By សតិវអតុ
I work
for the school system here in Wichita. I am a substitute teacher. I don’t have
my own class room. And from time to time I take a look at the books that are
used to educate our young people here in Kansas. Just the other day I was
looking at a history book being used for a class called; History I. The
book was called American Anthem, Modern American History.[1] In looking through it I
found some items quite biased. The thing that really stuck out in my head was
the book’s treatment of the peace movement here in the US. The book had a big
chapter on the Vietnam War and it also included a large section on the Vietnam
War protests.
Why was
that significant? Because later, there is a chapter on the conflicts in El
Salvador and Nicaragua with a lot of information on the struggle between then
US President Ronald Reagan and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It was
factual, but one important thing was left out—the US peace movement of THAT
time.
I was a
member of the peace movement of the 1980s. It may not have been as big as the
anti-Vietnam protests, but there were organizations in place and they were
substantial.
There
was the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or CISPES. That
group still exists. It was a major organization support the struggle in El
Salvador, especially the Farabundo
Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
There were many chapters nation-wide and I had one on the Wichita State
University campus. I was even spied on by the FBI for that.
There
were also groups to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front in
Nicaragua. People across the country supported that revolution and its
government. Witness for Peace was just one of such organizations.
I
actually went to a major anti-contra aid march in Washington DC. It was a
national march, in April 1987, and was the largest march I ever went to in my
life. I remember walking in front of the march for a while because there were
some celebrities, such as Ed Asner and Jesse Jackson. The March was backed by several
unions here in the US although some of the Union leaders tried to dissuade
their member from taking part out of their old cold war reactionary beliefs. At
one point I trailed back farther in the line of marchers. At one point I
climbed up on a light pole and could not believe my eyes. I could not see the
front of the line or the back. All I could see was a long trail of marchers in
both directions. The march went for blocks. I had never seen such a march. It
turns out that the march had almost 100,000 people in it.
A lot
of celebrities came out against Reagan’s war on the Sandinistas including Bonnie Raitt.
There were also celebrities who played a concert at the end of the march including
Jackson Browne.
Across
the country people had smaller marches from city to city. This event was a
major high point in the peace movement of that time. And this was just one
event. There were a lot of other marches, meetings and discussions. There was
pressure being put on members of congress. All this was in opposition to then
President Reagan. Don’t our young people deserve to know that a vibrant
community within the US was working against the president and his foreign
policies?
Another
important point is that Reagan was living out the cold war, while the
Sandinistas were one of the more modern “western style” Marxist organizations.
They were more like Salvador Allende rather than East Germany. Reagan ignored
that. But a lot of US progressives noticed the difference.
The
important point here is that the history of solidarity movements of the 1980s
was our history. Young people today need to know about it. There aren’t many
books written on that subject today. Maybe we need to change that. We need to
let today’s youth know that we were a part of the political landscape of the
1980s. That information is missing today.
[1]
Edwards L. Ayers, Robert D. Schulzinger, Jesus F. de la Teja,
Deborah Gray White, American
Anthem, Modern American History, (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Orlando),
2007.
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