WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO BUILD A DECENT ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT? Sgt. Stryker has some thoughts.

Sarge writes:

The first and most important step is to unload the Boomers and the baggage they bring to the table. They had their day and it’s time to put them out to pasture. This is a new generation fighting a new war and it’s time to bring new ideas appropriate to the world as it is, not as it was. The Boomers have had a stranglehold on the philosophies and ideas propagated throughout the anti-war movement, but what they’re saying are merely variations of the same things they were going on about almost forty years ago and have nothing to do with the world today. How much history has passed and how much has the world changed since the 60’s? Then why cling to their old, tired and irrelevant ideas? If the anti-war movement is ever going to get moving, then it needs to release itself from the ideas the Boomers have straight-jacketed it with for all these years. This is the 21st Century. We face a world far more complex and are dealing with issues far outside the desiccated worldview of the Boomers. Until the anti-war crowd realizes this, it will remain an anachronism.

I don’t know–given that many of those same Boomers are now teaching college, it will be quite some time before their ideas are “released”.

Vietnam is doubly instructive here–it was the high-water mark of the anti-war movement, which gained traction because the US military was ineffective in Vietnam, partially due to using tactics developed 25 years earlier in World War II. (And yes, that’s a gross simplification, and Robert McNamera, Westmoreland, and Johnson’s rules of engagement didn’t help things. But you get the idea.)

But each component of the military radically changed its tactics after Vietnam. The anti-war movement is still stuck in a 30 year old timewarp.

And it’s got to feel strange for them, to find the military’s thinking more modern than theirs.

UPDATE: This crowd isn’t helping them much.