> On Oct 8, 2024, at 8:31 AM, Dennis Brasky via groups.io
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> https://jacobin.com/2019/10/vietnam-war-moratorium-protest-gi-movement
The October 1969 Moratorium was my first protest.
I enjoyed reading the article and think that this sentence is an
understatement: "Even into 1970, some GIs still wrote to the Moratorium
committee with antiwar missives." The GI movement was still getting started in
1970,
https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/86943/.
Also important is the meme and attitude that prevailed in the military of this
time, FTA,
https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/search/searchterm/fta.
Not everyone could agree with the anti-war movement, and some were repelled
by the people who were protesting the war. But the vast majority could agree
on "fuck the army," which became a consensus and made the Army unreliable.
That persisted in my experience until the war ended, draftees and non-career
soldiers became a small minority as they were discharged (many early), and the
New Volunteer Army got underway with better pay, private rooms, and more
accommodation for families. It took years to run-down the Army but about a
year to restore discipline owing, in part, to the US government's deep pockets.
Finally, a lot more could be said about the antiwar left. Who helped and who
didn't: "At an international conference in Cuba in the fall of 1968, [George]
Murray affirmed Panther support for the North Vietnamese, telling the crowd
that every American soldier killed in Vietnam was one fewer they had to deal
with at home." (Harris, Malcolm. Palo Alto: A History of California,
Capitalism, and the World (pp. 433-434). Little, Brown and Company.) Rhetoric
like that was not rare enough, it gave fodder to the right and reinforced the
myth of returning GIs being spit on by antiwar protesters. I'd also like to
know why the Student Mobilization Committee ended their GI outreach in 1971 but
suspect it was because of diminishing returns to the SWP.
thanks, Mark
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