Deborah Oak says what I think many of us, women of "a certain age" are thinking and feeling these days:
My son is safely sleeping now, and this weekend he was as sweet as a fifteen year old can be. Besides the difficulty of his age, he's dealing with his father and young stepmother having just had a new baby. He’s a great kid, brought up in a remarkable community of activists and those who work for peace. Friends constantly reassure me that he won’t end up being a soldier, that I won’t lose him to war. Since his very age, since fifteen, I’ve done what I can to put an end to war. Perhaps I started out protesting to bug my parents, but they too in the end turned against the Vietnam war. I’ve marched, blockaded weapons, been to jail, signed countless petitions, wrote politicians, prayed, and done spell after spell to bring peace. And here we are, mired in a war as atrocious as that war of my childhood. In that war, it took us knowing that no son was immune to turn it around. My stomach lurches at this thought.
I’m sad that Cindy Sheehan feels so let down. But, damn, I understand it. What will it take for us to turn things around? How many sons and daughters have to die?
What mistake did we make at the end of the Viet Nam war that allowed it to be so quickly repeated? How should we have driven home the point that we thought had been indelibly etched upon our nation's soul? Somehow, after the Civil War, America figured out that it shouldn't repeat that mistake. What is it that needed to happen after Viet Nam that didn't happen? Should America have held war crime trials? How did a bunch of ugly rich white boys who neither fought in Viet Nam or in the streets to end the Viet Nam war wind up in power and so stupid as to do this all over again? How did America let that happen? I ask these questions because I have a Grandson. In the blink of an eye, he'll be a young man, fodder, in the eyes of the corporatists and the Christianists, for another immoral foreign war. I'd like to know what we failed to do at the end of Viet Nam so that we could be sure not to fail this time. I'd like to know so that there won't be a war for his mother to worry about. I'd very much like to know.
15 comments:
We rested on our laurels and forgot that a message fades over time. Our failure was a failure to emphasize the lesson consistently, which includes working to prevent ALL war, not just those launched by the Bushes.
What NTodd said. Only I would answer that the Civil War burned so much deeper because of its cost. All of the dead on both sides, and all of that knowing that it was often kin on the other side.
It's also that we didn't need to just stop war - 12 million of us remembered and marched. We failed to stop the fascists from taking the government in the first place.
Then too, we all got comfortable. We not only rested, we got fat, and busy, and older, and more conservative.
We also forgot to teach our children well...
We once again trusted our political leaders and those over 40 (used to be 30 but 40 is the new 30 )
We relied on our media to actually report facts and the truth
Lesson learned: Don't trust your political leaders and don't take the media at face value.
We forgot to draw a larger conclusion, which is that wars of occupation are simply a bad idea that end in disaster; and that we simply cannot remake the world by force.
Instead, the lesson we learned was the wrong one: Reagan phrased it something like, "don't enter a war you don't intend to win" -- as if all you need for success is to intend something hard enough.
In other words, we failed to learn that we are not now and never were gods.
I was born in 1971, so my political consciousness begins sometime after Vietnam ended, and I grew up amidst privileged people who had not served in Vietnam or Korea. My only military relatives were my grandfather who was a medic in WWII and his uncle who was a marine in the same war.
We failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam because we didn't experience them. It took Iraq for us to experience these lessons ourselves, though I was opposed to this war and did not vote for George Bush in 2000. Neither did I vote for Al Gore that year, because he had not convinced me that he was not himself a warmonger. I believed that whichever candidate I supported would start a war, because Clinton made wars and I expected nothing different.
You can tell me that Clinton's wars were justified, but I won't agree. All war is obsolete, we have the ability to destroy all human life and any war could backfire and escalate. You can only say good things about wars you win, and the price of winning is losing our moral ability to end war.
I wish we wouldn't think of WWII as a "good war." It wasn't good, it might have been necessary according to some, but were there not peaceful alternatives such as advised by Mahatma Gandhi?
I don't think there was any one thing that we did or didn't do. There were a whole bunch of mistakes piling up over 30 years.
We allowed the media to be taken over by corporate interests.
Then we allowed the corporate media and the conservative movement to define anyone in favor of peace as a whiny ass titty baby.
We allowed warmaking to become ghettoized and privatized. So it doesn't really hurt anymore as much as it did during Vietnam.
We didn't fight hard enough against the kind of people that would do *anything* to steal an election.
We didn't think any sane human would be stoopid enough to drop us into the middle of another quaqmire.
Then we allowed the insane ones to take over.
flory
What mistake did we make at the end of the Viet Nam war that allowed it to be so quickly repeated?
The 60s peace movement was part of a larger expression of revulsion against institutions like business and conventional politics. But those institutions are also among the most important means to power in U.S. culture, so we hobbled ourselves. The right sent their kids into business school and marketing and so did two things: (1) piled up a bunch of money which could be use for political donations and funding things like rightwing think tanks, and (2) made conservatives fluent in the language of television marketing.
Another factor is the outlook of different ideologies. Liberals tend to be sunny types who believe in the essential goodness of people and treating others as we would want to be treated. Liberals don't get hostile unless attacked, and maybe not even then. But conservatives, to put it mildly, are more suspicious and hostile towards those unlike themselves. So beginning, oh, around Nixon's time (or maybe McCarthy's), conservatives started formulating attack narratives that they use to propagandize the general public. We really had no way to counter these narratives because we don't believe in counterattacking, just telling the truth. But truth isn't reality in politics; what you can convince people of is reality in politics.
So we lost the ability to influence the narrative told about the Vietnam War: "We would have won if not for the dirty hippie protesters. They stabbed us in the back and spit on soldiers. They burned the American flag and want people to hate America. The way to restore the power and prestige of America is to ruthlessly destroy all of its enemies, at home and abroad." We abdicated our responsibility to really grasp and wield power in this country after Vietnam ended, due to our own flawed makeup. We are reaping the results in Iraq.
Hecate, it's what we humans always do. We just want to live, most of us don;t want to constantly fight, so we lose our vigilent stance, we become complacent. Who wants to struggle all the time? But, we apparently have to. Old Neil Young song: Rust Never Sleeps. Those who don't want to get a long, but who want to rule, dominate, never - ever - fucking sleep. And, when/if they do, they dream terrible dreams of destruction. It's always balance - and this world is hideously out of balance right now, as it was during and after Viet Nam. I still want to rest, not to have every damn day be a battleground against the mean and the ignorant. But, if I do, this is what happens. This is my humble opinion.
One more observation: We never connect the war to the larger world. We think of it as a zero-sum game, like football with guns: We win, you lose.
There's no awareness that the next war is often embedded in the last one, or in the economic disparities of the world.
Make everyone better off and there won't be so many people willing to be fodder.
That's the lesson that the hippies largely forgot. Communes became corporations, so to speak.
We don't know our history-Americans are very bad at that. We should have had Vietnam vets (both soldiers & those fighting here at home to stop the war) come into the school systems, the way the schools bring in people from the so-called "greatest generation" or holocaust survivors, to talk about their experiences.
Excellent question, indeed. I think the most important thing that we failed to do was correctly identify the evil, evil individuals responsible for the previous (and the current) war and remove them, and their motivations, from the framework. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Joe Lieberman, and all these other malignancies whose understanding of the world is grounded in the myth of military superiority as the basis for political interaction - these creatures were left in place, and while we slept, they worked to return themselves to power and once again seize the controls of the war machine. The lesson to take away is that a democracy is every citizen's responsibility. We must teach ourselves, and our children, well, and we must question every use of authority lest it turn into abuse while our eyes and minds are closed.
"What Did We Fail To Do At The End Of The Viet Nam War?"
We didn't lead.
Sun Tzu's Art of War is far more applicable to situations beyond the obvious.
Hence the saying: If you know the enemy
and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will
succumb in every battle.
We did not understand the forces arrayed against us in the aftermath of the Viet Nam war. Over time, we no longer even fully knew ourselves.
The short answer is that we went to an all volunteer military -- the cheap quick fix "It won't be me (or my kid)" which detached the armed forces from the people as a whole -- universal service would not militarize the country but civilianize the armed forces (which is one of the reasons they don't want it) -- if every citizen knew that they or their families would pay the price of our wars, they would be less frequent! (& I say this as a Gandhian whose personal experience on Nam led to a nervous breakdown).
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