John Perry Barlow

The antiwar movement may be relegated to historical oblivion if steps are not taken to preserve its history. Its members are often portrayed to us as intellectually dissipated individuals, who were incapable of doing little more than parroting slogans. I seem to remember there was much more substance to the movement than two-dimensional slogans. We believed in a good cause: to stop an immoral war.

Which. by the way, we eventually did. Not only that, I think that we stopped a number of other wars which might have happened following a "victory" in Viet Nam.

Many of the movement's contributions are valuable to our nation's history in the following years, and deserve to be publicly acknowledged. Until now, the nation's coming to terms with the Vietnam War has largely been accomplished by ignoring the antiwar movement.

Oh, actually I think that the increasing efforts to overwrite are vigorous in proportion to their mounting sense of desperation. They represent a view of the world, Superpower Nationalism, which is about to plunge into permanent decline. This is their last hurrah.

Perhaps you were at Mayday in '71,

I was there.

maybe it was "Czechago" in '68

No. In fact, I was riding into the real Czechoslovakia as that was going on.

maybe it was the Washington antiwar rallies of Nov. '69

I was there.

or the summer of '70 (where Nixon had a strange "midnight chat" with the antiwar folks in the Lincoln Memorial around 3AM).

I was actually present for this surreal episode, but my memory has it taking place during the May '71 Cambodia protest. I'm next to certain about this, but that was a while ago and I was pretty abstract at the time.