WAR IS OVER. If you want it.
The title of this blog serves as a tribute to John Lennon and Yoko Ono who posted that message on a billboard in Times Square, December 1969.
April 30, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee is marking the occasion with a webinar co-sponsored by WRL. Veterans for Peace is sponsoring a series of events also. Here we remember the end of the war with the sense of celebration from a June 30, 1975, mailing written by David McReynolds and sent to WRL members:
“you will find a ‘leaflet/poem’ which can be considered a memento of the end of the war. Some of you will enjoy it, some won’t. When the huge peace celebration took place in Central Park on May 11 the WRL wanted to hand out something not quite as ‘heavy’ with rhetoric – it proved very popular, with people coming by the office later to get extra copies. In any case, we were there, trying to say that the war was over but the struggle goes on.”
hey!
to happy hell today
with all hard politics
peddle the revolution tomorrow
the correct line this hour
is joy
stick a flower in your mimeo machine
or give it to the cop
smoke it up / drink it up / and
damn it
laugh!
we earned it
ten years of marchings/beatings/jailings
trapped in jails/armies/all night meetings
and for god sake don’t worry
about being serious!
we’ve a lifetime ahead
Rocky tumbles coming,
Fords to cross,
Kissinger goodby,
armies to disarm
banks to throw open,
jails to tear down.
tomorrow is time enough.
we’ve got a good life of work
standing right ahead.
but take this day off
miss the cell meeting tonight
skip the speaker who will explain it all
and take a friend to bed
instead
this was the end of the beginning
tonight is party time all over town
In the same mailing, David added:
“For graphic buffs. We have two striking posters on hand, each of historic value. One was designed by Lucia Vernarelli, an outstanding artist, and produced by WRL to be used in a final campaign to end funding for the Vietnam War. Who can complain that the war ended before the poster got into circulation! Ironically and joyously, events turned the poster into a collector’s item rather than one more in a long line of posters. This proved to be the final anti-war poster produced….”
“There is a larger poster, a black and white photograph, about 2′ x 3′, used to advertise the New York Peace Celebration May 11. Taken by Don Luce while he was in Hanoi, it shows a smiling woman with doves — from the Hanoi circus.”
David McReynolds (1929-2018) was WRL’s primary speaker, writer, and organizer during the U.S. war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos – from Sept. 21, 1963 (at the U.S. Mission to the UN) until the War Is Over rally in Central Park on May 11, 1975. That 1963 action was the first event of the League-initiated Committee of Public Conscience coalition set up to mobilize “timely demonstrations in crisis situations, on short notice.” Little did WRL know at the time that that “crisis situation” would become an all-consuming program of the League for 12 intense years catapulting WRL into the forefront of resistance to that war, which changed thousands of lives.
While on WRL staff he made three trips to Vietnam in 1966, 1971, and 1981. Photos from these trips are on the McReynolds Photos website. The 1981 trip was hosted by Don Luce.
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