The Vietnam War And Anti-War Protests

One war lost. Hundreds of protest. More than thousand suffered. A million people died. People were in fear of being killed and were afraid that the Vietnam War will never be ended. Vietnam War encouraged young people to develop anti-war protests. While there were both protesters and war supporters, the effects on young people who protested against the war, resulted in mass culture movements such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The Vietnam War began when the French controlled most of Indochina which is today Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In 1945, Japan had lost the war and left the country. The French wanted to control Vietnam again. Communist influence in Vietnam strongly when China became a Communist country in 1949 (TheRiseImpactWar.com).

Anti-war movements had a huge public support and worldwide attention in early 1968 after the Tet Offensive which ended in 1973. The movements and protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War started small among the pacifist and leftists on campus. Furthermore, anti-war movements such as nationwide demonstrations and organized by Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and Furman University Corps of Kazoos (FUCK) were the first mass demonstrations that took place in December 1964 assembling more than 700 people in San Francisco (History.com Staff.). American people kept increasing for movements and protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. However, the government continued the involvement of the Vietnam War, which increased the mass culture movements, but also a lot of people died not only from the war but also from the protests. The anti-war protests and movements were becoming violent, and more than a thousand people died during the anti-war movement protests (VietnamWar.com). Anti-war demonstrations around college campuses, the Civil Rights movement, in particular, had increased student activism. Anti-war movements and protest became a particularly visible part of American life. In addition, protest music was the most powerful means of voicing opposition to the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Television, brutal images of the Vietnam War and footage of social and political

Student for a Democratic Society (SDS), is an American student organization that formed in the mid-to-late 1960s and was known for its activism against the Vietnam War. Student for a Democratic Society (SDS), started in the League for Industrial Democracy, a social-democratic educational organization. An organizational meeting was always held in Ann Arbor, Mich. and Robert Alan Haber were the elected president of SDS (VietnamWar.com). The goal of SDS organization was to build a radical multi-issue organization grounded in the principle of participatory democracy. SDS mainly focused on students’ rights and protested to stop the involvement between US and Vietnam because millions of innocent people were dying and the country was crashing. The Vietnam War was a long and expensive armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam. Due to Vietnam War, there are a lot of dead bodies not only from the war but also due to the protests. On 4th May, the 1970s, Kent State college student were shot to death by the Ohio National Guardsmen during the anti-war protest on campus (History.com). Due to this incident, this leads to widening the anti-war protest and increased the spread of Student for a Democratic Society (SDS). The biggest impact of Vietnam War on young people around the world