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Government's call to support troops is hollow hypocrisy February 1991 | Page 13 IN THE weeks since the war against Iraq began, antiwar activists have been confronted with intense government and media pressure to "support the troops." How should activists respond? LANCE SELFA offers an answer. IN THE days following the opening of the air war against Iraq, public opinion surveys claimed huge majorities in support of President Bush's war policy. At the same time, pro-war activism, like the 6,000-strong predominantly Zionist rally in New York January 20, appeared for the first time on any significant scale since the Gulf crisis began last August. The media have done their part to convince a skeptical public that the bulk of the population is behind the war effort. Newsweek's January 28 report was typical: "Throughout the country, the news of the war fostered a sense of community and a mood of somber reflection. Americans flocked to Red Cross centers to donate blood for troops in the gulf...anti-war activists defied popular sentiment." All of this has had its impact on the antiwar movement. Not wanting to seem on the radical fringe of society, many sincere antiwar activists have adopted the view that they, too, should show their support for the troops. Already, antiwar groups across the country have participated in Red Cross blood drives or sent letters to soldiers. At the January 26 demonstration in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, many protesters wore yellow ribbons and carried American flags. The slogan "Support our troops, bring them home" appeared on placards and buttons throughout the crowds in Washington and in the companion demonstration in San Francisco. Alex Molnar, the father of a 21-year-old Marine in the Gulf, whose letter to the New York Times last August catalyzed the formation of the Military Families Support Network, has insisted in several interviews that he supports the troops while opposing the war. These demonstrations of solidarity with soldiers in the Gulf are problematic. While they often spring from the best of motives, they fail to take account of one simple fact: that pro-war forces are using the slogan "Support our troops" to whip up patriotism and support for the war. The January 20 Zionist demonstration in New York, for example, rallied under the slogans "Support Israel, support our troops." On the morning after Bush launched the war, pro-war AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said: "Whatever the differences over the best way to end Iraq's brutal occupation of Kuwait, these differences must be set aside. The American labor movement stands in full support of our country and of the men and women in our armed forces and their courageous efforts to bring this conflict to an early and decisive conclusion." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - IN THIS sort of political climate, it is crucial for antiwar activists to distinguish themselves sharply from those who are attempting to play on concern for soldiers' lives to boost support for the war. This is true both for the slogans the antiwar movement adopts and for the activities it sponsors. Slogans are useful insofar as they help to deepen opposition to the war. In this respect, a simple "Support our troops" slogan should be rejected. Since it sounds little different from the right wing's clamor for more firepower, it does nothing to build antiwar sentiment. During the Vietnam War, the slogan "Support our GIs, bring them home now" was identified with the left in the antiwar movement. This was because it stressed immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces. Thus, it rebuked war supporters who formed groups like the Support Our Servicemen Committee, and it contrasted to antiwar activists who called only for a negotiated settlement and phased withdrawal of troops. The situation in today's antiwar movement is different. As a result of the Vietnam experience, the bulk of the antiwar movement supports an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. As a result, when antiwar activists have included "support our troops" into their slogans, it has often been part of a defensive reaction to conservative pressure. Antiwar activists have no reason to be apologetic. They are the ones fighting to end the slaughter of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and civilians--against the wishes of hawks who are prepared to send thousands more to their deaths. However, if antiwar activists allow the hawks to set the terms of the debate, they are blunting the edge of their opposition to the war. What's more, the stress on supporting "our" troops takes attention away from the Iraqi civilians who have been the bulk of the war's early casualties. What criteria apply to slogans apply even more strongly to the antiwar movement's actions. Antiwar activists who take part in government-approved activities aimed at providing material support for the troops are--unwittingly or not--weakening opposition to the war. The claim that such activities are apolitical and humanitarian ignores the fact that the war and one's attitude to it are political questions. Take, for example, the question of blood drives. When the military or the Red Cross asks for blood donations, they are doing so in anticipation of thousands of war casualties. They are attempting to enlist the participation of millions of Americans into the war effort. If the government succeeds in obtaining the blood donations it seeks, it is emboldened to prosecute the war--and to produce thousands of casualties. However, if antiwar activists are able to organize workplaces or schools to oppose participation in such blood drives, the war effort can be impeded. Stopping the war is, after all, the antiwar movement's aim. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - THE ARGUMENT against "supporting our troops" does not detract at all from the sympathy for ordinary soldiers that socialists feel. Socialists understand the armed forces as organizations driven by class. At the top, the generals remain fully integrated into the ruling class. At the level of the ordinary soldier or sailor is a mass of "workers in uniform." Socialists do not subscribe to the view that those connected with the armed services form one reactionary of mass hopelessly brainwashed by militarism. Of course, the armed forces try to indoctrinate their rank and file--often with much success. Nevertheless, critical and radical ideas circulate among soldiers and sailors even in ordinary times. Moreover, soldiers, like other people, change through experience. The experience of war can have a particularly radicalizing effect, as seen in the First World, Second World, and Vietnam Wars. During Vietnam, the depth of resistance to the war among soldiers reached astounding levels. Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., the official historian of the U.S. Marine Corps, wrote in 1971 that the level of "sedition" in the armed forces in Vietnam could be compared only to that of the collapsing French and Tsarist armies in the First World War. And the Tsarist army collapsed in the face of the Russian Revolution of 1917! By 1971, as many as 144 underground antiwar GI newspapers circulated, and 14 antiwar GI organizations and six antiwar veterans organizations flourished, according to Heinl. Fraggings, or assassinations of officers by enlisted men, jumped from 96 in 1970 to 209 in 1971. GI protest was represented in every way imaginable--from booing hapless performers like Bob Hope off USO stages to mass refusal of orders. American troops showed solidarity with the Vietnamese by refusing to fight them. In 1971, the Viet Cong announced it would not attack American soldiers who did not molest them. Some American soldiers even switched sides during the war. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - CONTRARY TO the many right-wing myths that have been propagated since, the bulk of the antiwar movement viewed GIs as comrades, rather than as enemies. From 1967 to the end of the war, antiwar activists set up GI "coffeehouses" near military bases in the U.S. and Europe. At the coffeehouses, soldiers were given the opportunity to relax and to read antiwar literature and to meet antiwar activists. Civilian antiwar activists--with many socialists among them--aided the GIs in many other ways as well: editing and printing their newspapers, collecting money for GI support networks, providing legal services for resisters or conscientious objectors, and so on. All of this civilian "support" for the troops was consciously political, seeking to link civilian opposition to the war with antiwar sentiment among the military rank and file. Beginning in 1967 until the war's end, soldiers and sailors--both active duty and veterans--joined antiwar demonstrations in larger and larger numbers. In 1971, in one of the most dramatic antiwar protests, 700 members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War publicly tore off their war medals and threw them on the steps of the Capitol in Washington. By the late 1960s, the U.S. population had rejected U.S. government rationales for intervention in Vietnam. As a result, government officials and pro-war ideologues turned increasingly to appeals for "supporting our boys in Vietnam" to justify the unpopular war. A letter from 25 soldiers in Vietnam, published in the New York Times in November 1969, rejected such "support." They wrote: "We do not want that kind of support. It is the kind of support that brought us here, keeps us here and which will bring our younger brothers or sons here or elsewhere." The GIs identified their true supporters as those antiwar activists who were demonstrating to get them out of Vietnam. Their letter concluded by endorsing the 1969 Moratorium demonstration against the war: "We support the Moratorium participants who definitely do not support the reason for our being here." As an Air Force lieutenant colonel told the audience at a recent Chicago teach-in, "The antiwar movement helped save thousands of lives on both sides in Vietnam."
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