Mark Weisbrot
May
4 will mark thirty years since four students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent
State University were murdered by Ohio National Guardsmen. It is no exaggeration
to call it murder, since the students were unarmed and– given how far they were
from the troops– could not have posed any threat. The closest of those killed,
Jeffrey Miller, was shot at a distance of 265 feet.
The
photo of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling beside his body, arms outstretched and
screaming in anguish, was etched into the national consciousness as a searing
image of the war at home.
The
campuses responded with an explosion of protest, with five million students
taking part in America’s largest student strike. Kent State was a turning point
in the history of the war– "a shock wave that brought the nation and its
leadership close to the point of physical exhaustion..," as Henry Kissinger
would later write in his memoirs.
The
war dragged on for five more years, and so we have recently been treated to a
series of ruminations on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its conclusion. But not
enough space has been given to those who got it right three decades ago: the
anti-war movement.
The
protesters put forth an alternative analysis of the war. It was not a war to
save the world from a "Communist threat," as our leaders told us, but
a colonial war. We took over the war from the French, who were trying to regain
control of their former colony after World War II. We refused to allow elections
in 1956, as provided for by the Geneva accords of 1954– because (as President
Eisenhower noted) we knew that our adversaries, led by Ho Chi Minh, would win
overwhelmingly.
Instead
we poured in arms and money, and then troops to support a corrupt, dictatorial
client state in South Vietnam. We could never "win" the war, because
most Vietnamese saw the United States as a hostile invader trying to take over
their country. And the South Vietnamese army was understandably demoralized. So
our involvement escalated, and we resorted to increasingly brutal methods–
including the bombing of civilians and defoliation of large areas of land. Two
million Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly in the South, in addition to
more than one million fighters. As Nixon spread the war to Cambodia– his
invasion of which brought the Kent State protesters into the streets– our
bombing probably killed as many Cambodians as Pol Pot did, and helped create the
conditions for the holocaust that ensued there.
The
anti-war movement argued that these were heinous crimes that could never be
justified. "We have destroyed their land and their crops," said Martin
Luther King, Jr. "We have supported the enemies of the peasants. . . we
have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What
liberators!"
A
1990 poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign relations found that 71% of
Americans thought the Vietnam war was "more than a mistake; it was
fundamentally wrong and immoral."
Yet
the 25th anniversary has seen numerous attempts to find some middle ground, so
that we may "put the war behind us." Fifty-eight thousand American
soldiers died in Vietnam, and even more committed suicide after returning home.
Some say it is a disservice to the millions of veterans who fought there to talk
about the evils of the war.
But
many veterans do not feel that way. Barry Romo, national coordinator of the
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, reminds us that his was the only organization
of Vietnam veterans that existed 30 years ago– and the only veterans who took
to the streets were those protesting the war. "It’s unfair to those who
lost their lives, and their arms and legs, to pretend that the war had some
value. We were lied to by the government and the media– we should never have
been there. The most important thing now is for people to know the truth so that
it never happens again."
It’s
a compelling argument. Our government’s support for the mass atrocities in
Central America in the 1980s, which included arming the killers of tens of
thousands of innocents, might well have been avoided if we had owned up to the
truth after the Vietnam war. And since this more recent history, too, has been
swept under the rug, we are currently going down the same road in Colombia.
To
forgive is a virtue, but forgetting is an indulgence we can ill afford. Our
foreign policy establishment remains addicted to empire, and is possessed by a
hubris that is arguably even greater than the one that got us into Vietnam.
Until they learn the lessons that the anti-war movement tried to teach them, we
can expect more Vietnams ahead of us.
Mark
Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in
Washington, D.C.
