Politics & Power Quote by William Kunstler

Kunstler is careful to credit history where institutions won’t: not to presidents, not to Congress, but to “young people” who forced a moral reckoning from the bottom up. The phrase “unofficial level” is doing heavy lifting. It’s an indictment of the official level - the sanctioned storylines, the press conferences, the polite abstractions that made Vietnam legible as “policy” instead of carnage. By carving out an “unofficial” national life, he suggests the country’s real conscience often lives outside its formal organs of power.

Calling it a “glorious moment” is a deliberate provocation, because he’s praising a moment defined by grief and rage. The glory, in his framing, isn’t victory on a battlefield; it’s refusal. That’s why the sentence pivots on “decided.” He’s describing an act of collective agency, a generational line crossed from anxious dissent to organized obstruction: protests, draft resistance, campus strikes, courtroom battles. “Had to stop” isn’t debate language; it’s emergency language.

Then he punctures the euphemisms. Vietnam becomes “the shedding of blood,” a phrase that drags sanitized rhetoric back to the body. “Tragic adventure in Southeast Asia” is acidly ironic - “adventure” echoes the way elites romanticize intervention, while “tragic” exposes the cost and the hubris. In context, Kunstler (a radical civil liberties lawyer tied to the era’s most contentious trials) is also defending legitimacy itself: if the system won’t halt a disaster, public disobedience becomes patriotism’s unofficial channel.