U.S. Out of S.E. Asia Now! Stop Racism!: an SDS flyer for Inauguration Day, 1973

A typed 1973 flyer from Students for a Democratic Society in New York calls a national demonstration in Washington on Inauguration Day, 20 January. It lists five demands, opens its case with Curtis LeMay's "Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age," and calls U.S. bombing in Vietnam "GENOCIDE!"

The flyer

Typewritten body text, a headline, a numbered list, and two handwritten telephone lines at the bottom: this is a working organizer's sheet from Students for a Democratic Society in New York. It calls a "NATIONAL DEMO" in Washington for Inauguration Day, 20 January, and, in a boxed notice, a local march from the Columbia Sundial on 5 January. The archive notes that the spacing after commas is often missing in the original, and the transcription keeps it that way.

U.S. Out Of S.E. Asia Now!

STOP RACISM!

INAUGURATION DAY

JAN. 20 WASHINGTON, D.C. NATIONAL DEMO SDS

DEMANDS:

1.US OUT OF SOUTHEAST ASIA NOW,STOP THE RACIST BOMBINGS

2.RESCIND THE TALLMADGE AMENDMENT(FORCED WELFARE LABOR PLAN)

3.END THE WAGE FREEZE

4.STOP THE GOVERNMENT THEORISTS-MOYNIHAN,BANFIELD,ETC.

5.SUPPORT THE SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

"Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age,"said General Curtis LeMay about the Vietnamese people a few years ago.We thought it could never happen.The present crew of U.S. rulers prove us wrong.More bombs are dropped over Vietnam every day than were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki all together.The Vietnamese people are the pawns in the U.S. government's racist drive for economic and political control of Southeast Asia. We call this GENOCIDE!

[...]

One word, stretched

The archive tags name-calling, and the word doing it is "GENOCIDE." The flyer applies it first to the bombing of Vietnam, with LeMay's line as its lead evidence. Then it widens the term: "This genocide doesn't stop with the war in Vietnam,but it is seen in every aspect of the U.S.government's policies abroad and here." The paragraphs that follow turn to the Attica prosecutions, the wage freeze and the deaths at Southern University.

Some of the flyer's statements are factual claims that a reader could test: that more bombs fell on Vietnam each day than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki together, that Rockefeller "ordered the cops to murder prisoners and hostages," and that "2 black students were murdered" at Southern University. The record transcribes these claims without checking them. Stretching one charged word from a war to "every aspect" of policy at home makes each separate charge harder to weigh on its own terms.

Dissent in the open

The flyer is openly signed. It names SDS, a meeting place and a time, and gives two first names with telephone numbers. A national demonstration on Inauguration Day, called by name and advertised on paper, is the kind of speech the First Amendment protects whatever one thinks of its arguments.

The Vietnam War messaging hub covers what private American groups on both sides said back to the government, and its gallery includes SDS. The other side of the argument, from 1969, is Tell It to Hanoi, a Young Americans for Freedom poster. From the same year as this flyer, VIVA's wanted poster argued about the missing.