By Jim McIlroy
So Robert McNamara, the architect of the United States war against Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, now considers the war a "mistake", and an "unwinnable war." I doubt it. The real problem was that the US and its allies such as Australia did lose the war, in one of the major turning points of the 20th century.
And the imperialist world is still paying a price for the worst defeat suffered by the US in its history. The "Vietnam syndrome", despite a buffeting inflicted on it during the Gulf War of 1991, is still alive and kicking.
The Vietnam syndrome is why the US still cannot intervene in Third World trouble spots with large-scale ground troops if there is even the slightest chance of heavy casualties.
As soon as those body bags started arriving home any US presidential administration would be in deep strife.
Despite collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Saigon 20 years ago remains a spectre hanging over the future of the New World Order.
The fact that the Vietnamese people, poorly armed but determined to defend their national independence against the greatest and most ruthless war machine in history, were able to triumph in the end, at immense human cost, remains an inspiration to oppressed peoples of the Third World everywhere.
In 1965, when Prime Minister Robert Menzies declared Australia would send troops to support the US military invasion of Vietnam, I joined many students in opposing the war.
We were a small minority at that time, even among university students. One of the myths generated about the 1960s is that it just was a period of youth radicalisation.
In reality, like any other period of history, the antiwar movement was fought for over a long period of time. The more general radicalisation of youth which strongly characterised the 1960s and early 1970s developed through struggle, just as much as being a product of general social conditions.
At that time, I was studying arts at Melbourne University, involved in all the usual associated aspects of student life like late night parties, extensive red wine consumption, hangovers, film festivals etc.
Then conscription hit the country like a bombshell.
I remember rolling into the MU Cafeteria at a late morning hour, a little the worse for wear, in early 1966, meeting a group of my fellow 20-year-old males, only to realise that almost all of us had won the Lottery of Death — our birthday marbles had come out of the barrel, and we were conscripted to go to Vietnam.
In the early ballots, a high percentage of birthdays were chosen. We all decided then and there that we weren't going to fight a war against the Vietnamese people.
Remarkably, none of us did go in the end. I took the classical path for students of managing to stay at uni for some seven years, by one means or another.
I remember many adverts on the uni library noticeboard along the lines of, "Engineering student urgently needs marriage partner. Please contact X."
Others left the country; feigned insanity; went underground or whatever, until conscription finally ended in 1972. But conscription focused our minds very effectively on the slaughter in Vietnam, and the need to end it as soon as possible.
It was a bitter struggle from the very start. And the antiwar forces were quite isolated in the early days. I remember countless teach-ins, meetings, debates, gradually developing into pickets, marches and demonstrations, quite moderate in size at first.
We fought out the ideological battle very fiercely in those days, confronting the right-wing forces of the National Civic Council and the Democratic Labor Party, over the issue of the "threat from the north", the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CIA's White Paper on alleged Communist North Vietnamese takeover of "democratic South Vietnam".
The domino theory (that Asian countries would fall to Communism like dominoes once Vietnam was lost) was a major issue of debate. As our radicalism developed, we began to hope it was true.
In those days, I was a member of the Labor Party.
I also joined the Fabian Society (not a fan club for the singer, but a group linked to the British Social-Democratic organisation of the same name).
In 1966, we campaigned tirelessly for the ALP under Arthur Calwell's leadership. It was one of the most disastrous defeats Labor ever suffered at the hands of the Coalition, but it was also one of the most politically principled campaigns in ALP history.
Calwell came out for withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam and an end to conscription.
The election was bitterly contested, with the DLP putting up terrifying adverts with marching Communist jackboots and the stain of the Red Menace flowing south from China to Vietnam, to Indonesia and thence to a cowering Australia.
It was vicious, lying propaganda, but undoubtedly effective. It scared the Australian electorate into giving Harold Holt a huge mandate.
I remember our immediate revenge on the Country Party supporters at MU Queens College, where I was staying at the time, was to drunkenly sing "The Red Flag" late on election night to keep the faithful from their sleep.
At the end of 1966, US President Lyndon Johnson toured Australia. It was a turning point in the antiwar struggle. His motorcade was to drive past Melbourne Uni on the last day of the campus year, for heaven's sake!
Thousands of tired and emotional students poured out of the pubs next to uni, only to be enraged to find that the president's route had been changed.
They raced to the city centre and confronted the motorcade. That was the day two students made world headlines by throwing red and green paint (the NLF colours) on Johnson's limousine, demonstrating to an international audience that the Australian antiwar movement was strong and growing.
I later joined the MU Labour Club and the Democratic Socialist Club, and became more involved in the organisational side of the antiwar movement and the growing student rights movement.
We began to question not only the war, but all aspects of a repressive, corporate-dominated society, which waged war against Third World peoples abroad and exploited and oppressed its own people at home.
Universities were seen as institutions for the training of a new, technological working class, and for the maintenance of ideological conformity with the needs of the ruling class.
We began to press for student-worker control of universities; high school students began to organise against the war and for student rights; and the new women's liberation movement burst onto the scene. The radicalisation of the movement accelerated.
Annual July 4 marches on the US Consulate in Melbourne were initiated by the Maoist Worker Student Alliance, which became quite strong at Monash University and later Latrobe.
1968 was a crucial year, internationally and in Australia. First, the Tet offensive in Vietnam showed graphically to the world that the National Liberation Front would not be defeated, and that the US-led war was doomed.
Second, May-June '68 France showed the revolutionary potential of the student-worker alliance, and that a socialist revolution was possible (although very difficult to achieve) in an advanced capitalist country.
Third, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia showed that democratic socialism could be a reality, but the Soviet invasion dashed our immediate hopes for an end to Stalinist rule in the socialist bloc.
Finally, we had our own student revolt in 1968 with the Monash Soviet, in which students occupied the campus in the face of heavy police pressure, over campus and antiwar issues.
All these events gave a tremendous new impetus to the antiwar movement in Australia.
Antiwar sentiment gradually widened to more and more sectors of society. Unions became involved, with the famous Seamen's Union banning of the Boonaroo, a ship bound for Vietnam with war supplies.
A major escalation of the industrial class struggle was the jailing of Tramways Union leader Clarrie O'Shea in 1969, and the general strike which followed. I'll never forget the horror and fear on the faces of the good burghers of Melbourne as they walked out of Myer's in Bourke Street, to see thousands of industrial workers marching to the Industrial Court to demand O'Shea's release and the abolition of the industrial penal powers.
I remember thinking to myself, "We must link up the workers' movement and the antiwar movement to really give this system a shake-up!"
The movement had to fight for every inch of ground, including the basic democratic right to march, picket and demonstrate in public.
The By-Law 418 campaign I well remember, as many people were arrested for merely handing out leaflets on the steps of the Post Office. The law was eventually repealed.
By this stage, I was pretty well a convinced Marxist, and an ardent reader of New Left Review and other radical publications.
But I still didn't see the organisational way forward, and remained within the ALP and student movement framework.
The antiwar movement was now a gigantic force, but even we activists didn't realise just how big. Preparations for the first Vietnam Moratorium of May 1970 were growing apace. The movement was now very broad, with local committees and suburban protest actions breaking out all over.
At this time, ALP leaders in Victoria played an important role — contrast their pro-war position on the Gulf War, East Timor, etc, today!
Jim Cairns was the central figure in the Moratorium campaign. But the movement was a unique coalition of the entire left and progressive movement, from the radical left, to the Communist Party, to the churches and various liberal organisations.
There were many debates on strategy and tactics, over mass action versus small-group direct action, over demands, such as "Troops Out Now!" versus "Negotiations Now!"
But it was a period of great ferment of ideas, and a tremendous movement of people's power.
Back on campus, one of the most enjoyable activities the students got up to was to form a Liberal and Country Party Club. This infuriated the Liberals, but there was nothing they could do about it because the club was properly affiliated to the MU Students' Union.
The constitution of the MULCP was to oppose the war and specifically to raise funds for the NLF! It was a joy to behold to see the MULCP banner at every antiwar march, and to see stalls in the union at lunchtime collecting donations for the Vietnamese freedom-fighters — which was illegal under federal law.
Finally, the eve of the great day of the first Moratorium arrived and a huge debate took place in the Union: "Should the university close down for the Moratorium?"
I knew we would win the struggle when the vote was taken, overwhelmingly in favour of a total shutdown. It was a feeling of immense elation as prominent pro-war right-winger Dr Frank Knopfelmacher stormed out of the hall cursing us as Communist dupes.
On the morning of the Moratorium, hopes were high, but even the activists were stunned at the crowd which filled the entire centre of Melbourne, bringing the city to a standstill. More than 100,000 people marched to stop the war, coming from every age group and walk of life.
The government had accused marchers of being "bikies pack-raping democracy", and one elderly grandmother replied by carrying a placard, "I'm a pack-raping bikie!"
The stunning success of the first Moratorium in Melbourne and other cities marked the beginning of the end of Australia's intervention in Vietnam.
Shortly after this, realising the need to extend the antiwar struggle to a revolutionary struggle for socialism, as the only permanent answer to war and inhumanity, I joined the Socialist Youth Alliance (now Resistance).
We campaigned within the antiwar movement for a continuation and extension of a mass-action strategy, until all troops were out and conscription ended once and for all.
Two further Moratoriums were held in 1971, both huge mobilisations as well. The Liberal government was on the run, both with its war policy and for its own survival.
At the beginning of 1972, I became a founding member of the Socialist Workers League (later the Socialist Workers Party, now the Democratic Socialist Party.)
We continued to play an important role within the antiwar movement, which continued to operate on a lesser scale after the election of the Whitlam Labor government in December 1972. Whitlam withdrew all remaining Australian troops from Vietnam and ended conscription, an immensely popular move.
After the election of Labor on a wave of public demands for change after 23 years of Liberal-Country Party reaction, a new era in Australian politics was opened up, with new challenges for the left.
Nevertheless, we continued to organise antiwar protests against US policy, until the famous day when NLF troops entered Saigon and the US puppet regime finally collapsed.
The scenes on TV of US helicopters being tipped over the sides of aircraft carriers, because there wasn't time to send them back for a second load of panic-stricken US personnel and South Vietnamese supporters of the old regime was a cause of incredible excitement throughout the world.
We felt that we had played some modest part in this great victory. We understood that US and Australian imperialism had suffered a major blow, and that the national liberation movements of the Third World would be inspired to greater efforts by this victory.
Today, looking back at the 20 years since then, I still believe that, with all the recent setbacks to the world revolutionary movement, the example of Vietnam remains a beacon for the peoples of the world struggling to achieve their freedom and national self-determination.