He Was Anti-War

Ginsberg participated in decades of political protest against the War on Drugs and everything from the Vietnam War.

Ginsberg contributed to the anti-war pamphlet “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority”, which was distributed to draft dodgers in 1967 by the radical intellectual group RESIST. Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, William Sloane Coffin, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Lowell, and Norman Mailer were other signatories and RESIST members. Ginsberg pledged to withhold taxes as a form of anti-Vietnam War protest when he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest”, pledge in 1968. Ginsberg later supported the War Tax Resistance initiative, which engaged in and promoted tax resistance as a form of anti-war protest.

Ginsberg's poem “September on Jessore Road” highlighted the suffering of Bengali refugees brought on by the 1971 Genocide and demonstrates his steadfast resistance to “imperial politics” and “persecution of the powerless” as defined by literary critic Helen Vendler.