![]() By the mid-1960s, over half a million American troops were stationed in Vietnam. The United States (US) responded to the guerrilla war by sending 10 000 military ‘advisors’ to support South Vietnam, but progressively became more deeply involved. He thought “the answer to all war & was to simply not participate and encourage others not to participate and to think of ways that conflict could be resolved non- violently.”ĭuring the late 1950s, armed struggle had broken out in South Vietnam between the western-backed government and local communist insurgents. In hindsight, he took a much stronger, pacifist position than he would now. “First of all, that the Vietnam War was a completely unjust war,” Dalton says. The position he arrived at was personal and unrelated to religion. ![]() For Dalton, that led to “thinking more broadly about issues of war and participation in war, relationships to government and the power of governments to wage war and conscript people.” ![]() This was largely because many people considered World War Two to be a fight for democracy and freedom.įaced with the very real prospect of being drafted to fight, many young men began to question their attitude towards the war. The first time round, the public narrowly voted against conscription in two referenda held in 19.īy the time of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, many people supported the Government, conscription and the country’s involvement in the war. ![]() In December that year, the Menzies Liberal Government introduced selective National Service for 20-year-old men, something which the Hughes Labour Government had also tried to introduce during World War One. “It was a very small crowd down there demonstrating early in the morning as the first of those young men went in,” he recalls. By taking to the streets, people from various parts of the political spectrum challenged the policy positions of government and, in some cases, the very legitimacy and authority of the state itself.Īs a teenage high school student, Tony Dalton witnessed the first induction of Vietnam War conscripts at Melbourne’s Swan Street Barracks in 1964. ![]() The emergence of popular protest in Australia during the 1960s presented a fundamental challenge to government decisions and the way those decisions are made. ![]()
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