RIP Peter Camejo

I met Peter Camejo while sitting in a coffeehouse in Berkeley the one year I spent living in Sunnyvale. I introduced myself and we chatted for a while. I remember nothing of the conversation. What I do remember is that people who knew him in his prime were mesmerized by his speeches and motivated by his activism. That is an important legacy to be emulated.

For more:

The Angry Arab writes about him.

Two speeches he gave while participating in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement.

Counterpunch obituary.

Edited to add more tributes:

The City Project: Camejo wrote a book during this period about the civil war and was keenly interested in rooting left politics in the “American experience” in the same way that the FSLN did through Sandino in Nicaragua, the FMLN through Farabundo Marti in El Salvador, and Hugo Chavez through Simon Bolivar in Venezuela.

American Leftist: "Having worked for Merrill Lynch and, later, as an independent investment advisor, he was able to strongly advocate for universal health care, the living wage and farmworker rights within the framework of his financial expertise."

Louis Proyect: The Unpretant Marxist: " considered Peter to be a very good friend. More importantly, he was the one person who helped me understand a revolution could be made in the U.S. notwithstanding American Trotskyism’s tendency to create all sorts of obstacles in the way to that understanding."

Links including two articles by Camejo: "How to Make a Revolution in the United States" and Liberalism, Ultraleftism or Mass Action.

The first protest by Americans against the U.S. war against Vietnam

I'm currently reading Joe Allen's, "Vietnam: the (last) war the U.S. lost". He reminds me of an amazing incident that isn't taught often.

So before I provide some links, when do you think the first protest by U.S. citizens against the U.S. war in Vietnam may have occurred?

Did you guess 1968, the year the movement burst into the mainstream media?

Did you guess 1965, when Julian Bond and SNCC came out against the war?

Perhaps you recall 1960, when the anti-nuclear group SANE and Quakers spoke out against American forays into the country?

That would be pretty early, wouldn't it?

The truth: 1945.

And who were these suspicious antiwar activists?

The Merchant Marines.

Vietnam declared its independence in September of 1945 after the defeat of the Japanese colonizers. The U.S. and the nationalist movement of Vietnam, the Viet Minh, had fought together against Japan and the French Vichy occupiers. But only a few months later, the U.S. government switched positions and began supplying arms to the French colonizers.

Here's a bit from the BBC:

Within two months, at least eight US troopships were diverted from their mission of bringing American troops home from World War II. These ships were used to transport French troops and Foreign Legionnaires from France into Vietnam, to begin a recolonization process. ... The entire crews of four of these ships, all members of the US Merchant Marine, prepared a resolution condemning the US government for its use of US ships to transport troops 'to subjugate the native population' of Vietnam.

Here's more from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

At least 8 and possibly 12 U.S. troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from World War II and instead began transporting U.S.-armed French troops and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted crewmen of these ships, all members of the U.S. Merchant Marine, immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, for example, the entire crews of four troopships met together in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the U.S. government for using American ships to transport troops "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

Librarians Rock

After seeing "Hearts and Minds" last night I remembered where I was at 33 years ago. I was working as a typesetter, keyliner for the Post, the student newspaper at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. We worked on IBM selectric composers typing onto a thick clay-backed paper that was then pasted down on keyline boards with rubber cement. It was ridiculously tedious work and required a special skill with an Xacto knife. In addition, we were all full-time students working until all hours of the night to get a daily paper out.

When we received Van Es's iconographic photo over the AP wire, we knew we wanted to use it for an editorial. I remember spending hours cutting and pasting individual lines of type to get the story to wrap around the image. This is, of course, incredibly easy to do these days. Back then, I had to output entire columns of type in each of the different line lengths and then cut one from each column size and paste them into place. It was a weird way to be spending the night that meant so much to so many of us.

Around midnight last night, I found that OU student newspapers are archived and available at Alden Library at Ohio University. They have an "ask a librarian" page and I e-mailed. This image arrived in my e-mail tonight. Unbelievable. Thanks are due to Mike, the librarian who said they don't usually do this sort of thing but he decided to make an exception.



Oddly enough, I'm still a typesetter, and the guy who wrote the article, who was the second love of my life, is still writing about television. Here's the blog of John Kiesewetter from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

33 years



Photo by Hubert Van Es for The New York Times.

Vane Es wrote about the image:

Thirty years ago I was fortunate enough to take a photograph that has become perhaps the most recognizable image of the fall of Saigon - you know it, the one that is always described as showing an American helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the United States Embassy. Well, like so many things about the Vietnam War, it's not exactly what it seems. In fact, the photo is not of the embassy at all; the helicopter was actually on the roof of an apartment building in downtown Saigon where senior Central Intelligence Agency employees were housed.

I was working at a university newspaper when this happened and that day has always been important to me.

At the bookstore, tonight, we showed Hearts and Minds, an Academy-award winning documentary about the war in Vietnam. I had not seen this film before, even though I had lots of chances. Today I watched it with several veterans of many U.S. wars (one from WW II, one from Korea, four from Vietnam, one from Gulf War 1). It still affects me. I have a life-long hatred of General Westmoreland who was famous for lines like this:

"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

And important lesson to be learned: even with the draft and all those dead and wounded soldiers, even with the nightly news full of gruesome photos of death and devastation, a surprising number of U.S. citizens were blissfully unaware of the war and could carry on their lives without a clue as to what was going on half a world away. Sound familiar?