Calls for more 'civil' and de-personalized opposition to the Trump regime by, e.g., @davidaxelrod and @jpodhoretz, from members of my own generation perplex me b/c they seem to ignore the experience of our generation in the anti-Viet Nam war movement.+
Nothing that has yet happened in the context of Trump comes close to the mass turmoil that marked resistance to that war, over a period of years, but especially in the period 1967-70. Official violence and repression wd shock many younger Americans today.+
sfchronicle.com/thetake/articl…
sfchronicle.com/thetake/articl…
Ohio National Guard shot and killed protesting students at Kent State. Chicago police beat hundreds of demonstrators outside the 1968 DNC. Anti-war figures like the Berrigans engaged in 'direct action' by breaking into draft board and FBI offices and destroying records.+
In this charged environment, where many of the protesters feared their own lives might be at risk from the war, the protesters' response was NOT to leave the policy makers alone in their 'off' time. Every responsible official of the LBJ administration+
from McNamara, to the Bundy brothers to the Rostow brothers and many others were all, at one time or another, hounded and harassed on 'private' occasions. Invitations to speak at their sons' high school graduations were rescinded (Sidwell Friends), +
their friendly, private visits to their alma maters (MIT) became pitched battles. They knew little peace and so kept to themselves. They knew that that they were PNG in many of their familiar places. Whether it affected policy, in the end, is debatable,+
but a reading of their memoirs, or a viewing of any number of films (e.g. McNamara), will leave you in no doubt that they were, at a personal level, scarred by the turmoil and that the personal attacks and denunciations did strike home.+
2 takeaways: (1) we may be on the precipice of nationwide, sustained protesting on the scale of that anti-Viet Nam war movement, but we haven't come close to it yet, and ppl may not be prepared for the hard knocks involved, and +
(2) there is plenty of precedent, in living memory, for the efficacy & justice of invading the 'personal space' of the architects of large scale injustice. By 1969,anyone who stood up in a campus gathering and urged 'civility' and 'restraint,' would have been shouted down.+
There's a time and place for everything. There were some in 1969, I'm sure, urging civility and restraint. But they did not predominate and the anti-war movement was stronger for it, IMO. "Civility," in the midst of a great struggle, is code for passivity. That way danger lies.
