A Bloody Solidarity: Nguyen Thai Binh and the Vietnamese Antiwar Movement in the Long Sixties

This paper uncovers the history of antiwar activist Nguyen Thai Binh and the birth of the Union of Vietnamese after his death. As a former student at the University of Washington, Seattle, Binh participated in numerous antiwar protests against the U.S. military and imperialist government. On July 2, 1972, he hijacked Pan Am Flight 841 headed to Tan Son Nhut airport to protest American bombings of North Vietnam, but was assassinated in the attempt. Amidst the broiling anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, the Union of Vietnamese was the only group of Vietnamese in America to organize against the war following Binh’s death, suggesting the unique positionality of Vietnamese students and early immigrants among other marginalized groups in their struggles for liberation. In this paper, I reference the works of scholars Karen Ishizuka and Sylvia Shin Huey Chong to compare different methodological approaches to writing about the Asian American antiwar movement. Their texts frame my discussions of the invisibility of the Vietnamese antiwar narrative, the cross-cultural alliances that formed from political convergences, and the orientalist perception of the Vietnamese body. Thus, I argue that Nguyen Thai Binh’s activism and the Union of Vietnamese demonstrate a departure from the predominantly non-Vietnamese antiwar historiography. Through my analysis of letters, pamphlets, and government documents, I consider the ways in which Binh’s fatal devotion to ending American brutality in Vietnam and the Vietnamese antiwar movement both challenge American perceptions of race and ethnicity and critique the violent militarism of the war in Vietnam.

Emerson’s Superhero

After offering some preliminary remarks on the notion of what makes a “captive mind,” the article shifts its attention to one of the most significant and yet relatively neglected early essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essay “War.” This text, I argue, deserves not only to be considered the (largely forgotten) founding document of the American anti-war movement, but it remains important even today, as it sheds light on the inevitable contradictions and double-binds any serious movement against war and for social justice must face. It is a text, in other words, which helps us highlight some of the problems we run into—both conceptually and practically—when we try to free our minds from a given mindset, but we must still rely on a world that is pretty much the outcome of the ideologies, customs, and traditions we wish to transcend. To imagine a world free of violence and war is the age-old problem of how to change the world and make it “new” when the practical and intellectual instruments we have are all steeped in the old world we want to abolish. Emerson’s thinking provides a basis to unpack the aporias of what, historically speaking, the antiwar movement has been, both inside and outside the US. The article concludes by examining some recent collections of US pacifist and anti-war writings, as providing useful examples of the challenges antiwar, and more generally protest movements, must face.

“Wake up brothers and sisters”

Chapter 2 explores the convergence of forces that led to the 1970 shootings at Jackson State, beginning with the shooting of local activist Benjamin Brown in 1967 and then the tensions between conservatism and reform on campus from 1967 to 1970. Even as a new racial consciousness emerged on the campus after the ascension of John Peoples to the presidency, Jackson State remained largely isolated from the growing antiwar and student activism on campuses nationwide. Civil rights gains, student activism, the antiwar movement, urban rebellions, and the growing appeal of Black Power, though, had produced near-hysteria among white Mississippians and a broader backlash in white communities nationwide, a mood President Richard Nixon tapped into with his Southern Strategy and his deployment of racially veiled law and order rhetoric. In such a context, law enforcement in Jackson felt empowered to answer even limited unrest on the campus with force.