I think it is not a contradiction to respect combat veterans, per se, while not respecting people for listening to government agencies and not using their own brains (if you are already a soldier, though, and are getting no disinterested news from anywhere, what can you do? plus you can’t simply quit)
I was never disrespected in all my years in the military, even after Vietnam. There was pretty much a dead silence rather than any acknowledgement good or bad. I think people just wanted it all to be behind them. I know I did.
Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article about a book that debunked the “spitting” myth.
The first of the big anti-Vietnam-war protests in Australia was May 1970. The cabinet decision to wind down Vietnam involvement had already been made before that. The 8th RAR was in the middle of their 1yr tour, and were not replaced when they came home in November, but the decision not to bring the replacement to readiness had already been made.
The political decision followed and reflected popular opinion, as did the protests. The (Australian) protests themselves didn’t have any effect on anything.
FWIW, I knew a communist party member in the mid 70s, who explained to me that the purpose of organizing protests wasn’t to change government policy: it was to recruit and consolidate new supporters.
Isn’t that the goal of every political party? You can always change government policy tomorrow if you recruit enough supporters.
It’s the goal of every not-yet-big-enough-to-govern party. First get enough adherents. Then influence policy. Then make policy.
The more out-there your party’s views, the more your protests won’t influence policy. But they may influence would-be adherents to join.
I’d say that @Melbourne’s friend had an unusually clear-eyed understanding of what they were doing when they were doing it. Which may have sounded incongruous to @Melbourne at the time.
I wasn’t intending to create a tangent. Let me rephrase that:
The protests had no effect on government policy. FWIW, I spoke with a member of the group that was organizing the protests, and he pointed out that the organizers of the protests were not intending to change government policy.
As I noted in the thread about Books in translation , I’m in the middle of reading Robert Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger, which I read a few pages at a time before I go to sleep because it’s so boring. One of the things that makes it tedious is the repetitive nature of the peace talks that Kissinger engages in with the North Vietnamese. Time and time again, chapter after chapter, he sits down with them, and they never budge an inch off their chief demand, which is “Leave Vietnam now, and let us do what we will with so-called ‘South’ Vietnam.” Kissinger and Nixon keep waiting for this position to change, even a bit, so they could use it as an excuse for leaving Vietnam “See, we got them to concede something so we can now claim a small victory”—but they wouldn’t budge an inch.
The reason the North Vietnamese stuck to their guns was the American public. The North Vietnamese kept claiming that the war was very unpopular in the U.S., which it was, and which the 1960s anti-Vietnam war protests’ made obvious. The protests, public as they were and huge as they were, underscored the point the North Vietnamese were making to Nixon and Kissinger: this war did not have the support of the American people, and the U.S. could not maintain a war that was so unpopular with the American public. Time was on the Vietnamese side. They didn’t need to concede a thing (mainly, Kissinger was asking them to allow the South Vietnamese puppet government to stay in power for a little while which would save face for the U.S., who could then claim “Well, the South Vietnamese government fell but we were out of the country for x months or y years so that’s not our fault.”)
The U.S. position was untenable: Kissinger tried to argue that Nixon could go on bombing them for years, but they refused to buy it, and a large part of their refusal was the public protests in the U.S. The Nixon administration was so opposed to the protests because they said the protests were giving aid and support to the enemy, acknowledging that the protests worked against U.S. interests in the peace negotiations, which they did. Rather than achieving “anything,” I think the protests were the single largest cause of the U.S. finally pulling out of Vietnam.
How is that ‘not achieving anything’?
Especially since that was their exact intent.
I was a bit awkward in my phrasing. The question we’re responding to here is Did the protests achieve anything? so I used ‘anything’ to mean “the smallest possible accomplishment.”
Good point about Vietnam politics. I was talking about Aus protests. But your text doesn’t support your conclusion? What you’ve written is: Kissinger wanted to pull out, and eventually pulled out anyway, even though the protests delayed the decision. Then you’ve jumped from that to “protests caused the decision”.
I doubt it’s significant, but I’ll add that the US went into Vietnam following lobbying by Aus, which was worried about Communist control rolling downhill to Aus the same way as the Japanese had in recent memory, and the American pullout followed the Australian decision to pull out.
That’s not actually what I wrote, and far from my meaning. By the early 1970s, pretty much every U.S. policy-maker “wanted” to pull out of Vietnam–the question was “how?” Peaceniks like McGovern and most Dems just wanted out, period, but GOPers were still mostly hawks and felt we should pull out “with honor” as Nixon liked to say, meaning we should pull our troops after getting concessions from the North Vietnamese, who didn’t want to concede anything to the U.S. aggressors. So Nixon and Kissinger continued the bombing for years and years, and escalated it, having learned nothing from LBJ’s attempts to do the same. Meanwhile the anti-war protests drew more adherents until most of the U.S. stopped giving a damn about “honor” anymore, but Nixon and Kissinger viewed the war as a political issue rather than a moral or logistical one. They would look strong, they felt, if they bombed Hanoi into submission but they more they bombed (and mined Haiphong harbour) the more the Vietnamese refused to concede. Kissinger kept shuttling back and forth to Paris in an unending series of fruitless “peace” talks.
Nixon wanted to threaten Hanoi with how terrible the war would be AFTER he got re-elected (when he could safely ignore the protestors). At the same time, Kissinger felt that Hanoi could get peace sooner by conceding some face-saving measures in the spring of 1972, so there was some back and forth between about which strategy to employ. Still, the constants were the refusal of Hanoi to concede much beyond “withdraw U.S. troops NOW” and the anti-war protestors who were saying the same.
When I was 16 (1969) I supported the war mainly because It was supported in my church and the local press (Northern Wisconsin) . Finally I straight -out asked my dad:…
“dad your generation grew up to fight WW-2. Is this ( Vietnam) my war?”
…His answer came quickly.
“This war does not meet the criteria in our church (RC) for a “Just war”. This is a political war,…I would avoid it i were you” That is verbatim
Not until it coalesced into actual campaigns for, specifically, Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. You can have millions in the streets but until someone steps forward and runs for office on your platform it doesn’t matter.