Take Five--Vietnam Moratorium Memories

[Take Five. Every Friday, Fire on the Mountain picks a category and lists five cool things in it. It's up to you, dear reader, to add your own in the Comments section. Just click on the word "comments" at the bottom of the piece and you're off to the races.]

There's been a most heartening spike in activity against the occupation of Iraq in recent days--the student strike peaking in the seizure of CA Highway 217 in Santa Barbara, the Vermont legislature calling for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the swelling wave of takeovers of Congressional offices blogged here a couple days back.

In this context, it's hardly surprising that activists brainstorming the next step are contemplating the possibility of an Iraq Moratorium, based on the massive Vietnam Moratorium of Autumn, 1969.

Hence, here are five things I recall about the Moratorium. Readers who were there would be making a small but real contribution by sharing your own memories. Your comments will be a real help to folks trying to see what might be done this year.

TAKE FIVE

1. It was big, real big. On October 15, 1969, the Bronx campus where I was based hosted a borough-wide twilight rally of over 10,000, most of whom came on an unprecedented nighttime march through residential neighborhoods.(I seem to recall this being the candlelight demo where our SDS chapter marched with candles made from three foot lengths of 2 x 2, wire-wrapped at the top in kerosene-soaked mattress fabric.)

2. One unifying theme nation-wide was the widespread use of black armbands and ribbons.

3. Though the initial call six months earlier was for something more like a general strike, the no more business as usual aspect mainly took the form of student strikes at colleges and high schools, some junior highs too.

4. The Moratorium seemed pretty distant from the infighting between (and within) the two large anti-war coalitions and even more removed from the revolutionary politics them hegemonic in the student movement.

5. The single biggest error the organizers made was a voluntarist one: the concept was that each month the Moratorium would be extended by a day until the government caved in. In fact, after October, where participants in all the local actions must have numbered well over a million, the November Moratorium was folded into a huge Washington, DC March. By the middle of December, when it should have run an unsustainable three days, the Moratorium was heading for the dead letter office.

[This is crossposted over at DailyKos, where an interesting set of reminiscences is accumulating in the comments section.]

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Take Five--Reasons for the Fall-off in Anti-war Demos After '69

It's Friday, and time for Take Five. Last week's inaugural list was five lefty mysteries.

This time, it's a little more free-form. In a discussion about the student movement of today on another blog, a commenter nmed lawyerDan raised the following question:

One of the things I always wondered about was why there were those huge demonstrations of maybe 2 million people in the fall of 1969 and then, even as the war became even less popular, there were never such big marches again. It was like the Vietnam Moratorium ended the war, but it took 6 years to process the paperwork.

The response, by lao hong han, conveniently for Fire on the Mountain offered five points, as a partial explanation. That post follows:

I agree that the high point of mass demos was 1967-69. In the remarkable "Honorable Peace," one of the finest and most savage protest songs of the Vietnam era, Gerry Goffin writes of the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi ordered by Nixon and Kissinger:

I know the tide of protest has passed us by somehow,
But when will you speak out, if you don't speak out now?

(This puppy was recorded on Christmas Eve 1972 as the bombing intensified by, believe it or not, B.J. Thomas, Mr. "Rainsdrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," and almost universally forbidden radio play by station managers fearful of its blunt condemnation of Nixon.)

Five short points in partial explanation:

1. Fatigue with what some of us had taken to calling "Peace Crawls" and saw as ineffective and toothless, especially as media coverage dwindled.

2. A broad radicalization in the student movement which led to the eruption in May, 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, national shutdown of campuses, the partial or complete destruction of 33 ROTC buildings around the country, etc.). This advance was undercut even as it was happening by the 1969 collapse of SDS, depriving the student movement of organizational leadership.

3. The perception that the war was in fact ending with negotiations with North Vietanm and the NLF underway, the drawdown of US troops under "Vietnamization" to fewer than 200,000 by Fall, 1971, and the erosion of the US military.

4. The institution in 1969 of the draft lottery which let a majority of draft age males know whether or not they would likely be facing conscription, thus limiting the insecurity previously felt by an entire age cohort. This was followed by the end of the draft overall in 1973.

5. The fact that despite the shellacking of "peace candidate" George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, more and more Senators and Congressmen were belatedly taking stands for ending the war.

What say you, dear readers?

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