The claim is often made that nothing the peace movement has ever done has “worked,” because we haven’t stopped any wars.
You can’t have a logical argument on that level. There is no way to measure the “success” or “failure” of any social movement, you can only look for evidence of what it’s effects were, and even then it’s hard to separate that from the effects of whatever else was happening.
Having lived through it, I believe there is sufficient evidence that the Vietnam War era peace movement had lasting effects, but there were also other causes of those effects, such as all the body bags coming home from Vietnam, which in turn was caused by the killing efficiency of our opponents. Which also related to support they were getting from other countries, the nearby availability of sanctuaries, jungles they could use for cover, etc. U.S. public opposition might not have developed without the draft, a draft-age baby boom, and the willingness of the news media to see largescale demonstrations as news. (Which they mostly don’t now.) Every historical change or event has multiple causes. And consequences.
All causes taken together led to the “Vietnam War syndrome,” which kept us out of a similar quagmire for almost 30 years, until too many historically innocent people grew up and they could start the cycle over again. Now we have a 47 year-old president who thinks the political quarrels of the 1960s are irrelevant. He will probably find out how wrong he is. Vietnam was just one symptom of a bipartisan American foreign policy which was always aggressively expansionist, and indeed of a similar tendency in human nature. There have been many empires in world history. Afghanistan has been invaded repeatedly for thousands of years.
I think humans have always lived on the brink of self-destruction. It is inherent in our nature. We’re predators. I can only hope, for the sake of the rest of the universe, that we never make it outside of the solar system. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to the impending bankruptcy of the U.S., to stop us from killing people.
