Redemption Song by Mike Marqusee

Author:Mike Marqusee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844675272
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Ali’s outburst came eighteen months after the United States Congress had approved the Tonkin Gulf resolution licensing direct US attacks on North Vietnam. Johnson assured the electorate that “we will seek no wider war,” but as the Pentagon Papers make clear, with congressional endorsement of this “retaliatory action” (in preparation for at least five months before the alleged North Vietnamese aggression), “an important threshold in the war” had been breached with “virtually no domestic opposition.”

Six months later, in February 1965, the US launched its Rolling Thunder air war against North Vietnam. By the time the cease-fire was signed in January 1973, US planes and pilots had dropped on Vietnam three times the total tonnage of bombs unloaded on all of Europe, Africa and Asia in World War II. On 8 March 1965, the marines landed at Da Nang to become the first (officially acknowledged) US combat troops. They began offensive action against the insurgents on 1 April, initiating a ground war that was to last more than seven years. By July, 100,000 US soldiers had arrived in the country. Six months later, their numbers had doubled.

In early 1966, the United States was waging ferocious war against the Vietnamese population. Among the tactics deployed—and extensively documented—were crop destruction, rice denial, saturation bombings, forced evacuations, torture and mutilation of prisoners, immolation of homes and whole villages. The weapons used included napalm and anti-personnel cluster bombs. US pilots were flying 1500 sorties a week against the North, opposed only by anti-aircraft fire from below.

Although the reality of mass destruction was largely concealed from Americans by a compliant media, protests against the government’s policy grew steadily as the war escalated. The first signs of domestic dissent became visible in the spring of 1965, when anti-war teach-ins were held at more than one hundred universities across the country. The teach-in was a variation on the sit-in, the tactic popularized by black students in the South; in its early days, many of the activists in the nascent anti-war movement were veterans of the civil rights struggle, and they infused the gathering anti-war protests with its language and methods.

On 17 April 1965, in the first major national protest, 25,000 marched against the war in Washington, DC. The march was called by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and helped launch the organization’s meteoric career as the vanguard of the country’s radical white youth. In the call for the march, SDS had drawn explicitly on the experiences of the black freedom movement. The leaflet asked: “WHAT KIND OF AMERICA IS IT WHOSE RESPONSE TO POVERTY AND OPPRESSION IN VIETNAM IS NAPALM AND DEFOLIATION? WHOSE RESPONSE TO POVERTY AND OPPRESSION IN MISSISSIPPI IS SILENCE?”

At the demonstration itself, Paul Potter, the SDS president, delivered an impassioned indictment not only of the conduct of the war in Vietnam, but of the very premises of US foreign policy. It was necessary, he declared, to “build a movement that understands Vietnam in all its horror as but a symptom of a deeper malaise.

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