America’s Poisonous Antiwar Protests

By Bruce Thornton, FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE    1 May 2024

The sorry spectacles being staged at our most prestigious universities bespeak the accelerating degeneration of our future cognitive elites. How else do we describe the aggressive ignorance and moral idiocy of protestors who identify with sadistic, savage terrorists, and adopt the rhetoric and tropes of Nazi Germany? Who shamelessly smear Jews––the intended victims of Hamas’ widely publicized and celebrated genocidal aims­––the perpetrators of genocide? Who clearly know nothing of the region’s history, or that of Islam’s “settler colonialism” and millennium of imperialist depredations and slaving, or the Koranic foundations of that sanctified  aggression?

The letter of these chants and slogans is new, but the spirit goes back to Marx’s debut in history, whence it gradually migrated to Western fellow-travelers and progressives, until emerging during the Sixties to drive the protest movements against the Vietnam War.

There too willful ignorance about the facts of the conflict filled antiwar propaganda––especially the canard that the war was a “civil war” between North Vietnamese “patriots” seeking “national self-determination,” “decolonization,” and “human rights,” just as the American colonies did in the Revolutionary War. Wasn’t Ho Chi Min just another George Washington?

On the other side were the South Vietnamese, the willing collaborators with the “racist” occupiers and oppressors, the capitalist, imperialist Americans propping up the quisling regime in Saigon in order to take control of natural resources like “tin and tungsten,” the talking point provided to Jane Fonda by her handlers when she first became an activist against the war.

And of course, ignored was the reality of the conflict––a proxy war in the U.S.’s efforts to contain Soviet communism’s imperialist ambitions to turn the world into communist satrapies like Eastern Europe. The same callow, mostly affluent youth who demonized America soldiers as the feral attack dogs of the capitalists masters, never mentioned the millions slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved by Soviet and Maoist communist tyrants.

Also then as now, the shock troops of the antiwar movement were college students, some of the most privileged young people not just in America, but the world. Like today, they were cultivated, praised, and sometimes financed by America’s enemies exploiting these “useful idiots” who couldn’t have survived for five minutes living under communist totalitarianism, any more than the pro-Hamas feminists and champions of the LGBTQ alphabet people could survive under illiberal, homophobic, misogynist Islamic sharia law that recognizes only one “human right”––the right to submit to Islam by accepting dhimmitude or converting.

Vietnam created the paradigm of America’s toxic antiwar movements, as we saw after 9/11 with the war to punish the Taliban for sheltering and supporting al Qaeda. Every feature of antiwar protests was trotted out to hinder and smear our attempt to punish the abettors of terrorist murderers of 2996 Americans, cutting short the brief burst of patriotism and resolve that had followed that mass murder.

Just as today, protests were organized in major cities and on university campuses. Most of the protests were the work of International Answer, a coalition of radical leftist groups that supported communist regimes in Cuba and North Korea and, a portent for the future, Hamas. America’s most visible and well-paid “anti-capitalist” radical, MIT professor Noam Chomsky set the tone, announcing a few weeks after the war started that America is the “greatest terrorist state” and was planning a “silent genocide” in Afghanistan by starving the people.

Equally adept as Chomsky and today’s Hamas cheerleaders at specious moral equivalence and  projecting the sins of America’s enemies onto the U.S., radical historian Howard Zinn compared the bombing of Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks, “a crime which cannot be justified.” The Iraq war in 2003, which overlapped with the 2004 presidential primaries, featured equally passionate and morally idiotic protests even before the war began.

In October 2002, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators sprung up across the country. As David Horowitz wrote in Unholy Alliance, “Spokesmen denounced America as a ‘rogue state’ and a ‘terrorist state,’ likened the president to Adolf Hitler, equated the CIA with al Qaeda, described America’s purpose as ‘blood for oil, and called for ‘revolution.’” Such clichéd distortions of history and hard-left propaganda spread to hundreds of “sit-ins,” rallies, protests, and “teach-ins” across the country.

And of course, all were drenched in vicious anti-Americanism, and dull Marxist tropes about “imperialism,” “colonialism,” and the evils of capitalism. Typical was an anthropology professor at Columbia University––yes, the same Columbia currently appeasing antisemitic, badly educated students marching and chanting for Hamas––who hoped for America’s defeat in Iraq, and longed for “a million Mogadishus,” where in 1993 18 American servicemen were killed and their corpses paraded to cheers, just as Hamas did to Israelis on October 7, updating this barbarity with social media videos.

Finally, like previous antiwar protests, many in the Democrat Party support the antiwar movement for electoral political gain. In 2002, the rise of Howard Dean, the governor of Vermont, to a brief front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination, was fueled in part by his embrace of the antiwar movement. Soon mainstream aspirants Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, who had both voted to authorize the Iraq war, had to ratchet up their criticism of the the war and George Bush. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, “As Mr. Dean climbed in the polls by denouncing the war, he made opposition to it a party litmus test.”

By June 2004, the Dems were “back in Saigon,” reprising many of the self-loathing postures of the antiwar activists. The epitome of this shift to the party’s left was the enthusiastic presence of party bigwigs like Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at “documentary” filmmaker Michael Moore’s anti-American libel Fahrenheit 9-11. This celluloid agitprop  featured bizarre statements such as calling Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi fascist loyalists the “Minutemen” who “have risen up against the occupation” and “will win.” Moore was rewarded with a box seat next to Jimmy Carter at the Democrat national convention.

And as usual the establishment media eagerly served as the Democrats’ and activists’ press agents. At the beginning of the war, Peter Arnett of CNN acknowledged as much when he told Iraqi television that “our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.”

This survey of postwar antiwar activism puts the current protests against Israel and the Biden regimes’ wobbly support of it, into that clichéd paradigm comprising anti-Americanism, fake history, outright lies, specious Third Worldism, incontinent virtu-signaling, conspicuous preening of class privilege, and utopian expectations about interstate relations and conflicts.

And don’t forget the debased romantic idealization of “rebels” and “revolutionaries,” the feckless admiration for “men of action” whose “passionate intensity” both glorifies and excuses their psychopathic violence. As Rich Lowry said last week about today’s protestors, “Hamas is their equivalent of Che Guevara or the Viet Cong and Israel an expression of Western imperialism that must be opposed at all costs.”

The current demonstrations, encampments, and marches, however, mark a dangerous escalation in our cultural oikophobia and feckless antimilitarism. The enthusiastic endorsement of antisemitism and the Holocaust on the part of our future cognitive elite, and their partnering with adherents of the faith that endorse violence against “infidels” like themselves, is turning oikophobia into a suicide cult.

Coupled with the current administration’s disastrous foreign policy of appeasement, these political and cultural dysfunctions, even as America’s sworn enemy Iran is mere months from possessing nuclear weapons, have moved the doomsday clock to the brink of midnight.

Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.