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Consider just one long-gone date in the world of give-peace-(not-war)-a-chance: January 27, 1973. On that day, the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese rebel forces signed an agreement initiating a cease-fire during which the U.S. would withdraw its troops and dismantle all its bases in the South. On that very same day in this country, the draft was ended, launching what would become America's all-volunteer military. Richard Nixon was still president then. He had long been convinced, as Andrew Glass wrote at Politico, that "ending the draft could be an effective political weapon against the burgeoning antiwar movement. He believed middle-class youths would lose interest in protesting the war once it became clear that they would not have to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam."
Though it was already too late for Nixon to test out that thesis in terms of America's disastrous war in Vietnam, almost half a century later, it seems as if he was onto something. I was in that "burgeoning antiwar movement" of the late 1960s and early 1970s; turned in my draft card in protest; was often in the streets demonstrating against the war; and worked as an antiwar journalist at a time when, among others, both rebellious students and antiwar soldiers demonstrated repeatedly, often in significant numbers, against a first-class horror thousands of miles away.
In this century, we haven't exactly lacked Vietnam equivalents. After all, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush launched its Global War on Terror and, with it, two fiercely destructive distant conflicts that could have been considered Vietnam-competitive. I'm thinking, of course, of the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The devastating war in Iraq following that invasion continued for years, while the one in Afghanistan only ended (disastrously) in August 2021. And yet here was the odd thing: though there were large antiwar protests in February 2003 against the coming invasion of Iraq and more followed after that war began, unlike in the Vietnam era, they died out all too soon, while this country's conflicts went grimly on (and on and on).
TomDispatch itself began more than two decades ago as a protest against this country's disastrous war on terror and never ceased to focus on the conflicts it launched, even when they largely stopped being issues here. As TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson has reported, some active-duty military personnel and veterans did continue to protest them. (She even wrote a book about such protesters: War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built.) However, most Americans seemed to forget about the wars being fought in their name by that all-volunteer military in distant lands. In so many of those years, polls indicated that remarkably few of us even considered war a problem, so perhaps, once upon a time, Richard Nixon did have his finger on the pulse of this nation.
Today, at a moment when peace movements of any sort (including in relation to the war in Ukraine) get little or no attention, Levinson returns to the subject. Let her explain. Tom
Give Peace a Chance
Is There a World Beyond War?
By Nan Levinson
I like to sing and what I like best is to do so at the top of my lungs when I'm all alone. Last summer, taking a walk through the corn fields in New York's Hudson River Valley with no one around but the barn swallows, I found myself belting out a medley of tunes about peace from my long-ago, summer-camp years. That was the late 1950s, when the miseries of World War II were still relatively fresh, the U.N. looked like a promising development, and folk music was just oh-so-cool.
At my well-meaning, often self-righteous, always melodious camp, 110 children used to warble with such sweet promise:
"My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
but other lands have sunlight too and clover
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine"
It seemed such a sensible, grown-up way to think " like, duh! we can all have the good stuff. That was before I got older and came to realize that grown-ups don't necessarily think sensibly. So many years later, as I finished the last chorus, I wondered: Who talks, let alone sings, that way about peace anymore? I mean, without irony and with genuine hope?
Since my summer ramble, International Peace Day has come and gone. Meanwhile, militaries are killing civilians (and sometimes vice versa) in places as disparate as Ukraine, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. It just goes on and on, doesn't it? And that's not even to mention all the fragile truces, acts of terrorism (and reprisal), quashed uprisings, and barely repressed hostilities on this planet.
Don't get me started, by the way, on how the language of battle so often pervades our daily lives. Little wonder that the Pope, in his recent Christmas message, bemoaned the world's "famine of peace."
Amid all of that, isn't it hard to imagine that peace stands a chance?
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