policy - The Black Vault

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THE BDE M CORPORATION
evil within American society was associated with corruption by radicals
within the movement. For instance, recalling the 1967 Newark riots, Jack
Newfield said:
One cannot speak of Black Power, or the riots or even
Vietnam, in a departmentalized vacuum. They are all
part of something larger. We have permitted political
power in America to pass fru. the people to a technological
elite that manipulates the mass media and
boasts nuclear weaponry. Representational democracy
has broken down.41/
V
Members of 'rie antiwar movement chose one of three approaches to
tackling that perceived problem.
the imoalance.
One was to enter the system and correct
The second was to topple the system and replace it with
something presumably better. The third was to withdraw from contact with
the "defiling system" in order to ,maintain the moral purity of one's position.
Increasingly as the war continued, especially after the coming of
the Nixon administration and the sense of despair which engulfed the antiwar
movement as the war continued and US
bombing increased, ioitellectuals
and young who for one reason or another could not bring themselves to
support revolution, turned to the third option.
Some of those who chose
this latter course of political withdrawal considered those who tried to
work within the system "tainted" by association with the administration and
expressed these feelings forcefully.42/
With attitudes toward politics
that did not permit participation in the political system spreading among
antiwar intellectuals, it cannot be surprising that they were so politically
inept and ineffective, thus justifying Madame Binh's disdain for the
American left who were "reluctant to touch political power."
Some have argued that no matter how confused and contradictory
the antiwar movement was, it created the necessary conditions for the shift
in official policy from isolation to disengagement and was a key ingredient
in Johnson's March 1968 announcement that he would not seek another
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