'Vietnam Syndrome' still haunts Washington Behind the Lines

Scan page 2

ACTiON Barbara Putnam, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly for $8 per year by Socialist Action Publishing Association, 3435 Army St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Socialist Action, 3435 Army St., No. 308, RATES: For one year (12 issues) U.S. 2nd Class: $8, Ist Class: $16; Canada and Mexico 2nd Class: $12, Ist Class: $16; All other countries 2nd Class: $15, 1st Class:

2 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1990 to smash through her windows. She and her grandson and daughter (with her two-week-old baby) dove under the bed to escape being killed.

Soon, loud-speakers began to demand that all people leave the building. She didn't want to, but realized that her house was burning. When she and her family went into the street, there were U.S. soldiers and tanks all over the place. They were ordering people out of the burning neighborhood.

Many people had sons, daughters, and other relatives in the neighborhood and wanted to run and help them out of the burning inferno but the soldiers would not let them. They had to stand by while their meager possessions were burned into the ground. This particular woman lost her home and everything else she owned.

The concentration camp The troops demanded that all people in that area go to a camp which had been set up by U.S. troops. They told them they could get food, water, and shelter at the camp. Many, however, first wanted to find their families. But brute Editor: ALAN BENJAMIN Asst. Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER Staff: Alex Chis, Paul Colvin, May May Gong, Malik Business Manager: DAVID KIRSCHNER Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif.

San Francisco, CA 94110.

$30. (Money orders, checks should be in U.S. dollars.)

Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views expressed in editorials. we see the military "experts" nearly in tears—all because of Vietnam! "It isn't easy to start a war in the Middle East," they complain, "without support from the folks back home."

For once, the Pentagon-types are right on target. Today's growing antiwar movement, indeed, has its foundations in the earlier movement to Bring the Troops Home from Vietnam. The antiwar teach-ins of today, for example, were first developed in 1965 at the University of Michigan and at Berkeley. The technique had been adapted from the sit-ins of the Black civil rights Discussions over tactics are takClosing date Nov. 1, 199( Judy April 9 ralf* ing place within today's antiwar movement that echo the debates of the 1960s. Then, as now, a dispute raged over which slogans the antiwar movement should adopt— "negotiations" or "Bring the Troops Home Now."

Debates over slogans

The main cheerleaders of the "negotiations" position were the leadership of the old "Peace Movement" (groups like SANE and the Student Peace Union) and the Stalinists of the Communist Party. They saw the antiwar movement as little more than a pressure group on the Democratic Party "Doves" ir Congress.

In the early 1960s, people who advocated mass demonstrations around the slogan of "Bring the Troops Home Now" had to struggle to be heard. It was only with the growth of independent local antiwar committees-especially on the college campuses-that the "Out Now!" perspective (which appealed to both the troops and the masses of Americans) became predominant.

I took part in those early debates-although I was still a teenager and rather unsophisticated in politics. At the time I joined the Student Peace Union (SPU) in 1962, John F. Kennedy was threatening to bomb Cuba unless Khrushchev removed the missiles he had placed there. And many Americans were hunkering down for a thermo-nuclear war.

The Cuban Missile Crisis soon subsided. But a real shooting war was still raging-and had been for two or three years. That was the war in Vietnam.

On a cold day in early 1963, I remember, I attended a Ban the Bomb picketline outside the statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. Some of us carried signs demanding that the United States get out of Vietnam. The organizers of the demonstration (the SPU, SANE, and other pacifist groups) immediately booted us off the picketlinewhich we expected they would do.

We protested: "But the government is involved in a real war! We can't keep quiet!" It was to no avail. In those early days, for a short period, Vietnam protesters were forced to set up separate picketlines across the street.

I meet the Trotskyists One day, some of us students from Ohio drove to New York City for a demonstration-at the United Nations building, I believe. In the evening, we went to a party at someone's apartment on the Lower East Side. The little apartment was very crowded, and I followed the knots of people who spilled out into the stairwells and on up to the roof.

People talking "really" happening.

The SPU national office, he explained, was run lock, stock, and barrel by people in the YPSL ("Yipsil," " he pronounced it—the Young People's Socialist League.) Then he informed me that another youth group was gaining influence in the SPU. Activists around this group wanted mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam-as I did. These people were the "Trotskyists" (who at that time were in the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party and today are in Socialist Action).

I decided right there to try to get to know those "Trotskyists."

In February 1965, President Johnson ordered massive bombing attacks against North Vietnam. Nothing like this blitzkrieg had been seen since World War II. Thousands of people responded when one group, Students for a Democratic Society, put out the call for an April 17, 1965, mass march against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I was one of the 20,000 people (mainly students) who rallied in Washington, D.C., that day.

The new antiwar movement had received its christening. More and more students were becoming radicalized, the independent committees were growing, and the relative strength of the Stalinists and the Democratic Party-influenced liberals receded.

Soon millions of Americans would take part in the mobilizations to Bring the Troops Home Now. And to the consternation of the Pentagon, the "Vietnam Syndrome" has lasted until this very moment.

----- pull-quotes -----

CTION end women's rights

By Michael Schreiber