Allen begins by framing the US's Vietnam with the history of colonial occupation. The defeat of France's forces in Vietnam was a harbinger of what was to come. When the French were kicked out of Vietnam, the US stepped into "a devastated country". They "used the remnants of the French colonial state to begin building a new one", but the new state the US created in South Vietnam in the 1950s was "a brutal corrupt dictatorship". The puppet governments and leaders that the US supported in South Vietnam could not contain the discontent of ordinary people, nor solve the political and social crises that dominated. Crucially however, the post-France colonial settlement left intact the forces that could step into the gap.
Despite their attempts to avoid deploying troops to Vietnam, the US became deeper and deeper embroiled in war. Growing discontent at war melded with disontent at a host of domestic economic and political issues - particularly the question of civil rights. By 1968, as rebellion back home exploded, the anti-war movement surged. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassination of Martin Luther King, urban riots and the growth of revolutionary and radical movements such as the Black Panthers. If most of us know anything about the anti-Vietnam war movement it is from this year.
But 1968 was the result of a much longer process. The gradual development of the Civil Rights movement, coming together with the peace movement was a key part of this. There had been a small, if signifiant, movement against nuclear arms in the US. While this was fervently anti-left, it provided the context for a layer of activists to begin widening the scope of their pacifism into opposition to imperialism. Simultaneously the Civil Rights movement was creating the conditions for a generalisation of politics among its activists:
Throughout the spring of 1960, thecountry witnessed a new, more militant stage of the civil rights movement. Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, more than fifty thousand young Black and white people participated in sit-ins against segregation at lunch counters, theaters, parks and swimming pools throughout the country but mostly concentrated in the South and border states. These sit-ins captured the imagination of northern students, drawing many of them into the South, and led directly to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Allen continues:
In May 1960... white students in San Francisco proved that the nonviolent tactics of the southern movement could be used effectively against other kinds of unjust authority.
The occasion for this was a large protest against the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the body associated with McCarthyism and the US governments repression of left wing and progressive movements. In May 1960 the protesting students "battled the police" shocking the country. It was a moment that saw the "collapse in the ability of official red-baiters such as HUAC to inspire fear among Americans with liberal views".
This rapidly developing process of radicalisation came together with the defeat and demoralisation inflicted by the Vietnamese on US forces in Vietnam to create a potent mix of radical rebellion at home and within the military. But it was perhaps in "Black America" where this mix was to be so potent. Not least because the US military was dominated by Black troops - but also because of the reality of life in the US for ordinary Black Americans. Allen quotes an insightful comment by George L. Jackson, a US naval commander, "the Negro civil rights action has introduced definite constraints on the military capability of the US". It continues:
The most important of these constratings is that produced by the coalition of civil rights organisations and the anti-war organisations. This coalition has spearheaded the shift in public opiion away from support for the Vietnam conflict.
The intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement is quite well understood. But Joe Allen adds another crucial factor with one of his most important chapters, which discusses the US working class (and its organisations) and their relationship to the war. This chapter is important because discussion of US workers and the War often starts and ends with the protests in favour of the war and against the "hippies". What Allen shows though is that even from the early days of US intervention there was significant opposition to the War from working people. By October 1969, "a full page ad against the war" appeared signed by trade unionist Cesar Chavez and Paul Shrade, Western director of the UAW. Others were signed by leading figures in the Teamsters and the Chemical Workers. "Forty unions endorsed the Moratorium march in New York, labour leaders poke at many of the protests... thousands of union members attended the various protests that day." Allen concludes:
From the first Vietnam moratorium events in November 1969 to the explosion of rage following the Cambodian invasion, to the spring events of 1971, millions of Americans were drawn into political action against the war. The actions were becoming more militant, more working class, more multiracial and more left wing.
It was the beginning of the end.
Vietnam: The (last) war the US lost was published in 2008. At the time it was an intervention into the US anti-war movement by a socialist author determined to learn the lessons of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the questions it tackles - such as the importance of mass demonstrations - are clearly engaging with debates that were crucial in the 2000s as the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Allen draws on the past to show how a radicalising and growing anti-war movement needed mass mobilisations to give confidence and develop the movement further. But he also shows how the movement needed to draw in wider forces, and wider social movements, to generalise the discontent and give a home to wider forces. Crucially he argues that US movements have to understand that the US imperialism is not all powerful, but that "the US must be put under tremendous pressure to turn away from its vital interests". At the same time it was the coming together of US resistance with Vietnamese resistance that swung the balance in the 1960s. When Allen was writing in 2008 that resistance, and that of the US "GI movement" in the 2000s was "still in its infancy".
While the book is a contemporary polemic it is, however, well worth reading today. When I reviewed Max Hasting's monumental history of the Vietnam War, I noted that it did not do justice to the anti-war movement in the US. This book does. But it also shows how that movement arose out of the intersection of other social movements, and the resistance in Vietnam against the US. Allen's book is a useful antedote to those who ignore the US movement, or see it as just a bunch of peaceniks and hippies. Crucially though, for progressives facing the rise of the right and the clampdowns of the US government today, it reminds us that millions of Americans have resisted, protested and rebelled again. That's was the force that helped pull US troops out of Vietnam and its the force that can defeat Trump today.
Related Reviews
Hastings - Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War
Wilber & Lembcke - Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today
O'Brien - If I Die In A Combat Zone
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