Part I
Where were you 50 years ago? This is chiefly a question for baby-boomers, who have largely determined the course of the United States since the 1990s and are now gradually leaving active public and private life, but for whom 1967-1969 were formative years. In a way, the answer to this question provides a key to the social, political, and cultural condition of contemporary America. That includes our Ukrainian diaspora, and even its relations with Ukraine.
What happened in the late 1960s? Was it all about peace and love?
Not exactly. At New York’s Columbia College in April 1968, a peaceful black students’ protest against a planned gymnasium at the edge of Harlem ceased once their demands were met. But the so-called Students for a Democratic Society had a more ambitious agenda: as Marxists, they sought confrontation in order to provoke revolution. A conversation with an irate New Jersey bus driver during the following year disabused me of any illusions that students could represent the interests of workers. In May, coddled Parisian students protested against authority, hierarchy, the older generation, and so on. The workers, who had real grievances, did not join this imaginary revolution, which in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre’s former assistant Jean Cau saw “the sons of the bourgeois throw cobblestones at the sons of proletarians.”
Because of the Vietnam war, peace was a prime issue in the United States. Vietnam may have been the first “hybrid war.” With ample logistical support from the USSR and China, a militarized Communist North was determined to take over a weak, corrupt, quasi-democratic South, with the help of a highly motivated fifth column and regardless of human cost. The U.S. – half-hearted, indecisive, ignorant of Vietnamese society and culture or the nature of the conflict – intervened with unsuitable tactics and inconsistent strategy. Vietnam showed that a small country could coordinate military with diplomatic action and a worldwide propaganda campaign to defeat both the United States and its client. Thus, while the Tet offensive of January 1968 was a military disaster for the Communists, by helping turn American public opinion against the war effort it was a public relations triumph. (Thought experiment: if America intervened in the Donbas, would you protest? The analogy is imperfect, of course, but the question is worth asking.)
Once a truce was signed in January 1973, our baby boomers could return to their program of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” Meanwhile – and predictably – North Vietnam broke the truce, sacked Saigon, and instituted a system of prisons and re-education camps that one historian has called the “Vietnamese Gulag.” The war had taken over 58,000 American lives. But it was chiefly a tragedy for the Vietnamese people: roughly one in seven (according to Vietnamese statistics) became a casualty – whether at the hands of the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the American army, or the Viet Cong (JAS Grenville, “A History of the World in the Twentieth Century,” Vol. 2 (1997), Chapter 63).
Perhaps North Vietnam’s greatest success was in recruiting American students – like students everywhere, superficial in their thinking, easily outraged and thus easily manipulated – to their side. True, there were principled pacifists who opposed war as such. But peace, like war, requires the consent of both parties. To my mind, the campus protests were not genuinely against war in general, nor against the war in Vietnam, but against U.S. participation in that war. This meant that objectively, they aided the North Vietnamese war effort. A principled anti-war position, I reasoned, would have required one to protest also against the North Vietnamese invasion, not to mention Chinese and Soviet support.
The real import of the anti-war movement became clearer as I saw the hard Left co-opting it at Berkeley. I remember a particularly hysterical rally where the speaker called for hanging the president. My reaction was similar to that of a Columbia College student who, having attended a meeting of “revolutionaries” in the spring of 1968, recently wrote to his alumni magazine that he had “learned a lesson that an entire university education and a lifetime of reading about the incomprehensible rise of Nazism could never have taught me.” (Feedback, Columbia Magazine, spring/summer 2018, pp. 5-6). And I would have agreed with my Hungarian-born schoolmate who, having experienced the failed 1956 uprising, complained of “the untutored parroting by some students of talking points of communism with very little familiarity with its institutional evolution in Hungary and other countries” (id., pp. 3-4).
The war also exposed a class divide. Middle-class students like me were getting college deferments – a polite form of draft-dodging – while working-class men were dying in the jungles of Vietnam. While the first category included many of the offspring of the Third Wave of Ukrainian immigration, I suspect that the second, heavily blue-collar group included many descendants of our first two waves. The hero of the film “The Deerhunter” exemplified that particular demographic.
A decade later, on June 8, 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as commencement speaker at Harvard, declared that “members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there.” Indeed, the Communist victory had not brought peace to Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, a third of the population disappeared as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered millions in the “killing fields” between 1975 and 1978. Then came a Vietnamese invasion.
The end of the Cold War in 1991 was a windfall for the baby-boomers as they took the reins of power. But new threats appeared, due in part to their shortsighted policies in the Middle East. In the eyes of some critics, the erstwhile anti-capitalist peaceniks have imposed uninterrupted violence and occupation on Afghanistan and Iraq largely for the benefit of a corporate elite.
So much for peace. What about love? We will explore that in Part 2 next month.