Source: http://americanempireproject.com/blog/demobilizing-america/
A Nation Made by War and a Citizenry Unmade By It
by Tom Engelhardt
On successive days recently, I saw two museum shows that caught
something of a lost American world and seemed eerily relevant in the Age of
Trump. The first, “Hippie Modernism,”
an exploration of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (heavy on
psychedelic posters), was appropriately enough at the Berkeley Art
Museum. To my surprise, it also included a few artifacts from a movement
crucial to my own not-especially-countercultural version of those years: the
vast antiwar protests
that took to the streets in the mid-1960s, shook the country, and never really
went away until the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn
from Vietnam in 1973. Included was a poster of the American flag, upside
down, its stripes redrawn as red rifles, its stars as blue fighter planes, and
another showing an American soldier, a rifle casually slung over his
shoulder. Its caption still seems relevant as our never-ending wars
continue to head for “the
homeland.”
“Violence abroad,” it said, “breeds violence at home.” Amen,
brother.
