Film Review: The Vietnam War

It moved me and challenged me intellectually in many ways and at many levels, to see the movie and beyond. The film captures the richness and contradictions of that experience. Everyone should see it, reflect on it and all its dimensions. There is much to write (and much has already been written), in another context, about the movement of those years in general, such as their strengths and weaknesses, how participants saw what confronted and what they considered would solve the situation, why and how the system of segregation emerged after the Civil War and its relationship to the development of capitalism-imperialism. It should go into many of these issues. But now, at a time when the movement for revolution and the party as its leading core,

At that time, less than 7% of blacks in Mississippi had the right to vote; and that was an extreme aspect of an overall system of segregation and terror Mississippi constituted society in that period. A powerful element of the film are the people of Mississippi describing how inculcated the system of white supremacy in the population in almost every interaction with whites. Those who fought against all forms of that system experienced severe repression - in Mississippi in the early 1960s, to participate in this struggle were given brutal beatings, put in jail, those expelled from their work and home and very often they killed. In June 1963, Medgar Evers was murdered, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, in front of his house. However, while many blacks and whites young university sector is recognized and outraged by this repression, in effect did not impact the whole society. Heroic people working in Mississippi were making some progress, but usually could not do cede the system or could mobilize the masses on a large scale, and their activities were victims of murder without more

One proposal was to bring a thousand college students to registering voters - to have an impact on the masses of Mississippi and to a greater extent, influence the terms in society as a whole. The idea was that with the arrival of many people in Mississippi (besides the fact that the majority would be white) would push things to the next level, in which millions of people throughout the United States and around the world would be forced to pay attention. In the SNCC, many temperate grassroots organizers opposed this proposal, arguing that hundreds of university students (to repeat, mostly white) would have no idea how to work with people who were of a totally social sector different from yours, perhaps undid much of what pictures SNCC had achieved through painstaking efforts, and so on. But other members of SNCC argued that only a bold plan that would have the potential to affect the whole society to pay attention, and then change the terms. In the film, Charlie Cobb, one of the core SNCC people who opposed the proposal, at least initially, describes his confrontation with Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi brave woman who had endured beatings, threats and list black for daring to resist the segregation system. According to Cobb, she confronted him and asked him why he opposed the idea that the university came: "Well, Charlie," she says, "I was glad you came. What's so bad that more people come "In that