Pair of Anti-Vietnam War Pamphlets "Viet Nam - LOVE IT or LEAVE IT!" and "Peace or Four More Years of War?

1969. Archive of Two Anti-Vietnam War Pamphlets Critiquing Nixon-Era Policy, 1969-1972. Birmingham, AL and Cambridge, MA / Los Angeles, CA: Birmingham Moratorium Committee and Indochina Peace Campaign. Two pamphlets totaling 8 pages. A stark and emotionally charged pair of pamphlets confronting the human and economic cost of the Vietnam War, particularly under the administration of Richard Nixon and his South Vietnamese ally, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. Both documents highlight the structural violence wrought by U.S. imperialism through quotes, infographics, and personal testimonies. One pamphlet, issued by the Birmingham Moratorium Committee, presents a Marxist-inflected indictment of American capitalism's complicity in the war; the other, by the Indochina Peace Campaign, anchors its critique in the grief of a widow, counterposing Nixon's broken promises with devastating images of Vietnamese civilians and political prisoners.

[1] Birmingham Moratorium Committee. "Viet Nam - LOVE IT or LEAVE IT!" Birmingham, AL: [1969]. A four-page pamphlet structured around working-class economic critique. On the front page, black-and-white line art depicts a U.S. military cargo loader moving a casket-shaped crate labeled with stars, beneath the caption, "U.S. troops continue to be withdrawn from South Vietnam." It features a collage juxtaposing the Chase Manhattan logo with the silhouette of a prone soldier in Saigon. Alongside damning pull quotes from McNamara, Gen. Harkins, and Nixon ("...this may have been one of America's finest hours..."), it lists the GI toll from 1961 to 1966: "killed: 38,969; wounded & maimed: 254,947." The interior spread lays out the economic beneficiaries of the war-"Who Profits?"-stating, "only big business... corporate profits after taxes rose 91%." One cartoon labeled "The Free Enterprise System" depicts a caricatured Nixon shaking down an American taxpayer for the wealth-hoarding "Corporations and Upper Income Earners". The final page calls for a debate and mass rally on November 13-14, involving Alabama's senators and representatives, and denounces the war as a tool to "pay Vietnamese women 31¢ a day to make transistors (as they do now in South Korea)." The overall tone centers class exploitation, with a particularly Southern regional organizing base.

[2] Indochina Peace Campaign. "Peace or Four More Years of War?" Cambridge, MA / Los Angeles, CA: [1972]. Four-page pamphlet likely distributed in the lead-up to the 1972 election. The cover image-captioned "NBC-TV Dec. 12, 1972"-depicts a Vietnamese woman and barefoot child walking past a bombed-out village. Beneath it is a widow's testimony: "If they had gone ahead and signed the treaty as promised, my husband would be alive today with me and my children." The interior is a detailed exposé of the Nixon administration's duplicity in peace negotiations, asserting that "After two years of negotiations, all that remained was to settle one percent of a peace settlement." The Indochina Peace Campaign asserts that the U.S. deliberately sabotaged the Nine-Point Agreement by refusing to recognize the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), despite "warnings by Congressmen and Senators" and international outrage over the Christmas bombings. The pamphlet cites major media: "The U.S. supported regime in Saigon have ruled by suppressing all their opposition" (Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Vol. 1, p. 256), and includes documentation of 40,994 political assassinations under the Phoenix Program. A chilling image of children behind bars in Chanh Hung Prison accompanies these facts. The final call to action reads: "We have this choice: either we allow our government to prolong the rule of General Thieu, or we pressure it to sign the Agreement."

An ideologically diverse but thematically united pair of anti-war publications: one focused on working-class Southern economic outrage, the other on moral urgency and state-sponsored atrocity. Together, they demonstrate the breadth of opposition to the Vietnam War and the emotional, political, and class-based appeals that animated grassroots resistance across the U.S. Overall very good condition.