The Squirrel Took My Ice Cream

I have a lot of respect for Daniel Larison of The American Conservative, whose writing is useful not only as a reminder that not all conservatives are feral hydrophobes but for its own sake as a counter to the misinformation spread by mainstream media.  But sometimes I disagree with him, though even in this case his main thesis is basically correct - it just doesn't go far enough.

In a piece that went up on Monday, "Remembering the Invasion of Panama", Larison declares:

The invasion of Panama was the first regime change war of the last thirty years. No one realized it at the time, but it marked the start of an era of hyperactive militarism that has not ended yet. It is the first U.S. war that I can remember, and it is sobering to consider that the U.S. has been engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world almost every year since then.... It was the first in a series of wars against small, outmatched countries that posed no threat to the United States.

Um... no.  Those first two sentences are strange.  It is true, I suppose, that Panama was the first regime change war of the last thirty years; but it was also the latest in a long series of such wars that the US waged from at least the end of the Indian wars.  A better point to place the beginning would be the 1898 War with Spain, which was a war of regime change that set off a wave of hyperactive militarism that has not ended yet.  I suppose that that wave includes the Indian wars and the Mexican war and the American Civil War too, but the point is that the US has been engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world for most of its history.  (Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire [Farrar Straus Giroux, 2019] fills in the gaps very well.)  But also, think of Reagan's invasion of Grenada, eight years before Bush's invasion of Panama. 

There was a brief interlude between the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the attack on Grenada, thanks to what is known as the "Vietnam Syndrome," when American troops were supposedly not on the ground except as "advisors," but even then the US was underwriting and supporting escapades like the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, starting the year we left Vietnam.  As Madeleine "YASSS SLAY QUEEN" Albright complained to Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

But notice the closing sentences of the paragraph I quoted.  In fact, the invasion of Panama was the latest of a series of wars against small outmatched countries that posed no threat to the United States.  It's why Panama was picked, as Grenada was, because it would let Our Boys get the taste of foreigners' blood at minimal risk to themselves.  Korea and Vietnam were also small outmatched countries that posed no threat to us; as with Noriega in Panama, the threat had to be manufactured.  The difference was that the Korean and Vietnamese wars turned out not to be the cakewalks our rulers expected them to be, which is why they now refer to them as "tragic blunders" and the like.

Larison reminds his readers of how terrible the US invasion was for Panamanians, and that's valuable and I'm glad he did it.  I'm quibbling about the way he frames it, as some sort of watershed; I don't think it was.

Note: The title of this post comes from here.

The Care and Feeding of Propaganda

A site called HowStuffWorks posted a "quiz" about the history of the Vietnam War, which I saw on Facebook this morning.  Usually I ignore these things, but I was curious to see what kind of history they were peddling, so I clicked through and answered the first question.

At first I was pleased to see that HSW knew that the war began before the Kennedy Administration, but everything else here is wrong.  Spectacularly wrong, in fact.

Exactly when "the Vietnam War" began depends partly on how you define the war.  Americans tend to think of it in terms of US troops on the ground, but it makes a lot more sense to go back to 1945, when the Vietnamese declared their independence from Japanese occupation and French colonialism.  You could probably trace it back at least to the 1800s, when French seized control of "Indochina," a blanket term for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and probably even farther back than that.  Beginnings in history are generally hard to pin down.  But as far as US involvement goes, 1945 is a convenient and not inaccurate starting point.

The French wanted to keep its possessions, and the US, not without some controversy, decided to back imperialism over self-determination.  Anti-communism was a handy excuse, since the Viet Minh, the most significant resistance force, was led by Communists.  The Vietnamese, who had fought with the Allies against the Japanese, resisted.  The fighting escalated, and by 1954 the US was giving France a billion dollars a year in military aid.

I can't really make sense of HowStuffWorks's official answer.  It seems to assume that Vietnam was already divided into North and South before 1954, which isn't so.  That division was a consequence of the truce line drawn in at the Geneva Conference later that year, and the truce line became a border when the US client dictator in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, officially refused to hold the referendum required by the truce settlement, and South Vietnam became a separate state.

The North did not attack the South, however, until 1960, when Hanoi finally admitted that the Geneva agreements were a dead letter.  Before 1960 the fighting in the South involved Southerners, not all of them Communists, resisting the Diem dictatorship without the support of the North.  US aid to Diem's regime increased incrementally throughout that period, including weaponry and US military "advisers," officially just guys from the US government and there to help but in reality getting more and more involved in the fighting.  (This was typical of Eisenhower's foreign policy in Southeast Asia; see also the use of American forces in Indonesia, for example.)  In 1963 Diem began to lose his will to fight, so the US had him removed and largely took over that side of the fighting, thus commencing "the War in Vietnam" as most Americans think of it today.

So, as I say, HowStuffWorks got the history spectacularly wrong with the first question in its quiz.  I don't feel like continuing, or checking out their quiz about the Korean War.  But this is a reminder not to be too dismissive of most people's ignorance of history; it takes some work to find accurate accounts, and most people would have no idea how to begin looking for them.  Even events in people's own lifetimes are confusing, especially if they happened when one was young.  (Last week a student op-ed piece appeared the university newspaper, which exhibited utter confusion over the Birther controversy.  My scorn was tempered slightly when I remembered that the writer was still in grade school when Obama was first elected President.  It's not an excuse, but it's a partial explanation.  I might write more about that piece.)  The overall history of US involvement in Vietnam isn't all that murky, but it still involves battered US pride, so it will continue to be distorted.  We can expect the same about the War in Terror, but then you knew that, didn't you?

The Birth of Propaganda

I had a very interesting exchange on Facebook the other day.  Someone had posted a link to a PBS News Hour story about six US soldiers killed, and two more wounded, by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.  Judy Woodruff reported, "Defense Secretary Carter said the Bagram attack is a 'painful reminder' of the dangers U.S. troops face in Afghanistan."

I regret the deaths, though they're far fewer than the "More than 90 Afghan soldiers [who] were killed in Helmand in two days of fighting" at around the same time, to say nothing of the Afghan civilians we're killing with abandon.  But we could get out of Afghanistan. We have no business being there. There's no good reason for US troops to "face danger" there.

I said so in a comment, and got this reply:

Actually, we did have business there. We were part of a UN assistance mission that the was sent in to help the Afghan government deal with the Taliban. We sent additional troops, with the UN's blessing, at around the same time in order to go after bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan at the time. The operations merged and the UN is still there, according to their website. So is the Taliban and they sound like they're just as bad as they were 20 years ago.

That's quite a nice distortion of history, and it's not even ancient history.  It was written by someone around my age, who's old enough to remember the actual course of events.  Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was his own decision, based on the pretense that the Taliban were responsible for the September 11 attacks because some of the al-Qaeda leadership were based there.  The Taliban had offered to extradite Bin Laden if the US provided evidence of his guilt, an offer the US spurned.  Who did these ragheads think they were, calling for due process?  The United States is above all law.  The UN was brought in to ratify his agenda, though the US' main allies were the Northern Alliance, Islamist fanatics so vicious that the Taliban had at first been welcomed as liberators when they defeated them.  (The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was founded in March 2002, after the US invasion.) The US installed Hamid Karzai, whose government is the one the other commenter had in mind that needed help "deal[ing] with the Taliban," but he only came to power after the Taliban had been defeated.  At which point the Bush regime lost most interest in Afghanistan and Bin Laden as Bush moved to invade Iraq.  Despite the Obama regime's escalation of the war after his election, the Taliban have gained back much of their territory and their influence.  True, they are as bad as they were twenty years ago, but the takeover of Afghanistan by Islamists in the first place was largely the work of the US, which supported them in overthrowing Afghanistan's Soviet-backed secular government and then fighting against the Soviet forces who really were asked in by the government for help against the jihadists.  Even after Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops, that secular government managed to fight on against the Islamists for some time before it fell.

I pointed out to the other commenter that her fantasy version of history was rather like the distortion involved in the US invasion of Vietnam.  The more I thought about it, I realized that it was virtually cut from the same mold.  The propaganda justification for the US invasion of Vietnam had been that the government of Free South Vietnam, under attack by Communists in the pay of Moscow and "Peiping," had asked for our help to defend Vietnamese freedom.  This was a complete lie: the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem was installed by the US in 1954 to keep an anti-Communist foothold there, and US support including weapons, money, and American "military advisors" had grown steadily ever after, years before North Vietnam got involved after 1960.  Before then, the rebellion against the Saigon regime was almost entirely fought by Southerners, with no external support.  When Diem finally became interested in negotiating with those rebels, the US had him removed -- so much for the claim that we were standing by our allies.

Out of curiosity I looked at the other commenter's own Facebook page.  One of her recent posts claimed that Thanksgiving celebrates "the arrival of a group of people who were fleeing religious persecution. They were refugees, just like the people from Syria who are fleeing violence and oppression, looking for a new lives in new lands."  Thanksgiving isn't about the arrival of the Pilgrims, it's about their survival, celebrating a successful harvest.  But the Pilgrims were not refugees: they were refugees in the Netherlands, where they lived before they decided to try the New World, but they had freedom of religion there.  What they wanted was a place where they could be the persecutors, and they got one -- ironically enough from the same British government that repressed them at home. And there the parallel breaks down totally, for the Syrian refugees have not been granted land in the US by the Assad regime to start their own colony.  I credit the lady for having her heart in the right place and defending the acceptance of refugees in this country, but her distortions of history are not innocent.

It's hard for me to understand how someone who lived through the past fifteen years as an adult could have produced such a garbled version of US involvement in Afghanistan, but I'm not really surprised either.  And maybe "garbled" is the wrong word: her version was coherently written, it was just false.  I'm mostly intrigued that the propaganda narrative she'd absorbed was structured so much like the one used to justify the war in Vietnam, though I suppose most invaders and aggressors have used similar stories.  The United States often has.

Our Childlike, Emotional Leaders

For the past couple of days I've been reading David F. Schmitz's Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965 (University of North Carolina, 1999).  The larger picture of US support for right-wing dictatorships around the world is of course not news to me, but Schmitz provides lots of detail drawn from internal documents, and I'm learning a lot.

One place where I disagree with Schmitz is his choice of the word "paternalistic" to describe US elite attitudes toward the citizens (including political and other leaders) of other countries.  He evidently prefers it to the more inflammatory but still accurate "racist," but if the shoe fits, it should be worn.  So, for example:

President Truman, as his most recent biographer, Alonzo Hamby, has shown, might have "remained a racist only in the narrowest sense of the word and was considerably less so than the the vast majority of white Americans in the years after World War II."  Still, he used words such as "nigger" in private to describe blacks and held to the racial categories and stereotypes of his youth.  He found Latin Americans to be, "like Jews and the Irish, 'very emotional' and difficult to handle" [148].

I don't know that much about Harry S. Truman, so maybe I should look at Hamby's biography and see on what basis he thinks that Truman was "considerably less racist" than his peers in his day, or what "narrow" sense of the word "racist" he has in mind.  It certainly sounds to me like he was racist in a fairly broad sense of the word, not just for his use of "nigger" but for his adherence to racist categories and stereotypes.

Schmitz goes on:

State Department records are riddled with comments such as how Guatemalan leaders were known for their "mental deviousness and difficulty thinking in a straight line," or that trying to reason with Latin Americans was "rather like consulting with babies as to whether or not we should take candy away from them."  Descriptions of Latin Americans as children were common.  Spruille Braden opined that "our Latino friends were playing at economics, just as a child will pretend in his games to be something he isn't and has no immediate possibility of becoming" [149].

This view of foreigners -- just about all non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners, in fact -- as childlike fits the word "paternalistic," but it is also racist, since it casts whole populations as inferior by nature, and despite a certain amount of pious rhetoric to the effect that someday these childlike people may be fit to govern themselves, that day was always safely in the indefinite future.  The same rhetoric characterized a good deal of foot-dragging by whites about people of African descent (who'd always been stereotyped as childish) in the US itself.

The same theme recurs throughout Thank God They're On Our Side:

[FDR held] that the Vietnamese, along with many other Asians, were not yet prepared for self-government.  "With the Indo-Chinese," Roosevelt noted, "there is a feeling that they ought to be independent but are not ready for it.  They needed to be educated in the same manner that the Filipinos were.  In that case, "it took fifty years for us to do it."  He agreed with Queen Wilhelmina of Holland that because of Dutch rule the "Javanese are not quite ready for self-government, but very nearly," and would soon gain independence.  In contrast was the case of New Guinea, where the people were described as the "lowest form of human life in the world, their skulls have least developed."  They were probably "two hundred years behind the rest of the world" [169].

Notice, incidentally, Schmitz's use of the blind passive in "the people were described as..."  Why not say "Roosevelt described them as ..."?  Is it because he wants to dodge the unpleasant reality of FDR deploying such embarrassingly crude scientific racism?  It also occurs to me that if the people of New Guinea were "two hundred years behind the rest of the world" in 1944, when Roosevelt said this, that would put them in 1744, when American colonialists were moving rapidly toward independence.  You wouldn't think that was so backward.

The reference to the Philippines there is ironic, as is a 1959 remark by Dwight Eisenhower that "If we had not trained the Filipinos in democracy for forty years, the Philippines would now have become a military dictatorship" (225).  In 1972, that dream became a reality as Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law.

Again:

Invoking the standard paternalistic views that guided policy toward Latin America throughout the century, the secretary of state [John Foster Dulles] argued that the "most significant fact that throughout most of the world and certainly in Latin America there had been in recent years a tremendous surge in the direction of popular governments by peoples who have practically no capacity for self-government and indeed are like children in facing this problem" [220].

And so on.  But as I read on, the more I was struck by how childlike and emotional the US leaders were.  They were suckers for dusky men in uniform, from Benito Mussolini, who "was seen [by US diplomats and their bosses] as a moderate and the only reliable implementer of the policies essential to order, economic recovery, and development" (39) --

American businessmen were no less enthusiastic about Mussolini and his government.  Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan remarked after his first meeting with Mussolini that the Italian dictator was “a very upstanding chap.”  He wrote later that Italy was “going to be a great country despite its very limited resources.”  Otto Kahn, of Kuhn, Loeb, praised the recent change of government in Italy at the 1925 meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce.  “Parliamentary wrangling and wasteful impotent bureaucracy” had been replaced by an “efficient and energetic … government,” which had united Italy in “a spirit of order, discipline, hard work, patriotic devotion and faith.”  Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation wrote to Thomas Lamont after visiting Italy, “I think, were we in Italy, we would all be with Mussolini.”  And Judge Elbert Gary of United States Steel remarked while in Rome in 1923 that “we have here a wonderful renaissance of youthful energy and activity.  A masterhand has, indeed, strongly grasped the hand of the Italian state.”  Gary added that he felt “like turning to my American friends and asking them whether we, too, need a man like Mussolini” [40].

-- to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza --

[Former Secretary of War Colonel Henry L. Stimson] immediately liked Somoza, who sought to ingratiate himself with Stimson.  The colonel described Somoza as a "very frank, friendly, likeable young liberal" and noted that, because he spoke fluent English, Somoza "impresses me more favorably than almost any other" person.  So impressed was Stimson that he had Somoza act as his interpreter for the next few days while he finished the agreement [53].

-- to Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar --

Dean Acheson, in particular, was impressed by Salazar ... In his memoirs, Acheson described Salazar as one of the few people he was immediately drawn to upon first meeting.  He had come to power "to run a country that for twenty years had been sinking into economic chaos and political anarchy."  Acheson recalled that he saw Salazar not as "a dictator in his own right as Stalin was, but a dictator-manager employed and maintained by the power of the army ... "A convinced libertarian -- particularly a foreign one -- could understandably disapprove of Salazar.  But," Acheson wrote, "I doubt that Plato would have done so" [164].

(A Portuguese military philosopher-king!)

-- to South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem:

Senator [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy praised Diem for making South Vietnam "the cornerstone of the Free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike," while Mike Mansfield argued that the fact "that a free Viet Nam exists at the present time ... is the result of the efforts of Mr. Diem."  The Saturday Evening Post referred to Diem as the "mandarin in a sharkskin suit who's upsetting the Red timetable," and Life magazine, with no apparent sense of irony, justified Diem's refusal to hold the unification elections [mandated by the 1954 Geneva Accords] on the grounds that Ho [Chi Minh] would win.  "Diem saved his people from this agonizing prospect simply by refusing to permit the plebiscite and thereby he avoided national suicide."  The New York Times titled its 1957 profile on Diem "An Asian Liberator."  The paper of record applauded his work to "save his country from falling apart" and how he tirelessly toured the countryside so that the people would get to know him and perhaps like him more than they did Ho Chi Minh."  This effort was paying off as the "Vietnamese learn to respect their new Government and their new leader" [208].

Didn't the people already know their new leader?  They could hardly have done so, because Diem, "a Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist nation... had spent the entire war for independence in Europe and the United States" (205).  This material should also be borne in mind the next time someone laments the glorious days when American media were "adversary."  Not in the 1950s they weren't.  Or the 1960s.  But I digress.

Of course our leaders were often uneasily aware that our clients weren't always as docile as they would like.  Mussolini was an obvious case, but in Latin America especially they just didn't seem to know when they'd worn out their welcome.  When Rafael Trujillo's regime in the Dominican Republic began to look shaky, for example, the Eisenhower administration began looking discreetly for someone who could be "'a forceful leader,' albeit not necessarily as extreme as the generalissimo" (229).  Unfortunately, the generalissimo had killed or imprisoned anyone who might represent a threat to his tenure, and the respectable elements of Dominican society weren't about to stick their necks out signalling their availability to the US.  The American embassy warned that "the people are not now politically educated to accept democracy as it exists in the United States" (ibid.), hardly surprising since the US and Trujillo had considered any opposition to Trujillo to be communism, not democracy.  Trujillo refused covert US entreaties to step down voluntarily, even if he got to take his money with him.  (In the end he was assassinated by elements of his own army, none of whom proved strong enough to take his place.)  This is why there's an endless litany of complaints by apologists for US domination that our clients are sneaky, clever, irrational, corrupt, and so on.  As James Traub put it in The Freedom Agenda (FSG, 2008), "Some leading members of the [Filipino] elite absorbed the ethos of self-reliance and equality; others learned how to parrot it back to their gullible masters" (28-29).

The US elites Schmitz discusses and quotes kept saying that American "intervention" had to be avoided if at all possible.  I suppose by that word they meant sending in the Marines, because they used it even when they were intervening assiduously, not just through behind the scenes diplomacy but through covert action.  Negotiations with the local military about overthrowing a government, sending a naughty general into exile (with his Swiss bank accounts intact), training the police and army in American institutions (which Schmitz doesn't mention that I noticed), giving and taking away military or supposedly non-military aid and loans as a regime came into or out of favor -- none of this seems to have counted in their minds as "intervention," let alone interference.  After the US-supported ("contacts with the military were increased and planning begun for the overthrow of the government" [271]) coup that overthrew Brazil's President João Goulart in 1964, for example, President Lyndon Johnson "asked why the Brazilian Congress could not just make the president of the Congress, Ranieri Mazzili, the legal president pro tem to provide the cover of legitimacy, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk responded that 'Ambassador Gordon was using the resources available to him to encourage Brazilian legislators to do just this'" (276).  They merely took it for granted that the US had the right to decide what happened in any country in our sphere of influence anywhere in the world; any objection to US domination was, by definition, communism, to be put down by any means necessary.

When Congress began to question these policies, its efforts were met with protests that are still familiar.  Gerald Ford, for instance, "wrote [Senator Frank] Church at the end of October 1975 to urge the committee not to make public its findings on assassinations and covert actions.  The president asserted that any public disclosure of allegations on the overthrow of foreign governments would 'result in serious harm to the national interest'" (297).  Oh yes, we've heard that one recently.

Schmitz argues in his conclusion that "U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships was always morally questionable.  Because American leaders used moral arguments and appeals to gain public support for their Cold War policies, those policies can be fairly judged on moral terms.  The United States has to accept varying degrees of responsibility for aiding in the oppression of people around the world by supplying economic assistance, military goods, and political legitimacy to a large number of despots … Worse, the United States often was responsible for the very existence of many of these governments and undermined genuine efforts at reform, self-determination, and democratic change around the world" (308).  Another conclusion that I think emerges from his book is that despite their arrogant assurance that they were the best and the brightest, exemplars of the noble Anglo-Saxon race that is naturally qualified to dictate to the lower orders, our leaders have consistently shown that they aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.  That's another thing that hasn't changed.

Propagandists and Anti-Propagandists

The most useful part (for me, anyway) of Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe (Seven Stories Press, 2013), another book of interviews with Noam Chomsky, though by Laray Polk rather than Chomsky regular David Barsamian, is the appendices, which take up almost the last third of the book.  Appendix 1, for instance, is a declassified 1945 dialogue between two US Army brass who want to squelch reports from Japan about the effects of A-bomb radiation on survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima.  They're especially indignant because one of the sources is an American, not just the "Jap scientists" they can easily dismiss as "propagandists."  Appendix 4 is an open letter from a Marshallese magistrate to the US military doctor who'd been waltzing in irregularly to study the effects of radiation from nuclear testing on the islanders in 1970s.  "We've never really trusted you," says the writer.  "So we're going to invite doctors from hospitals in Hiroshima to examine us in a caring way" (105).  There's also material on the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in the early 1980s, and more I haven't gotten to yet. 

Readers unfamiliar with Chomsky's political writings could do worse than begin with this book, especially those with a special interest in the environment.  Since Chomsky is in his eighties now and has been concerned with politics as a dissident and writer for more than half a century, he provides a long view that shows the continuity in US policy and practice over that period.  For example:

It should be remembered that when he escalated the attack on South Vietnam fifty years ago from support for a murderous client state [installed by his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower] to outright US aggression, President Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons to destroy ground cover and also food crops, a crime in itself, even apart from the dreadful scale and character of the consequences, with deformed fetuses to this day, several generations down the line in Saigon hospitals as a result of persistent genetic mutations [36].

This conversation took place before President Obama's manufactured indignation over the use of chemical weapons in Syria this fall, which nearly led to another war in the Middle East.  It's good to be reminded that the US' own record with chemical warfare would (if we applied our own standards to ourselves) require a "humanitarian intervention," or invasion, to clean up our act.

Chomsky also talks about the symbiosis between academia, the military, the government, and corporate interests in the post-WWII period, which fits with David F. Noble's account in Forces of Production.

The actual US economy since the colonies has relied quite substantially on government intervention.  This goes right back to the earliest days of independence, and for advanced industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  The American system of mass production, interchangeable parts, quality control, and so on -- which kind of astonished the world -- was largely designed in government armories.  The railroad system, which was the biggest capital investment and, of course, extremely significant for economic development and expansion, was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was too complicated for private business [56].

Later Polk quotes a right-wing Christian radio pundit who said that Christian voters "would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated [!] by a real intellectual... He [Newt Gingrich] would tear Obama's head off."  Chomsky comments:

When we look over the record of famous debates, we find that they are not "won" on the basis of serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally.  Rather, their outcome turns on Nixon's five o'clock shadow, Reagan's sugary smile, lines like "have you no shame" or "you're no Jack Kennedy," etc.  That's not surprising.  Debates are among the most irrational constructions that humans have developed.  Their rules are designed to undermine rational interchange.  A debater is not allowed to say, "That was a good point.  I'll have to rethink my views." ... I don't know who Richard Lund is, and if he regards Gingrich as a "real intellectual," I don't see much reason to explore further [68].

Here I part company with Chomsky somewhat.  I think he's using "debate" in a narrow, tendentious way, referring to public spectacles like the candidates' debates staged during the American presidential campaigns.  Maybe we need another word for those performances, because it's true, they have nothing to do with "serious argument, significant evidence, or intellectual values generally."  They're gladiatorial combat, political sports events for people who are watching to cheer on their team, not to learn anything.  But that's not all there is to debate, as Chomsky knows, being a fierce, even bloodthirsty debater himself, whether about politics or about linguistics.  I have the same difference with him over his use of the word "intellectual," which he uses to refer to paid functionaries of the state and of business, not people who are interested in working with ideas.  But as with so many terms, I'm not going to harp too much on terminology: it's not the words but what they refer to, and there I agree about the function of argument and the proper role of those interested in ideas and evidence.

War Is Peace

Today was Martin Luther King Jr. day, and at least here in Bloomington, King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 4, 1967 got its fair share of attention. The community radio station broadcast the entire speech on Alternative Radio this morning, and Bring It On, the African-American affairs program, referred to it. I've often quoted the part where King referred to the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," but I hadn't listened to or read the entire speech before, and I'm glad I finally did.

King presented an accurate account of US involvement in Vietnam, which I suspect would still be news to most Americans. For example:

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

But, as he said, King was just as concerned with American troops as with the Vietnamese:

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

He also addressed this earlier in the speech, in words that are still painfully relevant today.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

I don't know what King would say about our current President and our present wars if he were alive today. Some people online were sure he would be excoriating President Obama; I'm not so sure of that. King privately hated President Kennedy, and he wasn't terribly fond of President Johnson either; but publicly he was diplomatic. I don't know what he'd think of Obama, or what balance he'd find between satisfaction at the US electing a black President on the one hand, and disapproval of Obama's doing exactly what King had spoken against in 1967. (I admit, I'm sure that he would disapprove.)

What I do know is Obama's contempt for King. (Compare his praise of Ronald Reagan.) In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

And you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Funny thing, though: I don't see King condemning defensive violence in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, though he didn't exactly endorse it either. He recognized that the US was the aggressor, and that the Vietnamese were defending themselves against it. He hoped for a negotiated settlement, but he recognized that the Vietnamese had good reason to distrust the US, and that the US was the principal obstacle to peace in Vietnam.

The real trouble with Obama's remarks here is that his wars are not defending the US: they are wars of aggression. Nor do they protect us: they make the world less safe, giving people some very good reasons to want to attack us. His succeeding account of post-WWII American foreign policy is equally dishonest, though this line is entertaining: "To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." Except for the United States, of course. If our wars were really "self-defense," I'd expect King to regard them as compassionately as he regarded the resistance of the Vietnamese.

In his Nobel speech Obama continued:

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

There's more in the speech along the same lines. (Whatever It Is I'm Against It dissected it mercilessly.) So: could a non-violent movement halt American violence around the world? I don't know; nonviolent resistance in Iraq did pressure Bush into permitting elections there, but American forces are still there, though they've mostly been replaced with mercenaries. Obama's lack of awareness that his justification for military violence also justifies defensive violence against his regime is a sign of how out of touch with reality he had already become within a year in office, and he hasn't gotten any better since then.

Roy Edroso has a post at alicublog about rightbloggers who observe MLK Day (a day on ... not a day off!) by trying to prove that King was really a conservative and therefore The Blacks should vote Republican. Judging from his examples, their heart really isn't in it anymore. A commenter, Mr. Wonderful, observed that there's "something so sad and desperate about their endless efforts to 'prove' that X--a show, a star, a song, a movie, a new entree at Outback, a floor wax, a new chewing gum-- 'is really conservative.'" True dat, but is it any sadder than liberals' conviction that King was a liberal, or that Barack Obama is a progressive?

That's Not the Way It Is, Actually

Walter Cronkite, the doyen of broadcast news anchormen, has died at the age of 92. The response has been predictable, from eulogy among liberals to vituperation on the farther right, conveniently summarized by Roy Edroso. You can also find denunciations of "Che" Cronkite the far-left "surrendercrat" in comments at the liberal sites. (I take it that the "-crat" in "surrendercrat" is meant to imply that Cronkite was a card-carrying Democrat, though in fact he wasn't -- according to the New York Times obit, he was so friendly with Dwight Eisenhower that John Kennedy, no liberal himself, took for granted that Cronkite must be a Republican.)

Me, I'm somewhere between these extremes. I was eleven years old in 1962, when Cronkite became the face of CBS Evening News. I think I remember when the program was expanded from fifteen minutes to half an hour each night. I barely remember the man himself, though; he was so bland, so white-bread, that he was virtually invisible, which I suppose was his intention: to be "balanced," "objective," as a newsman should. His closing line for each broadcast, "That's the way it is," summed up that ethos neatly. Eric Sevareid, the program's resident pundit from 1964 to 1977, was more memorable, just because he was so annoying.

It was only later that I began to have any opinion on Cronkite's news coverage. Roy Edroso is vexed with a rightblogger who prefers "to have a big, giant, sloppy mish-mash of information available for the public to pick through than a carefully managed stream of news being spoon-fed to us by talking heads on television who became so trusted nobody dared question them." I'm inclined to agree with the rightblogger there, though the right generally prefers a managed stream of news, passing along the Republican line, that (trusted or not) nobody dares question; it's only when a Democrat is in the White House that the right wants a thousand flowers to bloom, news- and opinion-wise. But Edroso feels differently:

While I enjoy the big scrum as much as the next guy, as my coverage ceaselessly shows, it is also full of bullshit, and there are disadvantages as well as advantages to the caveat lector approach, particularly considering the dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components of the blogosphere.

I can agree with Edroso too. I would only submit that the corporate media also exhibit "dangerously elevated public relations and permanent campaign components" (not to mention plenty of bullshit) and Cronkite was no exception. There's a tendency among liberals to lament the decadent state of the corporate media nowadays, and to cite Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow as exemplars of how serious news coverage should be done. But the news in the 60s was really just as corrupt and subservient to government and corporate agendas as it is now, and the range of information available from corporate outlets was as limited. I had to go to alternative sources, mostly in print because it's less capital-intensive than TV broadcasting, for other views.

The main focus of both the adulation and the condemnation appears to be Cronkite's editorial comment on the war in Vietnam on February 27, 1968, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, a nationwide campaign by Vietnamese insurgents that began on the Vietnamese lunar new year. Cronkite had just returned from a visit to South Vietnam, where he witnessed the collapse of the consensus that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and the commies were on the run. Wikipedia sums up the result nicely: "Although the offensive was a military disaster for the communists, it had a profound effect on the American administration and shocked the American public, which had been led to believe by its political and military leaders that the communists were, due to previous defeats, incapable of launching such a massive effort." Cronkite remarked:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is hardly a radical assessment; it's well within the mainstream of official American opinion about the war, beginning with the limiting of viewpoints to "optimists" who believed the US could win to the "pessimists" who believed it couldn't, at least not at an acceptable cost to us. It's why President Johnson reacted to the broadcast by saying that he'd lost Middle America -- because Cronkite said what other middle Americans believed, not because he told them what to think. There's also the characterization of the US as "honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy" -- in fact, the war in Vietnam was anti-democratic at its root, a refusal to allow the Vietnamese to determine their own government. It also ran roughshod over American public opinion, which had rejected the re-imposition of French colonial rule over Indochina after World War II, in 1945. 

Yes, 1945. In September and October of that year, eight troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from Europe to transport US-armed French soldiers and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted seamen on those ships immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, the entire crews of the first four troopships met in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the US government for using American ships to transport an invasion army "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

After the French finally gave up in 1954, the US took on the white man's burden, imposing a dictator on the South in violation of the international agreements -- a dictator we finally removed in 1963, when he showed insufficient dedication to our aims. The coup that killed Ngo Dinh Diem, a few weeks before the assassination of John Kennedy, disproves the standard claim that the US was in Vietnam only because our "allies" there asked for our help against Communist aggression. In reality, when our ally could no longer carry out his expected duties, we tossed him aside.

Cronkite had already shown his willingness to go along with government propaganda on Vietnam when he filed a report in 1965 lauding then-dictator Nguyen Cao Ky. In his biography of the maverick journalist I. F. Stone, D. D. Guttenplan describes Cronkite hailing Ky as "a hero to the Vietnamese people" who "doesn't even go out to lunch but, like an American businessman, eats off the corner of his desk". Stone reported that "the playboy Air Force general" Ky considered Adolf Hitler to be his only hero (American Radical, page 443-444). Cronkite's personal reaction to the Tet Offensive was to shout "What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war!" (op. cit., 420). It's worth comparing Cronkite's 2004 take on the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, used by President Johnson to justify US escalation in Vietnam, with I. F. Stone's take, written in August 1964, showing what a journalist not subservient to the government and armed with healthy skepticism could know. In 2004 Cronkite was still calling the Tonkin Gulf incidents a "misunderstanding that became the tipping point for the entire Vietnam War," even though he showed that Johnson and McNamara understood very well what they were doing. As Stone wondered in 1964, "Who was Johnson trying to impress? Ho Chi Minh? Or Barry Goldwater?" (P.S. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the answer to that question would be that he was trying to impress Walter Cronkite.)

This rightblogger criticizes Cronkite's 1968 broadcast without quite explaining why he was wrong. In this commentary, he writes, Cronkite

overtly and figuratively stepped out from behind the microphone to add his personal commentary to the news. We had not seen this before. By doing so, Cronkite issued an implicit license to his journalistic colleagues to interject personal opinions into their factual reporting of the news. The difference is that Cronkite clearly labeled it as personal opinion, while many MSM news personalities today weave their opinions into reporting. His sentiment registered with many, perhaps most, of his viewers that night. He changed opinions by offering his own. But in hindsight, his analysis was wrong – dead wrong for some.

On the contrary, journalists often put personal opinions, as well as other value judgments, into their factual reporting of the news. When I hear old broadcasts by the likes of Edward O. Murrow, for example, I'm struck by how much commentary is woven into his supposedly factual reporting, such as his broadcasts from England during World War II. And as the writer concedes, Cronkite explicitly distinguished his editorial remarks that night from straight journalism.

The blogger goes on to complain:

Many of those of us who served in Vietnam do not look upon its ending as reflecting “honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy.” A compelling case can be made that we should never have sent troops to Vietnam in the first place. But we did. And then, after nearly 60,000 U.S. deaths and countless Vietnamese casualties, we bugged out. There’s no way to put an honorable face on that unavoidable truth.

It's not clear what this has to do with Cronkite's commentary. If Cronkite ever said that the US war in Vietnam ended honorably, the blogger doesn't offer any quotations. Cronkite called for the US to negotiate in good faith, which it never did; at most this means he was too optimistic about the outcome. As influential as he may have been, he didn't decide how US policy in Vietnam was going to play out during the decade after that broadcast, and that appears to be the blogger's complaint.

Nor does the blogger explain how the US might have achieved an honorable end. He complains that the US abandoned our South Vietnamese allies, "cut off their military aid, and watched while they suffered the consequences when the North Vietnamese blatantly ignored the negotiated resolution (they never intended to honor) that Cronkite advocated." The US had been violating negotiated resolutions in Vietnam at least since we undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords (we never intended to honor), and did so right through 1973, when the Nixon administration began violating the January Paris agreements (we never intended to honor). Under those circumstances the Vietnamese were no longer bound by the agreements anyway, and began fighting back -- not only the Northerners, but Southerners who opposed the Saigon regime. But you wouldn't have learned that from Walter Cronkite either.

True to form, in 2006 Uncle Walt was saying that the war in Iraq was unwinnable and we could and should leave honorably, though a year later he was at least admitting that it had been "illegal from the start." That's progress of a kind, I guess.

"College students nowadays get their information from blogs and Comedy Central, not CBS," writes a pundit at the New York Times. She says that like it's a bad thing. The Times also quotes the current president of CBS News to the effect that "Viewers and Web readers now ... 'are so used to being assaulted by so many streams of media that it’s hard for them to imagine that there were only three or four ways to get news and information on TV.'" But the news I got from CBS, NBC, and ABC in the sixties and seventies was blinkered, biased, and often inaccurate. The crazed, paranoid leftists who criticized those institutions usually turned out to be right.

Even now, the range of news and information in the corporate media is severely limited. More voices are better as far as I'm concerned, but you still have to treat them critically. "Objectivity" is like a rainbow -- it can perhaps be approached but never attained, and in human affairs it may not even be desirable. Better to recognize that people have their interests and biases, instead of trying to find the kindly, calm, avuncular anchorperson who will spoon-feed you the truth each night for half an hour. The encomia to Cronkite kept mentioning the time he wiped away a tear while announcing the death of John F. Kennedy, as though pretending not to feel emotion 99% of the time were some kind of ideal, and the occasional lapse was proof of the robot's inner humanity. The adulation of Cronkite has more to do with nostalgia, and perhaps childish fantasies of a good daddy figure, than with whatever virtues he had as a newsman.