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| Oz (left) and me, “Forse”, in Canberra, 18 September 1970 This was a photo on the front page of the Canberra Times |
We were both in the conscription ballot, neither one of us chosen, though we’d both said that if chosen we’d go, even as we were anti the war. Some of our mates took off to Canada to escape the draft. We, neither Oz nor I, agreed with that.
Apparently ex Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, commenting on the widespread demonstrations at U.S. College campuses -- and now also at my dad’s Alma mater, the Uni of Sydney -- that in time we may come to see that they are right; just as we came to see the anti-Vietnam demos in the late 60s to 1975 as being right.
Many are saying similar: the current demos in the US are like the demos in the sixties.
My take: No.
That’s me on the right in the photo above there, at the Canberra, Australia, Moratorium demo of September 18, 1970. Along with the others, of course I was a leftie and of course I thought that we should stop fighting in Vietnam and pull our troops out. The line was: the North Vietnamese, Ho Chi Ming, the Viet Cong are just fighting for nationalism.
Well, since then, I guess most of my friends from those days still think the same. And I have for most of that time.
But, “if in doubt, zoom out”. Zoom out and see that the war was not really against nice Vietnamese nationalists. It was against the sweep of communism. Only a few years before Soviet President Nikita Krushchev had said “we will bury you”. Communism was on the march in Asia and in Europe.
It was not a crazy thing to want to stop it. It was not a crazy thing to talk about the “domino effect” of one country after another falling to communism.
After all, as soon as the U.S. and its allies like us in Australia surrendered and pulled out in 1975, Pol Pot and his commie maniacs took over the whole of Cambodia and started the Killing Fields. They killed nearly 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the population. Laos fell to communism and didn’t recover until recently.
IOW: more people were killed in Kmer Kampuchea in the few years the the maniac communist Pol Pot was in power than in the whole of the Vietnam war.
Also: the Vietnam war was very different from the current war in Gaza. And the North Vietnamese very different from Hamas. The former a communist, nationalist outfit; the latter an Islamic theocratic terrorist group bent on genocide of every Jew in the world. Different.
In Vietnam the U.S. was in a jungle insurgency, where its superior firepower was blunted. It was tired, dispirited.
In Gaza, it’s a city war, not a jungle war. It’s been going for seven months, not fourteen years. The IDF of Israel can prevail if it is let off the leash that American has put on it. Different wars, different times. Indeed if we were to listen to the loonies on the US campuses, and call a “Ceasefire”, it wold only lead to endless October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel. How do we know? Because they’ve said so.
A “Ceasefire” now is surrender. Surely a way to peace. But surrender is the worst way to have peace. Especially if the surrender is forced on you by your alleged “friends”, influenced by zanies on campus.
And, By the way, there is a Ceasefire on the table, one very favourable to Hamas -- releasing 1,000 Hamas criminals from Israeli jails in return for just 30 Hamas-held hostages -- but Hamas have said “no”. Clearly they think they’ll get an even better deal if they just wait. Because American university students are on their side.
ADDED: “How US campus protests over Gaza differ from Vietnam war era”. Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers, May 4, 2024.
