IT has been half a century since the humbling of the world’s mightiest military, the US army, by Vietnamese guerilla warriors. It was, by all accounts, the most tumultuous defeat in the history of modern empire. If the Viet Cong routed US troops in the trenches, Washington lost the battle for hearts and minds at home. The anti-war movement which raged on American university and college campuses for a decade from the mid-1960s was amongst the biggest popular mobilisations in US history. The movement signified a moral defeat for US imperialism arguably as significant as its military defeat on the actual battlefield.

The eruption of student protests on American university campuses against the US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has invited comparison with the Vietnam antiwar movement. A violent clampdown on peaceful students at Columbia University has triggered a wave of uprisings across the country, magnifying the extent to which young Americans oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Zionist pogroms.

Peaceful protests against the Israeli war machine and complicit Western governments have been ongoing in many Western countries, but the violent reaction of university administrators and the........

© Dawn