Click on the headline to link to the Marxist Internet Archive online copy of the entry on the Zimmerwald Conference.
Markin comment:
On a day when I am in high dudgeon after the October 2nd One Nation Democratic Party pep rally (that is what it was, politically, as intended by the organizers) I will keep this one short and sweet for now. And let history speak, the history of real anti-war work done in the throes of World War I, the Zimmerwald conference. I am glad that this One Nation demonstration occurred now as a "show of colors." But, politically, it was a rally to stir up the troops for the Democrats in November and nothing more. Christ, I am glad our committee did not endorse this thing. It is now clear, clearer than ever, that we have much, much, much work to do to get people to break from Obama's wars, and Obama's party. For those who think along those same lines going back to Zimmerwald in 1915 is like a breathe of fresh air.
With that sense of history in mind , and with and understanding that our anti-war tasks are about the same now as then, and as daunting, I am posting some thoughts from a recent comment concerning a few steps in my own personal anti-war evolution in the early 1960s that seem germane today because I have run up against many of the arguments recently:
“…In many ways 1965 was a watershed year in the struggle against the Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam War. Not only was there a grievous escalation of troop levels and bombing attacks based on the usual frame-up set-up (the Gulf of Tonkin incident) that seem to be conveniently available when the tom-toms of war get beating but the fledgling anti-war movement (at least in the East) was getting organized in more than a token manner. Thus, on the serious matter of which way forward for that movement in order to drive it to victory those New York meetings (the early meetings to organize the growing opposition to the Vietnam War-Markin), the epicenter of the East Coast opposition, took on added meaning both for the immediate struggle against the war and the long term prospects for a real anti-imperialist opposition to American aggression in the world. And, maybe, more.
Listen though, in 1965, I was at the height of my Catholic Worker/ Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)-tinged left liberal pacifistic political views. Although not philosophically absolutely committed to non-violence or to working totally within the parliamentary system I was no embryonic Bolshevik ready to raise all kinds of hell. I still believed that “sweet” reason could be brought into play in bourgeois politics and the “better angels of our nature” (a term that I was fond of even then) would prevail. I was in no way hostile to communists, of whatever tendency, but merely saw them as another set of partners in the struggle against war. In short, I held a very popular frontist attitude, to use a term of art in our communist movement that I was not familiar with, and would not have used, then.
All of the above is by way of saying that had I been at the New York anti-war meetings, as I had been at various Boston meetings with the same kind of groups, including SANE (a group that I had worked with on their nuclear disarmament campaigns in the very early 1960s) which drove anti-war efforts around here in those days, I would have been nonplussed by the wishy-washy politics of using “sweet” reason on the Johnson Administration (basically coalescing around “stop the war” versus “immediate, unconditional withdrawal of American troops” slogans). Now, of course, long after the fact, I can see that the commitment of the vast majority of anti-war groups to “sweet” reason toward Johnson Administration war policy and a commitment to an essentially pacifist, parliamentary opposition that could easily be pieced off was doomed to failure. Failure, that is if the object, as it was for me, was to stop the bloody bastards in their tracks.
Fortunately the North Vietnamese army (DNV) and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam took matters into their own hands and saved the day by beating the American imperialist forces and ending the war. No one can say truthfully that the American anti-war movement was minimal in that effort but it was, in the end, hardly decisive as some would have it in the fog of memory. Those famous pictures of the United States Embassy in Saigon being frantically and desperately evacuated by helicopter from the rooftops graphically make the point for those who want to argue otherwise.
History is full of little twists and turns, and maybe, just maybe, we can learn something from studying it. Here is the lesson that we can use today. The next time that you are in an anti-war planning meeting and someone argues for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all troops and mercenaries from (name the then current imperial adventure) as a central slogan for an anti-war demonstration vote for that proposal with both hands (and feet if you have to). That, in effect, is today’s anti-war version of those 1965 events.”
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