These are the first lines of an essay on that war and that movement titled "The Anti-War Movement We are Supposed to Forget" by H. Bruce Franklin. Unless you lived through it and were involved, not like that useless twit Tom Brokaw who just serves his corporate masters and repeats the company line like so may others, the odds are that everything you (think you) know is a lie. Well, not you in particular, since most here have looked behind the curtain, but I'd bet that some of that history has still been kept hidden from many. After all, that same ruling class still has power here and knows what information and beliefs serves their interest and how to control that.
I came across that short essay and wanted to share it.
The author (a professor at Rutgers) has a homepage with his many books and other essays at
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/The full essay is at
http://www.geocities.com/elethinker/RG/forget.htmFollowing are a few excerpts:
VISUALIZE the movement against the Vietnam War. What do you see? Hippies with daisies in their long, unwashed hair yelling "Baby killers!" as they spit on clean-cut, bemedaled veterans just back from Vietnam? College students in tattered jeans (their pockets bulging with credit cards) staging a sit-in to avoid the draft? A mob of chanting demonstrators burning an American flag (maybe with a bra or two thrown in)? That's what we're supposed to see, and that's what Americans today probably do see--if they visualize the antiwar movement at all.
We are thus depriving ourselves--or being deprived--of one legitimate source of great national pride about American culture and behavior during the war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated. Tens of millions sympathized with their suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence, and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.
But in the decades since the war's official conclusion, American consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its potential for healing and redemption, has been deliberately and systematically obliterated. During the first few years after the war, while the White House and Congress were reneging on aid promised to Vietnam, they were not expressing the feelings of most Americans. For example, a New York Times/CBS News poll, published in July 1977, asked this question: "Suppose the President recommended giving assistance to Vietnam. Would you want your Congressman to approve giving Vietnam food or medicine?" Sixty-six percent said yes, 29 percent said no. Ironically, it was only after the war was over that demonization of the Vietnamese began to succeed. And soon those tens of millions of Americans who had fought against the war themselves became, as a corollary, a truly hateful enemy as envisioned by the dominant American culture.
....
When did Americans actually begin to oppose U.S. warfare against Vietnam? As soon as the first U.S. act of war was committed. And when was that? In 1965, when President Johnson ordered the Marines to land at Da Nang and began the nonstop bombing of North Vietnam? In 1964, when Johnson launched "retaliatory" bombing of North Vietnam after a series of covert U.S. air, sea, and land attacks? In 1963, when 19,000 U.S. combat troops were participating in the conflict and Washington arranged the overthrow of the puppet ruler it had installed in-Saigon in 1954? In 1961, when President Kennedy began Operation Hades, a large-scale campaign of chemical warfare? In 1954, when U.S. combat teams organized covert warfare to support the man Washington had selected to rule South Vietnam? Americans did oppose all of those acts of war, but the first American opposition came as soon as Washington began warfare against the Vietnamese people by equipping and transporting a foreign army to invade their country--in 1945.
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As the antiwar movement was becoming a mass movement, in 1965, it was fundamentally aimed at achieving peace through education, and it was based on what now seem incredibly naive assumptions about the causes and purposes of the war. We tend to forget that this phase of the antiwar movement began as an attempt to educate the government and the nation. Most of us opposed to the war in those relatively early days believed--and this is embarrassing to confess--that the government has somehow blundered into the war, maybe because our leaders were simply ignorant about Vietnamese history.
....
Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today opposition to the war was not concentrated among affluent college students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers generally considered themselves "doves" and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves "hawks" and supported participation in the war were concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata.
For example, a Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that 60 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75 percent of those with a high-school education favored withdrawal, and 80 percent of those with only a gradeschool education favored withdrawal. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen reports a revealing experiment he conducted repeatedly in the 1990's. When he asked audiences to estimate the educational level of those who favored U. S. withdrawal back in 1971, by an almost 10-to-1 margin they believed that college-educated people, were the most antiwar. In fact, they estimated that 90 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal, scaling down to 60 percent of those with a grade-school education.
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The number of draft evaders and resisters was dwarfed by the number of deserters from the active duty armed forces. During the 1971 fiscal year alone, 98,324 servicemen deserted, an astonishing rate of 142.2 for every 1,000 men on duty Revealing statistics flashed to light briefly as President Ford was pondering the amnesty he declared in September 1974 (at the same time he also pardoned ex-President Nixon for all federal crimes he may have committed while in office). According to the Department of Defense, there were 503,926 "incidents of desertion" between July 1, 1966, and December 31, 1973. From 1963 through 1973 (a period almost half again as long), only 13,518 men were prosecuted for draft evasion or resistance. The admitted total of deserters still officially "at large" at the time was 28,661--six and a half times the 4,400 draft evaders or resisters still "at large." These numbers only begin to tell the story.
Thousands of veterans who had fought in Vietnam moved to the forefront of the antiwar movement after they returned to the United States, and they--together with thousands of active-duty G.I.'s--soon began to play a crucial role in the domestic movement. Dozens of teach-ins on college campuses were led by Vietnam veterans, who spoke at hundreds of rallies. More and more demonstrations were led by large contingents of veterans and active-duty service people, who often participated under risk of grave punishment. The vanguard of that Washington demonstration by half a million people in the spring of 1971 was a contingent of a thousand Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who then conducted "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," which they called Dewey Canyon III (Dewey Canyon I was a 1969 covert "incursion" into Laos; Dewey Canyon II was the disastrous February 1971 invasion of Laos). About 800 marched up to a barricade hastily erected to keep them away from the Capitol and hurled back their Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, and campaign ribbons at the government that had bestowed them.
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