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Lessons From the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
| Article
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11788 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
3,169 Words |
| Author
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David Horowitz
David Horowitz, former editor of Ramparts, is codirector of
the Second Thoughts Project, a speakers and writers bureau of
the National Forum Foundation. |
When I see today's campus protestors, flushed with idealism and carrying signs that say "No more Vietnams," a feeling of ineffable sadness overtakes me. Twenty years ago I was one of them. In 1962, as a student at Berkeley, I helped to organize the first demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. Like the premature anti-interventionists on today's campuses, I wanted to prevent my government from supporting the anticommunist cause in Indochina and from halting the revolutionary tide. Like many of them, my intentions were high-minded and noble: I hoped my efforts would mean a better life in the future for the peasants of Vietnam.
In the mid-sixties I left Berkeley and went to England to work for Bertrand Russell's Peace Foundation. I helped to organize a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and an International War Crimes Tribunal which brought American military action under damning scrutiny but ignored the atrocities committed by the other side. I also wrote a history of the cold war, The Free World Colossus, which identified America as the principal aggressor and the principal oppressor of the Third World. My book became an important text among radical college students who had joined the protests in growing numbers as the war went on. At the end of the sixties I returned to America and became an editor of Ramparts, the most widely read New Left magazine. Our most famous cover was a photograph of the My Lai massacre with a sign superimposed and planted among the corpses saying "Re-elect the President." The communists murdered ten times as many civilians during their assault on Hue, but the crime was never mentioned in the pages of Ramparts.
Like the slogans of today's protesters, our public arguments had a patriotic ring: America was not living up to its own ideals. The most striking domestic expression of this failure was the denial to American blacks of their civil rights under the Constitution. Our movement began its life and achieved its first victory with the struggle to extend the law of the land to American blacks in the South. Abroad, the United States was the guarantor of an international system providing protection to innumerable dictatorships and opposed insurgencies connected to the communist cause. Our movement supported the insurgents in South Vietnam because we believed they were struggling for independence and self-determination. If they were aligned with the communists as our government said, we refused to be alarmed. To us, Marxism was a strategy of development and social justice, while communism had entered a post-Stalin phase of internal political reform.
Like today's young radicals, our priorities reflected
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