Is There Any Point to Protesting?
<i>&quot;Let me flash back to November 15th 1969, Washington DC and the Moratorium for Peace in Vietnam. This was probably the single biggest anti-war demonstration of the era, estimated at half a million by some and twice that by others...</i><p><i>&quot;My scepticism about the demonstration’s effect seemed warranted when five months later, at the end of April, 1970, the US extended the war into Cambodia. In the protests that followed six students, four at Kent State in Ohio and two at Jackson State in Mississippi, were shot dead. The upshot was the biggest student strike in US history: more than 4 million students walking out of classes in universities, colleges and high schools across the country. Yet still the war did not end. Two and a half more years would pass before the peace treaty was signed in Paris in January 1973. By this time there were millions upon millions dead, disabled, bereaved, traumatised. Nonetheless, the movement against the Vietnam war is widely considered the most &quot;successful&quot; anti-war movement of modern times, against which more recent movements have measured their &quot;failure&quot;.</i><p><i>&quot;Many years later, I learned that the Moratorium demonstration was, in fact, anything but ineffectual. In July 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had delivered an ultimatum to the Vietnamese: if they did not accept US terms for a ceasefire by November 1st, &quot;we will be compelled – with great reluctance – to take measures of the greatest consequences.&quot; The US government was threatening and indeed actively planning a nuclear strike against North Vietnam. In his Memoirs, Nixon admitted that the key factor in the decision not to proceed with the nuclear option was that &quot;after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.&quot; What would have been the world’s second nuclear war was averted by our action, though we couldn’t have known it at the time...&quot;</i><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.socialsciencecollective.org&#x2F;success-failure-political-myths&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.socialsciencecollective.org&#x2F;success-failure-polit...</a>