WCM wrote:
>
> Many people feel that the anti-war movement on Viet was a serious part in
> getting the US power to admit defeat; Kurt I agree with everything you say
> except that that anit-war was a cream pie.
>

It is known from memoirs of Nixon administration figures that the
Moratorium of November 1969 led Nixon to cancel tentative plans to use
nuclear weapons against the Chinese installations in North Vietnam. So
the movement definitely did crontribute to stopping the _expansion_ of
the war in catastrophic directions. But it was not the anti-war movement
but the courage and strength of the Vietnamese people that made relevant
those installations. And it was the prolonged resistance of the
Vietnamese in the face of the horror of the U.S. assault that gave us
the time and the political space in the U.S. to build that movement.

So yes, the Movement was of great importance, but that importance was
_wholly_ subsidiary to the efforts of the Vietnamese themselves. And
large sectors of that movement -- I am thinking particularly of the
Weatherman and similar ultra-left tendencies -- showed themselves unable
to carry on the struggle and diverged into pointless individualist
point-scoring. They were unworthy of the people they pretended (to
themselves and others)to be serving.

And the U.S. never did admit defeat. The current condition of the
Vietnamese people (and the growth there of western investment) shows
that in the long run the U.S. won. And so far, won in two ways. (1)
Through the destruction of war and the effect of post-war sanctions it
destroyed the Vietnamese effort to build socialism. (2) It rewrote the
history of the war at home so the "lessons" of that war never got
through to the bulk of the u.s. population.

Bruce Franklin dedicated his classic work, _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in
America_ (1992) "For all those who have been trying for decades to stop
this war." We haven't succeeded yet.

Carrol