[Pity, yes, for the infected, But maintain antisepsis.]
Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> [clip]
> By 1970, it was cooler not to go, and I'd not have gone there and then.
> For the most part, we are talking *boys* here. And it's an exceptional boy
> indeed who flies in the face of definitions of male virtue du jour.
>
> >Maybehe should just come out and call the people who went to the
> >war with him bad names directly, as he does the "public".
>
> You'd have to do that case-by-case, I reckon.
Except in terms of a Thatcherian epistemology (Society does not exist, only individuals), there is of course a radical difference between "The Public" on one hand and the mere aggregate of individuals who make it up on the other hand. Blaming "The Public" simply has nothing to do with judgment of individuals.
> I knew some nice human
> beings who went.
Everyone must know _many_ who were (and are) admirable human beings. As I have indicated in other threads, I am not very interested in judgments of individuals, though no one living under capitalism can avoid constantly falling into such judgments. When that happens, they should be treated like a symptom of the common cold: ameliorated as much as possible. (The current threads on SUVs and "brats" illustrate how anti-political a focus on desirable and undesirable personal habits can be. The attack on SUVs and their owners is utterly without political merit.)
But again, there is a radical difference between responses to individual Vietnam Vets (or Japanese and German veterans of WW II) and judgment of "The Army in Vietnam," an army no better than Germany's in WW2 and rather worse than Japan's -- the two powers in the Pacific being more or less equally responsible for that war. The U.S. Army had no right to be in Vietnam -- every action it took, without exception, constituted a war crime. The POW/MIA campaign was _nothing but_ one more effort to maintain public support for a criminal endeavor. The individuals who were deceived by that effort were no worse, nor any better, than the Germans who believed Goebbels propaganda. It is hard for Americans, even those on the left, to come to terms with the fact that they live in a criminal nation, but without that recognition left activity in the U.S. becomes impossible.
> Dunno how they came back, as I was living amidst the
> SWAPO war of independence by then. I was on the wrong side of the fence on
> that one, too, of course (being a square-headed white boy, I wasn't given
> an option in the matter). In these things, the world's a bit too big for a
> teenage boy, don't you think?
Yes. But we cannot let pity and/or respect for individuals affect our judgment of their leaders, of the state they live in, of the actions of that state, _or of "the public" so far as it supports that state_. The U.S. "public" was deeply wrong (as wrong as the supporters of Hitler in Germany) in so far as it supported the invasion of Vietnam or the racist attack on the Vietnamese that the MIA/POW hoax represented. (More on leaders and followers at the end of this post.)
[Gordon speaking:]
>
> >Yes, there were all kinds of opinions among the folk, pro-
> >war, anti-war, confused -- many people went along with the
> >war because they had been taught at home and in school to
> >obey the government and serve their communities as
> >represented by that government. In those departed days that
> >sort of idea was more common than might be believable today.
Quite believable. I don't see any difference -- though perhaps people were not quite so cynical then. After Watergate the tendency was increasingly to disbelieve _both_ government _and_ the opposition. Gordon himself on the POW/MIA issue illustrates the gullibility which cynicism brings with it. There is a strong element of such cynicism/gullibility in TINA and its variants. Agnosticism on the POW/MIA issue is not an acceptable position for anyone overtly on the left: We are back in Harlan County, and there are no neutrals there. You either are Anti-War or an apologist for Nixon, Perot, Reagan, and other War Criminals, and the movement against that war is and was indistinguishable from the effort to explode the MIA/POW myth.
>
> Exactement. The banality of evil and all that. Although I suspect there
> remains, even today, more evil in banality than you imply here.
Exactly what? This is obscure, and I don't see the relevance of hauling in Arendt's rather unsatisfactory account of Hitler's Germany. "Evil" is not really a very satisfactory concept -- like Proudhon's "Providence" or Freud's "Unconscious" it is a sort of paraphrase of the facts which begs the issue of explaining them.
> I mean,
> although all those flag-waving Vietnam films and PR-mediated newsreel
> vignettes display a ferociously racist one-sidedness in their human
> sympathies,
Propaganda only works in a context ideologically prepared to respond to it. (Of the 50 or so legitimate definitions of the word "ideology," the one I am using here can be roughly defined as "common-sense interpretation of appearances taken at face value.") The cruel hoax on MIA families perpetrated by the fabricators of the POW/MIA would not have worked were it not for the grip of racist "common sense" on the U.S. public. Those old enough to remember the Sputnik hysteria should be able to see that even "anti-communism" depended in part at least on appealing to this bedrock racism. The shock came from the real impossibility of a bunch of semi-oriental peasants being able to match the U.S. in a technological feat. It was this same racist premise that made the Rosenberg murders possible: Those russian peasants couldn't have built a nuclear weapon all by themselves. They must have stolen it.
And going further back yet. I remember when the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the radio broadcast of a Chicago Bears game when we were among a number of relatives gathered at my grandmother's that Sunday. And what I remember most vividly is the response of an aunt (a wonderful woman and my favorite aunt): How would those monkeys dare attack us! How comical! What could they be thinking. And moving back another year or three, an episode in the Prince Valiant comic strip (which even then I recognized as somehow all wrong, which is why it stuck in my mind): Prince Valian, travelling in the the near east with a few companions, is set upon by hoards of little men in funny beards with leather shields, and at the end, Val stands alone on the top of a huge pile of corpses, a small army no match for the heavily armored young hero of the west.
Now I don't know how racism works outside the U.S., but as Barbara Fields has tellingly pointed out, in the United States there is only one race, the Black Race. When other groups (Irish, Japanese, Arabs, white migrant workers ["Arkies" & "Okies"]) become the victims of racism it is by being assimilated to the Black Race. It is that which, I think, significantly differentiates racism in the U.S. from mere national chauvinism. Without the racism which developed as a rationale for slavery in a nation dedicated to the proposition that "All men are created equal" these "subordinate" racism would not have such potential for shaping public opinion. My mother, daughter of a Michigan fruit farmer who for years had southren migrant workers each summer, really thought she could identify a southerner by his/her physical appearance.
Now, _inside the left_ (marxist, radical democratic, anarchist, etc.) the kind of racism I speak of above, though probably present, takes characteristically a different form -- namely, that of failing to see that no left movment (no working-class movement) in the U.S. can flourish unless it makes central to its struggle the direct confrontation with this omnipresent racist ideology within the working class itself. It stems from and is a political error rather than individual or cultural bigotry (or at least it is best to assume so), and might be called political racism. Extremely clearcut and vulgar instances are the likes of a Todd Gitlin or an Eric Alterman, but it can and does occur in much subtler versions, not probably visible to the persons themselves.
It is in this sense that _any_ defense of the POW/MIA myth contributes to, is itself an instance of, racism.
> they do a pretty good job of showing the chaotic
> slaughter-of-innocents that is modern war.
This _will not do_. It is in fact the core of reactionary apologetics for particular wars and for the perpetrators of war crimes. If you really think that the horrors of the Vietnam war were merely instance of the general evil of war, that the slaughter was as it were "chaotic," i.e., merely a part of the human condition, of the banality of life, of the unavoidability of evil in this vale of tears -- if this clause is other than a moment's pure thoughtlessness, then it is a lie and a defense of genocide. It is the sort of Buffy Saint-Marie sentimentality ("When will they ever learn") that clogged our efforts at every turn to build up the strength of the anti-war movement in the 1960s. (You are provoking specific outrageous incidents from my memory of the struggle, but I won't go into them here.)
It was not chaotic. Certain very rational, very personally kind and cultivated gentlemen in Washington D.C. set out deliberately and with full awareness of what they were doing to destroy a people. (That they destroyed several hundred thousand of their own citizens in the process -- direct casualties, agent orange, ptsd, suicide, etc. etc. -- was merely collateral damage.) They did it in a very systematic and quite unchaotic way. War never has been chaotic, and it is not chaotic now. (You should read Dugout Doug's Farewell address delivered to the U.S. Congress.) War (modern or otherwise) doesn't kill anyone, innocent or not so innocent. War makers carry out the slaughter for specifiable reasons -- such as giving Latin Americans a lesson as to what would happen to them were they to question their fated role in the American Empire.
> You don't need a particularly
> well-developed critical sense to discern that this is what you're putting
> your moniker to when you go along with a Desert Storm or a Novi Sad. Yet
> ...
Perhaps, Perhaps not. I'm really not very interested in making moral judgments of individual soldiers from any army. But neither am I very interested in making up elaborate excuses for them. My interests lie elsewhere.
> Something out there is stronger than reason - stronger even than the modest
> empathy with which Adam Smith credited our apparently timeless nature.
> "Capitalism" or "racism" are names we might give that something, but a name
> doth not an explanation make, eh?
Names like "chaotic" and "modern war" don't explain much. Other labels point to explanations that have been worked out in some detail. Why pretend that we do not know very well why Nixon and Perot dreamt up the POW/MIA hoax. They needed to rally the American people to give support to the massacre in Southeast Asia.
Now as to the left and self-nominated leaders of the left. Self-nominated because there is no other way to nominate them but that nomination must be ratified in struggle. Rosa Parks is an archetypal instance. Anyone who posts on this maillist, for example, is such a self-nominated leader. So viewed, Gordon's comments on the POW/MIA hoax _and_ the bellyaching of the SUV hating/book loving posters vividly illustrate two polar ways _not_ to be worthy of selection as a leader, in that each illustrates a different form of contempt for those who, if the world is to change, must do the changing.
In my post on Ideology and Psychology, I wrote as follows:
***I suspect this confusion between being wrong and being (somehow) "wrong as a person" -- irrational or weird -- was at the source of Gordon's absurdities on the POW/MIA question. (As I pointed out at the time, he is probably quite wrong, empirically, in his demographics, but for the purposes of the present argument we can assume he is correct in his rough-and-ready sociological description of the "believers" in the myth of the MIAs.) He assumed that if his "trailer-park and tract home" people were _wrong_ about the MIAs, then they were, as people, weird or irrational -- i.e., that one could only respect them as people by somehow or other respecting the content of their beliefs. But that is outrageous condescension.****
I was giving what I thought was a charitable interpretation of Gordon's strange views on the POW/MIA question. He later denied this excuse I provided for him, but the general point still remains. One does _not_ offer any kind of left leadership by tailing precisely those features of workers' consciousness which manifest their subjection to ruling-class ideology. At one of the recurrent new surges in the anti-war movement in central Illinois one student argued vigorously that we should not feature anti-racism in our work, because we might turn off people who would oppose the war but not agree with us on racism. That is the sort of argument I thought Gordon was advancing until he made it clear that he was arguing from the gullibility of cynicism.
One error is "tailing the masses." The opposite error as it were is mere contempt for the masses because they do not already see as we do. Hence the relevance of the SUV thread here. Just why in the hell should someone not drive an SUV if he wants to? What organized working-class organization has declared a formal boycott of SUVs? Do SUVs go around with a sign on them saying "I'm a thug for the ruling class" (police cars)? Do they carry a banner [a yellow ribbon or POW/MIA flag] that says, "Napalm a few more of them there monkey babies over in 'Nam"? Has the left adopted it as formal policy that all honorable members and supporters of the working class take a vow of poverty and parade about in rags? What the fuck business is it of someone killing time by posting to lbo-talk what kind of transportation private individuals take to work or to play. Since when does having bad taste constitute political or moral turpitude? What plan has anyone suggested for creating a public banner around which individuals could rally to flaunt their non-ownership of SUVs?
If one were to engage in psychology, I would say the only point of the SUV thread is to make a few lazy leftists feel morally superior to the great washed. Perhaps we should go back to pre-19th century standards and proclaim not ever washing as a political standard. Until people are politically organized -- until a movement exists capable of raising a banner to rally around, people live as individuals in capitalist society, and it is fucking stupid to keep bellyaching at them.
Carrol
P.S. I take for granted that human activity of any complexity requires
organization and leadership. There will always be riffraff who deny
this, but they merely complicate the process of generating and
controlling the necessary leadership. Their position is of no political
or intellectual interest in itself.
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.