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March 21, 2003
Support the Troops: End the War and Bring Them HomeI'm getting pretty tired of hearing well-meaning but ignorant people say, "We can't protest the war--we need to support our troops!" As anyone who wasn't a right-wing fool in the 1960s knows, one of the strongest and most vocal contingents of antiwar protestors was Viet Nam veterans themselves. "Vets to the front!" was the ubiquitous cry at antiwar protests, and the members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (some 300,000 strong) were present at virtually every antiwar protest during the Viet Nam war era. Ten years ago, Vietnam Vets Against the war rallied once again to support GI resistance among Gulf War soldiers. Today they've joined forces with Gulf War veterans and other groups of veterans for peace to challenge all those who claim that supporting our soldiers means letting our government send them to war. The liberal wing of VVAW has been issuing statements against Gulf War II, and about the concerns of and for soldiers for over a year now. The radical wing (splintered off in the 1980s, with a hard-line Marxist perspective) is still active as well, and operates under the name Vietnam Veterans Against the War-Anti-Imperialist. You can find the comments of more antiwar veterans at Veterans For Peace and Citizen Soldier. The right wing has done everything it could to erase the voices of the majority of Viet Nam veterans in the wake of the disaster that was U.S. policy during the Sixties and early Seventies. The idea that the peace movement is anti-soldier is an outright lie. Of all the tales of peace activists spitting on Viet Nam veterans that I've ever heard or read about, not a single one has ever been documented. I have, however, seen footage of World War II veterans, who belonged to Veterans of Foreign Wars, spitting in contempt at the feet of Viet Nam veterans at a peace march. It's the right who hates soldiers and wants to kill them. It's the left who wants to bring the soldiers home, who respects human life and human rights. Posted by kalital at March 21, 2003 12:39 PM Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a comment |
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