The Power of Protest
Lessons From the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
By Tony Wilsdon and Philip Locker

Thirty years ago in Vietnam, the U.S. government was defeated for the first time in a major war. With anger growing at Bush's war in Iraq, what can we learn from the anti-Vietnam War movement?

In August 1964, following decades of U.S. support for the French occupation of Vietnam, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson manufactured a fake attack on U.S. forces, known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to create political support for a massive assault on Vietnam.

The U.S. intervened to prevent a corrupt capitalist government in South Vietnam from being overthrown by the popular National Liberation Front (NLF) guerillas. The NLF was linked to North Vietnam, where capitalism had been overthrown and replaced by a Stalinist system which was politically ruled by a bureaucracy.
Although the NLF had a Stalinist leadership and did not base itself on genuine workers' democracy and international socialism, they did challenge capitalism and landlordism. The U.S. feared that the victory of "communism" in Vietnam would spur socialist revolutions throughout Asia.

By 1965, 200,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Vietnam, growing to 500,000 by 1968. During this war, the U.S. dropped 8 million tons of bombs, more than twice the total dropped during World War II. Twenty million tons of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange were sprayed, destroying vegetation and spreading dioxin throughout Vietnam's food chain, leading to a massive rise in birth defects. Altogether, the U.S. spent $150 billion and sent 2.8 million troops to Vietnam, 58,000 of whom died there.

On the other side was a desperately poor country with a guerilla army that used weapons from a previous era. The massive U.S. bombing destroyed 70% of North Vietnam's villages, leaving huge areas barren and the capital, Hanoi, completely destroyed.

At least 3 million Vietnamese died in wars against Japanese, French, and U.S. imperialism between 1945 and 1975. The NLF's program of national liberation from imperialist domination, land to the peasants, and a decent life for workers inspired the most astonishing support, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to fight to the death. This heroic determination could not be defeated by all the military hardware the U.S. rained down on Vietnam. The result was that the U.S. found itself bogged down in a costly, drawn-out war.

The Emergence of the Antiwar Movement
The earliest protestors against the war came out of the civil rights and socialist movements. Malcolm X and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, for example, came out against the war in 1965.

The antiwar movement started as a small minority, with student sit-ins and demonstrations. But as the war dragged on, its social and economic consequences triggered a much larger opposition. When the bombings began, a Boston Commons protest attracted 100 people. This grew to a massive 100,000 by October 15, 1969, with 2 million in total protesting across the country.

By 1969, there were 500 underground newspapers in high schools, and protests had been held on 232 college campuses across the country with 3,652 people arrested and 956 suspended or expelled. The existence of the draft, where all young people could be randomly selected to serve in the army, led to mass draft dodging. Many middle-class students were able to dodge the draft, leaving working-class and African American youth to be the majority of those forced to fight. By early 1968, 40,000 soldiers were dead and 250,000 were wounded, with the numbers growing daily.

The media has attempted to portray the antiwar movement as being mainly made up of well-off students. However, with working-class youth on the front lines in Vietnam, opposition to the war was actually strongest in working-class communities. A University of Michigan poll in June 1966 showed that 27% of people with a college education favored immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, compared to 41% of those with only a grade school education.

Revolt in the U.S. Army
Eventually, mass opposition developed within the armed forces themselves. With no confidence in the goals of an unwinnable war, rank-and-file soldiers revolted. With African Americans disproportionately represented in the army, the effects of the civil rights movement were a key factor. Black soldiers saw little reason to risk their lives fighting a racist war, in a racist army, for a racist government.

In 1970, there were over 50 underground newspapers on military bases. By 1971, 17.7% of U.S. soldiers were listed as AWOL. In 1972, a quarter of U.S. soldiers had mutinied or defied military orders. Units refused combat, fragging (soldiers killing their officers) was widespread, and almost a quarter of U.S. troops had become heroin addicts. Over 700,000 soldiers received less than honorable discharges.

The antiwar movement was strengthened by the thousands of veterans who returned home radicalized by their experience in the war. Driven by anger at the U.S. government's lies and the atrocities they witnessed, they moved to the forefront of the antiwar movement - in their uniforms, many on crutches or in wheelchairs.

This process was summed up by Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. when he wrote: "The morale, discipline, and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous." ("The Collapse of the Armed Forces," Armed Forces Journal, 6/7/71)

The most powerful army in the world disintegrated. This is an important lesson for activists today, as the ruling class attempts to make its massive firepower appear unstoppable. In reality, the U.S. military is not immune to wider social and political processes. Any major wave of radicalization and revolt in U.S. society will inevitably find an expression within the rank and file of the U.S. armed forces, who are mostly working class, thus tending to undermine the military's effectiveness as a tool for repression by the ruling class.

Mass Antiwar Movement
The war also hit people in the pocket book. At first, increased war spending boosted the economy, but the cost of the war and increased social programs at home (to stem an uprising of African Americans) forced the government to print excess dollars to pay for it. This led to a spiral of price increases, inflation, a ballooning budget deficit, and the erosion of the purchasing power of workers' wages - which triggered an increase in strikes and opposition to union leaders who refused to fight the bosses in order to win decent contracts.

At this point, the antiwar movement developed into a truly mass movement, dividing society in two. After national guardsmen, recently coming off a Teamster picket line, shot dead four students at a Kent State University antiwar protest, mass occupations of colleges erupted. By 1972, one million blacks considered themselves revolutionaries. Millions began to see clearly through the rhetoric of a "war against communism," and saw the naked aggression of the U.S. ruling class in its pursuit of profits and imperialist domination.

By this point, important sections of big business concluded that it was better to end the war rather than suffer further social explosions at home. They feared the civil rights movement, the growing threat of workers going out on wildcat strikes, and the youth movement all coalescing into one giant movement against the government and the capitalist system.

Lessons for Today
In 1973, Nixon was finally forced to withdraw all U.S. troops. Two years later saw the complete victory of the NLF. Suffering such an embarrassing defeat, and terrified of provoking new social upheaval at home, U.S. imperialism held back from major military interventions abroad for almost 20 years. Only since the early 1990s have they been confident enough to contemplate starting wars that risk a serious loss of U.S. lives.

Since then, the spokesmen of big business have been trying to rewrite history. The right wing argues that the U.S. never really lost the war, but just failed to conduct it energetically enough.

This is a completely wrong conclusion. As NY Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger wrote: "The U.S. emerges as the big loser and the history books must reflect this…We lost the war in the Mississippi valley, not the Mekong valley. Successive American governments were never able to muster the necessary support at home."

The distinguishing mark of the Vietnam War was that the U.S. waged a war against a social revolution. The majority of peasants and workers in Vietnam were fighting for their national and social liberation and were therefore prepared to make great sacrifices.

The U.S. was able to easily smash the Saddam's reactionary regime (and the Taliban in Afghanistan) because ordinary Iraqis saw no reason to risk their lives for a hated dictatorship. It became a conventional war of armies in which the U.S. had a huge advantage. This was the key factor that led to the swift U.S. victory.

However, the U.S. now faces an Iraqi resistance which rests on massive popular anger at the U.S. occupation. U.S. firepower has been unable to crush this insurgency. At the same time, the Iraqi resistance is dominated by right-wing groupings, and is very different from the Vietnamese NLF which had progressive social aims. This has held back the Iraqi resistance from developing into a truly mass popular resistance movement, unlike the NLF.
The massive anti-Vietnam War movement showed how mass resistance to war, once it penetrated wider sections of the U.S. working class and reached into the military, was able to force the ruling class to end a war. Once again, this time in Iraq, the U.S. is bogged down in an unwinnable war which is provoking a new anti-war movement.

Unlike during the Vietnam War, this war has occurred at a time of falling living standards. With the war costing over $300 billion, funding for vital services being slashed, and gas prices going through the roof, the possibility is growing to link this war with the attacks facing U.S. workers.

The Iraq war and September 11 represents a turning point in history, ushering in a new period marked by great instability, crises, and wars. The tremendous anti-Vietnam War movement is rich in valuable lessons. In the more turbulent and violent epoch we have entered, these lessons can be of great use in building a powerful, effective antiwar movement, which contains the seeds of a new world.