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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 30, No. 3. 1967.

[introduction]

Protest demonstrations by definition are not usually a rallying point for the hail - fellow - well - met sort of people. When President Johnson was eating his Official Lunch in Parliament Buildings last year, the demonstration milling around the lawns and flowerbeds out in front was mostly heated and volatile, peppered sometimes with little brushfire scuffles. This occasion turned up dissenters against very nearly everything over and above the basic Vietnam issue. It was all, of course, fully blown up in the uplifting dailies with that mediocrity which they invariably mistake for moral earnestness.

If ever there was a simple way to cloud over a few complex issues, the demonstrators seem to have found it. This particular display of feeling during Johnson's visit ended up, predictably enough, by turning into a pressure valve for all sorts of different anti-Americanisms and other anti-isms. Included among those present were, on the one hand, the serious intent proponents of a limitation to the destruction in Vietnam. If any man on earth has the power and initiative to change the pace of tilings in the war, that man must be President Johnson. So, the argument continues, give adequate strength to the arms of the opponents of his policies, as a demonstration possibly does, and the change in public and official thinking will lead to a change in the course of the war.