…and I’m exasperated. Excitement about a nascent anti-war movement is infused by naiveté, massively unwarranted assumptions, and derogatory misconceptions about the Vietnam era anti-war movement from people who weren’t there.

Kos speculates on the basis for Cindy Sheehan’s appeal, in part citing Jeff Feldman‘s contention that the ‘grieving mother’ meme has ‘captured the nation’s imagination’ and raises the possibility of “a visible anti-war movement centered around a broad-based unassailable concern, a mother’s concern for her children.” Kos suggests that “the country has turned against the Iraq Debacle” without the emergence of a visible anti-war movement and even gives the nod to the suggestion by atrios that this be attributed to the absence of a ‘Vietnam-style’ anti-war movement. He suggests that this family-centered concern might resonate “in a way a more traditional anti-war movement might not.” He is all aquiver over the possibility that this might be the strong breakthrough to the Heartland, and fingers as an aim “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream.”

There’s an awful lot of extrapolation, and ill-founded extrapolation at that, from the mere ‘possibility’ going on here. What I wrote below in my riff on the MSNBC piece about disengagement scenarios bears repeating; I think there is a great distance between the turning tide of public sentiment, as reflected in opinion polls, and any potential impact on neocon autocratic decisionmaking. This confusion is largely based on a somewhat naive and unwarranted faith in the so-called democratic political process which surprises me.

Furthermore, it is an utterly specious assertion to say that a ‘Vietnam-style’, ‘traditional’, ‘visible’ anti-war movement is a liability, or that the Vietnam-era movement did not appeal to family values, to families’ grief about the senseless loss of their children, or to the Common Good of our country. Soulsearching and sophisticated strategic thinking about how to build a mass movement and galvanize anti-war sentiment was a constant presence in the anti-Vietnam movement. One organizing strategy was to appeal to the, shall we say, selfish concerns about the domestic costs to the US (in terms of lives and dollars spent) to hook the Heartland, which Kos gushes over as a basis for organizing the anti-Iraq movement. But that was one component and one component only, of a movement with multifaceted appeal. As a sole organizing strategy it is IMHO a way to build a movement doomed to failure. I listen to NPR as my sole broadcast media source of news. Throughout the war, almost at random, they air features about this or that small town’s reaction to the death of a favorite son serving in Iraq. It is an attempt, to use a hackneyed media phrase, to put a human face on the war. I turn those features off in anger at our powerlessness to stop the senseless deaths and anger that there aer no profiles — from NPR or anybody else — of grieving Iraqi families whose children BushCo have murdered. But the Heartland, if they are even tuned to an NPR station in the first place, turns them off as well, and Cindy Sheehan is not going to change that. In fact, the Heartland is up in arms not with, but about, Sheehan.

The movement against the Indochina war, as I say, was much more than the selfish domestic concerns behind Kos’ ‘turning of the country against the Iraq Debacle’. It was about one of our finest human sentiments — global compassion, unselfish, without borders, feeling the pathos of the suffering we were inflicting on the people whose country we had invaded, who we were (literally) massacring, whose society we destroyed in the name of democracy. There were also significant ideologically- and spiritually-based pacifist and anti-imperialist strains melded into the struggle against the Vietnam war, and it was tied to a broader critique of the American projection of power and, indeed, the American way of life in ways that the cowed post-9/11 American public largely dare not utter. This is of course because the American countercultural critique of America parallels and aligns with the third world’s critique of America, including that which fuels extremist anti-Americanism and is, arguably, one of the reasons we are the terrorist target par excellence. Coalitions of widely varying concerns found common purpose in a shared endpoint, that the US rape of Indochina deserved to be zealously fought.

This may be the phobic avoidance behid atrios’ assertion that an anti-war movement today would succeed only in the absence of ‘Vietnam-style’ elements. Buying into the claims of supporters of the war that the anti-war movement gives aid and comfort to our enemies was always, and continues to be, a way of being manipulated into impotence. Of course there are some differences. While some in the ’60’s counterculture revered Ho Chi Minh as an inspiration or an ideological touchstone, I doubt there is any reverence for Saddam Hussein. (Besides, there’s no easy rhyme for his name, unlike that in ‘Hey hey Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong are gonna win!’). And we live in a far more paranoid country now than we did then (although if you had asked me in the ’60’s I would have been hardpressed to envision the possibility) — while the in-your-face sentiments of wearing a teeshirt with the VC flag or a button saying ‘Cictory to Vietnam’ were everywhere, has anyone seen a ‘Victory to Iraq’ button yet? Can you imagine it?

Back from this digression: both atrios’ suggestion and Kos’s weaker assertion that it could succeed without them are, then, laughable. Any parallels one attempts to draw between the anti-war movement of then and the nascent or ‘potential’ anti-Iraq movement will have to do a far better job accounting for how the latter could succeed without:

• a fervor and passion;
• a morally-infused outrage;
• boundary-less compassion that encompasses but transcends concern for the selfish domestic costs of the war;
• embracing the spectrum of diverse opinions and positions that lead to opposition to the invasion, the occupation and US military adventurism in general;
• a willingness to take substantial personal risks and sacrifices to stop the crimes against humanity that the US commits with impunity;
• the proliferating, explicit centering of the political platforms of candidates for both local and national office around their opposition to the war;
• a willingness to commit acts of civil disobedience and war resistance;
• encouragement of significant resistance within the military itself (despite the fact that there is no military draft, there are significant conscription-like recruitment activities);
• the growth of a panoply of charitable organizations raising money for both anti-war public relations campaigns and humanitarian aid for the war’s victims;
• substantial involvement of the moral high-ground in the form of the clergy;
• and indeed an entire strain of popular culture suffused with anti-war passion

One final comment. Even were a movement to gain the momentum and zeal of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, “push(ing BushCo) toward accepting the reality of the demise of the neocon dream” is about as likely an outcome as the imam of a Washington mosque succeeding in converting Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney to Islam. Don’t persuade them; disempower them, ignore and sidestep their contemptible agenda in an expression of the popular will. Don’t ask the President to end the war, tell him it is over. Stop cooperating with the war effort in all ways possible.