More on those hippie protesters

Pat Lang's post that I commented on in my previous entry here was somewhat surprising to me, in that he still seems to accept old Nixonian propaganda stereotypes about the anti-Vietnam War movement.  Even though he as a longtime critic of the Cheney-Bush administration and the Iraq War is now one of the targets of just those same kinds of slams.

In particular, this comment of Lang's is worth revisiting:

Some people fought the war and others supported the enemy. ...  It was a terrible thing.  Some Americans marched inthe streets behind the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.  The NLF are going to win" while other Americans were dying or being maimed under the US flag.

Now, it's true that some critics of the Vietnam War expressed some degree of sympathy for the Other Side.  Even that some demonstrators carried Viet Cong flags in antiwar marches.

But it's very safe to say that if the tensions between the military and civilians which Lang writes about had been limited to those civilians who carried Viet Cong flags or who specifically sympathized with the Vietnamese Communists, then that period would surely have seen the most harmonious civilian-military relations in all of American history.

Now, it's true that the 1960s was a time when radical-left ideologies enjoyed greater acceptance than previously, or than now.  But let's be real.  Actual left parties, whether the Communist Party or the Peace and Freedom Party or others, barely registered in the votes.  George Wallace's rightwing American Independent Party found far more voters and fans.

It was a time when nice respectable white folks were freaked out over integration in the South and urban riots in the North.  After Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, there were riots in so many cities that you didn't have to be a pants-wetting conservative to call it a spontaneous urban uprising all across the country.  But it was a matter of people venting rage and frustration, oftem in ways that were destructive to their own communities.  It wasn't something organized by the Communist Party or the Black Panthers or the Students for a Democratic Society.

Add to that dope-smoking, tie-dyed clothes, Indian gurus, psychedelic art, LSD, and the Summer of Love (and "free love") in San Francisco in 1967, and you've got a cultural trauma that is apparently as alive for today's "cultural warriors" as it was back then.  And gay marriage wasn't even an issue then!  Actually, it would be tough to decide what was more traumatic for the 1969 version of the culture warriors:  the birth-control pill, civil rights for black people, antiwar protesters or boys with long hair.

Spiro Agnew, the Rush Limbaugh of 1969 (that's Joe McCarthy's face in the puzzle)

Then you have the Republicans and Nixon's "Southern Strategy", aimed at getting conservative Southern whites to desert the Democrats and Wallace to come to the Republican Party.  But trying to do it wihout driving moderate voters away.  Running campaign commercials about how that there black man is after pure white women would have been considered over the line by the Republicans back then.  Obviously, times change.  Also see the response.

But let's not be too nice to the Nixon crowd.  They weren 't a very nice bunch.  And they may have been doing a balancing act on race.  But going after hippie protesters - or the bogeyman image they wanted Southern whites in particular to have in their heads of protesters - was right up their alley.

It's also important to remember that in 1969, as I mentioned in my previous post, the Nixon-Agnew administration was freaked out over the very prominent veterans antiwar groups, and particularly over the photogenic John Kerry.  Agnew came up with stuff like the following as red meat for their targeted "angry white man" voting segment.  As Jerry Lembcke describes in The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998):

In the speeches Spiro Agnew gave after [the successful, veteran-led antiwar demonstrations of] October 15 [1969], anti-war movement for siding with an enemy aggressor (October 19), for applauding our enemies, condemning our leaders, and repudiating the four hundred thousand American war dead in this century (October 20), for manufacturing homegrown totalitarianism (October 30), for marching under the flags and portraits of dictators (November 20), and for revering totalitarian heroes (December 3).  Although such accusations might be dismissed as vice presidential cant for awhile, Agnew's rancor was bound to have an effect if he continued speaking out long enough.  And continue he did.  On February 21,1970, he called anti-war activists "the best publicized clowns in our society" and their statements "seditious drivel." He called on leading anti-war organizations, such as Students for Democratic Society, to "transfer their allegiance from Mao Tse-tung and Castro and the Viet Cong to the United States of America."  On August 17, 1970, he warned that if a congressional proposal to cut off funding for the war, the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, passed, it would be known as "the amendment that lost the war in Vietnam."

The old Agnew propaganda images are still alive and kicking for today's cultural warriors of the Christian Right.  And even for some people who should know better from seeing the same thing, in even more virulent form, from the Cheney-Bush administration and its loyal followers.

Pat Lang wondered in that post:

What flag will the demonstrators march behind this time?

The American flag, I would think.  Most of us war critics, anyway.

But if you wanted to create a 2006 parallel to Agnew's 1969 "flags and portraits of dictators", you could point to the fact that neo-Confederates like those at LewRockwell.com are opposed to the Iraq War.  And you could characterize the anti-Iraq War sentiment this way:

"The anti-war movement is a bunch of dirty hippies and gays and lesbians and feminists who support the Islamic fundamentalist enemy.  They condemn our leaders and repudiate the four hundred thousand American war dead in this last century.  They're manufacturing homegrown Islamofascototalitarianism, these sexual libertines.  They march under the Confederate flag, the flag of treason, and they honor men  like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, the most notorious traitors in our history.  They revere white-supremacist heroes.  These people like Pat Lang and Richard Clarke and Jack Murtha are the best publicized clowns in our society.  And what they have to say is seditious drivel.  They should transfer their allegiance from Jefferson Davis and Osama bin Laden and that Ahmadinejad fellow to the United States of America.  And if Congress were to prohibit tortures like mock executions by partial drowning, that would be known as the amendment that lost the war in Iraq and the Great Crusade against the Islamunists."

It wouldn't be entirely wrong.  Neo-Confederate groups do tend to oppose the Iraq War.  But since a large majority of the American people oppose the war and the Cheney-Bush administration's handling of it, does a rant like that make jack for sense as a description of war opponents in 2006?

Actually, Republican war fans wouldn't actually condemn people for neo-Confederate and white supremacist sympathies.  They would offend too large a proportion of the core Republican base if they did that!