No, The Kids Are Not Alright

It has become fashionable to compare the current spate of campus demonstrations against the carnage wreaked by the Israeli invasion of Gaza with the anti-war protests of the Vietnam era.  As someone who was part of that half-century-ago movement, I am deeply resentful of the false equivalence of what we did and the “Free Palestine” attacks that have become college students’ cause-du-jour.

There are similarities to be sure.  In each case, a nation employed overwhelming military force and a disregard for civilian casualties to achieve a victory that was unlikely to do more than weaken an enemy too committed to be totally destroyed, oblivious to spawning a new generation of enemies that were certain to renew hostilities with even greater zeal. In both, when the realization sunk in that the initial strikes would not be sufficient to achieve the desired result, the invading force simply escalated, throwing more and more ordnance into the battle, thus creating even greater misery among the non-combatant population.  To blunt international outrage, both the Americans and the Israelis made highly publicized efforts, only to some degree genuine, to provide aid and care for those whose families, homes, and fortunes they had destroyed.  Finally, each of the aggressors was led by an unpopular head of state who was accused, justifiably, of prosecuting the war as much for personal as nationalistic reasons.

But the differences are significant.

The American misadventure in Vietnam took place in a country on the other side of the world, with an enemy that presented not a scintilla of threat to American lives and property, to support a corrupt, kleptocratic government, with a justification for entering the conflict that was a total fabrication.  Almost all of those protesting the war knew someone or was related to someone who had been killed or wounded, fighting for a group of generals and admirals who did not seem to have a clue as to what they were doing, making up for a series of incredible blunders by hurling more troops into battle, where they were killed by as many as 400 every week.

While there were some among us who were openly rooting for the Vietcong (who called themselves the Vietminh) and North Vietnamese to win the war, even if it meant killing their own fellow citizens—Jane Fonda comes to mind—the overwhelming thrust of our movement was simply for America to get out and let the Vietnamese decide for themselves how they should be governed.  (We, like Johnson and the military leaders, were all too aware that if free elections were held in the south, Ho Chi Minh, a national hero, would have been overwhelmingly elected.)

Not exactly the same set of particulars of the River-to-the-Sea crowd.

While there is some percentage of these demonstrators for whom the Gaza war is personal, likely not all that large, most are simply those that have decided that Israelis are wanton perpetrators of genocide and Palestinians repositories of virtue engaged in a noble, eighty-year resistance against fascist oppression.  (That Benjamin Netanyahu and his racist, far-right ministers willingly play into this scenario is a sad irony.) For them, the events of October 7 were merely an understandable counterattack against an amoral occupier, rather than an orgy of destruction, rape, and slaughter perpetrated by a Hamas leadership that not only accepted tens of thousands of deaths of their own people, but in fact demanded it.  We know this is true because Hamas leadership bragged about it.  The North Vietnamese government mourned their casualties—they did not anoint them as martyrs as Hamas’s leaders have done, all the while taking great care to not achieve martyrdom themselves.

As far as anyone knew, not a single North Vietnamese leader wanted to invade the United States and push its citizens into the Atlantic.  Ho Chi Minh, in fact, had solicited American support when fighting against the French, but had been spurned by a series of American presidents.  Lyndon Johnson had used the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident to propel American escalation, whereas Israel suffered a horrific terrorist attack that proportionally cost as many lives as would have occurred if an American city of 50,000 people had been wiped out.

Saddest of all is that many of the leaders of these new protests do not seem motivated by a genuine concern for the Palestinians—if they were, they would be a lot more knowledgeable about the politics of the region and its history—but by self-aggrandizement and a nihilistic distaste for authority.  (To be fair, there was a fair amount of that among our group as well.) What would be hilarious if it were not so tragic, is the “Queers for Palestine,” LBGTQ+’s who don’t seem to be aware that their Hamas heroes would have them ostracized, beaten, tortured, or killed if they had the misfortune to live in Gaza.

The upshot of these current student uprisings could be devastating.  While we were trying to unseat war-happy, gunslinging Lyndon Johnson and replace him with Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, both of whom were committed to ending America’s involvement and preventing further civilian casualties, these protestors may well cause the defeat of Joe Biden, who has exerted all the pressure he can to limit the Israeli offensive, and replace him with Donald Trump, who has no more respect for human life, especially non-white human life, than your average rabid dog. 

If we had been successful, which we might well have been if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated, things would have gotten better.  If these new protesters are successful and Biden loses to Trump, they will unquestionably be much, much worse.

So, no, the current crop of protesters are not our descendants.  They are our usurpers.