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Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Why there is no organized antiwar movement
Posted by Jill | 7:01 AM
Gary Kamiya wonders in Salon why the very people who are most likely to be affected by George Bush's war in Iraq -- those very kids in community colleges who are most likely to fight it -- aren't taking to the streets; why there is no antiwar movement.

There isn't any one answer to this question. The antiwar movement of the 1960's represented a confluence of a number of cultural factors missing at the moment:


  1. The draft
  2. A HUGE demographic affected by #1
  3. The draft
  4. The fact that images of the war's toll were being broadcast into our living rooms night after night. Today we are not even allowed to see flag-draped caskets, on the evening news, let alone shots of American kids with their legs blown off, writhin in pain
  5. The fact that the bulk of the casualties took place long AFTER the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that resulted in the escalation of the war.
  6. An overall e.conomic affluence which gave people the luxury of participating in movements


Today, there is no draft, other than the indirect economic one in which kids with no other prospects enlist in the hope of a better life. The generation of war age right now isn't the cultural force that tha baby boomers represented by dint of sheer size. There are more electronic media feeding stuff into people's ears to distract them than just the evening news; and those who run the networks that deliver the evening news have signed onto this war, marginalizing what little antiwar activity exists.

The other factor is that the message of Iraq being, however indirectly, a response to the attacks of 9/11/01, which DID play out in the national media, has been so ingrained in people's heads that even among those who might be inclined to be skeptical, there is this little voice that says "But what about 9/11?" -- as if killing enough Iraqis and a generation of American kids would somehow make it all better. The Vietnam war had no such triggering incident. Instead, it crept up on us on little cat feet through the Kennedy years and the first year of the Johnson Administration, until the post-Gulf of Tonkin escalation made it impossible to ignore.

Americans saw the actual toll of the Vietnam War -- today they see a president in a costume strutting like a bantan rooster on an aircraft carrier -- macho imagery right out of the video games the kids who at one time would have marched are playing on a daily basis. Today, there are communities with a high level of enlistment for whom this war is real; which have seen the man in the uniform ringing their neighbors' doorbells to deliver the bad news. But for most of us, the war just doesn't resonate.

This is why, as counterintuitive as it may seem, an antiwar movement's best friend would be a military draft without the college exemption that would do nothing to make this something other than a war fought largely by the poor and the working class. Perhaps only then would enough Americans feel that they have a personal stake in this war. As it stands now, there are over 20,000 exhausted American young people, pushed to limits their fathers in Vietnam couldn't have imagined, being sent to be used as target practice in a sectarian war -- and because most Americans with teenagers know that theirs are sleeping upstairs, they are disconnected -- as if it's just a video game after all.
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