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An analysis received by email at CPNN from Pace e Bene
Today [March 28] millions of us will pour into the streets to respond with nonviolent action to the nation’s deepening emergency. From coast to coast, we’ll join hands with our neighbors to confront the conflagration of hate, fear and violence that threatens to keep burning out of control, with its blaze currently spreading across the Middle East and throughout the United States.
Rather than fighting fire with fire, we’ll be a national bucket brigade bringing the waters of compassion and determination and nonviolence to contribute to dousing the flames. Stopping this destruction emanating from the White House will take many steps, but this nationwide mobilization will play an important role in generating and accelerating the people-power needed for durable change.
Sometimes, though, we might wonder, “What difference does this action make?”
Some of the people who converged on Washington, DC for The Mobilization in November of 1969 to protest the Vietnam War wondered this, too. As the second of two large demonstrations that autumn comprising what the anti-war movement called The Moratorium, some 500,000 people marched past the White House – yet the war continued. On the surface it didn’t seem to make one bit of difference.
What the protesters didn’t know was that President Nixon watched the march from his office and, when the last protester got on the last bus to go home, he turned to his aide and said he couldn’t do what he had threatened to do–use nuclear weapons on North Vietnam. “Why?” his aide asked. “The American people just told me,” the president answered.
Where in the world can we find good leadership today?
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As Ken Butigan explains in Waging Nonviolence:
“Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff has recounted the intricate details of how the Nixon administration signaled how it was preparing to wreak nuclear destruction on the North. It gave its adversary a deadline of Nov. 1, 1969. … On Oct. 26, bombers armed with nuclear weapons were launched and ordered to orbit over Alaska. “For three days, nuclear-armed B-52s tested the Soviet defenses, dancing around the edges of the country with their deadly arsenals in a display more provocative than perhaps any since the Cuban Missile Crisis…And then the whole thing stopped — as seemingly abruptly as it had started,” Graff writes.
What Graff does not report is why this threat was lifted. As anti-Vietnam War organizer and author Robert Levering has noted, Nixon’s Nov. 1 ultimatum fell between the two major antiwar demonstrations. “When Nixon learned from CIA infiltrators that the Moratorium was ‘shaping up to be the most widely-supported public action in American history,’ he saw trouble ahead,” Levering explained. “As Nixon later wrote, he saw that ‘the only chance for my ultimatum to succeed was to convince the Communists that I could depend on solid support at home if they decided to call my bluff.’”
That support did not materialize. With more than two million taking part in the Moratorium, and over half-million flooding the nation’s capital a month later for the Mobilization, “the size and breadth of both the October and November protests surpassed the organizers’ most grandiose expectations,” Levering continued. The evidence suggests that the president jettisoned his threat to use nuclear weapons because of this immense outpouring of nonviolent dissent.
We don’t know what the impacts of today’s nationwide mobilization will be. We know that concerted nonviolent action five decades ago apparently prevented an incalculably horrific escalation of an already gruesome war. We also know that most of the protesters at the time did not realize that they had made this possible, since most of this story did not come out until 15 years later.
We take nonviolent action because it is necessary. But we also know that, thanks to the growing study of movements—like the one that was built during the Vietnam war—we have more power, and more impacts, than we think. May this be the case today.
Onward!
Stacie, Rivera, Layal, Shaina, Rosie, Mili, Erin, Ken, and the entire Pace e Bene community
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