The Vietnam war legitimized anti-government sentiment during that period. How did the Vietnam war interact with other American cultural movements? What may have happened to those movements without the Vietnam war?
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The various movements overlapped in their ultimate goals of exposing the truths of the immoral technocracy present in American institutions. Additionally, just as in other cultural movements, resistance against the war in Vietnam required forming a distinct community. Both “Vietnam Summer,” organized by SDS and based on Mississippi Summer, and the March on the Pentagon exemplified the determined attitude with which Americans united in order to confront the war.
ReplyDeleteThere was an extremely strong intersection between the anti-war movement and the student movement. When the draft was initiated, college students who were given deferments were expected to take advantage of their situation and embrace capitalism. The government believed that the purpose of these men who were given deferments was to perpetuate the technical hierarchy of the nation. However, rather than neatly fitting into the government’s expectations, many students alternatively expressed their disappointment in the nation’s obsession with objective corporate life. The war in Vietnam therefore created an additional purpose for the student movement as participants recognized the political role of the university.
Without Vietnam, students may not have gained as discerning an awareness of the unbreakable connections between all American institutions. The anti-war movement was another manifestation of disassociation from mainstream American institutions as the public became aware of the schism between what the government said as opposed to the true inhumane cruelty occurring in Vietnam. This disassociation was evident in the “teach-ins” held at schools such as the University of Michigan.
The fact that the Vietnam War was seen as largely a giant lie from the government legitimized the anti-government attitude, as Omar pointed out. As a whole, the movements of the sixties would not have had the same effects on modern America that they had without the war. Without the war, the Hippies were just a bunch of high, drunk, dirty, music-loving bums who spent days doing nothing productive. Without the war, the Women's Movement was just led by improper, bothersome women who left home for no reason and the New Left only a bunch of angst-ridden college students. If the activists were right about the war, they could be right about everything else. It gave them unification and strength. The movements would not have survived if not for the war. They needed this one thing to prove that they did actually have a point in order to gain any support from mainstream America or even from other activists. In this way, the very thing that every movement was against was, ironically, the only thing that allowed them to succeed.
ReplyDeleteAs Liz mentioned the war really helped all the various movements to expose “the truths of the immoral technocracy present in American institutions.” All the various movements saw the Vietnam War as a symbol of the specific evils they were fighting against. And so the student movement, civil rights movement, counterculture, and feminist and ecological movements became united against one thing that represented all evils. In each of the movements the people recognized the evils they saw in the war and began to oppose it, just as Liz explained happened with the student movement.
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