologizing to your friends and other self-centered actions, you should think about adopting an Iraqi displaced family and contributing, say, $50 a month to help them with the basic necessities of staying alive.
Certainly it is very commendable that you dedicated so much of yourself to opposing the Bush regime, but that, unfortunately, has not helped the victims of the massive crime that you supported until you realized that YOU had been lied to.
I, for one, was standing on the roof with my hair on fire shouting about the lies every day starting September 11, 2001 when, just hours after the attacks in New York it became clear that they were going to opportunistically try to pin those crimes on Saddam and use it as a pretext for aggression against Iraq. Tragically, not enough people believed me and not enough of those who believed me cared enough to do what it took to stop it.
I’m with you, Hurria, in having recognised this for what it was right from the outset. It was abundantly clear from the beginning that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 11 September. There was also very good evidence from the UN weapons inpectors that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. The old truth that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick applied to the Iraq situation. The whole situation owed far more to personal revenge by Dubya for the supposed assasination attempt on his dad, together with the opportunity for domestic political advantage: for some bizarre reason, Americans love to support their government having a war.
As for Vietnam, BooMan, I’m old enough to remember the later part of that war. And it was exactly the same. The war was conducted for many years for domestic American political reasons, until it turned toxic for the President. The problem is, it’s hard to find your way out of what you got into. Unfortunately, Dubya hasn’t found the formula for peace with honour.
Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin…?
Yes, revolution, revolution, that is, the American Revolution which founded a country on violence. Well, America is exceptional.
Balls, bullocks, and more balls. Except for the uselessness of the war, Vietnam was totally different.
It started in the 50s with the US providing “military advisors”, because of our fear of the Great Russian Bear and the domino theory. Somehow, if Vietnam fell to Communism, Barack Obama would be elected President the very next day. Also, theoretically part of our obligations to SEATO.
The advisory position, slowly but inexorably, through Kennedy’s term, escalated to a war before most people even knew what was going on.
The big differences: there was no attack on the US of A that sparked it; the fighting and dying was televised and reported on–we got to see soldiers dying as well as civilians (My Lai, anyone???), we got to see the caskets; there was a military draft that affected all families, except the Cheneys and Bushes. And people weren’t as fat, lazy, and complacent in those days.
Um, ahhh… there was no attack on the US by Iraq, either.
The folks who created this nation weren’t against violent opposition to an oppressive government and if it got bad enough I bet lots of people would be all for it. The issue is that folks like Ayers thought it was bad enough before enough other people did so they were simply a radical fringe group. It’s not hard to see how the founders of this nation could have been viewed similarly if they weren’t successful.
Let’s be clear, I am in no way advocating nor using nor planning to use or advocate any kind of violence for ANY cause.
But I’ve got to ask – why is state-supported violence ok? Why is it ok to send in the military in X conflict (whichever one you support) but violence by non-state groups aka “terrorists” like the WU not ok?
I could even say well ok up until 1945 the Congress, which is elected by the people, DECLARED war when the military went into conflict (not exactly true but I’ll stipulate to it) and then those are the people’s representatives so that’s different.
But 1945 was a heck of a long time ago and there’s been a whole lot of killing going on in Korea, China, Haiti, the Phillippines, Yemen, Panama, Iraq, Cambodia, Laos, Granada, Serbia AND Vietnam (etc etc) since then and one lousy little “AUMF” hardly seems to cover it as a democratic act.
The “sainted” Founding Fathers et al tried every diplomatic and peaceful political means they could think of to resolve their differences and end tyranny. What makes their act of rebellion any different than the WU’s way of trying to stop an undemocratic and wholesale slaughter of millions of Asians and tens of thousands of Americans in three different countries?
The WU wasn’t formed in a vacuum. It came after Kent State and a whole lot of other peaceful, political, democratic methods failed. And considering their extreme caution in methodology, it seems like a pretty tepid group to rail against.
Maybe if we had a few more Paul Reveres and Benjamin Rushes running around today the mainstream body politic of the USA wouldn’t be quibbling over how much torture is “ok” and the myriad other symptoms of a police state we got going on.
Just saying.
Pax
Opposition to the Vietnam War began in 1965. In three years it was clear that the Democrats would continue the war and the Republicans would advocate carpet bombing North Vietnam as well as Vietcong strongholds in the South (tell me outside of Saigon, what was not at some point or other considered a Vietcong stronghold). So essentially there were no voices before Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy against the war. McCarthy was weak and Kennedy was assassinated. So at the 1968 Democratic convention there were no moderating voices on the inside of the establishment. And most of the critical voices were youth, inexperienced in effective politics.
And you had massive suppression of peaceful protests on a large scale beginning with the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. People were getting seriously beat up in large numbers at every protest.
Meanwhile, ideologically parts of a loose coalition of groups in the peace movement started becoming more extreme in their frustration over their inability to stop the war. One of the boy geniuses came up with the idea that you stop the war by stopping the movement of goods and troops to the war front. Thus the many protests in San Francisco and other places that were ports of embarkation for goods and troops going to Vietnam.
In two years after the Democratic Convention, and with a group that withdrew into a cult-like organization cut off from friends, family, outsiders and with a revolutionary mythology, the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society began movement toward a campaign of violence to stop a war of violence. In the process, they succeeded only in killing four of their members and blowing up a Greenwich village townhouse.
Youth + shut out of political process + unwillingness to let the war continue until politics caught up with its failure + withdrawal into a cult-like organization + revolutionary mythology = senseless violence
Every single term of that equation is different about the Iraq War. The opposition to the Iraq War has benefited from many veterans of the Vietnam peace movement. There has been opposition within the establishment from the beginning. The political process has resulted in the election of an opponent of the Iraq War as president. The blogs prevent the isolation and withdrawal that created cults of revolution in the early 1970s.
That’s the difference.
I was against the Vietnam war and I viewed myself as a traditional pacifist, that is, against all violence. I am still an almost pacifist, there have to be extraordinary circumstances in order to raise me to violent reaction, but I don’t dismiss the possibility. It’s just that it’s not a very effective strategy for people without state power.
Back in the day, when the Weathermen were blowing up trashcans in solidarity with the workers of the world and issuing manifestos that just irritated and insulted most people, I knew that this kind of agit-prop was counterproductive, not because it was “violent” but because it was so disconnected from the thinking of most Americans. It was as if the U.S. military-intelligence milieu invented the Weathermen to antagonize the average American into hating the anti-war movement.
In fact, there was so much infiltration of the Left by military intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, etc., that many of us presumed that the outliers of the SDS were working for The Man.
I’m not surprised that forty years later Bill Ayers has migrated to academia and is still embarrassing the left side of the spectrum.
Even in hindsight, the Weathermen smell fishy. The case against them was theoretically dropped to protect cointelpro, which had already been exposed anyway. The Weathermen were a poster child for Cointelpro, as there were very good arguments for keeping such a group under surveillance, unlike the bulk of Cointelpro targets. The group that paid them to spring Leary had deep CIA connections according to Acid Dreams by Shalin and Lee. They were thoroughly infiltrated, yet stayed successfully on the lam for years. What I suspect the “national security” concern was was that some of the infiltrators had themselves been implicated in the bombings, and the government could not risk having that come out in trial, especially since it was on record proclaiming the bombings terrorist and seditious acts. How can government agents justify such acts?
I’ve felt the need to set the record straight about some allegations about the WU, including from you Booman, that they had actually murdered people, for which there seems to be no evidence, or (from others) that they wanted to but were too incompetent, which is ridiculous in light of what they actually pulled off. They were carefully not murderers, so far as we know, which is important in judging them. I also do not believe that people who attacked government property rather than people can be called “terrorists”: property cannot feel terror.
All that said, some of the statements attributed to them sound demented or deluded. Praising the Manson murders as some kind of class warfare? Shows how morally bankrupt the notion of class warfare can become. Talking shyt about slaughtering millions? Considering their actual capabilities, they must’ve been pretty loaded to say that, but it still suggests a glorification of violence that has no legitimate function. Now, I’m not sure all these attributed statements are true; the last in particular comes from an infiltrator trying to justify his illegal actions, so it is suspect.
Vietnam was certainly worse than Iraq: the US was routinely firebombing entire villages (there is no way to “precision” napalm), even entire regions. The “Ho Chi Mihn trail” was a river valley inhabited by hundreds of thousands, and the US set out to “destroy” it. Only the second siege of Fallujah approaches this territory, and even there, most of the population was allowed to evacuate.
So a case could be made for sabotage in opposition to Vietnam. But I don’t buy that that was the deeper WU motivation. Ayers describes his movement in terms primarily of particularly American problems: the Vietnam war and America’s treatment of blacks. But similar things were going on all over the world at that time, arguing for different apparent causes, but still apparently interrelated. The 60’s were before my time, and I don’t understand the upswell of radicalism very well, and don’t know if anyone does. So I am reluctant to judge it. But the Weathermen seem to have been susceptible to finding a moral banner under which violence could be glorified and gloried in, a common and very dangerous phenomenon in history. The Greenwich incident, perhaps, ended that, but falling for it in the first place does not speak well of them as advocates of “peace”.
As for what they accomplished: they sprung Leary, and gummed up the Pentagon for a few days. Other than that, they and the Maoist idiots killed SDS, perhaps the most effective student radical organization of the 20th century, and did much to discredit the very causes they espoused, and even the non-political aspects of the counter-culture of which they were members. Not much of a legacy, really.
A minor correction: I do not think that what the US was doing in Iraq is so far behind what it was doing in Vietnam. First, while it is true that “only” military-age males were barred from leaving Fallujah during the second siege (and later we learnt that the Marines were under orders to shoot everyone on sight — in effect, an extermination campaign), the ‘evacuation’ progressed while fighting was going on, which was even more the case during the first siege. Second, Fallujah was not the only city besieged by the US, only the most extreme and prominent case. Several smaller “Sunni Triangle” places, central Najaf, and at least parts of Tal Afar.
Gotta love the opining, with statements like these:
“I don’t know how similar this all is to the Vietnam War…”
“The 60’s were before my time, and I don’t understand the upswell of radicalism very well…”
Well, let’s see. I was in fourth grade, when my third grade teacher rushed into the room to tell us all that the President had been shot. That was in 63. Last one had been McKinley. Prior to Kennedy’s assassination, Medgar Evars had been killed. During the next decade, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, Bobby Kennedy was killed, and the next decade started with four students being killed at Kent State.
Really, how could the upswell of radicalism have started? Seems to me, the upswell of radicalism came after the upswell of radicalism, which was merely an adjunct of hanging whatever Negro you didn’t like.
That I have to be lectured to by people, pseudo progressives, about our history, who know nothing about our history, is frightening, and I consider it a fault of mine that I waste my time reading.
Of course, as I clearly stated, the upswell of radicalism I spoke of was global: it happened in France, in Czechoslovakia, and in Mexico more dramatically than it did in the US. If you really think Dubcek, Svoboda, and Dubord were reacting primarily to the death of US political figures, you are a political narcissist of the first rank. Which makes sense given the arrogance and stupidity of a remark insisting that the entire character of an age even can be, much less must be, monocausal.
Er, Dubček was not a radical. If anything, the Prague Spring was the one 1968 event that did not spawn violent radicals. (After all, Dubček even called on people to not fight the Warshaw Pact tanks, thus things played out quite differently than 1956 in Hungary.)
Of course your general point that this was global stands. However, map106’s more general point also stands globally: the the rise of progressive movements and politicians in the sixties was met by violence from both the state and right-wing radicals outside the USA, too, which led more or less directly to the emergence and escalation of violent opposition.
For example, in Germany, violence started with the 1967 murder of Benno Ohnesorg. This inspired approval for material destruction, which was realised in the form of arson against shopping centers the next year, by a group that would form the core of the terrorist organisation Red Army Faction (known in English under the misnomer “Baader-Meinhof gang”). However, their escalation to violence against people was still two years away when a far-right guy attempted the assassination of Rudi Dutschke.
In Italy, the progressive political upheaval peaked in the autumn of 1969. Then on 12 December that year, some neofascists laid a bomb at Piazza Fontana in Milan (16 dead). This was followed by a turn to violence on the far-left, the Red Brigades terror organisation was founded in August 1970.
his was followed by a turn to violence on the far-left,
…the GAP terror organisation started operating in the spring of 1970, and…
GAP is notable for being founded and led by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the publisher who discovered, published and made world-famous Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. There are some strange biographies.
I would say that Dubcek and Svoboda were radicals in that they tried to fundamentally change their society. What they were not was violent. They also emerged from within the system. However, non-violent change from within the system was all that was going to emerge under Communism anyway; the police state was too effective for anything else to get off the ground. In the short run, that probably made Stalinism seem stronger, but as we now see, it made it weaker.
The point that radicalism grew violent in response to violent suppression is well-taken, though I would not credit map106 with saying that: for one thing, JFK was not a radical, and, if he was not killed by Oswald, it is debatable why he was killed, but it was not for trying to overthrow the system, violently or otherwise.
And for people who have sat through eight years of Bush and done virtually nothing but type on a computer, your cluelessness is recklessly “endearing”.
You don’t know shit about me nor I about you, nor will we in this forum since either of us can claim anything, and I for one will not believe any claim of yours, “map106”. So stop being presumptuous.
Hm, Booman, I don’t get you at all.
There is the specific case at hand. Have you even read the article you link to? with the quote falsely attributed to Ayers?
In the general case, as others have noted, what about the very founders of your country? Or violent Abolitionists?
I’m not asking about approval for those acts, but if we talk about Vietnam-War-era violent opposition, let’s talk about some serious violence rather than what the WU did: don’t you consider the practice of fragging as something that had a significant part in ending that war?
In the end, what’s the point of, and/or inspiration for, your post? Is it having residual troubles with Obama being associated to Ayers?