Many of us are old enough to remember the anti-war days of Woodstock and the hippie movement. I’m talking about the 1960s. The Vietnam War was at its worst, and the anti-war hippie subculture was out in force protesting the war.
They burned their draft cards; some fled to Canada; they marched in the streets by the hundreds of thousands; they organized sit-ins of government buildings and college administration buildings; they painted anti-war slogans in bright colors all over their Beetle vans; their “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” slogan was seen on signs all over the country; and they eventually helped bring an end to a war that America should have never entered.
At the time, I was the quintessential gung-ho-for-war guy. It was all my dad could do to convince me not to drop out of high school and join the Marines so I could go fight in Nam. I am so thankful he did.
The hippies were wrong regarding their promiscuous sex and drug-infested (even though the government’s “war on drugs” has been a constitutional disaster) lifestyles; and those misguided lifestyles brought much heartache and mischief to both themselves and our country for many years to follow. But their anti-war crusade was righteous. (It took me a long time to figure that out.)
To be sure, many of the national organizers of the anti-war movement back then had less than pure motives. They weren’t necessarily anti-war as much as they were pro-communist. These radicals opposed the war for leftist political reasons, not for the promotion of peace. Many of the 60s radicals within the hippie generation grew up to become some of the biggest warmongering politicians in America.
However, millions of common everyday hippies were genuinely pro-peace and anti-war for the right reasons.
For those of you who are too young to recall the days of which I’m speaking, you might be shocked to know that back then even the news media was anti-war. Every night on the three major networks’ news shows, we were subjected to non-stop videos of the hideous results of war: dead and mangled bodies lying in village streets, parentless children wandering around naked looking for something to eat, the emaciated and starving faces of the elderly, etc.
Those were the days before the Israeli lobby became the dominating, controlling force over the news media and U.S. government that it is today.
So, where are the anti-war peace activists today?
They certainly aren’t found in our churches. Evangelicals are some of the most rabid cheerleaders for war in the world. They aren’t in the newsrooms of America’s newspapers and news magazines. They aren’t in the television news studios. They aren’t in the faculties of America’s education establishments.
Where are the anti-war hippies when we need them?
Oh! Just about everybody claims to be anti-war—until a war breaks out. Then suddenly they become zealots for war.
Caitlin Johnstone wrote a terrific piece explaining this phenomenon:
Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.
Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.
This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory, people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.
Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like what people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.
When people think of themselves as “anti-war”, they’re usually imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.
Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.
This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest US war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.
Our entire civilization is shaped by domestic propaganda.
Propaganda is the single most overlooked and underappreciated aspect of our society. It has far more influence over how the public thinks, acts and votes than any of our official mechanisms for doing so, yet it’s barely discussed, it isn’t taught in schools, and even the best political ideologies barely touch on it relative to their other areas of focus.
Propaganda only works on those who don’t know they’re being propagandized. The US-centralized empire’s ability to hide its propaganda machine is a foundational element of its brilliance.
It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.
Amen, Caitlin!
And never forget that the “propaganda machine” includes at least 80% of America’s evangelical churches. Just as evangelical churches became part of the Covid propaganda, so now they are part of the Ukraine War propaganda—even going so far as raising millions of dollars from the pockets of gullible Christians for the moral reprobate and bloody butcher who calls himself a president in Ukraine.
It never ceases to amaze me how evangelicals can possess such strong pro-life convictions regarding abortion (which is admirable) yet possess such strong pro-death convictions when it comes to fighting unjust wars (which is deplorable).
And you might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of the world sides with Russia over the U.S. on Ukraine. “Out of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia. That means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the sanctions. Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s population.”
For Biden to lecture Russia on war crimes is the height of hypocrisy. Since G.W. Bush launched the horrifically homicidal “war on terror,” the U.S. (Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden) has murdered 6 million innocent people (including babies), and that does not include the more than 5 million Palestinian people that the U.S. has helped Israel murder since 1948.
Twice (2008, 2012) America had the opportunity to elect a genuine Christian constitutionalist president, a real man of peace: Dr. Ron Paul. And twice so-called Republican conservatives and Christians rejected Dr. Paul’s candidacy and nominated establishment warmongers.
And here is one more incredible irony regarding the way Christian conservatives rejected Ron Paul: If the rumor is true that the Supreme Court has decided to overturn Roe v Wade, Christian conservatives everywhere will be dancing in the streets—as will I.
But here’s the rub: For years, Dr. Paul would introduce the Sanctity of Life Act in the U.S. House of Representatives, by which Republican presidents and congresses could have overturned Roe. And every year Christian conservatives would yawn and totally ignore it—and, in some cases, outright reject it.
If we can rely on the Politico story that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe, the decision will likely be a carbon copy of Dr. Paul’s proposed Sanctity of Life bill—or Ron’s bill might actually have been stronger. Had pro-life Christians gotten behind Dr. Paul’s bill and pushed the GOP to pass the bill many years ago, millions of unborn babies would have been saved.
So now they will applaud a Supreme Court decision that replicates a decades-old proposed bill that was sponsored by Ron Paul—a bill evangelicals openly opposed.
And why did they oppose Dr. Paul? Because he was neither a warmonger nor a Zionist toady. Evangelicals like their politicians to be War Hawks and Zionists. But then, the two go together.
Considering the way evangelicals rejected Ron Paul and considering the way they cheer and applaud death and destruction on a global scale via unjust war, it seems clear that many evangelicals are only pro-life when it is politically expedient.
As I said, where are the anti-war hippies when we need them?
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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Psyoped and Co-opted: The CIA has disenfranchised Europeans and Americans from their own political culture without them even knowing…
Writers, teachers, artists, hand- picked, ‘free thinking’ gate- keepers with a Trotskyist agenda- policing their intellectual domains for their fascist elitist bosses.
‘They’ always ‘allow’ a voice of dissent (and that includes politics).
After all, this is a Democracy!
After the Police Riot that accompanied the 68 Democrat Convention in Chicago I began a tactic that revealed the true nature of the American Left and Yippie Culture. My Message: The USA, with 6% of the world population, consumes 60% of the World Resources. If, indeed, you want peace and racial justice, we must organizie at the point of consumption, and from the bottom up. Join my wife and I in voluntary poverty. Don’t fly to Morrocco to smuggle some hash. Go for home grown and simplicity. Get your clothes at resale shops. Grow some vegetables. Learn how to can and dry foods and etc. Of course, I was asking too much. A fovorite saying of industrial workers was “He who dies with the most toys Wins!”. And the New York “Lefties” all became “Yuppies”. I was rewarded with obscurity and erased from the record. What has changed?
Still trukin’ at 82; an original as anti war as ever. But the kids are too busy with wokism and gender confusion to get hip. I see no hope for the widow’s son. Maybe it is all lost in the tide of opoids crashing our shores.
.I was an antiwar hippie in the 60s,70s, 80s, 90s, and I am still amtiwar. I hate war and I am reflexively opposed to violence…… But I won’t be out there protesting this war, because I am NOT a pacifist. I am unhappy that Russia invaded. But I lay most of. the blame on the U.S. & NATO for placing Putin and Russia in a situation that they found too dangerous and greviou’s to endure. When Obama, Hillary Clinton & Victoria Nuland set out to overthrow the elected President of Ukraine in 2014 they knew they were playing with fire, maybe even nuclear fire. Equipped with $5 billion National Endowment for Democracy dollars to buy the coup which succeeded. The elected president fled, and someone new was installed who seems to have been chosen by Victoria (“fuck the EU”) Nuland, Obama assistant secretary of state in a recorded conversation with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Pitt heard round the world. Once the American chosen coup president was installed, he packed the government with far-right Russophobic followers of a Ukrainian group cum cult of followers of citizens who allied with the Third Reich in World War Two. They were known as Natzis. Once in, this group
Chuck Baldwin’s piece is very interesting. I recall the home scene during the Vietnam War very well. There were radicals then, as there are now. And there were evangelicals then, as there are now. To me, the biggest difference between then and now is that back then, as Chuck says, reporters were there filming the gory war, and we got to watch it night after night. So it wasn’t just the hippies who were revolted by the war. But now, the bloody media are ALL in on this Ukraine war, rah rah rah, and few reporters dare to actually do their job, unless they want to be canceled by Twitter and sent to Substack purgatory…
We also had some common sense then, to know that LBJ lied when he said we could have both guns and butter. We could not have both, and that’s why the USA alone in the developed world did not develop Universal Medicare in the 60s, and hasn’t yet. But now, those old hippies shrug their shoulders at the Trillions of deficit, as if it will never end. But it will end, and reporter Gonzalo Lira says it will end this year.
Btw, kudos to Chuck for saying that it was the Congress that had the ability to pass laws regarding abortion. They can still do that.
Well, at 72 I’m pretty occupied working 2 on, 2 off, 2 on, 3 off twelve hour shifts as an industrial Technician to pay for health care for my wife and an occasional meal out.
The third world has been implemented here in Kevin McCarthy’s home County.
I could put up a poster on my fence and get shot by my brainwashed neighbors.
#Aloha
And Nancy wants money to keep doing what they have done..
The question would only occur to someone who would never risk jail for activism. Count the hundreds who have been arrested and taxed for being a ‘protestor”. It is expensive, leadership often gets ridden for keeping monies, and one or two trips to jail with fines and lawyer fees, means we need fresh recruits. People with something to lose, have no interest in losing it.
Knowledge is responsibility, and when anyone has knowledge war is wrong, they are derelict in their duty to prevent it. The people scream to have protestors thrown in jail, and the judges are all too happy to do it. The police can kill you and get away with it. The thing is, not many people are anti-war. They are dullards who actual hope for 30 cents less at the pump, and killing a couple hundred thousand to them is well worth it. They are a product of the christian war agenda, and have no character or fortitude. Our culture has a multi-generational illness caused by colonization disease. We are the same (actually worse) as Palestine.
The better question is, When will christianity produce the fruit it promises ?
The hippies were not the problem or the solution. How many hundreds of years of torture and death at the hands of christians will we absorb , until we realize the entire thing is a psychological weapon of war itself ? It is obvious to the point of actual painfulness. It is a cause of regret and a dasher of hope to see so many gullible robots. The black robe has been known for thousands of years before christianity ever crawled out of the hole. never good.
Having lived through and participated in much of the late 60s social and political activity, I find this article true and false. Many of those who participated on the massive protests in DC in 1969 were in their 30s and 40s or older. Most just wanted to “give peace a chance”. The SDS and others were political and just wanted a civil war. Since then, most folks in all demographics don’t give a damn. The military draft was just part of the problem. So, we morphed to a mercenary force and the rest is history.
The anti-war protests nearly completely stopped when the draft stopped leading me and many of my generation (nearly same as Gordon’s) to doubt the sincerity of the protesters. The protests mainly centered on “Don’t draft me or people of my class.” While I had no objection to those who fled the country-we were not East Germany needing a wall to keep people in-I had, and still have, nothing but the utmost contempt for those who whined and complained and peed their pants and stamped their little feet to be readmitted to the USA. You made a choice. Man up and live with it! There were more than 58,000 others who made a very different choice and they are never coming back.
“Whrw is King Kong now that wee need him?” I wwnt from Europe to New Yorj fió ten days sixteen years ago and saw a Ciyt culture in decku´ne and in need to get dewastated, (I also liveedfor some weeks eachat age 6 (1957) and age 16 (1967), At bióth times NY appeared to me to fyúnction, At age 56, in 2006, i visited that dilapitated plce 8BY NOW), IT (NEW YORK) REMINDED ME OF MOSCOW IN THE MID.EIGHTIES!
They are called Woke Social Justice Warriors (SJW) now. Since there is no draft they protest over Climate Change to LGBT and everything in between. WW3 is not important to them as saving and endanger species. I wonder what happen to that species when the N Bombs start dropping, would they survive?
“As I said, where are the anti-war hippies when we need them?” Sadly, they were a product of the times, times that are no more. When I graduated HS in 1966 I was all ready to join the military so I could go to college on the GI Bill. My dad took me aside and told me I was f-ing crazy. He would get me a job in the local paper mill and I could save up enough money each summer to go to the University of Wisconsin in the fall. Mind you, in=state tuition was $65 per semester at that point.
The anti-war movement was all about the draft in those years. Hell no, I won’t go.
The draft led to a memorized military that was on the verge of collapse. By 1970, the U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions.
“By every conceivable indicator, our army that remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers…Sedition, coupled with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services…” – Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr, 1971
Would someone turn “memorized” into demoralized? Thank you.
Jonas Alexis, you are the best man at Veterans today.
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