Background
The war was visible on TV on a nightly basis and in US opposition was growing. The march on the Pentagon in March 1967 followed a 100,000 demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial drawing the charismatic youth leaders of Abie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the poet Alan Ginsberg. The media could not miss the symbolism when a plot to drop a 10,000 flowers on the Pentagon was foiled and some of them ended up being placed in the Military Police barrels by student protestors.
The counter culture’s flair for publicity succeded in placing the anti-Vietnam movement in the mainstream of discourse rather than a fringe affair associated with the campuses. The European left much more attuned to the Marxist, Maoist and Trotsky doctrinal left were not so much interested as Kurlansky argues in an “end to the war as a North Vietnamese victory”
The Tet offensive was seen by Tariq Ali a leading organizer of the Grosvenor Square demonstration as a “wave of joy and energy” that “rebounds around the world.” The big menace was colonialism and imperialism and in British as well as European eyes the Americans were Nazis. The pictures of the event show a sea of red banners but although many thousands came because of buses that were organized by orthodox left groups that does not mean the protestors were hard left many as were anti-war and were grateful just to have a vehicle to express their views. They seemed to be young left leaning people who were genuinely outraged or shamed by Britains association with the US. Harold Wilson’s government had not yet sent troops in but the fear was that this was the next step. There is widespread agreement that the people at the rally were a small fraction of young students and temporarily united the fractions of the left around a cause they could agree on. As Fraser states it,
“Unlike the Americans, they [the British] did not have to face their own war machine or the draft.... The student activism of the CND [Committee for Nuclear Disarmament] and the New Left had been sunk by the Labour Party machine in the sands of the unilateral nuclear disarmament battle, leaving them no credible model of organization.... It was thus mainly in the single-issue Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), originated in 1966 by a small Trotskyist group, that the "common ground" of student activism was re-discovered”
Grosvenor Square Riots --50 Years On
Laurence Peters
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