50 years after the Vietnam War, the legacy of nonviolent resistance lives on

This article 50 years after the Vietnam War, the legacy of nonviolent resistance lives on was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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“It was a big show.” That is how Robert Levering described the celebration in Ho Chi Minh City on April 30, marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. 

Levering was attending the celebration as part of a delegation from the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, one of three delegations invited by the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations, or VUFO, a non-governmental organization promoting people-to-people diplomacy between Vietnam and countries around the world.

The other delegations were from the National Council of Elders and the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, bringing to Vietnam an intergenerational, cross-movement cadre of organizers and activists to commemorate the anniversary of the war’s end.

The “big show” was the largest celebration and parade in Vietnam’s history, with international dignitaries as well as the current and former leaders of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the state of Vietnam in attendance.

Military demonstrations also contributed to the day’s atmosphere, causing conflicted feelings among some of the delegations’ attendees, who were looking to Vietnam for lessons on moving away from militarism.

Still, transnational solidarity and diplomacy were major themes of what is officially known as the Liberation of the South and National Reunification Day.

“We heard Cuban and Filipino and Indian delegates say, ‘Your struggle fortified ours,’” said Ora Wise, a delegate with the National Council of Elders, a collective of social movement leaders from the 1950s-1970s started by figures like Grace Lee Boggs and Dolores Huerta.

That struggle came to a head on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon, known now as Ho Chi Minh City, and took back the South from the anti-communist government backed by the United States.

Fifty years later, VUFO hosted delegations from the U.S. not to honor the government but to honor the individuals and organizations who opposed and helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.

“Vietnam is a small, once-impoverished country that had endured centuries of invasions by powerful foreign forces, often among the strongest empires of their time,” said Quynh Phan of VUFO. “These historical circumstances forged a unique national mindset: the Vietnamese people have always yearned for peace — to live, to rebuild and to coexist harmoniously with other nations.”

The participation of international delegations in the anniversary event is a testament to international friendship and solidarity, Phan said, though the U.S. government was absent from the celebrations.

“The U.S. ambassador was forbidden by the Trump administration to attend the commemoration of the end of the war,” said Frank Joyce, member of the National Council of Elders delegation. “It sends a message that is very consistent with this idea that we’re a nation that builds walls, and Vietnam is a nation that builds bridges.”

The U.S. is in the midst of tariff negotiations with Vietnam, threatening Vietnam’s economic goals as well as friendly relations between the countries.

“A lot of work on both sides has gone into building a healthy economic relationship between the United States and Vietnam,” Joyce added. “The future and status of that is, to state the obvious, very much up in the air at this point.”

The overlooked impact of the antiwar movement

Despite the uncertain future of the countries’ relationship, the legacy of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination lives on.

“I believe that, regardless of the country or circumstances, the deep nature of human beings, as well as of every nation, is always to strive for justice, freedom and a meaningful life,” Phan said. “The first essential step is to recognize that peace cannot be achieved through violence, nor can it be sustained if it is based solely on coercion or military force.”

To Joyce, coercion and military force is a cornerstone of U.S. history, rooted in a culture not of peace, but of conquest. That culture is what the antiwar movement was fighting against.

“One of the reasons that I was excited to participate in this delegation was to overcome the erasure of the history of the antiwar movement, because we did something very significant and very important,” Joyce said. “If you want to perpetuate the status quo, if you want to perpetuate U.S. hegemony, if you want to perpetuate U.S. militarism, you do not want younger people to know that there was even one time in U.S. history when there was mass opposition to a war.”

Previous Coverage

How anti-Vietnam War protests thwarted Nixon’s plans and saved lives

Indeed, one of the biggest inflection points in the antiwar movement came in 1969, when two of the largest protests the U.S. had ever seen pressured President Richard Nixon to cancel his plans for a massive escalation of the war, including the threat of nuclear warfare. In his own memoir years later, Nixon shared his realization that he could no longer carry out the escalation without turning his own country against him.

Large protests continued in the years leading up to the war’s end, from the 25,000 Mexican-Americans who marched in the Chicano Moratorium to the 4 million students who went on strike following the Kent State massacre.

The resistance to the war was intersectional, led by students, peace activists, housewives, faith leaders, labor unions, even the soldiers themselves. In 1971, 800 veterans hurled their war medals over a fence surrounding the Capitol.

The documentary film “The Movement and the ‘Madman’” which Levering was executive producer on, tells the story of this chapter in U.S. history.

“The lesson is that it’s very easy to become discouraged because, at least on the surface, it looks like all the protests and actions were not having any effect,” Levering said. “But over time, we learned that we really did have an effect.” 

From Vietnam to Palestine

Another people who were and are inspired by the Vietnamese struggle for liberation are the people of Palestine.

“We can’t look back on the Vietnamese struggle against Western colonialism without channeling what we see and learn from that history into the current struggle to end the horrifying genocide in Gaza and brutal apartheid in all of Palestine,” Wise said.

For Wise, going to Vietnam was about seeing decolonization in reality, and understanding how a people and a land heals and rebuilds after years of destruction and suppression. The land is still healing: 17 percent of the country is still contaminated and made unsafe by unexploded ordnance and Agent Orange.

Wise and many of her fellow delegates hope that the lessons of powerful, strategic nonviolent resistance in the U.S. to the imperialist war in Vietnam carry through to resistance in the U.S. to Israel’s war on Gaza. 

“I would like to see the mass tax resistance that organizations, like the War Resisters League, and everybody was trying to organize decades ago,” Wise said. “What does draft resistance look like for us?”

Wise suggests looking at the student divestment campaigns as one example: In the spring of 2024, students at over 100 universities across the U.S. set up encampments demanding their schools’ divestment from economic ties to Israel. 

Later that year, unions representing millions of workers in the U.S. demanded an end of U.S. military aid to Israel in acknowledgment of labor’s role in ending the genocide.

But as Israel escalates its indiscriminate destruction of Gaza and the West Bank — and as the hunger crisis mounts — it’s easy to get discouraged.

“Palestinians have the term ‘sumud,’ this steadfastness in the face against all odds, and I really saw that in Vietnam and in the history there,” Wise said. “I think for those of us in solidarity who are not directly impacted in the same way, I think it’s really important for us to study that steadfastness.”

Joyce took another hopeful lesson from his time in Vietnam. “Vietnam does remind us that occupation is not necessarily forever,” he said.

This article 50 years after the Vietnam War, the legacy of nonviolent resistance lives on was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/06/50-years-after-vietnam-war-legacy-nonviolent-resistance/