Photo Credit: Overlook Mountain Woodstock, NY by Howard Lisnoff
In the US, the general consensus is that we are an exceptional people who act only for the right causes. We are a nation among nations and a people among people. A corollary of that premise is that the government and its agencies reflect that moral high ground. The truth, however, is more Machiavellian and often hidden. As my tenth-grade world history teacher said, if she had taught about the People’s Republic of China a decade before, in 1953, she would have been fired in a heartbeat. That was the era of McCarthyism, a drunk on a mission to make the world safe for who knows what.
Much has been written about defeating Naziism, fascism, and bald-faced militarism by the US and its allies during World War II. I note historian Howard Zinn’s assessment of both his part in World War II as a crew member of a bomber and what he learned from that war. Zinn saw the difference between a just cause, which was true, and a just war, which was not the case as the number of civilian deaths, both by the US and its allies and its enemies, amounted to between 30 and 45 million deaths from both direct military actions and other causes such as the Holocaust. Imagine not being able to accurately name or account for about 15 million people? The world seems to be bad at math when it comes to counting up the number of the dead from wars.
This is a discussion of Genocide and War (CounterPunch, January 31, 2024).
Izzy Stone’s reporting on the Korean War, in which the US took a major part, in The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), illustrated how the issue of whether or not the US fought for a just cause had changed during and after World War II. Stone, an investigative journalist, calls into question some of the basic premises of the Korean War, such as the causes of its beginning and civilian deaths during the war. Stone was largely unknown and ignored for his reporting and writing during that war.
The best description and discussion, in my opinion, of US interventions following World War II is William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since Worlds War II (1995). My only criticism of Blum’s book is that there have been so many US military actions and CIA interventions since World War II that a reading feels like being stuck in a parallel universe, or listening to an old-style vinyl record that is caught in a groove.
Between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, there was the buildup of the military-industrial complex and McCarthyism. Dwight Eisenhower alerted the nation to that complex and took the nation on the road toward that buildup of weaponry and war. These events take up whole libraries by themselves. Of note is the fact that while there has been resistance to going to war among millions in the US, people are brought into line. The latter is not generally like the ban on free speech before and during World War I, but rather, the creation of consensus for war. It took four to five years of mayhem beginning in 1964 in Vietnam to begin the turning away of public opinion from the war, the first televised war. The US was involved in Vietnam much longer than from 1964 on. Its role in supporting France’s war there began shortly after World War II and ended with France’s defeat. Rather than support the government of the north, as much nationalists as communists, the US thwarted all attempts to assist and negotiate.
Vietnam, the quagmire, put the US role as superpower and colonial power out in the open for all to see. Anticommunism was a big selling point with the population at home and among US allies. Soon came carpet bombing, free-fire zones, strategic hamlets, and Charlie and gook. The pathetic rest, with many My Lai kinds of operations, and a general barbarism that led to fragging and then back to the cul-de-sac of Ronald Reagan’s “noble cause.” Even a casual observer may wonder what many were thinking? Were there many thinking, or simply following mindless anticommunism? There never really was a logical discussion of communism in the US. The US was on the ground in Russia during the communist revolution there. Coexistence was never on the table, so to speak in many meaningful ways.
The barbarism of Vietnam was documented in Kill Anything That Moves: The Real War in Vietnam (2013), Four Hours at My Lai (1992), A Bright Shining Lie (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1976), to name a few books out of libraries full of works noting the barbarism of the US war in Southeast Asia. The nationalists and communists from the north in Vietnam conducted campaigns as brutal as did the south and its allies. That war is hell is not a cliché!
It took the span of one short decade to return to the solid footing of war. Ronald Reagan began the march toward the acceptance of war that George H.W. Bush accelerated in the 1990-1991 Gulf War’s rout of Iraqi forces driven from Kuwait, which squashed the Vietnam Syndrome. That syndrome was the hesitancy of people in the US to support foreign wars far from US shores.
Then there was Bill Clinton in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton’s regressive social policies went hand in hand with the bombing campaign he championed in the fractured former Yugoslavia. Nothing, however, could eclipse the war-making frenzy of the intellectually challenged boy-president George W. Bush. The decade of the 1980s unleashed the Afghan mujahideen, the predecessor of the Taliban, a creation of the US proxy support of removing the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan. That a monster such as Osama bin Laden would arise from the ashes of that war with the backing of family wealth and viciously attack the US is no surprise. What is a surprise though, is that bin Laden could have been captured in the first months of the war in Afghanistan, with the help of the Taliban, but Bush was so inept that he unleashed nearly two decades of war there and began the insanity of regime change that extended to countries such as Iraq. The US was willing to kill the innocent in Iraq and turn that nation into a civil war bloodbath. The menu to undo the axis of evil was off and sprinting. At home, we got the Patriot Act and unlimited surveillance of innocent civilians in the US. The government now knows almost every single detail about our lives.
Barack Obama campaigned on the slogan of hope and change, bringing hope to the bailout of subprime mortgage lenders while screwing those who took out those amusement park loans and those who were dragged along with the weakening of home values. Obama also continued the war in Afghanistan with his troop surge that did nothing to stabilize that nation. Today, the country is once again a fundamentalist religious nightmare, much as Iran became after the destruction of democracy there in the early 1950s. Most don’t get that you reap what you sow.
Both the challenged Joe Biden and the ignoramus Donald Trump continue to fuel the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank. Who knows how many secret wars are going on as I write? The species hasn’t learned a fucking thing about war and peace. The environment tanks daily from fossil fuel production and use. Income inequality in the US is at a scandalous level. We are a failed species and will take many other species along with us on the road to perdition.
Part of the path toward oblivion of a society is the quashing of protest against the Israel-Gaza war. That a genocide can take place following a century of other genocides is a testament to the barbarity of the human species.