War in the Postwar: West Germany and Japan Protest the War in Indochina

Few events in the 1960s captured the radical imagination more than the Vietnam War. The projection of US military power in the Third World drew criticism from all corners of the globe – including America’s old World War II foes and contemporary allies – West Germany and Japan. In this presentation, I discuss the significance of the war in Indochina as an international symbol for the global anti-imperial imagination. With the advent of the Vietnam War, New Left and citizen groups in both nations began to see parallels with their own past and dangerous innovations on old fascist, imperialist, and militarist themes. At the same time, many also saw Vietnam as a kind of imperialist “experiment” – a testing ground for modern weapons and tactics for subduing the Third World to be used globally. As the war soured for the US, however, what began as a simple anti-colonial struggle eventually morphed into a dark global imperialist conspiracy for many radicals. Especially in the Japanese and West German anti-imperial mind, it was precisely the vicious but temporarily defeated Nazi and Militarist imperial powers planning to take the American place in Vietnam and around the world. Indeed, the combined moment of opportunity in US imperialism’s crisis in Vietnam and the rise of ambitious new imperial powers ultimately helped fuel of violently radical and internationally focused Red Army Factions. Here I argue that it was not simply the adoption of a Third Worldist image of the heroic guerrilla or a troubled national past that inspired tiny groups of international terrorists.