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The Antiwar Movement Disappeared Under Obama - Let's Make It Great Again
https://blackandintellectual.com/blog/the-antiwar-movement-disappeared-under-obama-lets-make-it-great-again"War has always been ugly and arguably it's always been a racket. Two-time Medal of Honor recipient General Smedley Butler said as much as he toured the United States in the early 1930's. Butler had participated in the U.S. takeover of the nation of Haiti in 1915 that led to a 19 year occupation and the installing of a dictatorship led by numerous U.S.-backed strongmen. The original reason behind American involvement was to prevent a leader from coming into power who might have hurt U.S. business interests on the island.
On April 4, 1967, an exact year before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech. It's one of those MLK speeches that you never hear and a lot of his supporters (white and black) at the time didn't like that he gave it. They thought it was a little "too radical." Mere days earlier on March 25, 1967, King had led a 5,000 person march against the Vietnam War in Chicago. In the speech, among other things, King stated...
“Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.
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If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.
I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.
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In more recent times, the antiwar movement has mostly manifested against the Iraq War. The movement began in 2003 and continued throughout both Bush terms and into the Presidency of Barack Obama (but became noticeably weaker and inconsistent). One of the largest antiwar protests occurred during the 2004 Republican National Convention where between 500,000 - 800,000 antiwar and social justice activists protested throughout the day of the RNC convention. Another large antiwar protest occurred in 2005 in Washington D.C. where nearly 300,000 Americans participated. While yet another in 2007 , organized by United For Peace and Justice, attracted roughly 500,000 peace activists.
2007 was the last year really massive antiwar demonstrations were organized, that was a decade ago now."
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