Remembrance of Wars Past: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement in America

[KoKo]

Remembrance of Wars Past
Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement in America
By Tom Engelhardt

Well, it’s one, two, three, look at that amputee,
At least it’s below the knee,
Could have been worse, you see.
Well, it’s true your kids look at you differently,
But you came in an ambulance instead of a hearse,
That’s the phrase of the trade,
It could have been worse.]

-- First verse of a Vietnam-era song written by U.S. Air Force medic Bob Boardman off Country Joe McDonald’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"

There was the old American lefty paper, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, which beat the Sixties into the world, and its later imitators like the Boston Phoenix. There was Liberation News Service, the Rat in New York, the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, the Old Mole in Boston, the distinctly psychedelic Chicago Seed, Leviathan, Viet-Report, and the L.A. Free Press, as well as that Texas paper whose name I long ago forgot that was partial to armadillo cartoons. And they existed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a jostling crowd of hundreds of “underground” newspapers -- all quite aboveground but the word sounded so romantic in that political moment. There were G.I. antiwar papers by the score and high school rags by the hundreds in an “alternate” universe of opposition that somehow made the rounds by mail or got passed on hand-to-hand in a now almost unimaginable world of interpersonal social networking that preceded the Internet by decades. And then, of course, there was I.F. Stone’s Weekly (1953-1971): one dedicated journalist, 19 years, every word his own (except, of course, for the endless foolishness he mined from the reams of official documentation produced in Washington, Vietnam, and elsewhere)

I can remember the arrival of that newsletter, though I no longer know whether I subscribed myself or simply shared someone else’s copy. In a time when being young was supposed to be glorious, Stone was old -- my parents’ age -- but still we waited on his words. It helped to have someone from a previous generation confirm in nuts and bolts ways that the issue that swept so many of us away, the Vietnam War, was indeed an American atrocity.

The Call to Service

They say you can’t go home again, but recently, almost 44 years after I saw my last issue of theWeekly -- Stone was 64 when he closed up shop; I was 27 -- I found the full archive of them, all 19 years, online, and began reading him all over again. It brought back a dizzying time in which we felt “liberated” from so much that we had been brought up to believe and -- though we wouldn’t have understood it that way then -- angered and forlorn by the loss as well. That included the John Wayne version of America in which, at the end of any war film, as the Marine Corps Hymn welled up, American troops advanced to a justified victory that would make the world a better place. It also included a far kinder-hearted but allied vision of a country, a government, that was truly ours, and to which we owed -- and one dreamed of offering -- some form of service. That was deeply engrained in us, which was why when, in his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy so famously called on us to serve, the response was so powerful. (“And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”) Soon after, my future wife went into the Peace Corps like tens of thousands of other young Americans, while I dreamed, as I had from childhood, of becoming a diplomat in order to represent our country abroad.

And that sense of service to country ran so deep that when the first oppositional movements of the era arose, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, the impulse to serve was essential to them, as it clearly was to I.F. Stone. The discovery that under your country’s shining veneer lay a series of nightmares might have changed how that sense of obligation was applied, but it didn’t change the impulse. Not at all.

In his writing, Stone was calm, civil, thoughtful, fact-based, and still presented an American world that looked shockingly unlike the one you could read about in what wasn’t yet called “the mainstream media” or could see on the nightly network news. (Your TV still had only 13 channels, without a zapper in sight.) A researcher par excellence, Stone, like the rest of us, lacked the ability to see into the future, which meant that some of his fears (“World War III”) as well as his dreams never came true. But on the American present of that time, he was remarkably on target. Rereading some of his work so many decades later set me thinking about the similarities and differences between that moment of eternal war in Indochina and the present endless war on terror.

Continued At:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175951/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_i.f._stone_and_the_urge_to_serve

[Downtown Hound]

1. Well, there's none right now because other than a few thousand troops in Afghanistan

and some bombing of ISIS we're not really at war. As for the Iraq War, I'm of the opinion that the anti-war movement against it was very large and very strong. Millions protested the run up to the war, hundreds of thousands protested at different times while it was going on. The 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC had more arrests than any other political convention in the history of the United States, including the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The 2008 RNC saw riots, mass police brutality and use of tear gas, all the things that happened in the 60's.

And all of this happened without a draft. After the war the movement turned its attention to Wall Street, as that was the more pressing issue for most.

Maybe the movement wasn't as strong as we would have liked, but it was definitely alive and definitely made its impact.

[KoKo]

2. We did have the Draft ....that made a huge difference. Even if the very Wealthy/Entitled

could get out of it...the Middle Class got stuck if they didn't have connections. These days we depend on the poor who need a job and the rambo young who are always fodder for war for the adventure, excitement they crave..

Also, these days we have "Private Contractors"...and if they die...we don't know about it. We had more media then that would talk about Vietnam Vets protesting against the War and we had those who went to Canada because they refused to kill. We just aren't invested in it because we don't really see the harm. We pay for it with our tax dollars, though.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

3. bring back the draft and print this picture on the cover of a magazine

WARNING - MY Lia photo

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?&id=HN.608042252932287365&w=300&h=300&c=0&pid=1.9&rs=0&p=0

[awoke_in_2003]

4. Be the first one on your block

to have your boy come home in a box.


K&R

[Scuba]

5. Kick.

[KoKo]

6. Good Weekend read...for Those Who Remember..

those years...