The “growing unrest in the cities” must have been a reference to the black uprisings that had taken place—and showed the link—between the war abroad and poverty at home. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, pro-slavery activists declared their right to “choose” to own slaves.
When Nixon took office, he too tried to persuade the public that protest would not affect him. But he almost went berserk when one lone pacifist picketed the White House.
They have enforced inhuman laws…. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion…. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials… .
They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. …
…from the end of last year, to the beginning of this year . . . more than two million of our fellow-citizens died of starvation. .. .
The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.
Drug War
One sign that the ideas of the antiwar movement had taken hold in the American public was that juries became more reluctant to convict
Most of the antiwar action came from ordinary GIs, and most of these came from lower-income groups—white, black, Native American, Chinese, and Chicano. (Chicanos back home were demonstrating by the thousands against the war.)
One of the great sports figures of the nation, Muhammad Ali, the black boxer and heavyweight champion, refused to serve in what he called a “white man’s war”; boxing authorities took away his title as champion.
Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out in 1967 at Riverside Church in New York:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
Dan Berrigan wrote a
“Meditation”
We say: killing is disorder, life and gentleness and community and unselfishness is the only order we recognize. For the sake of that order, we risk our liberty, our good name. The time is past when good men can remain silent, when obedience can segregate men from public risk, when the poor can die without defense.
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US Slave trade 2015 Under Dred Scott, owners could choose to buy, sell or under most circumstances kill their property.
The one woman among the Catonsville Nine, Mary Moylan, a former nun, also refused to surrender to the FBI. She was never found. Writing from underground, she reflected on her experience and how she came to it: David Barrow lamented the “strange doctrine of the Christian church that forbids ministers to condemn sin simply because it is authorized by the government.”
… We had all known we were going to jail, so we all had our toothbrushes. I was just exhausted. I took my little box of clothes and stuck it under the cot and climbed into bed. Now all the women in the Baltimore County jail were black-I think there was only one white. The women were waking me up and saying, “Aren’t you going to cry?” I said, “What about?” They said, “You’re in jail.” And I said, “Yeah, I knew I’d be here.” . ..I was sleeping between two of these women, and every morning I’d wake up and they’d be leaning on their elbows watching me. They’d say, “You slept all night.” And they couldn’t believe it. They were good. We had good times…
And then Vietnam, and the napalm and the defoliants, and the bombings. …
PROTEST
The poet Robert Lowell, invited to a White House function, refused to come. Arthur Miller, also invited, sent a telegram to the White House: “When the guns boom, the arts die.” Singer Eartha Kitt was invited to a luncheon on the White House lawn and shocked all those present by speaking out, in the presence of the President’s wife, against the war. A teenager, called to the White House to accept a prize, came and criticized the war. In Hollywood, local artists erected a 60-foot Tower of Protest on Sunset Boulevard. At the National Book Award ceremonies in New York, fifty authors and publishers walked out on a speech by Vice-President Humphrey in a display of anger at his role in the war.
In mid-1965, in McComb, Mississippi, young blacks who had just learned that a classmate of theirs was killed in Vietnam distributed a leaflet:
No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Viet Nam for the White man’s freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi.Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go. …
No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Viet Nam, so that the White American can get richer.
GANG RELATED
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air cavalry division were charged with refusal to fight. “A common sight,” the correspondent for Le Monde wrote, “is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his own.
” Regarding the radical nature of those who promote slavery, Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The question recurs, what will satisfy them? This and this only: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Holding as they do, that slavery is morally right and socially elevating…” 
Workers subcontracted by Shell Oil Company clean up an oil spill from an abandoned Shell Petroleum Development Company well in Oloibiri, Niger Delta. Wellhead 14 was closed in 1977 but has been leaking for years, and in June of 2004 it finally released an oil spill of over 20,000 barrels of crude oil.
David Barrow lamented the “strange doctrine of the Christian church
that forbids ministers to condemn sin simply because it is authorized by the government.”
Dred Scott said Blacks were nonpersons.
“All men are created equal.
They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Just as the Americans in 1776 had listed their grievances against the English King, the Vietnamese listed their complaints against French rule:
They have enforced inhuman laws…. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion…. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials… .They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. …
…from the end of last year, to the beginning of this year . . . more than two million of our fellow-citizens died of starvation. .. .
The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.
The U.S. Defense Department study of the Vietnam war, intended to be “top secret” but released to the public by Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the famous Pentagon Papers case, described Ho Chi Minh’s work: .. . Ho had built the Viet Minh into the only Vietnam-wide political organization capable of effective resistance to either the Japanese or the French. He was the only Vietnamese wartime leader with a national following, and he assured himself wider fealty among the Vietnamese people when in August-September, 1945, he overthrew the Japanese . .. established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and staged receptions for in-coming allied occupation forces.. .. For a few weeks in September, 1945, Vietnam was—for the first and only time in its modern history—free of foreign domination, and united from north to south under Ho Chi Minh. .. .
Between October 1945 and February 1946, Ho Chi Minh wrote eight letters to President Truman, reminding him of the self-determination promises of the Atlantic Charter. One of the letters was sent both to Truman and to the United Nations:
I wish to invite attention of your Excellency for strictly humanitarian reasons to following matter. Two million Vietnamese died of starvation during winter of 1944 and spring 1945 because of starvation policy of French who seized and stored until it controlled all available rice. … Three- fourths of cultivated land was flooded in summer 1945, which was followed by a severe drought; of normal harvest five-sixths was lost. … Many people are starving. .. . Unless great world powers and international relief organizations bring us immediate assistance we face imminent catastrophe…Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities. … Earlier in 1963, Kennedy’s Undersecretary of State, U. Alexis Johnson, was speaking before the Economic Club of Detroit:
What is the attraction that Southeast Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate, fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of Southeast Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil, and many others. ..Truman never replied.
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