THE
EARLY YEARS
The
movement consisted not only of pacifists, such as A. J. Muste
and the Quakers, but also anti-Communist liberals of the Committee
for a Sane Nuclear Policy, anti-Stalinist leftists, and the
remnants of the fellow-traveling milieu represented by such
groups as the U.S. Peace Council. Of course, in the pre-war
era, those who opposed the interventionist schemes of our
rulers were considered to be on the extreme Right: the America
First Committee, the biggest antiwar organization in American
history, was created by conservative businessmen in alliance
with classical liberals such as John T. Flynn, and midwestern
progressives such a Senator William E. Borah, the "Lion of
Idaho," and California's Hiram Johnson. Smeared by the rabidly
pro-war Left as agents of Hitler and the Mikado, the old isolationist
wing of the Republican Party had almost completely faded away
by the mid-fifties, driven underground and rendered practically
invisible by the rise of the Buckleyized Right, which plumbed
for a thermonuclear showdown with the Soviets as the core
of its political program. During the mid-fifties, the left-wing
peaceniks were lucky if they could count on a few thousand
to come out and rally in support of disarmament. By the time
the sixties rolled around, however, and the Vietnam war was
the number one item on the national agenda, the ranks of the
peace movement swelled to include hundreds of thousands of
active participants.
THE
SIXTIES
A
movement in opposition to something can only reach large numbers
of people when that something looms large in the popular consciousness,
and surely the sixties was such a time. Every night on the
evening news, families gathered 'round their TV sets to hear
the news anchor solemnly announce the day's casualty count.
The Vietnam war touched everyone and everything, for here
was a war that we were losing. Practically every time
you picked up a newspaper there was a blaring headline explaining
that the war had "escalated" in some way or other; every month
or so they sent fresh battalions of GIs into the jungles of
Southeast Asia. They came back in body bags almost as fast.
THE
OBSTRUCTIONIST LEFT
In
the beginning of the nascent antiwar movement of the sixties,
the organized Left was typically obstructionist. The sclerotic
Stalinists of the CPUSA stayed away. The Committee for a Sane
Nuclear Policy (SANE), made up of the kind of liberal Democrats
who were active in Americans for Democratic Action (ADA),
wouldn't touch the issue. Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), the premier student left group, abstained from
the first organizing meetings, and insisted instead that it
was time to do "community organizing" in the urban ghettos,
where trust fund activists could shed their "white skin" privilege
and get down with the bruthas.
GET
US OUT
It
was left to the old-line pacifists and religious activists,
such as Muste, to provide the leadership to organize a single-issue
coalition against the war, with the organizational backbone
for the massive protests provided by independent radicals
and the Trotskyists of the (pro-single issue) Socialist Workers
Party (SWP). It wasn't until later that the SDSers latched
on to an already rising movement, and then only to drag it
down into the bottomless pit of imbecility and wacko ultra-leftism
in which the "New" Leftists eventually found themselves. At
its high point, however, the movement against the war in Vietnam
became not just a political project but a cultural phenomenon,
a metaphor for the times that dramatized the spirit of a generation.
By the time the antiwar movement had run its course, every
sector of American society was basically in agreement with
its central premise: that we needed to get out of Vietnam.
The anti-Communist liberals who had initially supported the
war turned against it, and even some on the far right, such
as Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, were
saying that the old Bircher slogan of "Get US Out" –
originally meant to apply to the United Nations – was
equally applicable to Vietnam.
POST-VIETNAM:
THE FREEZE-NIKS
With
the end of the Vietnam war, it was only natural that the antiwar
movement would begin to wind down. Although the US government's
policy of global intervention was still fully operational
– and even preparing to go into high gear – as the
last helicopter gunship took off from the roof of the US embassy
in Saigon, a movement that had numbered in the millions shrank
back almost to its original size: at most a few hundred dedicated
activists, scattered around the country, mostly pacifists
and religious groups, disarmament activists of the Muste mold,
as well as the SANE liberals, who were back in business. These
groups, working in coalition, took advantage of the sixties
peacenik mentality to raise the demand for a nuclear freeze,
a kind of lowest common denominator that could and did appeal
to the Woodstock Generation and beyond. The Freezeniks built
up quite an organization, with local chapters nationwide and
a huge donor base: they were especially strong in California,
where the flowers-in-their-hair generation had integrated
itself effortlessly into the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party. But Ronald Reagan took the wind out of their sails,
the man who had fought the Evil Empire all his life, with
his historic disarmament agreement with the Soviets. What
Reagan proposed, not a freeze but a radical rollback leading
to the abolition of all nuclear weapons, was far more radical
than anything the Freezeniks had ever proposed – or dared
dream of.
THE
FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN
The
final nail in the coffin of the old-style left-led peace movement
was the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the victory of
the US in the cold war. The whole reason for the activism
of the old-line Stalinists had been the defense of the Soviet
Union – with the "workers' fatherland" overthrown, however
there was no longer anything to defend. In the cold war era,
when the peace movement was an appendage of the Left, the
Freezeniks were just another Friday night meeting ground for
the politically correct, along with the El Salvador and Nicaragua
solidarity groups and the committees to free sombody-or-other.
The remnants of the New Left that did not blow themselves
up making bombs in New York City townhouses had fled to the
universities, where they ruled their isolated domain with
an iron fist, and into the Democratic Party. With the end
of the Freeze movement, the small religious and pacifist groups
– dwindled down to a precious few – managed to carry
on in a limited way. But by the time our ex-peacenik President
ordered the "humanitarian" bombing of Belgrade, the peace
movement in America was long dead if not finally buried. This
appendage of the Left had withered and practically expired
long before the antiwar activists of yesteryear turned into
the warmongering Clintonistas of today.
WHY
DID THE LEFT SELL OUT?
I
won't go into how and why the Left sold its soul to the devil,
to begin with because my deadline approaches, and secondly
because I am not a leftist, and never was: a good dose of
Ayn Rand immunized me to that early on. I will leave it to
the man whose column
in the Nation is appropriately called "Beat the Devil,"
the witty and merciless Alexander Cockburn, to explain it
all to me at the upcoming Second
Annual Antiwar.com National Conference, being held March 24-26,
in San Mateo, California. For Cockburn is speaking on
precisely that subject: "How the Left Sold Out to Imperialism,"
at the Saturday luncheon and I can hardly wait. As the last
honest Marxist anti-imperialist still left standing, Cockburn,
whose writings inspired and entertained so many Antiwar.commers
during the Kosovo nightmare, is well qualified to speak on
this subject. While the Tod Gitlins of this world twisted
themselves into comic contortions to justify their betrayal
of the antiwar cause – and the totalitarian "liberals"
piously proclaimed that this was a war for "diversity" and
"civil rights" – Cockburn's cogent commentary on the
war and its aftermath has been a tonic to all of us, Left
and Right, who opposed Clinton's war.
PARADIGM
SHIFT
Well,
then, is the antiwar movement finished, along with the anti-imperialism
of Tod Gitlin's long-lost youth? No way. Every fifty years
or so, there seems to be a general reversal of political polarity,
where Right and Left switch sides on the question of war and
peace, and take positions heretofore opposed and even abhorred.
The opposition to World World I was primarily leftist and
populist in orientation, centered especially in the old Socialist
Party of Eugene Debs and the International Workers of the
World (Wobblies), along with such Southern populists as Tom
Watson, and the midwest progressive movement embodied by Robert
LaFollette. But Left and Right switched sides in the thirties,
as World War II loomed on the horizon. It was conservatives
and libertarians, the founders and rank-and-file of the America
First Committee, who feared that we would win the war against
national socialism at abroad – and lose it on the home
front. The war would be the final nail in coffin of the old
order, and all obstacles to the collectivization of industry
and Roosevelt's dictatorship would be swept away. The Old
Right was anti-imperialist and anti-statist: the former was
a function of the latter.
COLD
WAR INTERREGNUM
With
the final defeat of Robert A. Taft wing of the GOP, and the
coming of the cold war, there was another paradigm shift:
the Right was now the War Party, and the Left was inclined
to noninterventionism. It was William F. Buckley, Jr., who
declared in that it was necessary to put up with Big Government
and high taxes "even with Truman at the reins of it all" in
order to defeat Communism. For nearly half a century, the
Right compromised its devotion to individual liberty and free
enterprise in the name of the alleged "necessity" of militarily
defeating world Communism. When the Red Empire imploded, however,
the rationale for right-wing militarism no longer existed.
With the end of the cold war, we are in for another radical
role reversal.
BUCHANAN:
THE KEY FIGURE
As
Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and their Third Way cronies throughout
Europe and the world openly proclaim their intention to override
national sovereignty in the name of a global order, the nationalist
Right in every country is rising to meet the threat. Ever
since Patrick J. Buchanan made opposition to the Gulf War
the leitmotif of his first presidential campaign – and
of a new conservative sensibility – the most articulate
critics of interventionism have been on the Right. Pat was
really the key figure, the leader of the "paleo"-conservative
movement that has regenerated a tired and Beltway-led movement,
and that rejects the idea of an American Empire as dangerous
and blasphemous. Which is why is the Friday night keynote
speaker at the upcoming Antiwar.com National Conference is
none other than Buchanan – the most eloquent and certainly
the most well-known champion of noninterventionism in America
today. In a major foreign policy speech, Buchanan will inspire
us even as he instructs us – this promises to be the
kind of event that the attendees will long remember.
BEYOND
LEFT AND RIGHT
The
juxtaposition of Buchanan and Cockburn is precisely the kind
of ideological dissonance – and variety – that is
bound to make for a very interesting and productive conference.
It would have been easy to pack the conference schedule exclusively
with antiwar speakers from the Right, and draw a fairly large
crowd. With Chronicles editor Tom Fleming, Srda Trifkovic
– author of the single best essay, "It's
Not Just the Balkans," we have ever posted on this site
– not to mention Rep. Ron Paul and the wonderful Joe
Sobran, along with many of our own columnists, how could we
have gone wrong. But the theme of the conference, "Beyond
Left and Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement," makes
the vital point that a new paradigm shift is happening, and
labels like "left" and "right" mean less than anyone is willing
to admit. And so we have a hardline right-winger like myself
speaking from the same podium – and speaking on the same
subject – as Dr. Lenora Fulani, a Reform Party activist
and a woman of the left whom the liberal media like the New
Republic have chosen to demonize as a "dangerous extremist."
In an attempt to determine the terms of the debate by narrowing
the political and ideological possibilities, all dissent (especially
antiwar dissent) is denounced as "extremism" – which
is why we are proud to have Lenora Fulani on our platform.
POLITICS
AND THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE:
THE ULTIMATE OUTRAGE
The
old left-right paradigm is increasingly an obstacle to understanding
what is going on the world. If John McCain is now considered
a "conservative," or at least claims to be, how useful is
the term in describing my own belief system? In an age when
such people as Jesse Ventura, William Weld, and even the odiously
smarmy Bill Maher can claim to be a libertarian, what
does the word mean anymore? And getta loada this: in an interview
with Michael W. Lynch, McCain declares with a straight
face that: "Any objective observer who looks at my 16-year
record would view it as fundamentally conservative and
to some degree libertarian." Are we to be spared nothing?
Good Lord, with McEvil claiming that he's a "libertarian,"
and nobody blinking an eyelash, the world has truly gone mad.
Ideological labels have lost all meaning. So let's
not hear anything about how Buchanan and the paleo-Right have
joined up with Marxist revolutionaries and betrayed the cause
of true conservatism – I'll take Fulani over McCain any
day.
A
GOOD DEAL
Now,
I know what you're thinking. Usually these conferences are
pricey affairs, with high fees going to speakers and lots
of fancy frills. Not here! We have a no frills, no meals package
priced at only $75.00! If you want the package with meals
(lunch and the banquet on Saturday), you still get a reasonable
price: $125. If I were you I would get my reservations in
a.s.a.p. ñ this is going to be a sold-out, standing-room-only
event.
To
make sure you get a seat, call Sybil now at
800-325-7257.
(She
can also get you a special rate at the hotel, and make your
reservations). Or you can send your check or money order,
payable to the Center for Libertarian
Studies, to: P.O. Box 4091, Burlingame CA 94011.
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