Revisiting Vietnam
Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement

By Kel Munger
kelm@newsreview.com


This article was published on 03.09.2017

The late Tom Hayden has an answer for conservative attempts to recast the United States involvement in Vietnam as a patriotic and worthy exercise, and it comes straight from his own history as an anti-war activist. Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement (Yale University Press, $32) is part memoir, part history and part warning. The memoir portion has some regrets for things like protesters waving Viet Cong flags, as well as his own observation, during a postwar visit to Vietnam, of the same shops and chains that proliferate in America. He asks, “Why kill, maim and uproot millions of Vietnamese if the outcome was a consumer wonderland approved by the country’s still-undefeated Communist Party?” That is a very, very good question.

“Hell no” was the battle cry of the largest peace movement in American history – the effort to end the Vietnam War, and Tom Hayden was an elemental part of it. Here he tells the story of this movement in the attempt to save it from getting lost in the remembrance of a nation.
But Hayden not only tells us of the peace movement and to what length the government went to destroy it, he also tells us a lot about Vietnam itself and how this tiny nation not only defeated the world's most powerful nation, but how it also made it's peace with the former enemy. In this times, with IS terror already at our door (I'm living in Austria), it is lifting to read about people overcoming such enmity and embracing a positive future.
Reading it I just wished it had been read by all those Americans who voted for Donald Trump and maybe, just maybe, some of them wouldn't have given him their vote.