December 17, 2017
TOPIC: GI Resistance and Rebellion and
Breaking the Chain of Command
GUEST: John Catalinotto
ABOUT JOHN:
Mr. Catalinotto has been
active in the anti-war movement since the October 1962 missile crisis
and has worked on some of the peoples' war crimes tribunals
that the IAC organized regarding the U.S. wars against Iraq and
Yugoslavia. Since 1982 John has been a managing editor of Workers World
newspaper. And specifically from 1967 to 1970 he was a civilian organizer
with the American Servicemen's Union, a circulation manager of the
newspaper, The Bond, and must have read and answered some thousands of
letters from GIs around the world, and once in a while got into the
direct struggle.
Draftees and enlistees — eighteen-year-olds from the South Bronx, factory workers from Buffalo, miners’ sons from Kentucky, unemployed youth from Watts — hate the military and the Vietnam War. They throw a wrench into the Pentagon’s war machine, becoming leaders of the anti-war movement and organizing a union in the conscript military to battle war, racism and their officers.
In three other wars — the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 that sparked the Paris Commune; World War I, which sowed revolutions in Germany and Russia; African liberation wars of the 1960s that incited a captains' revolt in Portugal — ordinary soldiers turn their guns around to make revolution.
Weaving together letters from servicemen and servicewomen, interviews with GI war resisters and first-hand narratives, memoir and historical research, author John Catalinotto — as participant and historian — highlights the relation between rank-and-file soldier resistance and the struggle for state power.
From the first napalm bomb dropped, Catalinotto hated the U.S. war against Vietnam. By 1967 he was organizing rank-and-file servicemen to resist the war. For the last 50 years he pondered that experience and its lessons for humanity. Now he wants to share this history with all who want to fight injustice.
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CINDY SHEEHAN'S SOAPBOX
Thanks for exposing your listeners to this rare peek into what the soldiers were really thinking during the Viet Nam war. There is a lot of false narrative around assuming all vets would be annoyed with anti war civilians.
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