By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

May Day, May 1st, has long been a day of protest, and this year is no exception. Protests are happening across the country, against President Donald Trump and his attack on the social safety net, on immigrants, on people of color and the LGBTQ community, and more.

On May 1st, 1971, massive protests against the Vietnam war engulfed Washington, DC. Most participants were organized into affinity groups – small groups of trusted friends and associates considered more difficult for authorities to infiltrate and disrupt. One of those affinity groups included MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, historian Howard Zinn, and Pentagon consultant and former Marine officer Daniel Ellsberg. An estimated 12,000 people were arrested during the protests on that May Day and the days that followed.

Six weeks later, the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, the US government’s secret history of its involvement in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg was the whistleblower who leaked the classified papers, and that act of courage would change not only his life, but the trajectory of the war.

On April 30th, 1975, fifty years ago, the last of the US military and embassy officials fled Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, as North Vietnamese tanks rolled in. The war was officially over.

We interviewed Dan Ellsberg many times over the years on the Democracy Now! news hour. Our final interview with him was just weeks before he died. It aired, coincidentally, on May Day, 2023. He had just received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and, at 92, knew his time was short. Referring to the late 1960s, when he worked as a RAND consultant to the Pentagon and began secretly photocopying the Pentagon Papers, Dan Ellsberg recalled,

“The people I was working with in the government felt — everyone I could think of felt the war was hopeless, essentially. It was hopelessly stalemated, and there was no coming out. ‘Stalemate’ was taboo the year I came back from Vietnam with hepatitis, in 1967, after two years there. Lyndon Johnson had said, ‘No official is to use the word or hint at the word stalemate.’ And yet, that’s where it was. So, the war continued.”

Six weeks before Chomsky, Ellsberg and Zinn protested on May Day, 1971, Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam. As Saigon fell, Viet, then four years old, fled with his family to the United States. They were sent to a military camp in Pennsylvania with other refugees, then eventually settled in California. Viet Thanh Nguyen is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at the University of Southern California, USC. Now on tour for his new book, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other,” he joined us on Democracy Now!, reflecting on the Vietnam war and the long history of mistakes committed there by the United States:

“The mistakes American presidents have made started with Woodrow Wilson in 1919, refusing to listen to the appeal of a very young Ho Chi Minh in Paris, who had come to ask for American recognition of the Vietnamese quest for independence. From that mistake, we’ve had a series of mistakes over the past century, mostly revolving around the fact that the United States did not recognize Vietnamese self-determination. The US meddled in Vietnamese affairs, sided with the French in terms of their colonization, took over the French efforts after the French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh in 1954.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen continued, “If the United States had not interfered, I think the outcome in the long term would have been pretty much exactly the same, with Vietnam turning into a capitalist economy, which it pretty much is now, and the United States relying on Vietnam as an ally against China. The difference would have been that …at least 3 million Vietnamese people wouldn’t have died, and hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen concluded, “In 1975 the majority of Americans did not want to accept refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia…Fast-forward 50 years, I would say that the majority of Americans, if they thought about Southeast Asian Americans in the United States, probably generally have pretty positive images of people like us, because of our food and our ethnic enclaves and the like. And meanwhile, there are now new people to be afraid of. And this is an old cycle in American history.”

President Trump marked his 100th day in office this week, demonizing immigrants, defying court orders and wielding executive power with little restraint. Meanwhile, on May Day, over 1,000 separate protest events were planned from Bethel, Alaska to Madawaksa, Maine, and across the Atlantic in London and Paris.

This is not the first time a homegrown authoritarian has threatened the United States. The question now is whether the power of the people can rise to this moment.