( Tomdispatch.com ) – I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for U.C. Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, “major in history and minor in rioting.” Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the Civil Rights movement.
As it turned out, we were both right.
Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson — it might have been Dean Acheson — suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldn’t do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. “See? I was right. They’re lying about the war.”
It’s been 60 years since that summer and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Don’t worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)
The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It
Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all — the assassinations, carpet bombings, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the CIA’s first mass torture scheme) — but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, there’s a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.
That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. We’d see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.
Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities — it was easier in those pre-internet days — or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than being assigned one at birth). Since many employers demanded to see your draft exemption or, after the war ended, your discharge papers, he worked for his housepainter father until President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 amnesty for draft evaders.
A friend I came to know during the 1980s had spent nine months in the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for pouring blood on draft board records. Thousands were beaten bloody during the police riots outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where activists had gone to protest the nomination of pro-war presidential candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And on May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University during antiwar protests. They were all right about the war, but too few Americans believed them — until decades later, when just about everyone did.
For Once in Our Lives
My father had a few sayings he thought were pretty funny. On meeting a child for the first time he’d ask, “How old are you? Ten? When I was your age,” he’d continue, “I was 21!” A favorite of his was: “For once in my life, I’m right again.” He’d make that joke whenever he’d been proven right about anything. I sometimes think it’s the fate of many progressives for once in our lives to be right — over and over. This isn’t because we’re particularly good people, although some of my heroes are indeed good people. It’s at least in part because we are people with good luck. It’s been our good luck that, at some time in our lives, somebody offered us a place to stand, a viewpoint, an ethical way of grasping the world.
I think for example of Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan just days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. On the House floor, she got up and responded to the almost universal calls for revenge with these words: “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
As I wrote about her courage at the start of the Biden years:
“The legislation she opposed then, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), has indeed allowed ‘this’ to spiral out of control. It has been used to justify an ever-metastasizing series of wars, spreading from Afghanistan in central Asia throughout the Middle East, south to Yemen, leaping to Africa — Libya, Djibouti, Somalia, and who knows where else. Despite multiple attempts to repeal it, that AUMF remains in effect today, ready for the next president with aspirations to military adventures.”
And four years later, it’s still in effect, providing legal cover for a once-isolationist Donald Trump to drop bombs on Iran and threaten Russia with U.S. nuclear submarines.
Back in 2001, Lee was excoriated for her vote against that war. The Wall Street Journal called her a “clueless liberal” and the Washington Times claimed that she was “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.”
Twenty years later, the Washington Post celebrated her courage, noting that no one in Congress — not even Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders — had shared her prescience at the time.
…We’re Right Again
The best response to the horror of September 11th was never a military one. The attacks were a criminal act best prosecuted as such, both in this country and in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It was clear to anyone who remembered Vietnam that the Afghan war would become a murderous quagmire and some of us said so at the time.
We were similarly right that the Iraq war that followed would never be the “cakewalk” Bush administration officials promised. We knew that Bush speechwriter David Frum, who invented the phrase “axis of evil” for Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, was deluded when he said, “The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts.” We were convinced at the time that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were lying about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. We knew, in part at least, because Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq, had told the U.N. Security Council so on February 14, 2003, writing in part, “So far, UNMOVIC has not found any such weapons [of mass destruction], only a small number of empty chemical munitions…”
Twenty years later, and remembering the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, some of us had an inkling of what October 7, 2023, portended for Gaza. On October 25, 2023, just a few weeks into the now almost-complete destruction of that tiny strip of land, journalist Omar El Akkad tweeted this sentence: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” (He has since published a memoir of his reporting life, covering everything from the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the war on Black people in Ferguson, Missouri.)
In June 2024, I wrote that both the Democrats and Republicans were offering uncritical support for the demolition of Gaza. Here’s what I said then:
“Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and across the country and the world, even in Israel, students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in progress. While the “grownups” debate the legal definition of genocide, those young people continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.”
Now that it is too late, it’s no longer forbidden to use the word “genocide” in polite company. Now, as Gazans starve, as they are shot by soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces while seeking food aid at sites run by the farcically-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the world has decided it is, after all, “against this.” Only recently, in fact, two Israeli human rights organizations used the word “genocide” for the first time to describe their own government’s attempts to rid Gaza of Palestinian life.
France, the United Kingdom, and Canada have all called for the recognition of a Palestinian state, again many years too late. No contiguous land remains where such a state could be constructed. The world looked passively on for decades as Israel fulfilled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s dream of turning the occupied West Bank into a “pastrami sandwich.” Back in the 1970s, he explained the plan to Winston Churchill’s grandson. “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements,” he said, “in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” Over 20 years ago, The Nation magazine reported that Sharon’s mission had already essentially been accomplished. And now? This past May, the Israeli parliament the Knesset approved another 22 settlements there, a move that, as the country’s defense minister explained, “prevents establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
Recent weeks have seen increased attacks on Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but on the West Bank. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 757 such settler attacks by mid-July. As the newspaper Al-Jazeera reports, “The violence also includes the demolitions of hundreds of homes and forced mass displacement of Palestinians as well as annexations of more land in violation of international law.”
Premature Antifascists?
During the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, a group of Americans formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to help defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of fascist General Francisco Franco (aided by Adolf Hitler’s military forces). Almost a quarter of the Brigade died, the Spanish partisans lost the war, and Franco’s dictatorship lasted until he died in 1975. I knew a few of those Lincoln Brigade members in their later years, including Commander Milt Wolff, who was also a staunch member of the movement in solidarity with the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution.
In the 1950s, when this country was gripped by an anti-communist fervor, the Lincoln Brigade members and others who had opposed Franco came to be known as “premature antifascists.” Unlike the good (and timely?) antifascists who fought the Axis powers in World War II, they had recognized the dangers of fascism too early — before, that is, the United States had decided to enter the war on the side of France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. Those Americans who’d jumped too early for the Allies were derided as communists (as indeed, many of them were) rather than being congratulated for seeing the danger ahead of everyone else.
The 2024 election cycle contained what some might call a resurgence of premature antifascism: those of us who warned that electing Donald Trump (and by proxy, his coterie of anti-democratic monarchists) would bring a dictator into the White House and fascism to the nation. During the first Trump administration, of course, many people could already discern his despotic trajectory. And yet, in August 2017, the New York Times ran an op-ed headlined, “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” Its authors ridiculed the (presumably premature) opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism as “tyrannophobia,” which they defined as “the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions.”
Well, yes, some of us did see that threat as an, if not the, overwhelmingly important political issue. There’s no joy in saying, “We told you so.” Sadly, the first six months of Trump’s second term have proved us — disastrously — right again.
Copyright 2025 Rebecca Gordon
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