The Vietnam War Protests and the Israeli Genocide Protests

A history lesson

by John Massaro

HISTORY, WHETHER ANCIENT or recent, teaches us many valuable lessons. And we’ve all heard the saying, “History repeats itself.” I’m sure that most of you reading these lines are much younger than I am, and know little or nothing about the Vietnam War. America’s active combat role in that senseless conflict began when I was eleven and ended when I was nineteen. It was the defining event of my adolescence, not least because, had it not ended when it did, I likely would’ve been drafted and sent to fight — if I would’ve had the courage to go. I remember those years so well, including the massive protests and social upheavals the war provoked, in large part because of the draft, and especially among college students, pitting those who supported the war against those who opposed it.

For those who can’t quite understand the student opposition here in the U.S. to Israel’s ongoing slaughter in the Middle East, a look back at the 1960s and early 1970s will be most instructive.

From an early age, I was curious about world affairs but ignorant about nearly everything. The idea that America was the greatest country the world had ever seen, a beacon of hope and freedom that people of all nations looked up to, was instilled in me in elementary school. My parents never had any strong political opinions but were generally conservative, proudly displaying the flag on the front porch on national holidays. Deprived of any real education, ignorant of my own ignorance, I had only the influence of home and school and my instincts to go by. At the age of thirteen, I was aware that we were becoming increasingly involved in a war in a faraway country called Vietnam, and every fiber of my being told me that, since we were the good guys with the white hats who could do no wrong, we were on the right side of history in stopping the advance of international communism, and every good American was obligated to support the war effort by standing behind “our boys” — “boys” not “troops” being the popular term back then. The war raged through my high school years, and I became more and more emotional in my support of it, and more contemptuous of those who demonstrated against it. This was a time when marches and protests were becoming larger, more frequent, more chaotic, and in some cases more violent on both sides. I despised the anti-war protestors because of what they were. Broadly speaking, they could be broken down into two groups. One group was comprised of the pacifist types who were opposed to war as a matter of principle. Back then, I sneered at these people as pathetic wimps who seemed to believe in peace at any price, who were so blind and weak that they would rather live under the slavery of communism than stand behind their own countrymen who had taken up the fight against it. But they were not evil, and although I despised them, I didn’t hate them. However, I did hate the other group, whom I would simply characterize as street scum. They were the ones who chanted for a communist victory in Vietnam, who waved the Viet Cong flag and burned the American flag, and whose most violent members bombed government buildings and military recruitment centers. These types reappeared two generations later in the form of Antifa during the George Floyd riots of 2020, raising hell in the streets, toppling Confederate statues, firebombing police stations and the like. It’s only natural to have a visceral hatred for creatures like this. I instinctively felt that, if all these pacifist weaklings and violent radicals were against the war, it was only right to support it. I must say, however, that as the war dragged on, and even returning veterans were condemning it, marching in the streets and throwing their medals away for all to see, I became more and more perplexed, though stubbornly refusing to change my views.

I can’t overemphasize how ignorant I was at the time, and how much I’ve learned over the years, primarily from reading eleven books written by men who did the fighting. I knew less than nothing about “the facts on the ground” and all other aspects of the war while it was being fought. As a young teenager, I had no feelings either way about Lyndon B. Johnson, who started the war, but I now know him to be the most repulsive beast in the history of the presidency. I did know about the extensive bombing of civilian areas in North Vietnam, especially the capital Hanoi, but that didn’t bother me in the least. After all, we were the good guys who could do no wrong, and if American bombs killed thousands of innocent people, well, that was for the greater good of wiping out communism. I had no idea that we had been bombing Laos on an almost daily basis for years, and later Cambodia as well — two neutral countries on Vietnam’s western border through which the North Vietnamese Army had been transporting supplies through jungle cover — the legendary “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” named after the president of North Vietnam. In fact, inoffensive and impoverished Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare, and after all these years, people who live in the Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam region are still occasionally killed or maimed by the accidental detonation of unexploded ordnance, or UXO. In addition, genetic defects from the defoliant Agent Orange, sprayed by American aircraft to destroy the concealment of the jungle canopy, have carried down through three generations in many families, including those of American servicemen exposed to this toxin, not to mention lasting damage to the southeast Asian ecosystem.

The domino theory, much discussed at the time by brainy conservatives, which held that communism had to be stopped in South Vietnam or else it would topple countries one by one throughout Asia, proved to be absurd. I know now that the North Vietnamese campaign to conquer the South had little to do with Marxist ideology and a great deal to do with reunifying the country, which had been artificially split in half in 1954, and getting rid of foreign domination, which Vietnam had endured for centuries under the Chinese, the French, and lastly the Americans, who were entangled in their alliance with the hopelessly corrupt government of South Vietnam. Fifty years ago I would’ve scorned any criticism of our military as a symptom of the leftist-liberal mentality, but have since learned that political labels are largely meaningless — that most wars are run for profit, that most of our top government officials and military brass are stupid and incompetent scumbags, and that the military establishment in large part is a cancer and a refuge for thugs, parasites and slackers, like the higher-ups in Vietnam who directed operations from a safe distance in their air-conditioned headquarters, sending young American men, largely draftees, on dangerous patrols and other missions that had no real objective in a war for which there was nothing to win. I had no idea back then that there were genuine patriots, given no voice in the media, who from the beginning condemned the Vietnam War as a total farce.

And so, because of this eight-year-long farce, more than 58,000 American servicemen died, hundreds of thousands were permanently wrecked in body or mind or both, and the gravest injustices were inflicted on the people of Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia. There are great discrepancies in the estimated number of noncombatant civilians directly killed by the American military, but the figure of one million seems very conservative. And for what? For absolutely nothing. Had we not gotten involved, this internal conflict, which threatened no one outside of Vietnam, would’ve ended sooner and with much less bloodshed, and even if that were not the case, whatever happened in Vietnam had no significance for the American people.

I traveled all over Vietnam by public transport in 2013, and I firmly believe that America is more of a “communist” country these days. I got the impression that, whatever problems Vietnam may have, the great majority of people are content, are living to their fullest potential, and most unlike the U.S., have a future they can look forward to. Looking back to how I saw things as a teenager, I can only shake my head. Even after North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the presidential palace in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, on April 30, 1975, sealing our defeat one day after the last remaining Americans were evacuated, I was one of those conservative morons who believed that we could and should have won — while at the same time having no idea what there was to “win.” But I did learn from that experience. And one thing I learned was that those legions of non-violent pacifists who had voiced strong opposition to the war were “accidentally” right, that is, they were right in their hearts, even if, in their minds, they never understood the dynamics of the war.

Since my high school days, I have traveled the world and read a great deal. I see things clearly now, as clearly as anyone, I believe. I can see that, while there are different circumstances between the killing fields in southeast Asia many years ago and in the Middle East today, and differences in the war protests then and now, in many ways it’s the same thing happening all over again. An enormous number of innocent civilians are being slaughtered by American planes dropping American bombs, and people are rightly outraged by it. If this isn’t terrorism, what do you call it?

There are many young White Americans of college age who, while knowing nothing of the Jewish problem and the dark history of Zionism, sense that there is something profoundly wrong about what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. The big difference today is the huge demographic shift that the U.S. has undergone since the Vietnam War, so that non-White protestors, mainly of Middle Eastern and Asian origin, often outnumber their White counterparts, judging by news reports I’ve seen. Now, as then, the flag-waving simpletons need an enemy to hate, and they have it in Hamas, which the mainstream media, Fox News in particular, never stop reminding us is a terrorist organization, just as the Viet Cong — the South Vietnamese guerilla army which was supported by the North — were those evil communists killing American soldiers. I’m not denying that the Viet Cong committed some terrible atrocities on their fellow Vietnamese who opposed them, and I’m sure that’s true of Hamas as well. (If you want to talk about homegrown atrocities, fellow American, take a look in the mirror. Read what the federal government did to Southern Whites during the Reconstruction era which followed our own civil war, which they don’t teach in school.) Again, the circumstances surrounding the Viet Cong and Hamas are different, but they are and were whipping boys conveniently associated with “the Left,” as meaningless as that term usually is. Since being anti-Israel is the same as being anti-American in the minds of so many deluded conservatives, it follows that anyone who sympathizes with Hamas, and Hezbollah for that matter, must be one of those despicable leftists. I guess that makes me a leftist too. I guess that makes our soldiers who fought in World War Two communists, since the Soviets were our allies. Presumably, if you’re okay with bombing the hell out Arabs in the Mideast, you’re on the right, even though no media liberal commentators have condemned the bombing either. Just ask Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly; they’ve got it all figured out. Do you see how ridiculous political labels have become?

I’m sure there are millions of good Americans who are appalled by Israel’s ongoing air terrorism, who know there is something fundamentally rotten about their government sanctioning all this murder, but are confused by the nature of the protests. Just a few weeks ago, as I write, we were treated to news reports, with Fox leading the way, naturally, of Antifa mobs — or the more cautious calling them “Antifa-style” or “allegedly Antifa” — violently demonstrating in support of the Palestinian cause at the University of Washington. So when people watch this on the evening news, they think back to those genuine Antifa scum rampaging through American cities during the 2020 riots, and their sympathy shifts in the wrong direction. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, incidentally, if Israeli agent provocateurs were behind this latest round of mayhem in Washington state. In any event, opposition to the barbaric state of Israel and the Jewish occupation government in Washington D.C. is by no means “un-American,” but foreign students and non-White citizens play into the hands of the pro-Israel crowd and add to the confusion by conflating Israeli terror with imperialism or colonialism, by making the Israelis out to be White colonizers oppressing non-White Palestinians. They see a parallel here with the crimes, real and imagined, committed by European colonizers in ages past, but this only adds to the confusion and makes no sense at all. The proof of that is the tireless effort of Jewish leaders everywhere to destroy the White race by every method possible. Most Jews, even though they may have light skin, are a people apart and do not identify with the White race and Western civilization, except when it’s expedient for them to do so, as it is at present.

Unless and until we Americans find a way of getting the Jewish gorilla off our backs, the traitors in Washington will continue bankrolling the Israeli mass murder machine, wreaking havoc across the Middle East, and massacring innocent people in the name of fighting terrorism, as has already been going on for decades. Or will they? The increasing intensity of the Vietnam War protests, amid the rising bewilderment and anger of ordinary Americans whose sons and brothers were being drafted and fed through the meat grinder of Vietnam, eventually wore out LBJ, who stunned the nation on March 31, 1968 by announcing on live television that he would not seek a second term in November. His Secretary of Defense, the corporate egghead psycho Robert McNamara, had been under siege from all sides due to his handling of the war, and resigned the previous month. Richard Nixon inherited the war, even escalating it for a short time, and if anything the protests grew in scope, especially after the secret bombing war in Cambodia was publicized in 1970, the year that four Kent State University protestors were shot dead and combat operations were scaled down.

Warlord Netanyahu and his henchmen seem to think that they can get away with doing literally anything, and so far they’ve been right. They have a green light that never changes in Washington, and the worst that European “leaders” have done is wring their hands and whine, “Please Prime Minister, this has to stop.” At the same time, however, the foreign ministers of several European countries, among the 124 who recognize the International Criminal Court, have indicated that they will comply with the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Even if that’s a lot of hot air, which it probably is, it legitimizes the viewpoint that Netanyahu is a genocidal maniac, which he definitely is. I’ve even read that the creature avoids the air space of certain countries for fear of being arrested — Ireland in particular — and takes longer routes when flying abroad. I hope that’s true. In any case, history shows that Jews always overreach, and their hubris comes back to bite them, though the current rift between Trump and Netanyahu seems to be the usual pop-up political theatre.

Will the Jews go too far by dragging us into a war with Iran? Or by goading Trump and his hardcore Zionist cabinet to arrest White Americans for speaking out against Jewish power and Israeli terrorism? I make no predictions other than to say that history does not stand still, and both Trump and Netanyahu are well into their seventies. That’s pretty late in life, when many people die of natural causes, and as we all know, unpopular politicians face additional risks. For the here and now, I’m happy to see any kind of pressure that gets results applied to these two freaks and their accomplices in Washington and Tel Aviv. I hope to see bigger and better street protests, and more wild and woolly times on college campuses. Whatever gets the job done.

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