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      Did Vietnam peace protests stop Nixon using nuclear weapons?

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      A new documentary about demonstrations against the Vietnam war in late 1969 argues that the hundreds of thousands who filled the streets in Washington and almost every major US city convinced Richard Nixon to abandon a plan to sharply escalate the war, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.The Movement and The “Madman” will air on PBS on Tuesday. Produced and directed by the veteran documentarian Stephen Talbot, it evokes a peak moment of 1960s activism – and the “absolute disconnection” between what Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were “deciding to do and the human costs of it, whether it’s to our own soldiers or [Vietnam] civilians”.Those costs “had absolutely no part of their thinking” said the historian Carolyn Eisenberg. “They don’t care.”Talbot’s sure eye for searing images is matched by a perfect ear for songs. His soundtrack includes anti-establishment hymns by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix and Judy Collins, plus the essential anti-war anthem, I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-To Die Rag, which became world famous after Country Joe McDonald performed it at Woodstock in summer 1969.The one thing the documentary does not do is provide any convincing evidence that the demonstrations prevented the use of nuclear weapons.“It is a serious look at how one major demonstration was organized,” said Thomas Powers, author of The War at Home, a history of the anti-war movement; The Man Who Kept the Secrets, a widely-admired biography of former CIA director Richard Helms; and seven other books.But as far as the idea that “a real danger of the use of atomic weapons was prevented [by the Vietnam Moratorium] – I think that’s just plain wrong”, Powers told the Guardian.Talbot responded that declassified documents about Operation Duck Hook, which laid out options for Nixon, included the possible use of nuclear weapons as well as the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of dykes that would have caused massive civilian casualties.As to whether Nixon seriously considered the nuclear option, Talbot said: “I literally don’t know and I don’t think anyone could say for sure. But it was on the table.”The “madman” of Talbot’s film is Nixon. One thing that is not in dispute is that the president worked hard to convince the North Vietnamese and the Russians he was crazy enough to do anything, including pulling the nuclear trigger, if Hanoi refused his demands to withdraw from the south.As Stephen Bull, a former Nixon aide, explains in the film, his boss wanted the Russians to “think that he was a madman. However, my personal observation was, it was a bluff. He was never going to use nuclear weapons, but he wanted the threat to be out there to force them to the table.”Powers likened Nixon’s threats to use nuclear bombs to Vladimir Putin’s current threats to use such weapons against Ukraine – which Powers doesn’t think are serious either. Talbot agreed that was a possibility.In his memoirs, Nixon wrote: “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging anti-war controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”The other thing the demonstrations almost certainly accomplished was the passage of a law, signed by Nixon in November 1969, which created a draft lottery.On 1 December 1969, every draft-eligible young man born between 1944 and 1950 was assigned a number based on his birth date, from one to 365. The following year, the Pentagon announced that no one with a number higher than 195 would be drafted. A year later that number dropped to 125, then to 95 the year after that.Since everyone in the streets in 1969 was demonstrating in no small part because of an acute desire to avoid dying in what they considered a pointless conflict, the lottery had an immediate effect in reducing the number who felt a sense of urgency about the war.If you had a high enough number, your life was no longer in danger. After the very first lottery, more than a third of those previously subject to the draft no longer felt any imminent jeopardy. So there was less self-interest to propel the anti-war protests.Talbot agreed that the lottery was a direct result of the anti-war demonstrations, and said he included it in an earlier, longer version of his film – but it did not make the final cut. In fall 1969, he was a senior in high school. He went to DC to make his first film, March on Washington, which became his senior thesis when he attended Wesleyan University.“I used clips from my first student film for this documentary,” he told the Guardian.The truth is, while the Vietnam demonstrations did reduce the dangers of the draft, there is almost no evidence they shortened the war. When Nixon took office, 31,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, plus hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. By the time the last American combat troops left in March 1973, two months after the draft was abolished, 58,220 US soldiers had died – plus as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians and 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers.
      The Movement and The ‘Madman’ airs on PBS at 9pm ET on Tuesday and will stream on pbs.org
      Charles Kaiser’s books include 1968: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation More

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      We Iraqis had survived Saddam Hussein. It was the US invasion that destroyed our lives | Balsam Mustafa

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      Twenty years ago, around this time, the US-led military operation to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime finally seemed inevitable for Iraqis. With it, the idea of leaving started to sink in.By leaving, I do not mean fleeing the country. That was not even an option. After the 1990s Gulf war, and the international sanctions that followed it, Iraqis were isolated from the rest of the world. For many, there was no exit. Leaving meant departing schools, universities or workplaces, saying goodbye to friends and colleagues, and moving to relatively safer places within the country, away from the areas targeted by strikes and bombings. But my parents decided to stay at home in Baghdad. “If we were meant to die, it would be better to die at home” – that was our logic.The neighbourhood where I spent my childhood, adolescence and youth turned into a ghost town when most of our neighbours left. It felt empty and lonely, but we thought it was temporary. Everyone would come back when the war was over, and the scary idea of permanently leaving would dissipate, we told ourselves. We did not anticipate the trajectory that Iraq would follow after the invasion. We shared some cautious optimism about a better future despite our mixed emotions towards the war.This optimism evaporated quickly. And we gradually started to realise that, sooner or later, leaving the country would be one of two options for many Iraqis. The other? Keeping silent to avoid repression. Herein lies the biggest contradiction: many of those who had endured the dictatorship, wars and economic sanctions and stayed in Iraq would be forced to leave after Saddam was gone. The Americans and their allies seemed to have a plan to eradicate the Ba’athists rapidly and efficiently, based on lies and disinformation about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Yet they had no plan for, or interest in, rebuilding the country and the state afterwards. “Mission accomplished,” they said in May 2003.The terrible outcome was indisputable. Iraq quickly fell prey to chaos, conflict and instability, experienced an uncountable number of deaths and displacements, and the erosion of health, education and basic services. Behind the statistics, there are untold stories of agony and suffering. The structural and political violence would spill into social and domestic violence, affecting women and children. With every life lost, a whole family is shattered. From day one, the conditions were forming for the emergence of terrorist groups and militias.The same expat politicians who opposed Saddam and the Ba’athists have since established a system that keeps them in power through an ethno-sectarian network of patronage, corruption and militias. Throughout the years, they have resisted change by designing a rigged electoral system that maintains their positions and self-interest, benefiting from the support of the religious leaders and tribal networks.It is now a cliche, but an Iraqi phrase captures a profound new reality: “Saddam has gone, but 1,000 more Saddams have replaced him.” I recall two encounters, pre- and post-2003, that reflect this sense of continuity. Nearly four years before the US-led invasion of Iraq, the head of the university department where I studied threatened to move me to a different department because I refused to join the Ba’athist party. He yelled in my face: “Our seats are for Ba’athists only. You have taken a seat that does not belong to you.” Then, amid the sectarian conflict of 2006-07, I was once ordered by a militiaman to leave the lecture theatre because there was a religious occasion to observe. I was at first hesitant but decided to end the lecture for my students’ safety.The repeated failure to address Iraqis’ concerns has triggered cycles of protests since 2011. Each time, the demonstrations were met with repression. Yet it was what happened in 2018, and later in 2019 in response to the Tishreen uprising, that finally debunked the myth of Iraqi democracy. Young men and women, chanting for their fundamental rights, were met by a lethal state response. More than 600 were killed, and many more were injured, kidnapped, arrested or forcibly disappeared – to the international community’s indifference.As we approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I am reminded that there has been no accountability or justice for the victims and their families. The people abroad and at home responsible for the widespread misery that characterises Iraq are in denial. Meanwhile, the government only recently adopted a series of measures further cracking down on free speech and personal freedoms, resonating increasingly with the authoritarian policies of the Baathist regime.This month, Iraqi politicians and officials met with policymakers, academics, journalists and other representatives from around the world at the 7th Sulaimani Forum, held at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. At the same time, protests erupted in Dhi Qar province, one of the centres of the Tishreen uprising, over water scarcity, echoing the main driver for 2018’s Basra protests.At the forum, the journalist Jane Arraf asked the current Iraq prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, what “reasons” and grounds for hope he could give to young Iraqis so they would stay in the country. In his answer, he did not address the root causes of suffering; he instead acknowledged his government’s inability to provide young people with jobs in the public sector owing to “financial conditions”, and spoke about the “Riyada” (entrepreneurship) initiative for development and employment, via the private sector.Is that it? Will this ensure that Iraqis stay in their country and live with dignity? What about women and children, who remain marginalised in government rhetoric or policies, suffering under the patriarchal norms echoed in laws and legislation?One of the chants of the protesters three years ago was Nureed watan, meaning, we want a homeland – free from foreign interference, whether from the US or Iran. Twenty years after the invasion, Iraqis are still giving their lives for a place to call home.
      Balsam Mustafa is a Leverhulme early career research fellow at the University of Warwick and author of Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives

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      Scary CIA-MI6 Coup Destroyed Iran and Damaged the World

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, Boomer

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      ReviewThe Aftermath review: a younger, more liberal America? OK, BoomerPhilip Bump of the Washington Post has produced a fascinating account of demographic change and future possibilities Younger Americans are decidedly more liberal than their parents. On election day 2022 they thwarted a ballyhooed “red wave”, saved the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock from defeat and deflated Kari Lake’s bid for Arizona governor. Nationally, voters under 30 went Democratic 63-35.Myth America review: superb group history of the lies that built a nationRead moreMillennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, and members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are also less than proud of living in the US, according to survey data. Suffice to say, “Maga” sloganeering leaves them less than reassured.Those generations grew up in the shadows of 9/11, the Iraq war, the great recession and Covid. Their school lunch menus featured shooter lockdown drills. They are ethnically diverse. Millennials have defied political expectations. They did not shift right with age. Instead, they make Republicans sweat.Along with race, gender and culture, inter-generational rivalry can be tossed into that long-simmering pile of resentments known as America’s cold civil war. Enter Philip Bump and his first book, aptly subtitled The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. Bump is a national columnist for the Washington Post. Demographics, culture and economics are part of his remit. Through that prism, The Aftermath delivers.Bump attempts to explain how the US reached its present inflection point and offers a glimpse of what may come next. His tone is methodical, not alarmist.Gently, he introduces the reader to the term “pig in the python”, coined by Landon Jones, once managing editor of People magazine, to describe the demographic bulge created by GIs who returned from the second world war. Bump pays respect to Jones’s book, Great Expectations, which stands among the “first serious examinations of the baby boom”. Hence the label Baby Boomers, for people born in those fertile post-war years.Boomer politicians include Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich. They may not have made the world a better place but they definitely left their mark. Their appetites frequently eclipsed their judgment. Clinton and Trump were impeached. Both faced lawsuits alleging sexual assault. Gingrich was forced out as House speaker.“They are a generational tyranny,” Bump quotes Jones.“OK Boomer” is a catchphrase and retort, not a compliment.More than three decades ago, Lee Atwater, the manager of George HW Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, believed the boomer experience provided a more cohesive political glue than income, political tradition or religion.“This group has dominated American culture in one form or another since it came into being,” he observed.Stratocaster in hand, Atwater played with Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones at Bush’s inauguration. The new president jammed along on air guitar. Atwater recorded an album with BB King and others. Now, Atwater, Bush, King and Charlie Watts are gone. Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards play on. There’s always time for one more tour, until there isn’t.Bump also addresses tensions within the Democrats’ diverse, upstairs-downstairs coalition, observing that race and ethnicity are not necessarily destiny. Among minority voters without college degrees, the party of FDR and JFK has ceded ground to the GOP. The much-vaunted “coalition of the ascendant” has not lived up to its hype.Bump notes divides between Black and Latino voters. In the 2020 primaries, Black Democrats sided with Joe Biden, Latinos with Bernie Sanders. Among Latinos, Trump ran three points better against Biden than against Hillary Clinton. Among Black voters, he was five points better.As with working-class whites, cultural issues retained their salience for those without a degree. Before the supreme court gutted a woman’s right to choose, Republicans possessed the luxury of watching the Democrats trip over themselves as they grappled with the latest leftwing orthodoxy, turning off wide swaths of the electorate, including Boomers, as they did so.Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to squirm. Voters in red Kansas and Kentucky rejected abortion bans. In the midterms, inflation and abortion were the two most important issues. Inflation may be receding but abortion is not going away.As Bump observes, women older than 60 frequently emerged as both faces of the resistance to Trump and a moderating force. More than three in five Americans are angry or dissatisfied with the supreme court decision on abortion, yet the GOP faithful demands self-immolation.Affirmative action provides another example of ethnic fluidity. In 1996, California adopted Proposition 196 and scrapped race-based preferences, despite overwhelming Latino opposition. As Bump describes it, the Latino share of the electorate was smaller than its proportion of the population. If results were weighted to reflect that larger figure, Proposition 196 would been defeated.Priorities of ethnic blocs can change. By 2020, support for affirmative action among Californian Latinos appeared lukewarm at best. At the same time Californians were sending Biden to the White House they resoundingly rejected Proposition 16, an attempt to undo Proposition 196.By the numbers, backers of Proposition 16 spent more than $31m for around 44% support. Opponents of the measure raised a meager $1.6m yet took 56%.Bump posits that in the future, the US will look more like Florida: older and less white. Florida has moved right in recent years – whether ageing millennials and Gen Z-ers push it back towards the center remains, of course, to be seen. Bump also poses a series of “what ifs”, unanswered: “What happens if changes in the state reduce the motivation for Americans or immigrants to move there? What if the federal government further constrains international migration?”“Florida’s future is dependent on decisions made in the present,” he writes. “The long term depends on the short term.”
      The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
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      It’s hard to believe, but things are getting better. They will continue to if we keep up the fight | Robert Reich

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      It’s hard to believe, but things are getting better. They will continue to if we keep up the fightRobert ReichSetbacks notwithstanding, we are better today than we were 50 years ago, 20 years ago, even a year ago It was quite a year. Some of the regressive forces undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, widening inequality and stoking hatred have been pushed back.This is a worthy accomplishment and cause for celebration. It offers hope that the Trump years are behind us and the hard work of building a decent society can resume.Is Trump finally politically dead? Sort of | Robert ReichRead moreBut this is no time for complacency. No one should assume that the battle has been won.The anti-democracy movement is still fulminating. Trump is still dangerous. Corporate malfeasance continues. The climate catastrophe is worsening. Inequality is widening. Reproductive rights have been dealt a major setback. The haters and bigots have not retreated.These regressive forces have many weapons at their disposal – lobbyists, money to bribe lawmakers, giant media megaphones, the most rightwing US supreme court since the 1930s, a Republican party that has lost all moral bearings and, starting soon, a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.But their most powerful weapon is cynicism. They’re betting that if they can get most of us to feel like we can’t make a difference, we’ll stop fighting. Then they can declare total victory.We must keep up the fight.Here’s the thing to keep in mind. Setbacks notwithstanding, we are better today than we were 50 years ago, 20 years ago, even a year ago.We’ve strengthened labor rights and LGBTQ+ rights. Most Americans are intent on strengthening women’s rights and civil rights.Most also want to extend Medicare for all, affordable childcare, paid sick leave and end corporate monopolies and corporate dominance of our politics.We have clean water laws and clean air laws. We’ve torn down Confederate statues and expanded clean energy.Here are some crucial issues we’re covering in 2023 – with your help | Betsy ReedRead moreAnd we’ve got a new generation of progressive politicians, labor leaders and community organizers determined to make the nation and the world more democratic, more sustainable, more just.They know that the strongest bulwark against authoritarianism is a society in which people have a fair chance to get ahead. The fights for democracy, social justice and a sustainable planet are intertwined.The battle is likely to become even more intense this coming year and the following. But the outcome will not be determined by force, fear or violence. It will be based on commitment, tenacity and unvarnished truth.It is even a battle for the way we tell the story of America. Some want to go back to a simplistic and inaccurate narrative where we were basically perfect from our founding, where we don’t need to tell the unpleasant truths about slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and all the other injustices.But there is another story of America, one of imperfection but progress. In this story, which is far more accurate, reformers have changed this nation many, many times for the better.From Martin Luther King Jr to Ruth Bader Ginsburg to, more recently, Stacey Abrams, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Smalls (who led the victory of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse workers), Jaz Brisack (who led Starbucks workers) and Maxwell Alejandro Frost (the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress), and many others – individuals have repeatedly changed the course of history by refusing to believe that they could not stand up to repression, bigotry and injustice.You don’t have to be famous to be an agent of positive change. You don’t have to hold formal office to be a leader.Are US politics starting to turn towards a more hopeful future? | Gary GerstleRead moreChange happens when selfless individuals, some of whose names we will never know, give their energies and risk their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) to make the world more humane.Small actions and victories lead to bigger ones, and the improbable becomes possible.Look, I know: the struggle can be exhausting. No one can go all in, all the time. That’s why we need to build communities and movements for action, where people give what effort they can and are buoyed in solidarity with others.If at any time you feel helpless or despairing, remind yourself that the fight for democracy, social justice and a sustainable planet is noble. The stakes could not be higher. And we will – and must – win.Wishing you a good 2023.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      Waging a Good War review: compelling military history of the civil rights fight

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      Waging a Good War review: compelling military history of the civil rights fight Thomas E Ricks applies a new lens to a familiar story, showing how those who marched for change succeeded – and sufferedThomas E Ricks has written a sweeping history of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, retelling many of its moments of triumph and tragedy, from the Montgomery bus boycott spawned by the courage of Rosa Parks in 1955 to the bodies bloodied and broken by Alabama troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 10 years later.‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Read moreThe stories are familiar but Ricks is the first author to mine this great American saga for its similarities to a military campaign.James Lawson, a key figure in training a cadre of influential movement leaders, called it “moral warfare”. Cleveland Sellers said the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi “was almost like a shorter version” of the Vietnam war. Ricks points out that “the central tactic of the movement – the march – is also the most basic of military operations”.But the greatest value of this compelling account lies in its capacity to remind us how a relatively small group of intelligent, determined, disciplined and incredibly courageous men and women managed after barely a decade of pitched battles to transform the US “into a genuine democracy” for the very first time.As Martin Luther King Jr remarked, the attempt to undo the ghastly effects of the 90-year campaign after the civil war to keep Black Americans effectively enslaved became an effort to “redeem the soul of America”.The crucial ingredient was the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Ricks writes that it was “at the core” of how the movement “attracted people and prepared them for action”. It was the dignity of the marchers, who declined to counterattack the hoodlums who viciously attacked them, that would gradually “catch the attention of the media, and thereby the nation”.As Gandhi explained it, nonviolence did not “mean meek submission to the will of the evil doer”. It meant “the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant”. As an American disciple explained, “Your violent opponent wants you to fight in the way to which he is accustomed. If you adopt a method wholly new to him, you have thus gained an immediate tactical advantage.”Lawson compared the strategy to “what Jesus meant when he said ‘turn the other cheek’. You cause the other person to do the searching … We will not injure you, but we will absorb your injury … because the cycle of violence must be broken. We want the cycle of violence in America and racism stopped.”Early in the Montgomery protest, after a bomb exploded on the porch of King’s house, “filling the front room with smoke and broken glass”, the budding leader demonstrated his commitment. When supporters gathered, he ordered, “Don’t get your weapons. We are not advocating violence.” Go home, he said, “and know that all of us are in the hands of God.”King said Montgomery “did more to clarify my thinking on the question of nonviolence than all of the books I had read … Many issues I had not cleared up intellectually were now solved in the sphere of practical action.”As in a conventional war, martyrs played a vital role in inspiring soldiers. Nearly all of the students who led sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters had visions in their head of Emmett Tell, the 14-year-old boy who was tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman.During Freedom Summer, in Mississippi in 1964, the brutal murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner became the turning point in the campaign to get the federal government to transform the nation.Two of the victims were white. Ricks writes: “The simple, hard fact was that the American media and public cared more about killings of whites than of blacks. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s hard calculation about white lives mattering more than Black ones had been confirmed … It was no different from Winston Churchill celebrating the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”But the most influential martyrs of all were John Lewis and 140 fellow marchers who were brutally attacked as they tried to march from Selma to Montgomery. The images blanketed network television, leading directly to Lyndon Johnson’s speech before Congress one week later in which he electrified the nation by declaring: “We shall overcome.” Just four months later the president signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the movement’s two most significant legislative accomplishments.“Now you were having brought into every American living room … the brutality of the situation,” remembered Bayard Rustin, one of the key architects of King’s March on Washington. “I think that if we had television 50 years earlier, we would have gotten rid of lynching 50 years earlier.”Ricks does a tremendous job of putting the reader inside the hearts and souls of the young men and women who risked so much to change America. In just three months in Mississippi in summer 1964, there were at least six murders, 80 beatings, 35 shootings and 35 church bombings, not to mention policemen who routinely put guns to the heads of protesters and cocked them without firing.The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the oldRead more“There were incipient nervous breakdowns walking all over Greenwood, Mississippi,” Sally Belfrage wrote to a friend. Her roommate, Joanne Grant, said it was an understatement to say she was frightened most of the time. And yet, “as with all of us, it was the best time in my life. I felt we were changing the world.”Ricks of course points out all the reversals of this progress accomplished by disastrous supreme court decisions and hatred rekindled by Donald Trump. He ends by calling for a “third reconstruction”, a new “focused effort to organize, train, plan, and reconcile”.I only hope this riveting account of the glorious exploits of so many civil rights pioneers will inspire a new generation to make that gigantic organizational effort.
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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      ‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6

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      Interview‘It’s good to think strategically’: Thomas E Ricks on civil rights and January 6Martin Pengelly in Washington In his new book, the historian considers the work of Martin Luther King and others through the lens of military thoughtThere is a direct connection from Freedom Summer to the January 6 committee,” says Thomas E Ricks as he discusses his new book, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968.‘Now is a continuation of then’: America’s civil rights era – in picturesRead moreFreedom Summer was a 1964 campaign to draw attention to violence faced by Black people in Mississippi when they tried to vote. The House January 6 committee will soon conclude its hearings on the Capitol riot of 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump attacked American democracy itself.But the committee is chaired by Bennie Thompson. In his opening statement, in June, the Democrat said: “I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi … I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021.”Ricks is reminded of the insurrectionists as he retells that grim history. Watching the January 6 hearings, he says, he “was looking at Bennie Thompson. And I realised, his career follows right on.“Summer ’64, you start getting Black people registered in Mississippi. A tiny minority, about 7%, are able to vote in ’64 but it rises to I think 59% by ’68. Bennie Thompson gets elected alderman [of Bolton, in 1969], mayor [1973] and eventually to Congress [1993]. And then as a senior member of Congress, chairs this January 6 committee.“Well, there is a direct connection from Freedom Summer, and [civil rights leaders] Amzie Moore, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dave Dennis, to the January 6 committee. And I think that’s a wonderful thing.”Under Thompson, Ricks says, the January 6 committee is acting strategically, “establishing an indisputable factual record of what happened”, a bulwark against attempts to rewrite history.“It’s always good to think strategically,” Ricks says. Which brings him back to his book.As a reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Ricks was twice part of teams that won a Pulitzer prize. His bestselling books include Fiasco (2006) and The Gamble (2009), lacerating accounts of the Iraq disaster, and The Generals (2012), on the decline of US military leadership. In Waging a Good War, he applies the precepts of military strategy to the civil rights campaigns.He says: “This book, I wrote because I had to. I had to get it out of my head. The inspiration was I married a woman who had been active in civil rights.”Mary Kay Ricks is the author of Escape on the Pearl (2008), about slavery and the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, she was “president of High School Friends of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], Washington DC chapter.“She would pick people up at Union Station and drive them wherever they needed to be. So her memory of [the late Georgia congressman] John Lewis is him arriving, saying, ‘I’m hungry, take me to McDonald’s.’ All our lives we would be driving along, and somebody would be on the radio, and she’d say, ‘Oh, I knew that guy’ or ‘I dated that guy. Oh, I thought he was crazy.’“So I was reading about the civil rights movement to understand my wife and the stories she told me. And the more I read, the more it struck me: ‘Wow. This is an area that can really be illuminated by military thinking.’ That a lot of what they were doing was what in military operations is called logistics, or a classic defensive operation, or a holding action, or a raid behind enemy lines. And the more I looked at it, the more I thought each of the major civil rights campaigns could be depicted in that light.”In 1961, campaigners launched the Freedom Rides, activists riding buses across the south, seeking to draw attention and thereby end illegal segregation onboard and in stations. It was dangerous work, daring and remote. Ricks compares the Freedom Rides to cavalry raids, most strikingly to civil war operations by the Confederate “Gray Ghost”, John Singleton Mosby.“The Freedom Rides as raids behind enemy lines. What does that mean? Well, it struck me again and again how military-like the civil rights movement was in careful preparation. What is the task at hand? How do we prepare? What sort of people do we need to carry out this mission? What kind of training do they need?“Before the Freedom Rides they sent a young man, Tom Gaither, on a reconnaissance trip, where he drew maps of each bus station so they would know where the segregated waiting rooms were. He reported back: ‘The two cities where you’re going to have trouble are Anniston, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama.’ There are real race tensions in those cities.”Activists faced horrendous violence. They met it with non-violence.“They did months of training. First of all, how to capture and prevent the impulse to fight or flee. Somebody slugs you, spits on you, puts out a cigarette on your back. They knew how to react: non-violent.“But this is a really militant form of non-violence. Gandhi denounced the term passive resistance. And these people, many of them followers of God, devoted readers of Gandhi, understood this was very confrontational.”In 1965, Selma, Alabama, was the scene of Bloody Sunday, when white authorities attacked a march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and southern racism stood exposed.Ricks says: “A line I love comes from Selma. People said, ‘What are we doing when the sheriff comes after us?’ The organisers said, ‘No, you’re going after the sheriff.’ A good example: CT Vivian, one of my heroes, a stalwart of civil rights, is thrown down the steps of the county courthouse at Selma by Jim Clark, the county sheriff. And Vivian looks up and yells, ‘Who are you people? What do you tell your wives and children?’“It is such a human question. And in this confrontational form of non-violence, I think they flummoxed the existing system, of white supremacism, which the world saw was a system built on violence inherited from slavery.”Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photosRead moreRicks has written about his time in Iraq and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the end of Waging a Good War, he considers how those who campaigned for civil rights, who were beaten, shot and imprisoned, struggled to cope with the toll.“If you want to understand the full cost, it’s important to write about the effect on the activists and their families, their children. Dave Dennis Jr, the son of one of the people who ran Freedom Summer, he and I have talked about this a bit. We believe the Veterans Administration should be open to veterans of the civil rights movement. There aren’t a lot of veterans still alive. Nonetheless, it would be a meaningful gesture that could help some people who have had a hard time in life.”In a passage that could fuel a whole book, Ricks considers how Martin Luther King Jr, the greatest civil rights leader, struggled in the years before his assassination, in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.Like many PTSD sufferers, King sought refuge in drink and sex. But for Ricks, “the moment that captures it for me is he’s sitting in a rocking chair in Atlanta, with his friend Dorothy Cotton. And he says, ‘I think I should take a sabbatical.’ This is about 1967. This guy had been under daily threat for 13 years. I compare him to [Dwight] Eisenhower and the pressures he was under as a top commander in world war two … yet King does this for well over a decade. The stress was enormous. I only wish he had been able to take that sabbatical.”The campaign took its toll on others, among them James Bevel, a “tactically innovative, strategically brilliant” activist who abused women and children, moved far right and died in disgrace.Ricks hopes his book might help make other activists better known, among them Pauli Murray, Diane Nash – a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom – and Fred Shuttlesworth, “a powerful character, a moonshiner turned minister”.Shuttlesworth lived in Birmingham, Alabama, scene of some of the worst attacks on the civil rights movement, most of all the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, in which four young girls were killed.To Ricks, “If there’s a real moment of despair in Martin Luther King’s life, it’s the Birmingham church bombing. He says, ‘At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel.’ That was the focal point for how I think about what King went through.”But there is light in Birmingham too. Ricks recounts the time “the white establishment calls Fred Shuttlesworth up and says, ‘We hear Martin Luther King might be coming to town. What can we do to stop that?’ And he leans back and smiles and says, ‘You know, I’ve been bombed twice in this town. Nobody called me then. But now you want to talk?’“Shuttlesworth threw himself into things. He believed in non-violence as an occasional tactic, not as a way of life. He sent a carloads of guys carrying shotguns to rescue the Freedom Riders from the KKK in Anniston.“Then there’s Amzie Moore. I wish I could have written more about him. He came home from world war two, worked at a federal post office so he would not be under control of local government. He starts his own gas station and refuses to have whites-only bathrooms. ‘Nope, not gonna do it.’ To me, he’s like a member of the French Resistance but he does it for 20 years. When Bob Moses and other civil rights workers go to Mississippi, he’s the guy they look up. ‘How do I survive in Mississippi?’ And he tells them and helps them.”Waging a Good War also considers how campaigners today might learn from those who went before. Ricks says: “Some of the people in the Black Lives Matter era have reached back. I talked to one person who went to James Lawson, the trainer of the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, and asked, ‘How do you go about this? How do you think about this? What about losses? Instructions?’“A demonstration is only the end product, the tip of an iceberg. There has to be careful preparation, consideration of, ‘What message are we trying to send? How are we going to send it? How are we going to follow up?’ So James Lawson conveys that message. Similarly, Bob Moses, who recently died, attended a Black Lives Matter meeting. There are roots by which today’s movements reach back down to the movements of the forefathers.”Democrats see hope in Stacey Abrams (again) in a crucial US election – if she can get voters to show upRead moreHe also sees echoes in two major strands of activism today.“Stacey Abrams’ work on voting rights is very similar to a lot of the work Martin Luther King did with the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Fighting voter suppression, finding ways to encourage minorities to register and to vote, looking to expand the franchise.“Black Lives Matter reminds me of SNCC, if somewhat more radical, more focused not on gaining power through the vote but on abuses of power, especially police brutality.“It’s sad that the problems the movement tried to address in the 1950s and 60s still need to be addressed. We have moments of despair. Nonetheless, one of things about writing the book was to show people who went through difficult times, and usually found ways to succeed.“The more I learned, the more I enjoyed it. It was a real contrast. Writing about the Iraq war? It’s hard. This felt good. I was hauled to my writing desk every morning. I loved writing this book.”
      Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
      TopicsBooksCivil rights movementUS politicsRaceThe far rightProtestBlack Lives Matter movementinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Democratic members of Congress arrested during pro-choice protest

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and House colleagues arrested during pro-choice protest The legislators were engaged in peaceful civil disobedience against the loss of abortion rights in front of the supreme court Several prominent Democratic members of Congress were arrested on Wednesday during a protest in support of abortion rights in front of the supreme court, in the aftermath of the historic overturning of Roe v Wade last month.The politicians gathered in front of the US Capitol before marching to the court building, chanting “our bodies, our choice” and “we won’t go back”.The group, which included the prominent progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush, proceeded to stand along a crosswalk, or pedestrian crossing area, in front of the court, which is surrounded by a large black fence claimed to be unclimbable and erected to keep protesters away.Happening rn: MOCs & EDs of orgs across the country are risking arrest at the Capitol. #BansOffOurBodies @CPDAction pic.twitter.com/Cl9ldc9iBf— Maegan LLerena 🦋 (@maeganllerena) July 19, 2022
      The group sat down in the middle of the street as an act of peaceful civil disobedience, as a group of police officers gathered around them, broadcasting a pre-recorded message announcing imminent arrest for blocking the street.The officers then began to arrest the lawmakers, cuffing them and leading them to an area taped off away from the street.Multiple members of Congress, including @AOC, being arrested by Capitol Police for blocking traffic outside the Supreme Court in abortion rights demonstration: pic.twitter.com/fysQN1oBAw— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) July 19, 2022
      A livestream of the protest was posted online by CPD Action, the protest-centered arm of the Center for Popular Democracy, a social justice organization, which coordinated the direct action.CPD Action said 18 members of Congress were arrested. Seventeen were women. Andy Levin of Michigan was the sole congressman among them.In a statement, Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York who was also arrested, said: “I have the privilege of representing a state where reproductive rights are respected and protected – the least I can do is put my body on the line for the 33 million women at risk of losing their rights.”Jackie Speier, a representative from California who was also arrested, said on Twitter: “Proud to march with my Democratic colleagues and get arrested for women’s rights, abortion rights, the rights for people to control their own bodies and the future and our democracy.”Reps. Jackie Speier and Carolyn Maloney getting arrested pic.twitter.com/c1AP7ILHDu— Nancy Vu (@NancyVu99) July 19, 2022
      It has been less than a month since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which protected the right to an abortion under the constitution. Abortion is now banned or under threat of being banned in 60% of states.Backlash against the supreme court, which is now dominated by six conservative justices, including three appointed by Donald Trump, intensified in May when a draft of the decision to overturn Roe was leaked. Soon after, the court installed the 7ft security fence.Immediately after the release of the official decision, massive protests swept the US from New York to Los Angeles, including in large cities of Republican-led states such as Missouri and Texas.Joe Biden has announced and the House has since passed bills offering federal protections – but these are largely symbolic as long as the Senate is all but certain to reject such legislation, and as the individual states now have the right to dictate abortion regulation.Analilia Mejia, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, said the protest “sent a powerful message to Republican lawmakers and [the supreme court]: we will not back down.“Our rights, our freedoms, and our reproductive autonomy matters. Abortion is healthcare and a human right – and you don’t represent the vast majority of Americans who believe we, not the government, should dictate our own health decisions.”Polling shows consistent majorities in favor of abortion being legal in at least some cases.Mejia said: “We will not stop fighting for the world our communities deserve – one that honors our right to decide our futures.”TopicsAbortionProtestReproductive rightsUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More