Page updated:
Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's radical past revisited...

What was learned?

Those who were at the core of the movement may be best placed to answer that, however there are a number of points that may be worth discussing.

Movements accelerate social trends

Through strategy and persistence the relatively small number of people who participate in social movements can influence and accelerate trends in society.

Resistance and the Third World Bookshop made a continuing contribution to the wider anti-war movement but that movement did not bring about the withdrawal of Australian troops and the ending of conscription all by itself.

What it did do was contribute to a change in the public mood. It was this that made political change possible. As Hall Greenland wrote in an online forum: "Did we, with the help of the media, stop the war? Certainly not... But we began the groundshift that brought the Australian troops home by the end of 1972... We were a central part, too, of a time that has changed the way we live and act forever."

The public mood to end Australian participation in the war that grew through the late-1960s was reinforced by external events such as:

• the increasing number of Australian casualties
• the inconclusive results of military operations
• the shock of the 1968 Tet Offensive, which brought the Viet Cong into the heart of Saigon and discredited US claims to be moving towards victory
• the failure to achieve victory despite the effort of US presidents to talk it up - Lyndon Johnson's 'light at the end of the tunnel' which never seemed to get any closer of brighter; people simply stopped believing it
• the acquisition of knowledge by the public about the modern history of Indo-China that placed the war in a historic context
• the anti-war movement in the US, the UK and Europe.

The media is the critical actor

Some Americans and Australian commentators blame the media for turning the public against the war. This is too simple an explanation and is akin to 'shooting the messenger'.

The growing public disillusionment with the war was increasingly reported in the media as it grew. Disillusionment was fuelled by:

• the realisation that continual American claims of approaching victory were nothing but talk
• more coverage of dissident viewpoints
• reportage of the opinions of American soldiers on the ground in Vietnam that disclosed a weariness and a belief that the war was not being won
• images from the front that brought home the reality of the fighting, especially photographic images of the Mai Lai massacre and villages being burned
• the perception that the war was becoming bogged down.

Initially, mainstream media coverage of the anti-war movement was critical. This was seen in a Sydney weekend tabloid article from the late-1960s that described a weekend Resistance camp in the Blue Mountains as a "guerilla training camp". Sensationalist the article might have been, the Resistance leadership were not put out by it because any mention in the press was seen as a good thing. It gave the organisation coverage that was otherwise unobtainable and that it was believed would attract, rather than repell youth.

By the time of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, press coverage of the movement had changed sufficiently to give dissident viewpoints a running; the movement had become respectable.

Certainly, Vietnam was the first war to come into the public's living rooms on the evening news and the coverage that was shown was the actuality on the ground. The government was unable to blunt the impact of the images and the reports that became increasingly critical of them. Governments were inept at manipulating media coverage - that had not yet developed into a fine art.

Images from the war were seized upon by the anti-war movement and given new meaning. Eddie Adam's classic photograph of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a Viet Cong fighter, holding a pistol to his head as he pulls the trigger, is a case in point. The meaning the movement gave this image was one of a brutal regime in Saigon and a depraved war. The reality, mitigating circumstance or not - and this did not come out until years after the war ended - was that the officer's colleagues had just been executed by the Viet Cong.

What the media did was to keep the war, in all its graphic detail, before the public. The lesson drawn from the role of the media is that images and words have a powerful and cumulative effect. A single piece of video actuality, a single story or photograph will not change minds. An accumulation of mutually supporting media images will. Today, it is in the media as much as on the battlefield that wars are won or lost.

Persistence pays off

The tactic adopted by Resistance and its allies was to keep the issue of Vietnam before the public and to broaden public awareness of it. In doing this, the organisation's message was propagated.

Initially, the actions mounted to raise public consciousness of the war were limited and the numbers which participated in them was small. In the early days the organisation persisted with demonstrations frequently numbering fewer than 100.

Numbers grew as public sentiment changed until Resistance was only a single contingent in a broad movement fielding thousands of people at demonstrations. Hall Greenland wrote that " ...opinion polls were not to record a majority in favour of bringing the troops home from Vietnam until August 1969". Until that time, Resistance had to persist with representing a minority but growing public sentiment.

Articulate a clear, achievable goal

As a leftist political organisation, Resistance had a wider agenda than opposition to the war in Vietnam. The leadership, however, knew that they could not achieve this wider agenda of political change all by themselves and that shorter-term, achievable aims would provide the educational vehicle that would point out deficiencies in the socioeconomic system and raise demands for change.

Resistance's demands were simple to present and comprehend. As time went on, they appeared as increasingly desirable and achievable:

• to end the war
• to bring the troops home.

The focus of the movement on the message of 'end the war and bring the troops home now' expounded a simple, clear, powerful and achievable message that increased in credibility as public disillusion with the war grew. While Resistance was incapable of achieving this goal by itself, through its persistence it succeeded in keeping the message prominent until it became the rallying cry of an undeniable mass.

Plan for the long-term while working on the short-term

With its agenda of social and political change, Resistance transmuted into other political formations such as the Democratic Socialist Alliance after Australian involvement in the Vietnam war came to an end. All of its energy had been focused on the war but that was now gone. The International Marxist League was an attempt to provide an ongoing structure, however the factional warfare so common to leftist groups put an end to it.

The development of a more-determined post-war strategy to build on the radicalisation of the Vietnam era, had it been pursued in a more determined manner, would probably have stumbled anyway. The ending of Australian involvement in the war was seen by the public as a finality. There was no further need for a radical political movement - a perception reinforced by the ascention to power of the social democrats. The leadership of Resistance had thought of the long term but attempts to enact a strategy had come to nothing.

The election of the Whitlam government represented a closure to a period of history. It was a clear ending, a deliniation separating the 1965 (when Australian troops were committed to the war) to 1972 period from that which came after. It was if the final chapter of a difficult book had been finished and the volume slammed shut. It was time to move on.

Offer more than politics

When John Percy announced the end of the 'fun crowd' at Resistance he took a wrong turn. Members were interested in more than a mono-focus on political action. As youth in the process of growing up, they needed a political organisation that could cater to their cultural needs and that was inclusive of their music, dress styles and subcultural practices.

John's statement represented the ambiguity towards popular culture that was an undercurrent at Resistance. Despite it, the organisation did offer more than politics - the parties, film screenings and live music at Goulburn Street catered to cultural and social needs, a necessary overlay covering an unappealing 'serious' politics.

Contemporary subculture must be incorporated, not resisted.

Build new structures with contemporary appeal

To make the leftist political message appealing, Resistance had to give the appearance of being a new organisation with a new manner of operation. It had to cut ties with an existing stale and moribund Australian Left.

Rebadging the movement the 'New Left' was a step in the right direction but it was contaminated by provisional support-in-principle for the corrupt, thuggish and dogma-bound states of the Soviet block. The 'newness' of the New Left was not always genuine; there were just too many ties to the past.

The Resistance leadership, although having some sympathy for those states (they believed that they could be reformed) knew such societies had absolutely no appeal to contemporary youth. Western individualism, the Western liberal tradition and contemporary youth culture had to somehow be blended into an acceptable package that could achieve democratic socialist goals.

This was something the Left never really succeeded in doing. Dogmatic Marxist politics, support for authoritarian states - no matter how qualified and hesitant - a myoptic world view based on the theory of class struggle and factional politics formed a background noise that emerged often enough to turn away many of those in search of a new society. What would have been useful would have been to dissociate completely from existing socialist states and organisations and to have sought a means of blending the humanitarian elements of socialist thinking with Westrern liberalism. That never happened and the Left has been the worse for its ommission.

Time for more research

After 35 years it is time to make a serious assessment of Australia's role in the Vietnam war and that of the anti-war movement in changing public opinion. So far, there are too few publications analysing this period of recent history.

What there have been are a number of analyses of the war from the perspective of military history and some personal histories by soldiers who fought in the war. These are all valuable, but what is missing are texts and images from those who opposed the war. All of these perspectives are needed if we are to build a comprehensive picture of those times.

The war in Vietnam was a traumatic episode for those who fought it and for the history of Australia. We must not forget it, in all its persectives.

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Footnote - the strangeness of the working class...

One lesson of Resistance was that the Australian working class, contrary to Marxist theory, was neither a revolutionary class nor was it particularly interested in substantial social change. Much of Resistance's support came from the children of the middle class.

Like the working class in the UK, Australia's has a history of trade unionism and industrial action but, unlike their UK counterparts, Australia's was less self-conscious of itself as a political force. It has been said by leftists that it had a middle class outlook, something which perplexed them. Activists of the Left have looked askance as industrial workers bought houses and property, seeing this not as a means of improving family security and living standards - the ostensible aim of the trade union movement - but as an exercise in small scale capitalism. It seemed that the working class did not so much want to change society as have a stake in it.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that support for the Left has at times come from the middle class. It was they that had access to university education, they that were exposed to alternative ideas. In the days of Resistance's origin, free tertiary education was still a dream that would not become reality until the era of the Whitlam government when it would become available to people of diverse class background. Children of working class families would, through education, move into what was regarded as the middle class. As time went on and industry automated and restructured, the industrial working class, traditional target group of Marxists, would decline in number.

Resistance did attract a number of activists of working class origin, but for the most part it consisted of youth from middle Australia. There was much talk of the industrial working class but little experience of it.

Social class is traditionally seen in Australia as an anachronism of the type that plagues the UK and India with its caste system. Yet in the 1960s it was a reality that brought opportunity to some and disadvantage to others. Despite this, industrial workers had, for the most part, security of employment in a growing economy and the prospect of rising wages and improving conditions.

At Resistance, social class cropped up during discussion at education meetings, however the discussion leaders usually reverted to Marxism's default setting on the topic and new interpretations were never fully explored.

Freer were the informal discussions that would sometimes take place among those hanging out in the bookshop. In one case, Keith James, ever the scruffy intellectual, explained that it was less a person's class origins and more their class allegiance that mattered. This nicely validated the predominant middle class source of the Resistance membership but failed to raise the question of why it was that the organisation had difficulty appealing to working class youth. Perhaps it was simply that those youth were not attracted to the ambiance of the bookshop and the concerns of those who frequented it. Perhaps it was the case of youth of a particular class creating Resistance in its own cultural image.