@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 Sender: "•••@••.•••" <•••@••.•••> Subject: A needed look back Just recently a neo-liberal businessman won the presidency of Guatemala. It was a marginal triumph of the capital's urban consumption patterns over the Mayan peasants of the countryside, and right next door to Chiapas. Thus we shall soon see one more "structural adjustment plan," one more garage sale of a people's national properties for the benefit of the insatiable multinationals. Eventually, we shall also see two contiguous liberation movements merge and the Pentagon make its move on behalf of remote, globalized power. It will supply the hardware, but it is our responsibility that American youth does not supply the requisite innocence. I'd like to share with CJ readers the words of one of the lesser known writers to come out of the Vietnam War; lamentable, because he's one of the very best. I hope that your subsequent comments will aid me in coaxing him online with us, for his real subject is not war's gross tumult but the more subtle violence of politics in a terminally confused society. "By the time I left Vietnam in the waning days of the Tet Offensive and the battle for Hue, I had become acutely aware that something had gone horribly wrong in Vietnam. But I didn't know what. I thought maybe it was me. Men like Rusk and Bundy and Rostow were still insisting that the cause was worthy. They would soon be replaced by men like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but these men, too, would insist [on] the worthiness of their cause right up to the very moment North Vietnamese tanks crushed the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, achieving at an incalculable cost in human suffering what might have been achieved without the loss of a single life thirty years earlier. "I paid a terrible price for the bargain I struck with the people who sent me to wage war on Vietnam: more than a decade of nightmares and alcohol and self-loathing; a white-hot fury, shapeless and unpredictable, that seared anyone who came too close; a loneliness profound as the silence between the stars. And I was lucky. "I have friends whose names are carved on that ugly black slab in Washington, D.C. I have friends who were dumped into wheelchairs at nineteen and won't be taken out again until thay are laid into their coffins. I have friends who still can't see an Asian face without trembling. I have friends who live in shacks deep in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula. I have friends whose wives are afraid to touch them when they are sleeping. "Okay. My friends and I made a mistake and we paid the price. I've learned to accept my share of responsibility for that mistake. I can live with myself. But where now are the people who asked us to take the risks? Where have they been these past twenty years? Willy Crapser spent seventeen years in and out of psychiatric wards, and Robert McNamara became president of the World Bank. Ron Kovic never had the chance to have children before he was paralyzed for life, and McGeorge Bundy became president of the Ford Foundation. Kenny Worman and Randy Moore have been dead longer than they got to live, and Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk are respected professors at respected universities. "Not once, not once in all these years, have I ever heard a single high-level policymaker of the Vietnam war apologize for what he did, ever admit that he made a mistake, ever show the slightest sign of remorse for all the havoc and misery, the shattered lives and shattered families and shattered nations left gasping in the wake of his decisions. There is no regret, no sorrow, no shame. Some of these men merely skulked off the public stage quietly. Others continue to this day to insist that their cause was worthy, and is worthy, and always will be worthy. "Honorable men, they asked my friends and me to get down and dirty in the ricefields only to abandon us under fire. We did the killing and the dying, and then they left us to find our own way back while they went on with their honorable lives as if nothing at all were out of order. They struck a bargain with us, and then they broke it. And they have refused ever after to admit that it was broken." From "A Letter to McGeorge Bundy" by William Daniel Ehrhart (1989) Finally, last summer, there came McNamara, The Boss himself, with his little-boy act of late-blooming contrition. The actual book, I'm told, is less contrite than its author was on his book tour. I'm told by a vet who has come a long way from the poor, dumb hillbilly boot he was in '65 that the book itself is a primer of improved, unobtrusive techniques of imperialism for future American policymakers. However, this counsel _before_ the fact was infinitely more valuable: Are we going to take the position that anti-Communism justifies anything, including colonialism, interference in the affairs of other countries, and aggression? That way, let us be perfectly clear about it, lies war and more war leading ultimately to full-scale national disaster. -- from "What Every American Should Know About Indo-China" Paul M. Sweezy & Leo Huberman Monthly Review, June 1954 valis @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Richard K. Moore (•••@••.•••) Wexford, Ireland •••@••.••• | Cyberlib=http://www.internet-eireann.ie/cyberlib Materials may be reposted in their entirety for non-commercial use. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
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