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Seeing history from a different perspective is often an enlightening experience. Noam Chomsky is a excellent guide to a historical narrative that makes sense and fits the facts of the situation, as opposed to what we are told by approved sources. It is a long read, somehow sadly classified as a radical perspective, but well worth your time. The media in the US often do not publish Chomsky’s work despite its accuracy and veracity, because publishing it might actually stir public opinion and motivate people to get involved with their government. It is left to alternative media organizations and Al Jazeera to find insight on how the world really works without the usual mainstream blinders.
“Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out – “anything that flies on anything that moves” – a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.
When the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide”.
Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history [and] only the strong… can possibly survive”, in this case reflecting on the failure of US aggression and terror to crush Cuban independence.
By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”. He was again referring to South Vietnam.
When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual”.
There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilise the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.
The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question”, George W Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy”, and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.
Later, as the scale of the US defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the US military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege US investors in the rich energy system – demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance. And all well kept from the general population.
Gauging American decline
Tim Wise has many things to say on the topic of racism in America. His analysis is deft and competent, I reprint the introduction to his essay “Getting What We Deserve? Wealth, Race and Entitlement in America” for the benefit of the education of my readership. Educational purposes aside, many of the complaints/justifications that seem to come up in the comments section of DWR are mentioned in this essay, and are given a thorough rebuttal and explanation. I may dedicate a page to the entire essay for sake of easy reference.
Everywhere you turn, conservatives are bemoaning the so-called “mentality of entitlement.”
“To hear such folks tell it, the problem with America is that people think they’re owed something. Of course, income support programs, nutritional assistance, or housing subsidies have long been pilloried by the right for this reason — because they ostensibly encourage people to expect someone else (in this case, the government, via the American taxpayer) to support them. But now, the criticisms that were once reserved for programs aimed at helping the poor are being applied even to programs upon which much of the middle class has come to rely, like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.
Increasingly one hears conservative politicians and commentators arguing for cuts in these efforts as well, and critiquing those who rely on them for health care, retirement, or income in-between jobs. To the right, the elderly and unemployed apparently refuse to do for self. They aren’t far-sighted enough, one supposes, to invest their money in a high-growth (and high-risk) private retirement plan; they aren’t responsible enough to purchase good health care, and they’d prefer to sit at home collecting a couple hundred dollars a week in unemployment insurance than find a job that might support them and their families. In other words, there’s something wrong with these people: they’re lazy, have the wrong mindset, and need to get out there and show initiative, presumably the way rich people do.
Though this critique is not solely aimed at persons of color, there is little doubt but that the history of growing opposition to social safety net efforts — which were wildly popular among most whites from the 1930s through most of the 1960s — mirrors, almost perfectly, the time period during which black and brown folks began to gain access, for the first time, to such programs. While blacks, for instance, were largely excluded from Social Security for the first twenty years of its existence, and while very few people of color could access cash benefits until the 1960s, by the 1970s, the rolls of such programs had been opened up, and the public perception was increasingly that those people were the ones using (and abusing) the programs. So in large part, the critique of “entitlement” has been bound up with a racialized narrative of the deserving and undeserving, which can be seen, in many ways, as a racist meme.
But if we look and listen closely, what we discover is that the mentality of entitlement and expectation is far more embedded among the affluent and among whites than among the poor or people of color.”
Well shall miss your voice Mr. Zinn. Thank you for all you have contributed to history and progress.
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Mystro
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