Liberals often credit the anti-Vietnam-War movement with ending American involvement in the war, but it didn’t really, did it? The movement is generally considered to have peaked in 1971. Nixon, despite breaking his 1968 campaign promise to end the war, defeated peace candidate McGovern in a landslide in 1972. American troops were not pulled out until 1973 – by which time it was clear even to Nixon that victory was impossible.
There were grassroots movements of varying scales against the Mexican-American War (see “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail”), the Civil War, and WWI. There was even a strong isolationist movement against American involvement in WWII, although it mostly shut up after Pearl Harbor.
The UK has also seen its share of antiwar movements – against the Boer War, for instance, and against British intervention in the Russian Civil War.
In all case, despite all protests, the war was prosecuted until the government protested against could consider that victory either had been achieved or could not possibly be achieved. And the existence of a domestic peace movement seems never to have had much influence on that judgment.
No peace movement in history, so far as I know, has ever succeeded in persuading a government to stop a war until the government was damned good and ready to do so for its own reasons. (The Bolsheviks did end Russian participation in WWI – but they did so by becoming the government, not by persuading the government.)
What’s the point, really? Has any peace movement ever been, on its own terms, successful? Could one ever be successful?
Without looking, I’ll guess that someone, somewhere has won on the “get us out of war” (or avoid war) platform.
But I’ll suggest the people marching in the streets do so precisely because they feel they are out of the mainstream and feel they have no other way to be heard. If, say, the Democratic party had been dead-set against the Iraq war, I submit we’d have seen fewer protests, not more.
President Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war!” But then he went ahead and got us into the war anyway. Oh, dear.
Not about war, but the movement against developing and deploying Neutron Bombs was successful, at least according to this cite (sorry, Dutch; the history of the Dutch anti-nuclear-weapon movement)
Translation: 50,000 people demonstrated against neutron bombs, 1.2 million signatures were collected, the government got in trouble, defense minister Kruisinga had to resign and a year later President Carter decided to stop production. Their real claim to success is to have put the nuclear weapon issue on the political agenda, such that it became part of many political parties’ platforms.
Later there were much larger demonstrations against deployment of medium-range nuclear cruise missiles in Europe but to my shame I can’t remember if they had any effect.
Ironically, the power of a “peace movement” is in the threat of rebellion. Peace movements rarely win - they just turn into riots, which are either squashed or succeed in overthrowing the local regime.
Really, I can either sit at home and just be resentful that our government is doing something absurdly stupid, or I can yell out as loud as I can and try to educate those howevermany % of Americans who still think WMDs were found in Iraq.
I think it’s oversimplification to say “Peace movements don’t work” because they aren’t the direct, simple cause of a government’s decision to end a war. However, when politicians (the elected sort, anyway) look out the window and see a million people with signs on the lawn, or get a mountain of constituent mail about it, they gotta be thinking about reelection, or even (dare I say it?) the will of the people. I think it’s very difficult to determine when an active peace movement is a factor in governmental decision making and when it isn’t.
People often point to Vietnam as an example of the success of a peace movement - it’s true that public opinion had definately turned against the war, which almost had to have some effect on our getting out of it. Was that because of the peace movement? Because it was a “living room war”? Because of the draft? A combination of lots of things, I’m sure - but possibly the most effective result of a peace movement is increased awareness on the part of the general public, and I think that could possibly shown to be effective.
I’d like to see studies of the effect the level of public awareness has on the length of a war, and try to compare and measure the effectiveness of a peace movement that way, rather than just the dates of the height of the movement - it’s possible, for example, that the Vietnam protests had already done their work and had an effect that lingered after the peak of the movement.
The point was to put pressure on the British and American governments to unilaterally get rid of their nuclear deterrants. Which would have left the Soviet Union with a huge advantage.
No, that might have been the Soviet Union’s point. What is your point? This thread is about whether peace movements can be effective. Whether they are well-conceived would be a different debate.
They were effective. Nuclear disarmement became the official policy of the Labour Party under Michael Foot. Fortunately for us, the Labour election manifesto was a mishmash of lunacy, aptly described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. So the Soviet Union’s gambit failed only at the last hurdle.
While the movement against the Vietnam war peaked in 1971, it was still pretty strong in 1968. And peace activist work for the MacCarthy campaign (Gene, not Joe, read a damn book) led to MacCarthy’s victory… which led to Johnson getting out of the campaign and RFK getting in.
The fact that we didn’t get out of the war until 1973 is because enough people were more interested in ‘peace with honor’ than ‘peace with getting the fuck out of there right now, goddamnit’ and most Americans were willing to let the war de-escalate as we lumbered to peace. It didn’t help that many of the people who were serious anti-war activists decided to place themselves out of the process as a whole, believing that a Nixon win would bring the system crumbling down and lead people to beg for the new Anarchist/Leftist heirarchy. (See: 2000 election, Nader supporters being blase about a Bush win.)
The problem is, given our election system, a war has to drag on long enough that an election occurs during it, for a peace party to have any effect whatsoever. And that peace movement has to have enough popular support that it is still a viable option once that election is reached. 1864 is a good example of that occuring- had Sherman not taken Atlanta three weeks before the election, there’s a strong possiblity that the Democrats would have won and tried to negotiate a settlement with the Confederacy. 1968, as I stated, is a good example. 1972 isn’t because in many peoples’ minds, the war was already winding down enough that “end it now” as opposed to “end it in a year or so” wasn’t as huge an option. 1944 likewise saw us near the end of a war in which we had been attacked in the first place, so there was no chance of any “let’s make peace with the Japs and Nazis” to actually succeed. But 1952 saw Eisenhower elected partially because he promised to “go to Korea” and negotiate a peace. The other wars mentioned occurred conveniently between national elections- Mexican War 1845-1847, Spanish American War 1898, World War I 1917-1919.
But even still, the peace movements had repercussions in previous or following elections; in 1900 Bryan ran on an anti-imperialist platform against our actions in the Spanish-American War (and was trounced completely for it); Wilson in 1916 and FDR in 1940 promised to not engage Americans in foreign wars (and, in both case, we were in the war within eighteen months of the election).
Peace movements bring attention to the idea that not everyone agrees with the war. And once enough people stop agreeing with the war, the government usually decides to get out of the war, though it usually takes at least one election cycle to do so. No minority peace movement alone will ever stop a war. But a peace movement that slowly convinces the majority certainly will.
The Spanish ousted their government and voted in a new one that ended (or soon will end) that country’s involvement in Iraq. Granted, it wasn’t a huge involvement, but would you count that as an example asked for in the OP?
I think it’s reasonable to say that the “Peace Now” movement in Israel effectively brought about the downfall of the Shamir government and ushered in the Rabin government which signed the Oslo peace accord with the PLO.
Of course, it blew up (all too literally) in Israel’s faces seven years later, which will make Israelis unlikely to trust their future to peaceniks again, but they were certainly successful in their aims at the time.
Wait a minute, here! What you’re back-handedly saying is the Democrats were right all along! I mean, if yiou end a war…peace breaks out! Imagine that. BTW, IIRC, Congress pulled the plug on funding the Conflict. I was too young to know, but could it be it was a Democratic Congress that handed Nixon decision?
I’ll tell ya this, the peace movement lowered the voting age, did it not? And, you’re not accounting for the political pressure in the US to end the war. This pressure comes from the constituents on up. I’m sure Nixon didn’t end the war ALONE out of the kindness of his heart and a heavy conscience, ya know.
The OP should have started his history of the peace movement a wee bit before November 1968. The incumbent president refused to run for reelection because of the political firestorm over Vietnam. The OP might have some other explanation of why Johnson didn’t run again that doesn’t have to do with millions taking to the streets in opposition to his policies, but I wouldn’t really buy it.
