One, Two, Three, What Are We Fighting For?

Abstract

The anti-Vietnam War movement created a focus for the counterculture. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) was created by Trotskyists Ken Coates and Pat Jordan who ran a magazine called The Week and who refused to ally themselves with Labour Party entryists (people using the party for their own ends). In that sense they were also independent of the British Campaign for Peace (a CP front) or the Peace Conferences (a Soviet front). Young activists such as Tariq Ali (of IMG) and established cultural figures such as Vanessa Redgrave (of the Revolutionary Workers Party) were attracted to their anti-war/anti-American stance. Their hero was Che Guevara, who had dedicated his revolutionary life to ‘uniting [people] against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America’.¹