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Having lived through it all, as a young person who marched against it in the first big anti-war demonstration in 1967, I can tell you that the only thing we accomplished, with ten years of ever-increasing anti-war efforts, across the board in American society--including, for instance, Jesuit priests pouring blood on Draft records, and a retired AF jet pilot friend of mine deciding to go to Canada if they called him out of retirement--was Nixon's decision, well into the war, NOT to use nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese.
The war continued for ten years, no matter what we did, ultimately slaughtering two million people in Southeast Asia and over 55,000 US soldiers. The sentiment then among many warmongers and war profiteers was that the US should "nuke 'em back to the stone age." It is quite arguably the massive anti-war protests in Washington DC (and around the country) that stayed Nixon's hand on using nukes. Nukes are the only weapons that could have beaten the Vietnamese, a people on fire with a passion for independence and a 5,000 year history of defending it. It would not have been any kind of "victory," though, and may well have brought down the US empire, then and there (if not the planet itself).
When the Vietnamese finally won it, against the biggest war machine in the world, my generation was exhausted and in disarray, and failed to follow up on what the next step should have been: dismantling of the US war machine, reducing it to defense of our borders and removing the temptation to tyrants to use our standing army and war machine for ill purposes. I think we put up a noble battle against one of the most unjust wars in history, but we failed in the decade that followed to address the fundamental problem--the escalating power of war profiteers and global corporate predators over our government.
I also think we scared the beejeebers out of our war profiteers and corporate predators--a generation revolting against war and against being used as cannon fodder in senseless and unjust wars--and they were very careful, for several decades, about overt use of the US war machine as the pre-emptive tool of US foreign policy. It became known in war profiteer circles as "the Vietnam syndrome"--that Americans would not tolerate being drafted into unjust wars. One of the goals of the "Project For A New American Century" signatories--who brought us the Iraq War--was to reverse that "syndrome" and motivate Americans to be willing killers in a scheme of world domination including grabbing control of the world's last oil reserves. This is one reason why the suspicion that the Bush junta permitted or implemented 9/11 will not go away. They stated in their PNAC document that they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to mobilize the American people behind their scheme of world domination, and 9/11 fit that requirement to a T, in a much too convenient fashion.
I would say that the "nightmare of my generation" has come true: Tyrants did, in fact, reverse "the Vietnam syndrome" and did, in fact, hijack the US military for purposes of world domination. It is a nightmare that we were unable to prevent, though many people kept trying, including those who successfully lobbied Congress, for instance, to prevent the president from waging a war on Nicaragua in the 1980s. The "Vietnam syndrome" drove our war profiteers into covert wars--such as the Reagan horrors in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua during that era. The US-funded/organized war on Nicaragua was blatantly ILLEGAL, but the result was mere handslaps from the Democratic Congress. Having gotten away with that, the war profiteers ventured further, at first with "little wars" (such as Grenada and Panama) with experiments in "embedding" news reporters and presenting the war as a sort of video game on TV. (A free press was rather a big factor in mobilizing my generation against the Vietnam War--and that, too, has been dispensed with.) They then succeeded in enticing Saddam Hussein (a Bush Cartel ally to whom they had sold chemical weapons) into invading Kuwait and began upgrading the US war machine for bigger plans, which unfolded a decade later.
The Clinton administration, unfortunately, helped them prep the final Iraq oil grab (and slaughter of about a million people) through perimeter bombings (Iraq had no air defense by the time the Bushwhacks bombed Baghdad) and devastating sanctions (erasing Iraq's relative prosperity), and also laid the "neo-liberal" ("free trade for the rich") ground work for the mindboggling plunder and looting of the US economy by the Bush junta.
My generation was denied the leadership of peace-minded, social justice-minded Democratic presidents, JFK and RFK, by means of assassination. The current generation was denied the leadership of peace-minded, social justice-minded Democratic presidents, Al Gore and John Kerry, by means of election fraud, apparently by consensus of our national overt and covert political establishment, which is now in total thrall to the "military-industrial complex" that President Eisenhower, in his final days in office, warned us against. He said that the MIC would destroy our democracy if we were not vigilant. The '60s generation tried to be "vigilant," but we were overwhelmed. And now, as then, the people of the world cannot count on the American people to prevent wars of aggression against them. We are far less powerful now than we were then, and we could not stop a horribly unjust and genocidal war then, for all our ten years of non-stop protest.
Remedy (from this ever hopeful anti-war activist of the '60s): First and foremost, GET RID OF THE 'TRADE SECRET' CODE VOTING MACHINES! Those were the instruments of affirming a rightwing coup in 2004, and are responsible for the paralysis of our Democratic Party leaders now, apparently by their own consent. We cannot even begin to reform our country if a handful of rightwing corporations are counting all our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code and virtually no audit/recount controls. We MUST restore transparent vote counting, the fundamental condition for empowering leaders who truly represent the interests of the American people.
It's going to be a long hard road back to democracy BECAUSE OF the failure of my generation to deal with certain grave matters back in the 1960s and 1970s, combined with the determination of our war profiteers and global corporate predators to enrich themselves and dominate the world at our expense. To undo the tragedy that our country is enacting, we MUST recognize that the fundamental conditions for democracy do not exist here any more, and we MUST restore those conditions, starting with the vote counting system. The vote counting systems currently remain under state and local jurisdictions, which are more subject to the pressure of ordinary citizens, so there is still hope that this can be changed by citizen effort.
I was personally demoralized by the events of the 1960s and 1970s--the assassinations of our most progressive leaders, JFK, RFK and MLK, within the space of five years--and the continued horror in Vietnam. It was a tumultuous time and I was barely out of my teens--as was true of many anti-war activists and young men facing the Draft. We were a "rudely awakened" generation--awakened out of the slumber and more hidden injustices of the 1950s--and thrown into radical ferment by the corrupt and murderous actions of our elders. It is no wonder that we could not defeat the war machine, and that it, instead, defeated us, in the end. I try to forgive myself for becoming demoralized and pretty much burying my head in the sand for a couple of decades. But it is difficult. If only we had fought harder, and more persistently, on fundamental issues, such as the out-of-control war profiteering, preservation of a free press and honest, aboveboard elections with campaigns funded by our taxes not by corporations and the super-rich!
The regrets of an older person--true--but they do contain lessons for the young. Know what you're up against. Really know it. Don't let yourself be fooled by delusions of democracy. Effective strategy and ultimate success depend on fully understanding what you are fighting. Open your eyes. See it all, and decide where best to put your energy to restore democracy in the US and save our country. Don't be led astray into side fights. Go for the fundamentals of true democracy and citizen power. Stick together on those and do not give up! The people of Latin America are doing just this, and are succeeding at it--and they have suffered a lot more than we have, from both US militarism and corporate rule. Leftist governments have been ELECTED in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala--and they are furthermore sticking together in a challenge to US domination and assertion of their sovereignty and independence. If the Latin Americans can do it, so can we.
And know, too, that one of the chief methods of control being used against us is inducing feelings of powerlessness and isolation, for one thing, by nonstop 24/7 corpo-fascist "messaging" in all media, and for another, by manipulations of the election system including outright theft of elections and installation of "Blue Dog" Democrats, as a blockade to any real reform. It is no accident that the people vote time and again for peace, and get war. And that is VERY demoralizing, as I believe it is intended to be. We need to fight demoralization, such as I and others personally suffered in the 1970s and '80s. That was our biggest failure--giving in to feelings of powerlessness.
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