Just a reminder folks - the Vietnam war ended largely
as a result of the anti-war movement, a social
movement that consisted disproportionately of young
people, including many college students.

When the antiwar movement first challenged the war, it
received little support from politicians or the press, and
its goals seemed almost hopeless. But the tide of public
opinion gradually began to shift .

In the 1968 presidential primaries according to what
I've read an antiwar candidate backed by student volunteers
did unexpectedly well and President Johnson decided not to
run for re-election.

From that point on, political debate on the war focused not
on how to stay in it, but how to get out of it.

Through collective action, ordinary people
with few resources other than their own
determination had changed a national
consensus for war to a national consensus for peace.

This time they have a large portion of the press on their
side and global support as well as the support of
famous people and politicians. A fundamental insight of
sociology is that once people no longer take their world
for granted, but instead understand the social authorship
of their lives and futures, they can become an irresistible
force in history.

Foxy,

The anti war movement in the US was certainly a factor in when the US pulled out of Vietnam, but to claim that it was the major factor is stretching the truth more than a little bit.

The main problem the US had was that the Russians and Chinese were not only supplying the VC with vast quantities of high quality weapons and supplies, but also providing training and maintenance for their aircraft, airports and training areas while sending in hundreds of 1000s of guerillas into South Vietnam. The strategic targets the US should have attacked were populated with Russians and Chinese with the implicit threat of the Russians and Chinese formally joining the conflict if their citizens were killed.

The US were left with a Hobson's choice of a full scale obliteration of enemy positions in North Vietnam which could ignite a conflict of the scale of Korea, or in the face of a constant escalation by the Russians and Chinese face an unwinable conflict with escalating costs and casualties. If there had been no anti war movement, the US would have had to leave, though possibly some time later.

Of course the US paid the Russians back with interest in Afghanistan to the point where the USSR collapsed in bankruptcy roughly in 1990

Shadow Minister,

A striking example of collective action to stop war
occurred during the 1960s, when the United States
became embroiled in the longest and most humiliating
military conflict in its history.

Vietnam was involved in civil war between the north ruled
by communists, and the south, ruled by an undemocratic
regime that called for American help.

Determined to "fight communism", the United States stumbled
into an obscure but vicious conflict on behalf of peasants
who seemed largely indifferent to the outcome of the
fighting and to America's ideology.

Americans public opinion gave patriotic support to the war.
But as the nation became more deeply involved, the Vietnam
war became a quagmire that drained its energy, strength,
credibility, treasure, and blood.

As casualties mounted and troops became more demoralized,
the war began to tear American society apart, dividing
neighbour from neighbour, friend from friend, family
members from one another. Some sons volunteered for war,
some were drafted, some became conscientious objectors,
some evaded the draft by going into hiding or fleeing
their country.

Those who fought and those who refused to fight branded
each other with such names as - traitor, brute, coward,
dupe and so on. Altogether, more than 2 million young
Americans went to this unfamiliar place to fight an
unwanted war for uncertain ends. Some 57,000 of them
were killed, and almost 300,000 wounded.

To some extent the war divides Americans still, but there
is now a general consensus that, somehow, a terrible
mistake was made.

The memory of that mistake places an informal social
restraint on American leaders, for there is intense
public resistance to any prospect of "another Vietnam"
any where else.

As I stated earlier the Vietnam war came to an end largely
as a result of the antiwar movement

Foxy,

I totally disagree with Shadow Minister's thesis on the reason the US abandoned the cause of democracy in South Vietnam.

I side with you on the anti-war movement but think that the power elite itself had come to a consensus that it could not win a guerrilla war in which it could not see the enemy and the enemy refused to come out into the open. I think the anti-war protestors and the power elite both knew that such a guerrilla war would never end and the power elite had to get the politicians to capitulate to the demands of the anti-war movement.

Like the current protests, it had turned into a struggle between institutional power and people power.

(PS Don't pay to much attention to what Shadow Minister says, he's just an engineer. I've worked in engineering forever and they are all the same: a bunch of know-all-know-nothings. They are like that simply because they are just engineers who really want to be something more than just an engineer.)

Foxy & SM,

Hmmmm ....... I was in demos from around late 1965 against the US war against Vietnam, but it took me maybe thirty years to realise that the demonstrations weren't against the US war against Vietnam so much as against conscription for the war against Vietnam, both here and in the US.

Soon after conscription ended here, the demos pretty much stopped - except that Nixon had massively increased the B-52 bombing against anti-US-held areas in Cambodia and Laos as well, so I do recall a major protest march on about January 20, 1973, after Whitlam had been elected and announced the end of conscription. But the war dragged on for another two years. Without any memorable protests.

Joe

LOUDmouth,

And what is the point you are making?