Can the People Make the Peace Again?

Raise your hand if you are a U.S. American and you have lived one single day of your life when the United States government was not killing someone in some foreign country somewhere. I thought so. Very few hands.

The truth is we are a nation of permanent war, except for some short interruptions here and there, we have been ever since “pilgrims” landed in Jamestown in 1608. As much as we don’t like to talk about it, war has been the norm throughout our history.

And yet, there was an extraordinary time when the people rose up against war in massive numbers, in the 1960s and '70s. That war was in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. As much as the great big forgetting and misremembering machine wants us to think otherwise, there is a lot to be learned from looking back at that movement.

That’s the assumption behind the recently published book, The People Make the Peace: Lessons From the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Just World Books) of which I am co-editor and a chapter author.

What’s the book about? If you just read it as a collection of adventure stories, it’s a pageturner. It is also a work of history—neglected and important history in several ways. And it’s a mythbuster, debunking several falsehoods about the Vietnam antiwar movement. It’s not just the guy’s version either—half of the authors are women. Karin Aguilar San Juan is the co-editor.

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