Rapid Response

In the spring of 1965, when serious U.S. involvement in Vietnam had been building for more than a year, Howard Zinn addressed an antiwar rally in Boston's Copley Square. "We had maybe 100 people," says Zinn, an emeritus historian at Boston University. Two weeks ago, he found himself in Copley Square again, speaking this time before a crowd gathered to oppose any U.S. military response to the terrorism of Sept. 11. And this time, though it was only a few days after George W. Bush first uttered the words "act of war," more than a thousand people had turned out for the protest. "The antiwar movement," says Zinn, "has sprung up more quickly than the war."

Exactly. Even before the first American shots have been fired, there is a rapidly emerging peace movement making pre-emptive strikes against military action. In churches and meeting halls, but especially on the college campuses that were centers of antiwar energy in the 1960s, Americans unnerved by the prospect of war have organized so swiftly to oppose it that they don't always have a name for their own organization. Two weeks ago, Judy Miller, 20, helped mobilize other students at Yale as part of a nationwide Day of Action marked by teach-ins and demonstrations at more than 100 U.S. campuses. But her group hasn't yet had time to decide whether to use the term antiwar in its name. "The idea of being peace activists is very new to us," she says. "We're not all sure if we're opposed to war in all its forms."

It's not hard to understand why a peace movement got off the ground so quickly, even in the face of a TIME/CNN poll showing that 86% of Americans favor military action. Through websites and group e-mail listservs, antiwar activists have reached campus veterans of campaigns for a "living wage" or against foreign sweatshops, and have tapped into the fully primed energies of the anti-globalization movement. After the World Bank and International Monetary Fund canceled their joint meeting in Washington last weekend, demonstrations long planned against that event were refashioned into antiwar protests and drew thousands to the capital on Saturday.

At this very early stage, the peace movement is still without cultural trappings--no songs of its own, no symbols, no cultural heroes. For now, at least, the model of the old peace movement hangs over the new one. At a teach-in last week at Columbia University, Danny Katch, 26, gave a 25-minute lecture on the lessons of Vietnam for today's activists. Lesson No. 1: The movement helped end the war. In fact, not many Vietnam-era lessons apply automatically. A major accusation against the U.S. in the '60s--that it was the aggressor in Southeast Asia--is not so easy to invoke this time, when any U.S. military action will follow a terrorist attack carried out on American soil. And the argument that the mass murder of Sept. 11 was brought on by injustices of American foreign policy is hard to credit when Osama bin Laden is a man whose ideal of social organization is not exactly Denmark.