Why marching is crucial

The success of the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war show why this Saturday's Stop the War march is so important, says Paul Foot

The Guardian
September 26, 2002
By Paul Foot

In the grim weeks before what seems likely to be the second Gulf war, nothing is so depressing and debilitating as the sense of political impotence that overwhelms so many people.

The case for the war put by the governments on both sides of the Atlantic is pathetic, the dossier produced by the prime minister almost ridiculous. But the men behind the case and the dossier seem impervious to argument.

More people in Britain are against the war than for it, but in parliament our allegedly democratic representatives seem a million miles from the people they pretend to represent. Only a handful of MPs, not much more than a tenth of them, even voted for an adjournment motion to register their opposition.

Press and television are heavily loaded in favour of the conflict. There are warmongers on every side, even liberal warmongers. So what is left for the majority?

Must we meekly stand aside while the infectious martial spirit takes hold, and leer resignedly at the television as the scene shifts from real people arguing the case for or against war to generals and admirals poring over maps and debating military tactics? Isn't it inevitable that the war will happen anyway, and therefore that there's nothing we can do about it?

Looking back over the wars in which our government has been engaged over recent years, the picture is bleakly similar. A poll shortly before the Falklands war showed most people against the project. That majority vanished as the victorious task force took Port Stanley.

There was considerable opposition to the first Gulf war when it started and to the proposed war in the Balkans in 1999. That too evaporated in rapid victories for the allies. But the older campaigners among us remember another war, to which when it started there seemed little or no opposition.

The war led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, many of them children and civilians. As the slaughter mounted, so did the opposition to it. This was the US war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Arguments of protesters' impotence that seem so powerful today also applied during the Vietnam war. The chief culprits were the US government. Our Labour government, under Harold Wilson, sided unequivocally with the US government. Wilson himself grovelled and wheedled at the feet of the US president, Lyndon Johnson, and was duly rewarded by the president with the title "a modern Churchill".

Because Labour was in government, most Labour MPs stayed silent, and the Tories and Liberals meekly fell into line. Lots of people felt increasingly indignant at the slaughter in Vietnam.

But after all, parliament and the media seemed almost impenetrable. In a by-election in Hull in 1966, Guardian writer Richard Gott stood on an anti-war platform, and lost his deposit. What, after all, was the point of voicing that opposition, let alone doing anything about it?

The opposition grew slowly. It was initially relegated to pubs and clubs. The unquenchable radical, Adrian Mitchell, enthused many thousands of people with his immortal poem Don't Tell Me Lies About Vietnam.

And in 1967 and 1968 the anti-war movement took to the streets. The two enormous demonstrations of March and October 1968 were called not by a political party nor even by recognised organisations such as CND.

The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, at its root, was no more than a tiny group of what were denounced in the Tory press as "splitters and sectarians". One Tory MP described the demonstrators as "scum from abroad".

Any of the hundreds of thousands of people who went on those demonstrations will still remember them. The exuberance was overwhelming, infectious. "We are all foreign scum!" screamed one of the banners. I remember hearing Tariq Ali speaking in Trafalgar Square and my admiration for the clarity of his arguments and the melodious defiance of his tone.

The demonstrations made a difference. They altered the popular mood. All three of the diarists in the Labour government at the time, Crossman, Castle and Benn, though none of them left the government, all referred rather testily to the impact of the demonstrations.

Wilson's support for the Vietnam war continued, but his credibility among young people vanished. It was his and his foreign secretaries' stand on the Vietnam war confirmed him as a creep and a twister.

Above all, the strength of feeling on the question that the demonstrations proved convinced Wilson that he must curtail his instincts to send British troops to their deaths in Vietnam. Though his verbal enthusiasm for the war never faded, no British lives were lost.

Many of these conditions apply today even more than they did in 1968. The government's case is even weaker, the popular hostility to it even stronger. The anti-war demonstrations, called by a numerically small coalition of anti-war forces, have been big enough to shock the government, but not yet to change its course.

Saturday's demonstration needs to be seen in that context. Tariq Ali will be speaking, for a start. There is a point at which no elected government can continue to defy the will of the people, and that point can be reached by mass demonstration of the strength of popular feeling. That is why marching on Saturday is so crucial.

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