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The pacifist, by his own definitions, has a moral imperative to stand against war, any war and all war; he can no more have a favorite war than an unfavorite war. Today's war protest movement certainly includes some such pacifists. But the movement is much more heavily populated by the selective pacifist—the one who, had he been born three decades sooner, might well have been a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and who almost certainly would have fought against Hitler in World War II. Brandeis University's John P. Roche, a former national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, defines this as "part-time pacifism, or liberal isolationism. Liberals who would storm Congress to aid a beleaguered Israel suddenly shift gears when Asia is involved and start talking about 'the inevitability of Chinese domination' and the 'immorality' of bombing North Viet Nam."
More disturbing is the incidence of those within the end-the-war-movement who really seem to be rooting for the other side. Automatically among them are American Communists and Marxists who insist that the U.S. presence in Viet Nam is another example of capitalistic imperialism. A bunch of recent marchers in Manhattan actually carried red, blue and yellow flags that, to the shocked astonishment of spectators, turned out to be the banner of the Viet Cong—or rather, since protesters think that term pejorative even though Cong only means Communist, the National Liberation Front.
Other protesters, less subversively, act put of a conviction identified by Columnist Max Lerner: "The idea of being patriotic seems to most of them square and laughable." In their circles, talk of God and country and Old Glory is for such birds as American Legionnaires or Daughters of the American Revolution. As for the old-fashioned idea of "My country—right or wrong," the newer notion seems to be "My country—well, probably wrong."
Questions of Protest
The bulwark of pacifism (even unfavorite-war pacifism) and patriotism (or antipatriotism) is the right to protest—a right secured by the U.S. Constitution in its guarantees of freedom of speech, peaceable assembly and petition. Dissent and disagreement are the essence of democracy and one of its greatest strengths. This is something that totalitarian leaders never quite seem to get through their noggins, and to their later dismay they have often mistaken American argumentation for a national weakness of spirit. The outer limits of dissent are not easy to reach; Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach acknowledges a "large bite of constitutional protection." But the limits are reached and breached by draft-card burning and other practices clearly against the laws of a land.