Vietnam and Iraq: A Resurgence of Campus Activism

By Harold Jaffe

Innocent Blood for Oil? Not in Our Name! From San Diego State to Kent State; from the University of Florida to the University of Alaska, campuses throughout the nation have erupted in protest. Not since the late Sixties, at the height of the Vietnam War, have American university students been so committed to a cause and so vocal.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, most anti-war American students were considered part of the "counter culture," at odds with their elders, who by and large supported American foreign policy. In 2002 the sentiment against an American invasion of Iraq is gathering momentum from all quarters and includes progressives and conservatives, artists, business leaders, children, soccer moms and grandmothers.

As in the Vietnam era, university student protesters appear less concerned with their own welfare than with what they perceive as the common good. To be sure, young males are alert to the possibility of a draft, even though none of the official invasion advocates has publicly invoked the dreaded D-word. It stands to reason that if the impending war in Iraq proves more problematic than envisioned, or if the war spreads beyond Iraq, the US would need to augment its fighting troops above what the military services and the reserves can provide.

What deeply troubles most young activists is not conscription but destruction, with its too-familiar justification of "collateral damage," which, in both the Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan, killed children and innocent bystanders.

Students who have come of age in our era of diversity are not only sensitive to the fate of innocent Iraqis, but to the welfare of American Muslims. Under the extraordinary powers that Attorney General Ashcroft arrogated to his office in the wake of 9/11, official investigations of suspected terrorists now routinely take place outside the traditional boundaries of civil liberties. As a consequence, many African American Muslims are discouraged from openly practicing their faith when their mosques are kept under surveillance and federal agents question their allegiance. This and other versions of racial profiling, ethical-minded young activists view as a form of legalized "terrorism."

One would be hard-pressed to find an American who wasn’t deeply unsettled by the 9/11 attacks and the enormous number of American casualties. But student activists understand that to condemn those attacks is far different from condoning a full-scale invasion of Iraq. And despite the bullying insistence on American compliance in preparation for war, there are times when, as Miguel Unamuno said, "To be silent is to lie." Vocal dissent, then, is not unpatriotic; it is in fact a fundamental principle of our country’s founding.

In the Sixties, student activists were among the first to protest the war in Vietnam, and they were mostly dismissed as spoiled, indulged hippies, less engaged in real issues than in the "rush" they got from their exuberant defiance. Then, in 1995, twenty-two years after the war’s end, Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War, published his startling autobiographical confession: In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. McNamara writes that the war was not winnable and it was wrong, and that the US should have pulled out of Vietnam as early as 1963.

What McNamara has admitted long after the "tragedy" that accounted for millions of casualties and the despoliation of much of the land and infrastructure in Vietnam and Cambodia, student activists were onto at the start of the war, and despite harsh criticism, they continued vigorously protesting for the ten long years of the war’s duration.

I am not arguing that the situation vis-à-vis Iraq is the same as Vietnam. Because the impending invasion has inflamed religious and nationalist passions worldwide, the current situation is in fact more perilous and unpredictable than Vietnam. What I wish to emphasize here is the value of the principled dissent that is issuing from student campuses throughout the country. It is useful to think of this collective response not as a somewhat rare and isolated phenomenon, but as an integral part of what Aldous Huxley called, in a slightly different context, a "perennial philosophy."

In the US, the perennial philosophy of principled dissent dates back to the New England Quakers who refused to participate in the slaughter of "heathen" Indians. It continues with the daring of renegade African slaves such as Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman; and with the white abolitionists who supported them in word or deed. Principled dissent is implicit in Walt Whitman’s mystical collectivism; and at the turn of the century, graphically explicit in the working class aspirations of Mother Jones and the IWW. One finds it in the widespread, progressive response to the Spanish Civil War; and later in the writings of the Beat Generation, which facilitated the counter culture movement of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Principled dissent is movingly demonstrated in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973; in the nuclear disarmament initiative during the Reagan administra-tions in opposition to "Star Wars"; and now again in the campus protests against a US invasion of Iraq.

The fact that a potent manifestation of the perennial philosophy may

occur unpredictably and at long intervals, does not mean that it has

disappeared. Rather it is like a seed or a field of seeds which awaits the

conditions that favor its germination. Like a desert plant, it may be compelled to wait for a generation or longer before flowering.

Student protest on behalf of principle is alive and flourishing in 2002. We can only hope that our official policy makers have learned from the lessons of the ill-fated Vietnam War to pay close attention to their impassioned sons and daughters.

 

 

 

 

*Harold Jaffe is a writer, editor and Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at San Diego State University.