4/13/2024 0 Comments Anti war rally venice beach 1968This resulted in a wave of outrage around the world, including in Australia, and it drove up attendance at the Moratorium marches here. The final detonator for the May 8, 1970, Moratorium marches was news of the Kent State University massacre, in which Ohio National Guard soldiers shot and killed four students and wounded another nine, at a campus anti-war rally on May 4. In Australia, this culminated in the development of the Vietnam Moratorium movement, which brought disparate peace groups into a broad coalition, primarily around the demands “Troops out now” and “End conscription” In Melbourne, where the anti-war movement was strongest, this led to mass Moratorium committee meetings, involving up to 1000 activists in the Richmond Town Hall on more than one occasion. From 1968 onwards, the US, Australia and other invading governments were on the defensive against the Vietnamese freedom fighters and a growing anti-war movement was on the march at home. It demonstrated that the US war drive could be defeated and that the Vietnamese liberation forces were capable of winning the war.įrom that point the anti-Vietnam War movement gained a decisive edge over the pro-war forces, and public opinion turned in favour of withdrawal. In early 1968, the Tet Offensive by the National Liberation Front of Vietnam (NLF) and the North Vietnamese Army was a decisive blow against the occupying forces of the US and its allies. I was a university student at the time and became increasingly involved in anti-war activities, that began as small protests and teach-ins and gradually grew to become larger demonstrations, public meetings, anti-war committees of various kinds, as well as the draft resistance movement. While, in the end, I managed to stay out of the army, this began my personal journey of determined opposition to the Vietnam War and the capitalist system, which generated such wars and oppression. I was one of those 20 year olds, whose birthday marble came out of the barrel in early 1966 in what became known as the “Lottery of Death”. This lit a small brush fire of anti-war opposition, which grew to become a huge bushfire by the end of the decade. ![]() In 1965, then-Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies ordered Australian troops into Vietnam and introduced conscription for 20-year-old males. In the US and Australia, which were directly involved in the invasion and occupation of Vietnam, the introduction of the draft (conscription) for military service in Vietnam effectively threw petrol on the growing flames of anti-war sentiment among young people. Within the advanced capitalist countries, the Vietnam War accelerated the 1960’s youth radicalisation then sweeping the West. The Vietnam War was a decisive event in post-World War II history, which divided the entire world into pro- and anti-war camps and fundamentally changed the social and political history of the capitalist world.įor the US and its imperialist allies, such as Australia, the war was intended as a decisive blow against the “advance of Communism”, and also against the national liberation movements of the Third World, which were challenging imperialist domination internationally. The Vietnam Moratorium, which took its name from huge anti-war rallies in the US in 1969, was a turning point in the long campaign to force the then-federal Liberal-Country Party government to withdraw troops from Vietnam. 'I've really lived today': memories of the Vietnam antiwar movement
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