Agent Orange

An Unfinished War Legacy


Wednesday, November 13  8 - 9:30 p.m. ET

Register by clicking here
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vj28SDp8Q5-iKZ30dhHoLQ


The U.S. military used more than 12 million gallons of Agent Orange and 8 million gallons of Agents White, Blue, Purple, Pink and Green in Indochina between 1961 and 1971, an act of ecocide with devastating medical consequences for local populations, American veterans and their children.  After years of unconscionable denial, the US government has taken major steps to redress contamination in Viet Nam and to provide assistance to victims there and here.  Less is known about and less help provided to affected areas and people in Laos and Cambodia 

VPCC offers a front line account by longtime activists and an overview by an acclaimed journalist plus recognition for the essential role of retired Senator Patrick Leahy and committee staff member Tim Rieser.




Agent Orange victim  in Quang Ngai assisted by the Mennonite Central Committee
Photo by Doug Hostetter




George Black is a British-born author and journalist. His most recent book, The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam (2023) was a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice and was selected by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best books of the year. His previous seven books are on a wide range of international, environmental, and historical topics, including U.S. policy in Central America and the Caribbean, the Chinese democracy movement, the 19th century exploration of the American West and the wars against the Plains Indians, and a travel memoir of a journey down the River Ganges in India and Bangladesh. His award-winning journalism has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and many other newspapers and magazines, and has taken him to more than two dozen countries in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. He has a master’s degree from Oxford University. He lives in New York City and is married to author and Columbia University scholar Anne Nelson  https://george-black.net


Heather Bowser, MSEd, is the daughter of a Vietnam Veteran. Her activism has focused on helping others affected by their parent’s exposure to Agent Orange. Heather was born with multiple birth defects associated with her father’s service in Vietnam. 





Jacquelyn (Jacqui) Chagnon  Representative for the War Legacies Project, Lao PDR, and Chair of the Board, focused on Lao Agent Orange Survey and Victim Support (2014-current).   South East Asia Quaker International Affairs Representative, American Friends Service Committee in S.E. Asia (2005 - 2013).  Senior Consultant on Participatory Development, and Strategic Planning in  the Lao PDR (1990 - 2005) working with World Bank, European Union, United Nations Development Program, and many non-profit organizations.  Field Representative on Post-War Reconciliation and Reconstruction in Viet Nam, Lao and Cambodia for the American Friends Service Committee (1978-1981, 1986-1990).

Clergy and Laity Concerned, Washington DC Foreign Policy Office, serving as Senior Congressional Liaison and Co-chair of Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy. Keynote US Speaker - Indochina Mobile Education Project “Tell Them We Are People” (1971-1975)
Congressional Liaison, Coalition to Stop Funding the War, Washington DC (1974 - 1975) supported by major religious institutions.



Susan Hammond, the daughter of a U.S. Vietnam veteran, became interested in post-war Southeast Asia after traveling to Viet Nam, and Cambodia in 1991. In 1996, after earning her MA in International Education from NYU, Susan returned to Viet Nam to study Vietnamese. She became involved in fostering mutual understanding between the people of the U.S. and Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia and addressing the long-term impacts of war while working as the Deputy Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development from 1996 to 2007. During this time, she lived in New York, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. In 2007, Susan returned to her home state of Vermont and founded the War Legacies Project to continue addressing the long-term health and environmental impacts of war.   https://www.warlegacies.org/about-us


Resources

The Long Reckoning: A Story of War, Peace, and Redemption in Vietnam by George Black  (Knopf, 2023) - a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice



Asia Society HostsViet Nam's President

 

Recognition of 30th Anniversary of the United States-Vietnam Diplomatic Relations & 1st Anniversary of the United States-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership

On Sunday, Asia Society hosted the official 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States and the first anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement. Among those who delivered remarks were H.E. To Lam, President of Vietnam and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam; Hon. John Kerry, former U.S. Secretary of State; Dan Sullivan, U.S. Senator (R-AK); Dr. Kyung-wha Kang, Asia Society President and CEO; H.E. Nguyen Quoc Dzung, Ambassador of Vietnam to the U.S.; and H.E. Dang Hoang Giang, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the UN.

“Even the most optimistic observers could not have imagined how Vietnam and the U.S. would transcend the scars of war to build a robust, positive relationship,” said General Secretary Lam. “This result is a testament to the efforts of many individuals, including key figures of leadership and other working quietly behind the scenes.”

Secretary Kerry likewise emphasized how far the bilateral relationship has come since he was deployed to Vietnam in the 1960s.

"Anniversaries have a value, not in and of themselves, but what they can actually produce. Anniversaries can often be action-oriented events, forcing moments of redefining or improving or readjusting a relationship between countries,” said Secretary Kerry. “So as someone who invested many years in finally making peace, I hope you won't mind if I suggest something unconventional for next year. Next year let's mark those two anniversaries not by looking back, but by making sure that we are looking forward. Ending the war and making peace two decades later were never ends in themselves, they were hard fought openings to put the bitterness behind us and to work together as countries.”

In the midst of increased tension with China, Senator Sullivan emphasized the importance of multi-sector cooperation between the United States and Vietnam. “The Indo-Pacific is more important than ever. I think one of the key things we need to be looking at, is when we look at the first anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership, looking at the different areas that we can continue to work together. I think these areas are endless. It's of course security, it's economy, high-tech, it's energy,” he said.

The celebration featured several performances from Vietnamese and American singers and musicians, underscoring the evening’s theme of “unity through art.” Among the performers were Vietnamese classical pianist Quynh Nguyen and American saxophonist Henry Threadgill, who, like Secretary Kerry, fought in Vietnam.

Before the celebration, General Secretary Lam joined Dr. Kang, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Krintenbrink, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Mark Knapper, and others for a private roundtable to discuss U.S.-Vietnam relations.

https://asiasociety.org/new-york/recap-un-general-assembly-week-asia-society-lam-s-jaishankar-and-ban-ki-moon

Antiwar Internationalism: Australia, Japan and South Korea


Opposition in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina


Wednesday October 23

View on youtube by clicking here    https://youtu.be/0I2J2bdbcO0


During the 1960’s and early 1970’s sustained popular opposition to U.S. intervention in Indochina developed in countries thought of as U.S. allies.   US bases in Australia, Japan and South Korea supported the war effort.  Australia and South Korea sent troops.  In the case of Australia, opposition advanced beyond forms of verbal dissent to include a significant degree of draft resistance.   Three knowledgeable observers of, and participants in, opposition will share their experiences in peace movements that were not well known to US activists.

 

Rowan Cahill is a graduate of the universities of Sydney, New England, and Wollongong. Conscripted for military service in 1965 in the recently introduced selective National Service scheme, he became a Conscientious Objector and prominent in the Australian student, anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation began its dossier on him in 1967. He has variously worked as a farmhand; as a teacher in schools, the prison system, universities; as a freelance writer; and for the trade union movement as a publicist, historian, and rank and file activist. He has published widely in mainstream, trade union, social movement, and academic publications. Author of numerous books his most recent, co-authored with Terry Irving, are Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010) and The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, 2021). Currently he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong (New South Wales).    (photo by Monica Donoso)

Blog: http://radicalsydney.blogspot.com.au     https://rowancahill.net/


Associate Professor Bobbie Oliver is an Honorary Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Western Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Although old enough to have been snared in the last few rounds of the notorious birthday ballot had she been male, her peace activism dates from a later period after studying Gandhi's peace movement in India. She taught and researched in Australian labour history and civil liberties at Curtin University from 1997 until 2018, and has published two books and several chapters and articles on the Australian peace movement.  Her most recent publication is Hell No! We Won't Go! Resistance to Conscription in Postwar Australia (Interventions Publishing, Melbourne, 2022). An earlier book, Peacemongers, which tells the history of Australian conscientious objectors to military conscription from 1911 to 1945, is being republished by Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, and should appear in late 2024 or early 2025.

Book Review Editor, Labour History

Vice President, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History


Terry Provance  Moderator After graduating from college in 1969, I became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement first organizing locally in Pittsburgh and then eventually with national groups like Harrisburg Defense Committee for Dan and Phil Berrigan, Pentagon Papers Trial and Medical Aid for Indochina.  I began working with the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia in 1973 to oppose US nuclear weapons until 1983 when I went to graduate school in Berkeley, California.  I received a fellowship and then studied two years in South America and worked with human rights groups in Chile. I returned to Pittsburgh where I pastored a local United Church of Christ congregation for 5 years and then worked in its national office on peace and justice issues for 10 years.  I then worked 12 years with Oikocredit, an international anti-poverty organization, as its Executive Director in the United States.  I retired in 2012.  



Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer based in Washington, DC. He grew up in Japan and South Korea during the Korean and the Vietnam wars and was actively involved in the antiwar movement from the time he was in high school. During the 1970s, he was active in the Indochina Peace Campaign in California. Starting in the 1980s, Shorrock reported extensively on the Japanese and Korean labor and peace movements and broke important stories about the interventionist role of the US military and the CIA in both countries. In 2015 he was given an honorary citizenship by the city of Gwangju for his reporting on the secret background role played by the US government and military in the events surrounding the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising in Korea and the imposition of martial law by the infamous general Chun Doo Hwan. This year, the city’s archives published a three-volume book translating into Korean the 3,000 US documents Shorrock obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to write his stories. Over the past 45 years, he has published in numerous US, Korean, and Japanese publications, including The Progressive, Salon, Hankyoreh, Sisa Journal, Newstapa, and Sekai. He was a correspondent for The Nation magazine from 1983 to 2023 and is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock is now working on a book about the tripartite US military alliance with Japan and South Korea and last visited Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea in 2023.

https://timshorrock.com


For video from Melbourne, Australia's Moratorium protest in 1971, click here



AUSTRALIAN ANTI-INDOCHINA WAR ACTIVITY 1962-72: 

A POTTED HISTORY & CONTEXT

by Rowan Cahill

[Panel contribution to webinar “Opposition in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina”, Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, October 2024.]

In 1962 the conservative and rabidly anti-communist Australian Government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent 30 military advisers to join the South Vietnam and US war effort in Vietnam. In 1964 this was substantially increased to combat troops. During the course of Australia’s  participation in the war, which ended in 1972,  some 60,000 Australians served, of whom 523 died as the result and some 2400 wounded. Amongst those who served, and amongst these casualties, were 16,000 conscripts.  

Australia has never felt at home in Asia and through much of the twentieth century tried to maintain itself as a white racial society. A settler-colonial state created via Britain’s invasion beginning in 1788, and war with and dispossession of the First Peoples, Australia is an island continent a bit smaller in size than the US (minus Alaska and Hawaii), sparsely populated, 53% of it desert or nearly so.  Today it hosts a population of nearly 27 million. In the 1960s some 11 million.  

Federated and independent as a nation since 1901 it has historically looked for and to a powerful friend/ally to come to its aid in times of perpetually feared invasion. Its experiences with Japan during World War II, which included air and naval attacks on Australian soil and in its waters, heightened this fear.

Until the Fall of Singapore and the end of British power in Asia in 1942, followed post-war by India’s exit from the British Empire, the ‘Mother’ country provided this security, real or imagined. Subsequently, based on the close military and strategic relationship forged during World War II between Australia and the US, successive Australian governments have attached the nation to the military and strategic interests of the US.                                                     

In November 1964 the Australian government introduced Conscription. The Australian Army was not  sizeable enough to do the job ahead in Vietnam and recruitment drives were not yielding the quality of manpower needed.

A selective scheme was concocted involving all males as they turned 20 years of age, a year before they gained the right to vote. To avoid compromising the economy and the workforce, the scheme was designed to select 1 in 12 males, letting the rest get on with their lives. By the 1970s, these odds had lengthened to 1 in 17.

All up from its introduction until it ended in 1972, some 63,735 males were conscripted out of a pool of 804,000 registrants.

Conscription involved two years of continuous full-time military service followed with another three and a half years of part-time service in the Army Reserve. Selection was by the spin of a lottery barrel with ballot balls representing birth dates. Draws were  made twice a year depending on which half of the year your birthday fell. 

The scheme created two classes of conscripts. Males already in the workforce who were conscripted went straight into the army. Males who were conscripted whilst engaged in university studies could defer military service until the completion of their first degree, providing there were no failures along the way. This gave them time to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam and for those who figured the war was wrong, how to express this. Thus the nation’s universities became hotbeds of agitation, organisation, resistance.

By the mid-1960s there were more university students in Australia than ever before. Post-World War II, Australian governments had determined that national security and economic growth needed more and higher education, there had been a post-war baby boom, and accommodating expansions of school and university systems.

Initially Australia’s intervention in the Vietnam War and Conscription had widespread public support. Saying NO to both in the early years was no easy or simple matter as it took place in a national culture profoundly ignorant of Asian histories, societies, and cultures  – a national culture susceptible to simple anti-communist Cold War rhetoric and Domino Theory political understandings. 

Initial opposition tended to be quietist and educational. The preferred mode of protest took the form of Letters to the Editor, petitions, small peaceful demonstrations, educative public meetings with guest speakers aiming for media coverage of dissident opinions, and the circulation of literature contesting government policies.

The first voices raised and actions against the war came from long established political organisations and from activists with track records and/or family links to a dissenting/oppositional past, and from a peace movement with a history, traditions, and links that can be traced back to the early twentieth century and Australia’s involvement in the Boer War.

But that was the quiet before the storm and opposition  intensified and grew. Protest actions became increasingly confrontational and disruptive. There was a mushroom growth of anti-war, protest groups and organisations. Cheap offset print technology produced a tsunami of protest literature.  

Symbolic of increasing militancy was the Australian tour of US President Johnson in October 1966. While the Australian Prime Minister declared ‘All the way with LBJ’, in the streets protestors disrupted his cavalcade, there was police violence in retaliation, and in Sydney the hosting Premier of NSW told his driver to ‘run over the bastards’. The following year  the militant and powerful Seamen’s Union of Australia dramatically placed bans on Australian merchant ships taking war materials to Vietnam.    

Producing a substantial and dramatic shift in public opinion against the war was the Tet Offensive in February 1968. This dramatically exposed the spurious ‘we will win, we are winning’ claims of both the Australian and US governments. So effective were mounting protest and opposition that in 1969 the Federal government considered draconian legislation to curb free speech, the right of assembly, and anti-war protest generally. 

But it was a tide that could not be turned. In 1970 and 1971, Australians turned out three times in tens of thousands in its cities and towns in Moratorium protests against the War and Conscription. The largest of these took place in Melbourne with an estimated 70,000-100,000 present. By this time the Australian government was considering withdrawal from Vietnam but had no time frame. And as far as it was concerned, the protestors according to one of its leading spokesmen were “political-bikies packraping  democracy”.

These Moratorium protests were the result of hard and difficult work by activists who managed to cobble together united action from amongst the many protest organisations, factions, interests across the nation, thus mobilising people intergenerationally across divides of politics, ideologies, race, gender, social class, religion. 

Amongst early and high-profile critics of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and of Conscription, were prominent members of the centre-left Australian Labor Party, Australia’s oldest political party. The party had taken Australia through World War II but lost national office in 1949 in a Federal election featuring a Cold War fear mongering campaign launched by conservative forces. It had been out of office since, and these early critics were isolated voices in their Party.

It wasn’t until much later that the party’s leadership and rank and file had read the wind and that efforts by anti-war/anti-conscription activists within the party were successful. In October 1969 the Labor Party promised to immediately withdraw Australian troops from the Vietnam War if elected, and in 1971 to end conscription. All of which immediately happened following its  election to the leadership of the nation at the end of 1972. And with this too, the bonus release of anti-war resisters from prison and cancellation of a backlog of prosecutions against a legion of activists yet to be arraigned.     

Rowan Cahill

24 October 2024

 

 Opposition in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina

 

Tim Shorrock - Japan and South Korea

 

I begin my talk with four points:

 

1. The Japanese antiwar movement was one of the largest and most powerful in the world. It began during the early days of US intervention in Vietnam shortly after the Korean War and continued through the 1970s. The movement was largely focused on the role of US military bases in Japan/Okinawa during the Korean War and in Vietnam, as well as the US-Japan Security Treaty first signed in 1952 and renewed against massive protests in 1960 and 1969. It was a fight for peace as well as a struggle for independence from US hegemony and control. 

 

2. The South Korean antiwar movement was largely underground until the country, led by citizen protests, won its democracy in the late 1980s. In the period after the Korean War and during the US war in Vietnam, South Korea was under a military dictatorship led by General Park Chung Hee, who had been trained and served in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Open opposition to US forces and holding anti-American views publicly was nearly impossible. It got even harder in the late 1960s, when Park sent troops to fight alongside US counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam. The Korean movement was therefore a fight for democracy that turned into a struggle for reparations for the Vietnamese people in the late 1990s and 2000s.

 

3. The Japanese and South Korean antiwar and peace movements were closely linked in their struggles against the US drive to militarize both countries and integrate them into the enormous American military platform in East Asia. They had a huge impact on the US conduct of the war and the Japanese and Korea public's attitude towards Vietnam. But in the long run, they failed to bring either independence or peace. Japan now hosts the largest contingent of US troops in the world, with South Korea not far behind. The US under self-imposed Status of Forces Agreements with Japan and Korea continues to virtually occupy both countries militarily.

 

4. I experienced and participated in the Japanese antiwar movement while I was living there in the 1950s and 1960s and reported extensively on the South Korean democratic movement in the 1980s. My introduction to Vietnam came in 1963, when I visited Saigon with my family while on an ocean voyage from Europe to Japan. During the war, I was subject to the US draft (I escaped with high lottery numbers) and was active in the US antiwar movement until the end of the war in 1975. So much of my analysis is directly from my own observations and experiences.

 

An Overview of Japan and South Korea's role in the Vietnam War

 

From 1948 on, Japan became the keystone for US military power in East Asia. That year, the United States “reversed course” in its occupation of Japan, moving from demilitarization and democracy to focusing on the containment of communism. Almost overnight, US policy shifted from punishing Japanese officials responsible for World War II to enlisting them in a global war against communist forces wherever they were. The shift inside Japan was symbolized by the rise of Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Kishi was minister of commerce and industry in the wartime Tojo Cabinet that declared war on the US and labeled a “Class A” war criminal for helping run Japan’s colonial empire in Manchuria and Korea (his grandson, Shinzo Abe, was prime minister twice and was a US favorite until he was assassinated in 2022)

 

Muto Ichiyo, a Japanese writer who worked closely with the US antiwar movement in the 1960s, explained the Japanese shift to me in a 1981 interview in Tokyo. “The part of Japanese imperialism which was made powerless after the defeat in the war wanted, of course, to revive itself," he said. “But they knew perfectly well that the situation had changed. They knew also that fighting against America again would be both impossible and purposeless. So they adopted a very clear-cut strategy: Japan will concentrate on the buildup of the economic base structure of imperialism, while America will practically rule Asia through its military forces.”

 

Japanese industry profited handsomely by supplying the Pentagon with steel, munitions and even napalm when the United States fought wars in Korea and Vietnam. Then, as Washington propped up South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, South Korea’s Park Chung Hee, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia’s Suharto with vast quantities of military aid, Japan kept their economies alive with financial aid and investments from Mitsui, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and other major corporations.

 

THE KOREAN WAR was the catalyst for the monumental shift in American policy in East Asia from peace-maker to empire-builder. Essentially, it set the stage for the militarization of the Korean Peninsula and, later, Japan. It's also important to remember the war also began US involvement in Vietnam. When Truman ordered US ground troops into Korea in 1950, he also began aiding the French colonial army in Vietnam and, incidentally, sent the US 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits to prevent China from completing its takeover of Taiwan.

 

The Korean War was fought by U.S. forces directly from bases in Japan. Even today, the largest US bases in Japan and Okinawa fly the UN flag as integral parts of the U.S.-run "UN Command-Rear" established in Japan as the logistics and planning headquarters for Korea. Once the armistice was signed in 1953 (by the US, North Korea, and China), the US network of bases became the perfect jumping-off point for the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon transformed its air and naval bases in Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea into a massive platform for regional war.

 

South Korea's role as a junior partner in the empire was sealed in 1965 when its military rulers sent over 300,000 troops to back up the U.S. military in South Vietnam. After President Nixon's shift toward "Vietnamization" in 1972, the Korean forces outnumbered American troops by a two-to-one margin.

 

JAPAN'S ANTIWAR MOVEMENT. Now I'll return to the antiwar movement in Japan. It began with the Korean War. The Japanese people, who had suffered through the indiscriminate bombing of over 60 cities by US B-29s in the last months of World War II, were disturbed by the American use of their bases to bomb Korea and the enormous buildup of U.S. forces in Okinawa during that war. Then in 1954, the US hydrogen bomb "Bravo" dropped over the Pacific island of Bikini poisoned a crew of Japanese fishermen, sparking Japan's first anti-nuclear movement after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

I trace the Japanese movement against the Vietnam War back to 1956. It began at Tachikawa Air Force Base, a huge US airfield in western Tokyo that I could literally see from my family's back porch in the 1960s. In 1955, a year after Bikini, the US military announced plans to use Tachikawa for transporting nuclear weapons. To do that, it needed to use the surrounding farmland for longer landing and takeoff distances. In response, farmers, villagers, students, unionists, and Buddhist priests in Sunagawa, the small village adjacent to the base, began a campaign of nonviolent protests and occupation of the farmland. Tens of thousands of people, including Diet members from the Socialist and Communist parties, joined the protests, which forced the US military to cancel the expansion in 1957.

But after this, the US simply built bases for nuclear bombers in Okinawa, which remained under US military rule until 1972. The anti-base struggle at Tachikawa set the pattern for many of the protests during Vietnam.

Japan doubled down on its support after the US Marines landed in Vietnam in 1965. By then, its prime minister was Eusaku Sato, Kishi's brother. He became a big-time cheerleader for US in Vietnam. When President Johnson began bombing North Vietnam in 1965, Sato could hardly contain his enthusiasm.  In one visit to Washington, D.C., he endorsed the U.S. efforts to stop communism at a speech at the National Press Club. He was so emphatic about his support for the war in his meetings with President Johnson that he became known as LBJ's favorite foreign leader.

 

But to millions of Japanese, Sato was a warmonger. Their land was being used as a base to bomb and lay waste to another Asian country, and many felt ashamed. The rage was compounded as Japanese commuters watched long trains of jet fuel being shipped to US bases moving through Tokyo (I recall seeing these black cars slipping through crowded stations like Shinjuku and feeling embarrassed and sickened). As Japanese reporters began sending back stories from South Vietnam of the extensive U.S. bombing and shelling throughout the country and the brutality of General Westmoreland's search and destroy operations, public opposition grew to the war and Japan's complicity in it.

 

Most of the early demonstrations were organized by the "old left," made up of the Communist Party and its affiliated unions. By 1967, the war was a deeply divisive political issue in Japan and a rallying cry and symbol of the Japanese new left and the Zengakuren student movement. That year, two events brought many ordinary Japanese into the streets and sparked a new citizens peace movement: the desertion of sailors from the USS Intrepid, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, and a port call to the southern port of Sasebo by the USS Enterprise, the nuclear-powered carrier that was leading the airborne assault on North Vietnam. This movement, new to Japan, was much broader than the leftwing student and labor groups and included housewives, environmentalists and farmers.

 

The best known of the antiwar organizations was Beheiren, "Peace in Vietnam Committee," led in part by Muto Ichiyo, who I mentioned earlier. It was organized in 1965 to create links between the Japanese movement and antiwar forces in the US and Europe. Beheiren came to national attention when the four US airmen from the Intrepid deserted their posts in the US Navy base in Yokosuka and sought assistance from the group, many of whom spoke English.

 

Eventually, hundreds of American deserters escaped from the killing fields of Vietnam and Southeast Asia through Japan, many of them ending up in the Soviet Union and Sweden. Beheiren housed the deserters and kept them out of the clutches of the U.S. Naval and Army intelligence. Eventually, the deserters were escorted to northern Japan, where they boarded fishing boats and other vessels that took them to the Soviet Union. When the US demanded that Japan crack down on this underground railroad, the Japanese government had to confess that they had broken no laws: it was perfectly legal to escort a foreigner across Japan and help get them board a boat out of the country. It was also during this time that US antiwar activists such as Jane Fonda and the late Donald Sutherland, began funding GI Coffee Houses at US military bases in Japan and Okinawa to work with active duty GIs who were protesting the war.

 

Labor unions allied with the Socialist and Communist parties as well as the New Left were also deeply involved in the antiwar movement. In 1968, when massive protests against LBJ's escalation of the war shut down the city of Tokyo, leftwing train conductors affiliated with one of the New Left groups collaborated with the student-led protests to shut down several commuter lines, paralyzing the city. Unions were especially active in US-occupied Okinawa. Workers at major US bases went on strike several times during the war, once during a wave of US bombing raids on North Vietnam. In response, the US military flew in top officials of the AFL-CIO to help break the strikes.

 

The Japanese movement culminated in 1969 with massive demonstrations against the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. They are still the largest protests I have ever seen in my life. During that year, dozens of universities were seized and shut down by students affiliated with one of the two factions of the Zengakuren. One of them was International Christian University in western Tokyo, where my father worked as an administrator. It was closed down for over two years until Japanese police were called in to end the strike (after my dad had left his job).  Protests in Japan continued through the 1970s. One of the largest took place in 1973, when the aircraft carrier USS Midway was homeported in Yokosuka for the first time.

 

SOUTH KOREA's ANTIWAR MOVEMENT. In 1960, Syngman Rhee, the Korean leader since 1945, was overthrown in a popular revolution. The US was tired of his rule (as well as his hatred of Japan) and supported the new liberal government by flying Rhee out of the country in a CIA aircraft. Over the next year, Koreans continued their citizen revolt by calling for a neutral, unified Korea without foreign armies on their soil and seeking justice for the thousands of innocent civilians executed by the Rhee regime during the Korean War. But everything changed in 1961, when Park Chung Hee took over in a military coup. In 1965, under pressure from the US, he signed a normalization treaty with Japan. Thus began South Korea's antiwar movement.

 

The 1965 treaty was signed amidst massive demonstrations and another declaration from Park of martial law. One of the protest slogans was "The US is not our master." It was spot-on, because the US had sought the treaty as it was getting bogged down in Vietnam and needed military help from South Korea and economic assistance from Japan. That year Park sent the first Korean troops to Vietnam; they eventually numbered over 300,000. They were responsible for many massacres and in some towns and villages were considered worse than US troops. By 1973, 3,806 Koreans had been killed in combat and 8,779 wounded. During the war, those statistics were never made public. To hide the soldiers' role from the Korean people, the dead were returned secretly to Osan US Air Force Base; the families were then notified and given indemnity. Foreign reporters were prohibited from photographing the returning dead and any reports of atrocities by Korean soldiers were censored.

 

Public protest was virtually impossible. In 1972, fearing a total US military pullout from Korea, Park declared martial law again and transformed South Korea into one of the first torture states. By 1973, South Korean jails were filling up with peasants, workers, and students. Even in Park's home town, peasants demonstrated against government confiscation of land to build factories. Their leaders were arrested and tortured and charged with being "communist agents." 

 

Yet the democracy movement would not be silenced. In 1973, the opposition leader Kim Dae Jung (elected president in 1997) led South Korean resistance to military rule. That fall, over 60 demonstrations against Park took place. A statement by Christian youth summarized the resistance perspective: "Thinking of none but itself, Japan's economic takeover is not only making Korea a serving maid to Japan's economic advantage, while bringing about the economic ruin of our people, but is also increasing the Korean government's corruption and dictatorship."

 

In October 1979, Park was assassinated by the director of his own KCIA. Over the next year another general - one of the many Korean soldiers trained by the US to fight in Vietnam - seized power in a rolling military coup that began in December 1979 with his takeover of the Korean Army and climaxed on May 17 with the expansion of martial law throughout the country. Over the next few days, General Chun Doo Hwan slaughtered hundreds of people in the city of Gwangju, sparking the first armed revolt in the South since the Korean War. But the US covered up his crimes and threw its support to him, as did the ruling LDP leaders in Japan. But, inspired by Gwangju, Korean citizens organized and fought against the dictatorship, finally winning their democracy in 1987.

 

Under Korea's new democracy, the press was now free to investigate the past. Thus began the South Korean movement against the Vietnam War and in support of reparations for the Vietnamese people who were the victims of South Korean military violence. In 1999, reporters from the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh made the first findings, including an incident from 1968 in which Korean Marines assembled around 70 resident of the village of Phong Nhi and executed them. Similar massacres of civilians by South Korean troops occurred in around 80 places during the Vietnam War, with the death toll estimated at around 9,000 Vietnamese civilians.

 

Koreans organized several organizations to support the Vietnamese victims, including the Civil Society Network for a Just Resolution to the Vietnam War Issue and the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation. They travelled to Vietnam to visit sites of the massacres and meet victims. In 2020, they helped one Vietnamese victim file a damages lawsuit in Seoul, and in 2023 a Korean judge ruled that veracity of her claims and ordered the government to pay her around $23,000 in restitution. Many other claims like that have been made, but the current Korean government of Yoon Suk-yeol has refused to pay, and is appealing.

 

In the end, the Japanese and Korean movements were effective in building democracy and reining in US power in their countries. Yet today, nearly 50 years after Vietnam's liberation, both countries are in a three-way military alliance with the US that continues to dominate Asia and threatens war with China and North Korea. The resistance continues, however. In Okinawa, where the governor was elected on a platform to remove the US Marines, protests continue daily at Henoko, where the LDP government is building a new base for the Marines. Many of the Koreans active in the democracy movement of the 1980s are still speaking out against US military policy in Asia and the Pacific. Both movements have built strong people-to-people ties with Vietnam. In contrast, the US antiwar movement (in my opinion) abandoned Asia after the Vietnam War and left the region to be defined for Americans by the Pentagon and the far right. That was a historical error of huge proportions and has resulted in the militarized US policies we see today throughout Asia and the Pacific.

 

 


Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer based in Washington, DC. He grew up in Japan and South Korea during the Korean and the Vietnam wars and was actively involved in the antiwar movement from the time he was in high school. During the 1970s, he was active in the Indochina Peace Campaign in California. Starting in the 1980s, Shorrock reported extensively on the Japanese and Korean labor and peace movements and broke important stories about the interventionist role of the US military and the CIA in both countries. In 2015 he was given an honorary citizenship by the city of Gwangju for his reporting on the secret background role played by the US government and military in the events surrounding the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising in Korea and the imposition of martial law by the infamous general Chun Doo Hwan. This year, the city’s archives published a three-volume book translating into Korean the 3,000 US documents Shorrock obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to write his stories. Over the past 45 years, he has published in numerous US, Korean, and Japanese publications, including The Progressive, Salon, Hankyoreh, Sisa Journal, Newstapa, and Sekai. He was a correspondent for The Nation magazine from 1983 to 2023 and is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock is now working on a book about the tripartite US military alliance with Japan and South Korea and last visited Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea in 2023.

 

Website: https://timshorrock.com

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/DMZEMPIRE

Twitter/X: @TimothyS

 

 

 

 


The Women: Our Impact on the Vietnam Antiwar Movement

September 19, 2024, 4-5:30 PM ET


View the webinar on youtube by clicking here

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https://vnpeacecomm.blogspot.com/2024/09/women-and-antiwar-movement.html



The ultimate success of the movement to stop the war in Vietnam was due to the mobilization of multiple segments of society, such as students, academics,businesspeople, lawyers, religious activists, unions, veterans, and humanitarians.  Not least of these were traditional women's peace organizations such as the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom and Women Strike for Peace that redirected their efforts toward stopping the war, and newer Vietnam War specific groups such as Another Mother for Peace and Gold Star Mothers for Peace.  This webinar features the experiences of women peace activists who helped to transform the movement into a broad coalition that reached into a majority of American households and influenced the movement for women's liberation. 


Moderator:

Linda J. Yarr is a Research Affiliate of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the journal Critical Asian Studies, successor to the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars published by The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Previously she was a research professor of international affairs at George Washington University and served as director of Partnerships for International Strategies in Asia. She has authored articles, book chapters and reviews on Vietnam and Southeast Asia. As a student in France during the war in Vietnam, she was a member of the Paris American Committee to Stop the War. She holds a master’s degree from Cornell University, an advanced degree in international relations from Sciences Po in Paris, and a B.A. from D’Youville College (now University).


Speakers:

 

Leslie Cagan has organized peace and justice movements for more than 60 years. From nuclear disarmament to lesbian/gay liberation, from the Rainbow Coalition to Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, support of Palestinian rights to normalizing relations with Cuba, fighting sexism to confronting police brutality to climate justice, she’s been a central organizer in many struggles.

Her organizing began in the early-1960’s at NYU in the student wing of the movement against the US war in Vietnam. She served on the Coordinating Committee of the National Student Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam and was part of the NYC Fifth Ave. Peace Parade Committee. Her antiwar work continued in St. Louis and Cambridge.

Leslie was the National Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 1,400 groups central to the movement against the war in Iraq. Her coalition-building and organizing skills have mobilized millions of people in many of the nation’s largest demonstrations, including the 1982-million-person Nuclear Disarmament demonstration in NYC; the1987 lesbian/gay rights march on Washington; massive mobilizations against the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007; the 2014 People’s Climate March in NYC; and the 2019 Queer Liberation March in NYC on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

Her writings appear in ten anthologies and in scores of print and online outlets; she has done more workshops, conference presentations, and speeches at rallies than she can count. 

 


Le Anh Tu Packard's first significant antiwar talk was to a group of skeptical U.S. naval officers in 1969 at an Episcopal church in Wickford, Rhode Island. They were surprised to learn that their “enemy” Ho Chi Minh was allied with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) toward the end of World War II. While a student, Tu participated in demonstrations organized by Asians Against the Vietnam War and encouraged the student body at her college to support the People’s Peace Treaty. In 1971 she joined the National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), a project of the American Friends Service Committee. She spoke at peace actions that included the Womens March Against the Presidio and the Winter Solder Investigation at Faneuil Hall. In 1972 Tu and Marilyn McNabb co-authored “Aid to Thieu”, a NARMIC report on the use of U.S. military and economic aid to prop up the Thieu government. Tu also worked closely with Peggy Duff, Gabriel Kolko and Richard Falk in a successful campaign to oppose secretive efforts by the U.S. government to use World Bank funds to aid the Thieu administration.


Vivian Rothstein was introduced to activism through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She was a Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteer in 1965 and later a community organizer in Chicago working to build “an interracial movement of the poor”.

In 1967 Vivian participated in a conference in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia co-sponsored by Liberation Magazine which brought 45 diverse American peace activists together with representatives of North Vietnam and the insurgents in South Vietnam, represented by the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), to build understanding of the American war in Vietnam.  Following the conference, she and 6 other participants travelled to North Vietnam to witness the impact of U.S. bombing on the country and people of North Vietnam. The delegation, headed by Tom Hayden, spent 17 days visiting bombed sites including schools, villages and hospitals, reviewing the American weaponry used against the Vietnamese people, and learning how the North Vietnamese mobilized to survive the onslaught.  They also met with American POWs being held in Hanoi and brought back letters from them for their families.

Upon returning to the U.S. Vivian spoke widely to audiences in the Midwest to share what she had learned in North Vietnam about our country's intentions.  She helped organize the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in January 1968, the first national women's march in Washington D.C. against the Vietnam War, as well as subsequent meetings between American and Vietnamese women in Toronto, Canada.

In 1994 Vivian returned to Vietnam on a women’s delegation, coordinated with the Vietnamese Women’s Union, to highlight the need for normalized relations between the U.S. and Vietnam.  Vivian donated her anti-Vietnam War posters to the Women’s Museum in Hanoi. 


Cora Weiss has spent her life in the movements for human rights, civil rights, women’s equality and peace. She was the UN Representative of the International Peace Bureau (Nobel Peace laureate 1910), which she led as President, 2000-2006; is among the founders of the Global Campaign for Peace Education and was a civil society drafter of what became UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security unanimously adopted in 2000. Her dedication to peace and peace education has garnered several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Adelphi University awarded her the Honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

During the war in Vietnam, she represented Women Strike for Peace (WSP) as the only woman of 4 co-chairs of the National Mobilization which organized the Nov. 15, 1969 demonstration in DC against the war in Vietnam. With Rev. Richard Fernandez she tried to bridge  the Mobilization with the Moratorium. She was co-Director with David Dellinger of the Committee of Liaison which arranged for the monthly exchange of mail with prisoners of war and their families, increased the number of packages POWs could receive, returned with the first list in Dec. 69 of those alive, and brought home 3 pilots in 1972. The Committee arranged for 3 Americans to travel to NVN every month carrying mail and who returned with eyewitness accounts of the war. She was a leader of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, linking WSP with the religious and African American communities which called for Ending the War in Vietnam and Poverty and Racism at Home.  She was a director of Friendshipment, which helped to rebuild Bach Mai Hospital; served as Consultant to Church World Service organizing a shipment of 10,000 tons of wheat and was a member of the delegation which delivered it to reunified VN (1978).


Resources


The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973, Clara Bingham, One Signal Publishers/Atria, 2024  includes interview with Marilyn Webb


Revolutionary Feminism: The Women's Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke U Press, 2023) by Barbara Winslow

 I have an entire chapter about feminist anti Vietnam and anti imperialist organizing. I think it is one of the only academic/popular discussion of this topic. Using mainly primary sources, I write about the involvement of women in the anti-draft and anti-war movement; how we brought a gendered analysis of war and imperialism into the anti war movement, how we fought and won to get more women's speakers at anti-war rallies. We brought a gendered analysis into the anti‚ draft movement; we worked in the GI coffee The Shelter Half in Tacoma and worked with Jane Fonda when she brought her FTA show to Tacoma, close to an airforce and army base.  - Sea Tac airport was then the second largest disembarkation‚ point to Vietnam; women regularly leafleted at the airport.We were involved in meetings with Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian women in Canada many times. 


Women's Anti War Diplomacy During the Vietnam War by Jessica M. Frazier, University of North Carolina Press, 2017


Hanoi Journal 1967, Carol Cohen McEldowney, edited by Suzanne McCormack and Elizabeth Mock University of Massachusetts Press 2007


Women Strike for Peace by Amy Swerdlow, University of Chicago Press, 1993


Radicals on the Road -- Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Cornell Press 2013


Mrs. Van's Video Message to American Women Patriots -- The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian G Appy, Viking Penguin 2003 ( in Antiwar Escalations page 274 "What? Meet separately with women?" Vivian Rothstein)


Speech by Vietnam Women's Union Representative: