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Marching Against War

By Winston Warfield

[The following article is reprinted from POINT, the publications of the Smedley Butler Brigade/Veterans for Peace in Boston. It was written by Winston Warfield, President of the Smedley Butler Brigade.]

As many as 100,000 peaceful demonstrators arrived in Washington DC by bus Saturday to express opposition to U.S. government policies in Central America and South Africa. Their demands were that this government stop interfering in the internal affairs of Central American countries and, in particular, cease any and all assistance to the Contras, and stop giving tacit support to the fascist regime maintaining apartheid in South Africa.

The large turnout, including marchers from as far away as Wyoming, showed without a doubt that what used to be called a "Movement" during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War years has re-emerged. It is worth mentioning that the crowd was popular in character rather than solely a large turnout of sixties-style activists, and included blacks, students, and labor union officials in impressive numbers.

Demonstrators began gathering in the early hours of Saturday morning on the Ellipse in Washington, DC near the White House, and the mood was serious and positive as the morning progressed and the number kept swelling.

Veterans for Peace, Inc., and Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered around a veterans' contingent table while awaiting the march's beginning and were an attraction for passerby. Some 75 veterans signed a Veterans for Peace, Inc. contact sheet in the space of two hours.

The combined veterans contingent of Veterans for Peace, Inc., VVAW; and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, famous as an all-volunteer unit that fought the Franco fascists in the Spanish Civil War, marched together to the nation's capitol. The vets contingent kept up a steady cadence of slogans done to basic training marching rhythms drawing attention to the Vietnam veterans' sense of betrayal about having been manipulated or dragooned into serving in an unjust war against a peasant uprising for national independence in Vietnam.

The April 25th march in Washington was significant especially in the large number of union locals represented, particularly from among government workers. They came despite a concerted effort by top CIO-AFL leadership to smear the march as a communist front effort, which only proved that many people in this country are capable of seeing that freedom from want, national independence, and self-determination are really what's at stake for the peoples of both Central American and South Africa.