How Do Things Really Change?
“What Ended the Vietnam War?”
June 25, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Trump/Pence regime is a grave danger to humanity. People are being told the only realistic way to stop Trump is working through established channels—Congress, investigations, elections, etc. But history points to a different lesson, that only action by masses of people outside those channels can bring significant change for the better. Take ending the Vietnam War.
What Did Not Help End the War
1964 Presidential Election
In 1964, most who opposed the Vietnam War voted for the Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson. “LBJ” ran as the “peace candidate,” against Republican Barry Goldwater, who talked of escalating the war, possibly with nuclear weapons.
LBJ won a historic landslide—then proceeded to vastly escalate the war, pouring 500,000 troops into Vietnam by 1968. Planes saturated Vietnam with bombs, destroying jungles, fields, villages, people. The U.S. committed atrocities against children, including massive use of napalm—a chemical weapon that adheres to the skin and burns through to the bone. U.S. soldiers raped women, shot infants, burned villages, destroyed crops. By the war’s end, the U.S. had slaughtered three million people in Southeast Asia.
What Did Help End the War
Stop the Draft Week: “From Dissent to Resistance”
These horrors and the just struggle of the Vietnamese people caused thousands and ultimately millions, particularly youth and students, to see the U.S. war as unjust and immoral. Many had been influenced by the civil rights movement, which had stood up against clubs, dogs, and tear gas, and by the emerging Black liberation struggle. They felt they couldn’t just stand aside, wait for the next election, or work through the very system carrying out the war. Tens of thousands demonstrated. Thousands of young men burned their draft cards (risking five years in prison). Muhammad Ali, then boxing’s heavyweight champion, sacrificed his crown and jolted society by refusing induction in April 1967: “No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.”
In 1967, Bob Avakian was one of the originators of “Stop the Draft Week.” In his memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, he recalls, “During that time there were people, including myself, who felt that the opposition to the Vietnam War needed to become more active and militant—and that it should appeal more directly to the soldiers and the people being drafted and more directly oppose the machinery that was carrying out the war. We came up with the idea that we would shut down the Oakland Induction Center, which was one of the major centers where they inducted people into the Army.” (pp. 158-161) In October 1967, 10,000 took part, standing up to vicious police attacks, injuries, and arrests on three separate days. This action had a powerful impact in building broader and more serious opposition to the war, including because Bob Avakian and others worked to link the antiwar movement with the Black liberation struggle and the Black Panther Party, which had been formed in 1966.
The next day, 30,000 protesters laid siege to the Pentagon, clashing with U.S. soldiers. By 1968, college and high school student strikes were demanding that schools cut their ties with the U.S. military, driving defense research, military recruiters, and ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) off dozens of campuses.
Summer 1968: Confronting the Democratic Party in Chicago —
“The Whole World Is Watching”
By the summer of 1968, chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” echoed in streets and on campuses, and LBJ was forced to withdraw from the campaign. Thousands of youths and students went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Some to work within it, many to denounce and disrupt it. Outside the convention, protesters faced an all-out attack with tear gas and clubs by the Chicago police. Blood and tears streaming down their faces, the night sky thick with gas and smoke, young people stood against the cops chanting, “The Whole World Is Watching”—and it was! People in Chicago and those watching on TV were profoundly jolted by these scenes of “their” government waging war on its children.
Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated pro-war Hubert Humphrey to run against pro-war Richard Nixon.
A Society in Upheaval
A broad cultural revolt—a counterculture—spread. Millions of youths were turning against the “status quo” in various ways: its wars and racism, its fashions and music, and/or its sexual “morals.” Religious forces raided draft boards, burning files or pouring their own blood on them. Celebrities used their public platform, even White House invitations, to denounce the war. Movie star Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam to express sympathy for the Vietnamese people and opposition to U.S. bombing. In November 1969, 500,000 people marched against the war in Washington, DC. This was a time of deep discussion and sharp debate and struggle. Millions were changing their thoughts and lives and the political terrain was changing dramatically.
Editor’s note: Here Bob Avakian talks about the 1960s.
Between the anti-war protesters and the war planners in the Pentagon; between the Black Panthers and J. Edgar Hoover; between Black, Latino, Asian, and Native peoples on the one side and the government on the other; between the women who rebelled against their “traditional” roles and the rich old men who ruled the country; between the youth who brought forward new music, in the broadest sense, and the preachers who denounced them as disciples of the devil and despoilers of civilization: the battle lines were sharply drawn. And through the course of those tumultuous times, those who were rebelling against the established order and the dominating relations and traditions increasingly found common cause and powerful unity; they increasingly gained—and deserved—the moral as well as political initiative, while the ruling class dug in and lashed out to defend its rule, but increasingly, and very deservedly, lost moral and political authority.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 5:6
The Oppressed Rise Up
As the antiwar struggle raged, the oppressed were rising up. The Black liberation struggle included massive, spontaneous inner city uprisings and organized revolutionary forces like the Black Panther Party. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, rebellions broke out in more than 100 cities. This in turn inspired others. The women’s liberation movement took to the streets burning symbols of oppression. Native American activists occupied Alcatraz Island and later the site of the Wounded Knee massacre to protest past and present horrors visited on Native peoples. Tens of thousands marched against the war in the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in Los Angeles.
Revolution was in the air, and new revolutionary and communist organizations were forming and growing, many inspired by revolutionary China led by Mao Zedong.
Vietnam Vets and GIs: “If I ever fight again it will be to take these steps.”
Many activists weren’t “honoring” the troops—they were struggling with them to confront their crimes in an unjust war. The more radical, internationalist segment of the antiwar movement understood Vietnam was an imperialist war, and openly supported the “enemy,” chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF Is Gonna Win!”* This and the military defeats suffered by the U.S. sparked broad questioning and resistance among GIs. Many units refused to fight. Returning GIs formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War and exposed the atrocities they’d carried out. In 1971, hundreds threw their medals on the Capitol steps in Washington, DC, and a vet declared: “If we have to fight again, it will be to take these steps.”
* Ho Chi Minh was President of North Vietnam and overall leader of the Vietnamese liberation struggle. The National Liberation Front—NLF—led that struggle in South Vietnam.
The Massacres at Kent State and Jackson State and the Student Uprising:
“They can’t kill us all.”
In 1970, the U.S. military invaded Vietnam’s neighbor, Cambodia. This new escalation sparked broader, deeper resistance. Protesters at Kent State University in Ohio burned down the ROTC building. One thousand National Guard troops occupied the campus, and on May 4 fired into a crowd, killing four and wounding nine. The next day, cops opened fire with shotguns on protesters at Mississippi’s Jackson State University, a historically Black school, killing two and wounding 12.
In the coming days, four million students took part in protests; 450 campuses were forced to close. Even popular music now included antiwar, antiracism, and anti-system anthems, such as “Ohio” (about Kent State). Very broad swaths of the population, from all walks of life, were turning against the war, and in many cases, the government.
Mass Struggle Outside the System’s Framework Helps End the U.S. War in Vietnam
By the early ’70s, the political terrain in the U.S. had been radically transformed. There was very broad sentiment against the war. The legitimacy of the U.S. government and key institutions like the military, as well as America’s culture and ethos, were being called into question. Millions of oppressed people were no longer willing to passively tolerate injustice and humiliation. Radical and revolutionary forces, while a distinct minority, had gained broad influence and support.
This situation, together with big changes in the global terrain, sharp divisions among the powers that be, and most importantly, the defeats the U.S. military was suffering at the hands of the Vietnamese liberation forces—not elections or working through the system—compelled the U.S. rulers to withdraw from Vietnam (and make other significant changes, including legalizing women’s right to abortion, breaking down some social barriers confronting Black people, and ending the draft).
In 1973, the right-wing Republican Nixon administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, committing to the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam, and in 1975, the world saw the mighty U.S. military and diplomats scrambling to jump on helicopters as Saigon fell to the liberation forces.
For a vivid, firsthand description of the struggles, upheavals, and transformations of the 1960s, including the development of the anti-Vietnam War movement, see Bob Avakian’s memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, especially Chapter 6: “Your Sons and Your Daughters...” and Chapter 7: “...Are Beyond Your Command.” (Listen to Bob Avakian read Chapter 6 here.)
For a thorough discussion of resistance and revolution, the role of the Democrats, and why breaking out of the existing political confines is essential to even waging effective resistance, as well as other issues vital to making revolution, listen to the first of Bob Avakian’s historic 7 Talks—“Why We’re in the Situation We’re in Today... And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution,” Track 3.
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