The history that we’re not told about, the history that we need to know. Twenty five minutes of what we are not supposed to know.
Nick Turse describes the horror that is war.
Your opinions…
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
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7 comments
May 17, 2016 at 6:13 am
Carmen
That was certainly disturbing. Of course, I had just read the Contrarian’s blog piece for today about an hour before watching this video- here’s an excerpt .
“You might also think that religious fanaticism—and especially Muslim fanaticism–is the greatest threat to peace. That’s the claim of religion-bashers like Dawkins, Krauss, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and the late, great warmonger Christopher Hitchens.
The United States, I submit, is the greatest threat to peace. Since 9/11, U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan have killed 370,000 people. That includes more than 210,000 civilians, many of them children. These are conservative estimates….”
He didn’t include Vietnam’s stats.
Then there’s the annual military budget in the U.S. And the fact that Canada has supported their ‘forays’. . . .sigh. . ..
Food for thought, eh?
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May 17, 2016 at 10:20 am
The Arbourist
@carmen
I think that if we taught more like what history actual was, instead of the acceptable sanitized version – war would be much less acceptable in the mind of the public.
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May 17, 2016 at 10:24 am
Carmen
As it OUGHT to be, Arb.
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May 17, 2016 at 3:54 pm
VR Kaine
And what’s the point of studying all this history – so that it’s not repeated? The attitudes are definitely being repeated.
War seems just as acceptable now by the left as it was back in Vietnam by the right. Back then the left didn’t want us doing the killing/raping/destroying, and rightly so, but today they seem all too fine to let everyone else do it instead under our watch, so long as it isn’t us.
That’s the concern I have with liberal grandstanding of books like Turse’s. I think it’s a great book, and more reality and truth is always a good thing, but the concern is that waving it around from some moral “high horse” and (wrongly) comparing Vietnam to the military and war now only gives a bunch of pacifist, whiny, ideological do-nothing liberals all the more reason to turn a blind eye to what cancers like ISIS do, and letting them grow.
Certainly letting a bunch of warmongers loose with orders to “kill anything that moves” isn’t the solution, either, but the fact is our military today is hardly anything of what it once was.
And what good is a book like this in the hands of the left, anyways? Instead of marines throwing “gooks” out of choppers at high altitudes you now have ISIS throwing “fags” off of buildings at high altitudes. The left protested the tossings then – are they doing anything now? Not a thing, so what’s the point? All they’ll do is take books like Turse’s and use them as the excuse to not get into ANY sort of war, thereby letting ISIS continue its slaughter of the innocents. The left did more to stop dwarf-tossing, but gay-tossing? It’s “Yeah but look what we did to them.”
“War shouldn’t be so acceptable” – and I think neither should be pacifism. If books like this tell us all to not go so blindly into a war thinking we’re always the good guys, then I’m all for it. If instead, though, it’s just to give a bunch of pacifist losers more excuses to hate an old military that’s long gone and a new military that their brains will never know or understand, then the next baby killed or gay person murdered or child raped or person burnt alive by the REAL evil that exists today can be on their hands.
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May 17, 2016 at 10:25 pm
Emma
This is very important, yes. I respect both Moyers and Turse (his recent report from South Sudan where the locals, in the midst of their own bloody conflicts, are preoccupied with the possibility of Trump becoming the US president, was eye-opening) — but I had to stop watching it halfway, as my impatience had gotten the better of me.
It is hard for me to process Moyers saying that he regrets not understanding what the war was like. I want to ask him, What the [expletive] did you think war was like?
Similarly with Turse’s recollection of being asked by the librarian if he thought that witnessing war crimes could possibly create trauma — and him responding that this was an interesting hypothesis. An interesting hypothesis.
Oof. [deep breath]
The lack of emotional and moral imagination evidenced in these two statements — coming, after all, from the good guys, with the right values — is depressing. If men like Moyers and Turse have trouble envisioning / imagining the horrors of war and their effects on human beings, what hope is there for less developed members of our species?
I know, I know. I’m not looking for a debate, my dear friends, rather an opportunity to unload my frustration (sorry!).
Maybe everyone should be exposed to the horrors of war early on in life — through education, not direct experience — to become properly sensitized to it. Maybe if people knew, in their guts and bones, the pain and suffering caused by war, they would be less likely to engage in it. Maybe.
Thank you, Arb, for this thought-provoking post — and sorry for the rant.
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May 18, 2016 at 7:11 am
The Arbourist
@Emma
Well they do have to try and play the ‘serious and impartial’ male figure in the interview because showing emotion makes you look like a woman and a man certainly cannot have that on his CV.
I’ve read Turse’s book and is quite impassioned in his text, there could be a lot of things going on being on camera and what not. But being raised to hide/ignore your emotions isn’t the best avenue for developing one’s empathy.
I’m not sure if that would work or not. WW2 came fairly quickly – maybe a half generation – after the War to end all Wars. WWI was a dirty bloody slaughter fought with second generation weapons while using first generation tactics. The cost in human life was staggering, the damage to families and societies ran wide and deep, yet that shit happened again, only bigger and better, 22 years later.
I don’t necessarily think that the people of the various countries wanted to engage in mass slaughter again, but the ruling classes have much different ideas about what is important and what is worth dying for than the poor.
You are welcome. :) Rants, for the most part, are welcome here. :)
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May 18, 2016 at 7:41 am
The Arbourist
@Vern
Hi Vern,
Well one would hope that enough people would become aware of what went down and elect representatives in their sundry democracies that mirrored their feelings.
I know you are aware that politics in the US have been dragged increasingly to the right during successive decades. The mainstream political left in the US today is just as morally deficient, corrupt and as bought as the political right.
The comparison between Vietnam and the wars being fought today are frighteningly apt. The use of military power in an attempt to pacify a weaker nation stirs people of said nation to a bitter guerilla resistance that eventually bleeds the imperial nation dry. That is precisely what Al-qaeda and ISIL are doing, and while paying the human price for their actions, they are making progress.
The idea would be to resist the imposition of empire on the rest of the world. Because the cycle of imperial expansion, over-reach, contraction and dissolution needs to be stopped as it is the path that the US is on. The resistance and dismantling of empire is not going to come from the nationalist right, so it the duty of the left (what remains of it) to propose and struggle for an alternate to the imperial path.
ISIS would not exist currently if the American imperial intervention in the Middle East, specifically Iraq had not happened. American military intervention created the failed state of Iraq and power vacuum in the region allowing ISIS not only to form, but to thrive.
The converse, not engaging in imperial war, would have meant no ISIS and a much more stable Middle East.
I’m thinking if we stop slaughtering innocents (targeted drone assassinations), it would be a good start to finding a peaceable solution in the region. But repeatedly calling them the bad guys and blaming them for the strife in the area, while at the same time remotely blowing the shite out of scores of innocent people, will do nothing but increase the membership of ISIS and harden their resolve.
We haven’t even tried pacifism. And with the current state of affairs, it is mostly untenable because of imperial undercurrent in the modern zeitgeist. When we stop killing people for the crime of living on top of the resources we covet and negotiate with them instead then we might – might – get a glint of what pacifism looks like.
The ‘new’ military looks very much like the old military as it serves the same function and performs similarly while bringing justice (read domination and subjugation) to others across the globe. Nothing gets solved – short of genocide – when dealing with power imbalances of this nature. So, the legacy of VC, Al-Qaeda, and ISIL shall continue until empire crumbles.
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