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50 YEARS AFTER THE VIETNAM WAR, THE LEGACY OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE
LIVES ON  
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Elena Novak
June 20, 2025
Waging Nonviolence
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_ At the 50th anniversary celebration of the end of the Vietnam War
in Ho Chi Minh City, U.S. antiwar activists drew lessons for stopping
the war on Gaza...“Vietnam does remind us that occupation is not
necessarily forever...” _

Thousands of anti-Vietnam demonstrators march through Oakland
California, Nov. 20, 1965, organized by the Vietnam Day Committee,
started at the University of California in Berkeley, en route to De
Fremery Park near the Oakland Army Terminal., Police estimated the
total number of Marchers at about 8000. VDC leaders had predicted
12,000 or more. (Bettmann photo // Waging Nonviolence)

 

“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
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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.

 
During the commemoration of the Reunification of Vietnam, a display
of white doves — a symbol of peace — were woven through the
parade. (Photo: WNV/Alyzza May)
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
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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
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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
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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.”

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
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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
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the Chicano Moratorium to the 4 million students who went on strike
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the Kent State massacre.

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

The documentary film “The Movement and the ‘Madman’
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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
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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
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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
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schools’ divestment from economic ties to Israel. 

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

But as Israel escalates
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indiscriminate destruction of Gaza and the West Bank — and as the
hunger crisis mounts
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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.

_[ELENA NOVAK is a Tennessee-based freelance journalist and member of
the National Writers Union. Their work has also appeared in Everyday
Feminism and YES! Magazine.]_

* Vietnam
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* Vietnam War
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* peace movement
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* US Peace Movement
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* U.S. history
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Ceasefire
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* Iran
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* Protest
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* non-violence
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* non-violent resistance
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