why was the vietnam war called the working class war

The fashionable attempt to revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops. The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers against officers who viewed them as expendable. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war. They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia-casts a pall on the Pentagon.

defeat in Vietnam-despite more recent U.S. The legacy of the soldiers' revolt and the U.S. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam-described once by President Johnson as a 'raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country'-from U.S. For this reason, the soldiers' revolt has been written out of official history. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers' revolt-the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinousŠonditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by.the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 19.

International Socialist Review Issue 9, August-September 2000 For ISR updates, send us your Email Address

Why was the vietnam war called the working class war