Where Did the Anti-War Movement Go?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_did_the_antiwar_movement_go_201508
13/
Posted on Aug 13, 2015
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
AK Rockefeller / CC BY-SA 2.0
This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.
Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I'm not likely to forget
even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It
involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only
seemed to come closer as time passed.
My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate
school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then
working as a "movement" printer-that is, in a print shop that produced
radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists. It
was, of course, "the Sixties," though I didn't know it then. Still, I had
somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life
trajectory-and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't particularly early to protest it. I think I
signed my first antiwar petition in 1965 while still in college, but as late
as 1968-people forget the confusion of that era-while I had become firmly
antiwar, I still wanted to serve my country abroad. Being a diplomat had
been a dream of mine, the kind of citizenly duty I had been taught to
admire, and the urge to act in such a fashion, to be of service, was deeply
embedded in me. (That I was already doing so in protesting the grim war my
government was prosecuting in Southeast Asia didn't cross my mind.) I
actually applied to the State Department, but it turned out to have no
dreams of Tom Engelhardt. On the other hand, the U.S. Information Agency, a
propaganda outfit, couldn't have been more interested.
Only one problem: they weren't about to guarantee that they wouldn't send a
guy who had studied Chinese, knew something of Asia, and could read French
to Saigon. However, by the time they had vetted me-it took government-issue
months and months to do so-I had grown far angrier about the war, so when
they offered me a job, I didn't think twice about saying no.
Somewhere in that same year, 1968, I joined a group called the Resistance
and in an elaborate public ceremony turned in my draft card to protest the
war. For several years, I had been increasingly involved in antiwar
activism, had marched on the Pentagon in the giant 1967 processional that
Norman Mailer so famously recorded in Armies of the Night, and returned
again a year or two later when, for the first time in my life, I got
tear-gassed.
For a while, I had also been working as a draft counselor with a group whose
initials, BDRG, I remember. A quick check of Google tells me that the
acronym stood for the Boston Draft Resistance Group. Somewhere in that
period, I helped set up an organization whose initials I also recall well:
the CCAS. Though hardly an inspired moniker, it stood for the Committee of
Concerned Asian Scholars. (That "concern"-in case it's not clear so many
years later-involved the same war that wouldn't end.) With a friend, I
designed and produced its bulletin. As one of those "concerned scholars," I
also helped write a group antiwar book, The Indochina Story, which would be
put out by a mainstream publishing house.
Of course, there's much that I've forgotten and I can't claim that all of
the above is in perfect order. Even at the time, life was a blur of
activism. Nearly half a century later, I'm a failing archive of my own life
and so much seems irretrievable.
My intention here, however, is simply to offer a sense of how so many lives
came, in part or in whole, to revolve around that war, while other things
went by the wayside. It's true that our government hadn't mobilized us, but
we had mobilized ourselves. Though much has been written about "dropping
out" in the 1960s, this antiwar form of it has been far less attended to.
Images of War
So much of what I'm describing must seem utterly alien today. At a time
when America's endless wars might as well be millions of miles from our
shores (and the national security state desperately needs a few "lone-wolf"
Islamic terror types to drive home how crucial it is to our protection),
it's hard to remember how large the Vietnam War once loomed in our national
life. In this age in which Americans have been demobilized from the wars
fought in our name, who recalls how many people took to the streets how
repeatedly in those Vietnam years, or how much the actions of our government
were passionately debated from Congress to kitchens, or how deeply plagued
and unnerved two American presidents were by the uproar and fuss? Who
remembers how little the antiwar movement of that moment was a weekend
operation and how central throwing some kind of monkey wrench into that war
became to so many lives?
Much of the tenacious antiwar opposition of that era, when thought about
now, is automatically attributed to the draft, to the fact that young men
like me were subject to being called up and sent thousands of miles from
home to fight in a conflict that looked more brutal, despicable, and even
criminal by the second. And there is, of course, some truth to that
explanation, but it's a very partial, dismissive truth, one that, for
instance, doesn't explain the vast number of young women who mobilized
against the war in those years.
While the draft was a factor in the growth of war consciousness, it was
hardly the only one. It's easy to forget that a generation raised in the
Golden Fifties believed the American system would work for them and that, if
it didn't, it was the obligation of the citizen to try to fix it. Those
young people were convinced that, if you spoke up loudly enough and in large
enough numbers, presidents would listen. They also believed that you, as an
American, had an obligation to step forward, to represent the best in your
country, to serve. Hence my urge to join the State Department. In other
words, I came from a generation primed-in part by the successes of the Civil
Rights Movement (when it seemed that presidents were listening)-to believe
that, in a democratic country, protest worked.
Of course, by the time the antiwar movement took off, it was hardly stylish
to admit to such sentiments of service, but that didn't make them less real.
They were crucial to a passionate protest that began mainly with students
but grew to include everyone from clergy to businessmen, and that, in its
later years, would be led by disillusioned military veterans home from the
country's Southeast Asian battlefields.
The importance of an antiwar movement that refused to stand down, that-while
two administrations continually escalated the killing in Vietnam and spread
it to Laos and Cambodia-never packed up its tents and went home, can't be
emphasized too strongly. Its refusal to shut up brought Vietnam, both
literally and figuratively, to America's doorstep. It made that grim war a
living (and dying) presence in American lives-and no less important was what
it made present.
Somehow, from so many thousands of miles away, we were turned into witnesses
to repeated horrors on a staggering scale in a small, largely peasant land:
free-fire zones, the body count, torture, assassination, war crimes, the
taking of trophy body parts, and above all the feeling that a spectacle of
slaughter was occurring and we were responsible for it. We here at home had
a growing sense of what it meant for the U.S. military to fight a war
against guerilla forces (which, at least on the left, came-unlike the
Islamic insurgents of the twenty-first century-to look ever more heroic and
sympathetic), with every means available short of nuclear weapons. That
included bombing campaigns that, in the end, would outdo in tonnage those of
World War II.
The images of that time still remain with me, including Ron Haeberle's
horrific photos of the My Lai massacre, which appeared in LIFE magazine in
December 1969, and Associated Press photographer Nick Ut's iconic 1972 shot
of a young Vietnamese girl napalmed by a South Vietnamese plane and caught
in pain and terror running naked down a road.
If you were in the antiwar movement in those years, you couldn't help coming
across testimony by American soldiers who had been in Vietnam and were ready
to paint a nightmarish picture of what they and their companions had seen or
done there. In the growing alternative or (as it was romantically termed
then) "underground" press of those pre-Internet days, snapshots of
unbearable atrocities were soon circulating. These undoubtedly came
directly from soldiers who had snapped them, or knew those who had, or were
like the servicemen-stirred to action by a growing military antiwar
movement-who appeared at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971. There,
they essentially testified against themselves on the commission of war
crimes. Others similarly moved handed such photos over to alternative
publications.
I've never forgotten, for instance, a trophy shot I saw in those years, of
an American soldier proudly holding up a severed Vietnamese head by the
hair. (If you want to imagine the impact such photos had, click here to see
one that circulated in the alternative press at that time.)
In those years, thanks to the efforts of the antiwar movement, the
Vietnamese-the dead, the wounded, the mistreated, as well as "the enemy"
("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Gonna Win!")-seemed to come ever closer to us
until, though I was living in quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sometimes
had the eerie feeling that Vietnamese were dying right outside my window.
In the post-9/11 American world, that sounds both ludicrous and histrionic.
You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not exaggerating and that the
sensation was visceral indeed.
A Spectacle of Slaughter
Which finally brings me to that clunky television set. At some point in
1968 or 1969, I got an old black-and-white TV. I have no idea whether I
bought it or someone gave it to me. I do remember one thing about it,
though. In that era before remote controls, the dial you turned by hand to
change channels was broken, so I used a pair of pliers. Sometimes, I had it
running on my desk while I worked; sometimes, it was propped on a chair,
just an arm's reach from my bed. (Remember those pliers!) And in the off
hours when old movies filled schedules on secondary channels, I began to
re-watch the westerns, adventure films, and war movies of my childhood.
I no longer know what possessed me to do so, but it became an almost
obsessional activity. I watched at least 30 to 40 of them, no small feat in
the era before you could find anything you wanted online at a moment's
notice. Keep in mind that those films from the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s-grade B-westerns, John Wayne-style World War II movies, and the
like-were for me the definition of entertainment sunny side up. I had only
the fondest memories of such films, in part because they were bedrock to the
American way of life as I understood it.
You always knew what to expect: the Indians (or Mexicans, or Japanese) would
fall in vast numbers, the cavalry would ride to the rescue in the nick of
time, the Marines-it hardly needed to be said-would advance triumphantly
before the movie ended, the West would be won, victory assured. It was how
it was and how it should be.
Add in a more personal factor: my father had been in World War II in the
Pacific. It wasn't something he generally cared to talk about. (In fact,
it made him angry.) But he often took me to such films and when we sat
together in silence in some movie theater watching Americans fight his war
(or cowboys and blue shirts fight the Indian wars), I felt close to him. In
that shared silence, I felt his stamp of approval on what we were watching.
If he and his generation were far more conflicted and less talkative about
their war experiences than we now like to remember, they really didn't need
to say much in those days. After all, we kids knew what they had done; we
had seen it sitting beside them at the movies.
Imagine my shock, on looking at those films again so many years later-with
that visceral sense of Vietnamese dying in my neighborhood-when I realized
that the sunniest part of my childhood had been based on a spectacle of
slaughter. The "Vietnamese" had always been the ones to fall in staggering
numbers just before the moment of victory, or when the wagon train again
advanced into the West, or the cowboy got the girl.
Consider this my own tiny version of the disillusionment so many experienced
with the previously all-American in those years. Our country's triumphs, I
suddenly realized, had been built on conquest and on piles of nonwhite
bodies.
Believe me, looking back on one of the sunniest parts of my childhood from
that antiwar moment was a shock and it led me to produce "Ambush at Kamikaze
Pass," the first critical essay of my life, for the Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars. "Anyone who thinks the body count is a creation of the
recent Indochinese war," I wrote then, "should look at the movies he saw as
a kid. It was the implicit rule of those films that no less than ten Indian
(Japanese, Chinese.) warriors should fall for each white, expendable
secondary character." Almost a quarter century later, it would become the
heart of my book The End of Victory Culture.
The Spectacle of Slaughter Updated
In 2015, the spectacle of slaughter is still with us. These days, however,
few Americans have that sense that it might be happening right down the
street. War is no longer a part of our collective lives. It's been
professionalized and outsourced. And here's the wonder of it all: since
9/11, this country has engaged in a military-first foreign policy across
much of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, launching an unending
string of failed wars, conflicts, raids, kidnappings, acts of torture, and
drone assassination programs, and yet Americans have remained remarkably
unengaged with any of it.
This is not happenstance. There is, of course, no draft. President Richard
Nixon ended it in 1973 with the demobilizing of the antiwar movement in
mind. Similarly, the military high command never again wanted to experience
a citizen's army reaching an almost mutinous state and voting with its feet
or its antiwar testimony or its medals. Ever since Vietnam, the urge of
successive administrations and an ever-expanding national security state has
been to fight wars without the involvement of the American people (or the
antiwar version of democratic oversight). Hence, the rise of the warrior
corporation and the privatization of war.
Especially after 9/11, a kind of helplessness settled over Americans left
out in the cold when it came to the wars being fought in their name. In
some sense, most of us accepted our newly assigned role as a surveilled and
protected populace whose order of the day was don't get involved.
In other words, amid all the military failures of this era, there was a
single hardly mentioned but striking victory: no antiwar movement of any
significance proved to have staying power in this country. Osama bin Laden
can, at least in part, be thanked for that. The 9/11 attacks, the shock of
the apocalyptic-looking collapse of those towers in New York, and the loss
of almost 3,000 innocent civilians inoculated America's second Afghan
War-launched in October 2001 and still ongoing-against serious protest.
The invasion of Iraq would prove another matter entirely. That act of Bush
administration hubris, based on kited intelligence and a full-scale White
House propaganda campaign filled with misinformation, brought briefly to
life something unique to our era: a massive antiwar movement that preceded
the launching of the war it was protesting. Those prewar demonstrations,
which stretched worldwide, ran into the hundreds of thousands and were
impressive enough that the New York Times front-paged "public opinion" as
the other "superpower" in a post-Cold War world.
But as soon as the Bush administration launched its much-desired invasion,
the domestic movement against it began to crumble. Within a couple of
years-with the exception of small groups of antiwar veterans-it was
essentially dead. In the end, Americans would generally live through their
twenty-first-century wars as if they weren't happening. There would neither
be an everyday antiwar movement into which anyone could "drop out," nor a
population eager to be swept into it. Its lack would be a modest tragedy
for American politics and our waning democracy; it would prove far more so
for Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and others.
For the spectacle of slaughter itself continued, even if few in this country
were tuning in. Don't consider it a fluke that the war culture hero of the
period-on the bestseller lists and in Hollywood-was an American sniper whose
claim to fame was that he had created his own singular body count: 160
"confirmed" dead Iraqis. Skip the unknown number of casualties of every
sort (ranging from Iraq Body Count's 219,000 up to a million dead) that
resulted from the invasion of Iraq and the chaos of the occupation that
followed or the tens of thousands of civilian dead in Afghanistan (some at
the hands of the Taliban and their roadside bombs, some thanks to U.S.
efforts). Consider instead the slaughter that can be connected to this
country's much-vaunted "precision" air weaponry, which-so the claim has
gone-can strike without causing what's politely termed significant
"collateral damage."
Start with the drone, a robotic machine that guarantees one thing in the
ongoing spectacle of slaughter: no American combatant will ever die in its
operations, no matter how many Afghans, or Yemenis, or Iraqis, or Syrians,
or Pakistanis, or Libyans, or Somalis may die when it releases its aptly
named Hellfire missiles. From that heroic investigative crew, the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism, we have an approximation of the casualties on the
ground from Washington's drone assassination campaigns across the Greater
Middle East, and they run into the thousands (including hundreds of
children) and lots of what might be called the mistaken dead. Keep in mind
that the most basic drone attack of Washington's wars in the Greater Middle
East has been the "signature strike," as it's euphemistically known. These
target not specific individuals, but groups on the ground that seem to fit
certain behavioral patterns suspected of being telltale marks of terror
outfits-particularly young men with weapons (in regions in which young men
are likely to be armed, whatever their affiliations).
Or consider U.S. air strikes targeting the Islamic State's forces in Iraq
and Syria. Again, with the grim exception of one Jordanian pilot, there
have, as far as we know, been no casualties among American and allied
combatants. That shouldn't be a surprise, since the Islamic State (like
just about every group the U.S. Air Force has faced in the twenty-first
century) is incapable of bringing down a fighter jet. In the last year,
according to a recent report, the U.S. and its allies have launched more
than 5,700 strikes against Islamic State operations, claiming at least
15,000 dead militants. (Such figures, impossible to confirm on the ground
under the circumstances, are undoubtedly fantasies.) The Pentagon has
acknowledged only two civilian deaths from all these strikes, but a new
study by Airwars of what can be known about just some of them indicates that
hundreds of civilians have died, including more than 100 children.
To offer one more example, since December 2001 U.S. air power has
obliterated at least eight wedding parties in three countries (Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Yemen). According to my count (and as far as I know there
are no others), just under 300 people died in these eight strikes, including
brides, grooms, and celebrants of every sort. Each of these incidents was
reported in the western media, but none had the slightest impact here. They
went essentially unnoticed. To put this in perspective, imagine for a
moment the media uproar, the shock, the scandal, the 24/7 coverage, if
anyone or any group were to knock off a single wedding party in this
country.
And this just scratches the surface of Washington's long "global war on
terror." Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and
slaughter that has been at the heart of that war has passed largely
unnoticed here. Unlike in the Vietnam years, it's never really come home.
In an era in which successes have been in short supply for two
administrations, consider this a major one. War without an antiwar movement
turns out to mean war without pause, war without end.
Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century
equivalents of the movies of my childhood. Such films couldn't be made.
After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines
advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the
horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl. Think of
this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.
In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of
slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes
unnerved drone video analysts. Could there be a sadder tale of a
demobilized citizenry than that?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
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Where Did the Anti-War Movement Go?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_did_the_antiwar_movement_go_201508
13/
Posted on Aug 13, 2015
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
AK Rockefeller / CC BY-SA 2.0
This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.
Let me tell you a story about a moment in my life I'm not likely to forget
even if, with the passage of years, so much around it has grown fuzzy. It
involves a broken-down TV, movies from my childhood, and a war that only
seemed to come closer as time passed.
My best guess: it was the summer of 1969. I had dropped out of graduate
school where I had been studying to become a China scholar and was then
working as a "movement" printer-that is, in a print shop that produced
radical literature, strike posters, and other materials for activists. It
was, of course, "the Sixties," though I didn't know it then. Still, I had
somehow been swept into a new world remarkably unrelated to my expected life
trajectory-and a large part of the reason for that was the Vietnam War.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't particularly early to protest it. I think I
signed my first antiwar petition in 1965 while still in college, but as late
as 1968-people forget the confusion of that era-while I had become firmly
antiwar, I still wanted to serve my country abroad. Being a diplomat had
been a dream of mine, the kind of citizenly duty I had been taught to
admire, and the urge to act in such a fashion, to be of service, was deeply
embedded in me. (That I was already doing so in protesting the grim war my
government was prosecuting in Southeast Asia didn't cross my mind.) I
actually applied to the State Department, but it turned out to have no
dreams of Tom Engelhardt. On the other hand, the U.S. Information Agency, a
propaganda outfit, couldn't have been more interested.
Only one problem: they weren't about to guarantee that they wouldn't send a
guy who had studied Chinese, knew something of Asia, and could read French
to Saigon. However, by the time they had vetted me-it took government-issue
months and months to do so-I had grown far angrier about the war, so when
they offered me a job, I didn't think twice about saying no.
Somewhere in that same year, 1968, I joined a group called the Resistance
and in an elaborate public ceremony turned in my draft card to protest the
war. For several years, I had been increasingly involved in antiwar
activism, had marched on the Pentagon in the giant 1967 processional that
Norman Mailer so famously recorded in Armies of the Night, and returned
again a year or two later when, for the first time in my life, I got
tear-gassed.
For a while, I had also been working as a draft counselor with a group whose
initials, BDRG, I remember. A quick check of Google tells me that the
acronym stood for the Boston Draft Resistance Group. Somewhere in that
period, I helped set up an organization whose initials I also recall well:
the CCAS. Though hardly an inspired moniker, it stood for the Committee of
Concerned Asian Scholars. (That "concern"-in case it's not clear so many
years later-involved the same war that wouldn't end.) With a friend, I
designed and produced its bulletin. As one of those "concerned scholars," I
also helped write a group antiwar book, The Indochina Story, which would be
put out by a mainstream publishing house.
Of course, there's much that I've forgotten and I can't claim that all of
the above is in perfect order. Even at the time, life was a blur of
activism. Nearly half a century later, I'm a failing archive of my own life
and so much seems irretrievable.
My intention here, however, is simply to offer a sense of how so many lives
came, in part or in whole, to revolve around that war, while other things
went by the wayside. It's true that our government hadn't mobilized us, but
we had mobilized ourselves. Though much has been written about "dropping
out" in the 1960s, this antiwar form of it has been far less attended to.
Images of War
So much of what I'm describing must seem utterly alien today. At a time when
America's endless wars might as well be millions of miles from our shores
(and the national security state desperately needs a few "lone-wolf" Islamic
terror types to drive home how crucial it is to our protection), it's hard
to remember how large the Vietnam War once loomed in our national life. In
this age in which Americans have been demobilized from the wars fought in
our name, who recalls how many people took to the streets how repeatedly in
those Vietnam years, or how much the actions of our government were
passionately debated from Congress to kitchens, or how deeply plagued and
unnerved two American presidents were by the uproar and fuss? Who remembers
how little the antiwar movement of that moment was a weekend operation and
how central throwing some kind of monkey wrench into that war became to so
many lives?
Much of the tenacious antiwar opposition of that era, when thought about
now, is automatically attributed to the draft, to the fact that young men
like me were subject to being called up and sent thousands of miles from
home to fight in a conflict that looked more brutal, despicable, and even
criminal by the second. And there is, of course, some truth to that
explanation, but it's a very partial, dismissive truth, one that, for
instance, doesn't explain the vast number of young women who mobilized
against the war in those years.
While the draft was a factor in the growth of war consciousness, it was
hardly the only one. It's easy to forget that a generation raised in the
Golden Fifties believed the American system would work for them and that, if
it didn't, it was the obligation of the citizen to try to fix it. Those
young people were convinced that, if you spoke up loudly enough and in large
enough numbers, presidents would listen. They also believed that you, as an
American, had an obligation to step forward, to represent the best in your
country, to serve. Hence my urge to join the State Department. In other
words, I came from a generation primed-in part by the successes of the Civil
Rights Movement (when it seemed that presidents were listening)-to believe
that, in a democratic country, protest worked.
Of course, by the time the antiwar movement took off, it was hardly stylish
to admit to such sentiments of service, but that didn't make them less real.
They were crucial to a passionate protest that began mainly with students
but grew to include everyone from clergy to businessmen, and that, in its
later years, would be led by disillusioned military veterans home from the
country's Southeast Asian battlefields.
The importance of an antiwar movement that refused to stand down, that-while
two administrations continually escalated the killing in Vietnam and spread
it to Laos and Cambodia-never packed up its tents and went home, can't be
emphasized too strongly. Its refusal to shut up brought Vietnam, both
literally and figuratively, to America's doorstep. It made that grim war a
living (and dying) presence in American lives-and no less important was what
it made present.
Somehow, from so many thousands of miles away, we were turned into witnesses
to repeated horrors on a staggering scale in a small, largely peasant land:
free-fire zones, the body count, torture, assassination, war crimes, the
taking of trophy body parts, and above all the feeling that a spectacle of
slaughter was occurring and we were responsible for it. We here at home had
a growing sense of what it meant for the U.S. military to fight a war
against guerilla forces (which, at least on the left, came-unlike the
Islamic insurgents of the twenty-first century-to look ever more heroic and
sympathetic), with every means available short of nuclear weapons. That
included bombing campaigns that, in the end, would outdo in tonnage those of
World War II.
The images of that time still remain with me, including Ron Haeberle's
horrific photos of the My Lai massacre, which appeared in LIFE magazine in
December 1969, and Associated Press photographer Nick Ut's iconic 1972 shot
of a young Vietnamese girl napalmed by a South Vietnamese plane and caught
in pain and terror running naked down a road.
If you were in the antiwar movement in those years, you couldn't help coming
across testimony by American soldiers who had been in Vietnam and were ready
to paint a nightmarish picture of what they and their companions had seen or
done there. In the growing alternative or (as it was romantically termed
then) "underground" press of those pre-Internet days, snapshots of
unbearable atrocities were soon circulating. These undoubtedly came directly
from soldiers who had snapped them, or knew those who had, or were like the
servicemen-stirred to action by a growing military antiwar movement-who
appeared at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971. There, they
essentially testified against themselves on the commission of war crimes.
Others similarly moved handed such photos over to alternative publications.
I've never forgotten, for instance, a trophy shot I saw in those years, of
an American soldier proudly holding up a severed Vietnamese head by the
hair. (If you want to imagine the impact such photos had, click here to see
one that circulated in the alternative press at that time.)
In those years, thanks to the efforts of the antiwar movement, the
Vietnamese-the dead, the wounded, the mistreated, as well as "the enemy"
("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Gonna Win!")-seemed to come ever closer to us
until, though I was living in quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, I sometimes
had the eerie feeling that Vietnamese were dying right outside my window. In
the post-9/11 American world, that sounds both ludicrous and histrionic.
You'll have to take my word for it that I'm not exaggerating and that the
sensation was visceral indeed.
A Spectacle of Slaughter
Which finally brings me to that clunky television set. At some point in 1968
or 1969, I got an old black-and-white TV. I have no idea whether I bought it
or someone gave it to me. I do remember one thing about it, though. In that
era before remote controls, the dial you turned by hand to change channels
was broken, so I used a pair of pliers. Sometimes, I had it running on my
desk while I worked; sometimes, it was propped on a chair, just an arm's
reach from my bed. (Remember those pliers!) And in the off hours when old
movies filled schedules on secondary channels, I began to re-watch the
westerns, adventure films, and war movies of my childhood.
I no longer know what possessed me to do so, but it became an almost
obsessional activity. I watched at least 30 to 40 of them, no small feat in
the era before you could find anything you wanted online at a moment's
notice. Keep in mind that those films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s-grade
B-westerns, John Wayne-style World War II movies, and the like-were for me
the definition of entertainment sunny side up. I had only the fondest
memories of such films, in part because they were bedrock to the American
way of life as I understood it.
You always knew what to expect: the Indians (or Mexicans, or Japanese) would
fall in vast numbers, the cavalry would ride to the rescue in the nick of
time, the Marines-it hardly needed to be said-would advance triumphantly
before the movie ended, the West would be won, victory assured. It was how
it was and how it should be.
Add in a more personal factor: my father had been in World War II in the
Pacific. It wasn't something he generally cared to talk about. (In fact, it
made him angry.) But he often took me to such films and when we sat together
in silence in some movie theater watching Americans fight his war (or
cowboys and blue shirts fight the Indian wars), I felt close to him. In that
shared silence, I felt his stamp of approval on what we were watching. If he
and his generation were far more conflicted and less talkative about their
war experiences than we now like to remember, they really didn't need to say
much in those days. After all, we kids knew what they had done; we had seen
it sitting beside them at the movies.
Imagine my shock, on looking at those films again so many years later-with
that visceral sense of Vietnamese dying in my neighborhood-when I realized
that the sunniest part of my childhood had been based on a spectacle of
slaughter. The "Vietnamese" had always been the ones to fall in staggering
numbers just before the moment of victory, or when the wagon train again
advanced into the West, or the cowboy got the girl.
Consider this my own tiny version of the disillusionment so many experienced
with the previously all-American in those years. Our country's triumphs, I
suddenly realized, had been built on conquest and on piles of nonwhite
bodies.
Believe me, looking back on one of the sunniest parts of my childhood from
that antiwar moment was a shock and it led me to produce "Ambush at Kamikaze
Pass," the first critical essay of my life, for the Bulletin of Concerned
Asian Scholars. "Anyone who thinks the body count is a creation of the
recent Indochinese war," I wrote then, "should look at the movies he saw as
a kid. It was the implicit rule of those films that no less than ten Indian
(Japanese, Chinese.) warriors should fall for each white, expendable
secondary character." Almost a quarter century later, it would become the
heart of my book The End of Victory Culture.
The Spectacle of Slaughter Updated
In 2015, the spectacle of slaughter is still with us. These days, however,
few Americans have that sense that it might be happening right down the
street. War is no longer a part of our collective lives. It's been
professionalized and outsourced. And here's the wonder of it all: since
9/11, this country has engaged in a military-first foreign policy across
much of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, launching an unending
string of failed wars, conflicts, raids, kidnappings, acts of torture, and
drone assassination programs, and yet Americans have remained remarkably
unengaged with any of it.
This is not happenstance. There is, of course, no draft. President Richard
Nixon ended it in 1973 with the demobilizing of the antiwar movement in
mind. Similarly, the military high command never again wanted to experience
a citizen's army reaching an almost mutinous state and voting with its feet
or its antiwar testimony or its medals. Ever since Vietnam, the urge of
successive administrations and an ever-expanding national security state has
been to fight wars without the involvement of the American people (or the
antiwar version of democratic oversight). Hence, the rise of the warrior
corporation and the privatization of war.
Especially after 9/11, a kind of helplessness settled over Americans left
out in the cold when it came to the wars being fought in their name. In some
sense, most of us accepted our newly assigned role as a surveilled and
protected populace whose order of the day was don't get involved.
In other words, amid all the military failures of this era, there was a
single hardly mentioned but striking victory: no antiwar movement of any
significance proved to have staying power in this country. Osama bin Laden
can, at least in part, be thanked for that. The 9/11 attacks, the shock of
the apocalyptic-looking collapse of those towers in New York, and the loss
of almost 3,000 innocent civilians inoculated America's second Afghan
War-launched in October 2001 and still ongoing-against serious protest.
The invasion of Iraq would prove another matter entirely. That act of Bush
administration hubris, based on kited intelligence and a full-scale White
House propaganda campaign filled with misinformation, brought briefly to
life something unique to our era: a massive antiwar movement that preceded
the launching of the war it was protesting. Those prewar demonstrations,
which stretched worldwide, ran into the hundreds of thousands and were
impressive enough that the New York Times front-paged "public opinion" as
the other "superpower" in a post-Cold War world.
But as soon as the Bush administration launched its much-desired invasion,
the domestic movement against it began to crumble. Within a couple of
years-with the exception of small groups of antiwar veterans-it was
essentially dead. In the end, Americans would generally live through their
twenty-first-century wars as if they weren't happening. There would neither
be an everyday antiwar movement into which anyone could "drop out," nor a
population eager to be swept into it. Its lack would be a modest tragedy for
American politics and our waning democracy; it would prove far more so for
Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and others.
For the spectacle of slaughter itself continued, even if few in this country
were tuning in. Don't consider it a fluke that the war culture hero of the
period-on the bestseller lists and in Hollywood-was an American sniper whose
claim to fame was that he had created his own singular body count: 160
"confirmed" dead Iraqis. Skip the unknown number of casualties of every sort
(ranging from Iraq Body Count's 219,000 up to a million dead) that resulted
from the invasion of Iraq and the chaos of the occupation that followed or
the tens of thousands of civilian dead in Afghanistan (some at the hands of
the Taliban and their roadside bombs, some thanks to U.S. efforts). Consider
instead the slaughter that can be connected to this country's much-vaunted
"precision" air weaponry, which-so the claim has gone-can strike without
causing what's politely termed significant "collateral damage."
Start with the drone, a robotic machine that guarantees one thing in the
ongoing spectacle of slaughter: no American combatant will ever die in its
operations, no matter how many Afghans, or Yemenis, or Iraqis, or Syrians,
or Pakistanis, or Libyans, or Somalis may die when it releases its aptly
named Hellfire missiles. From that heroic investigative crew, the Bureau of
Investigative Journalism, we have an approximation of the casualties on the
ground from Washington's drone assassination campaigns across the Greater
Middle East, and they run into the thousands (including hundreds of
children) and lots of what might be called the mistaken dead. Keep in mind
that the most basic drone attack of Washington's wars in the Greater Middle
East has been the "signature strike," as it's euphemistically known. These
target not specific individuals, but groups on the ground that seem to fit
certain behavioral patterns suspected of being telltale marks of terror
outfits-particularly young men with weapons (in regions in which young men
are likely to be armed, whatever their affiliations).
Or consider U.S. air strikes targeting the Islamic State's forces in Iraq
and Syria. Again, with the grim exception of one Jordanian pilot, there
have, as far as we know, been no casualties among American and allied
combatants. That shouldn't be a surprise, since the Islamic State (like just
about every group the U.S. Air Force has faced in the twenty-first century)
is incapable of bringing down a fighter jet. In the last year, according to
a recent report, the U.S. and its allies have launched more than 5,700
strikes against Islamic State operations, claiming at least 15,000 dead
militants. (Such figures, impossible to confirm on the ground under the
circumstances, are undoubtedly fantasies.) The Pentagon has acknowledged
only two civilian deaths from all these strikes, but a new study by Airwars
of what can be known about just some of them indicates that hundreds of
civilians have died, including more than 100 children.
To offer one more example, since December 2001 U.S. air power has
obliterated at least eight wedding parties in three countries (Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Yemen). According to my count (and as far as I know there
are no others), just under 300 people died in these eight strikes, including
brides, grooms, and celebrants of every sort. Each of these incidents was
reported in the western media, but none had the slightest impact here. They
went essentially unnoticed. To put this in perspective, imagine for a moment
the media uproar, the shock, the scandal, the 24/7 coverage, if anyone or
any group were to knock off a single wedding party in this country.
And this just scratches the surface of Washington's long "global war on
terror." Yet without an antiwar movement, the spectacle of mayhem and
slaughter that has been at the heart of that war has passed largely
unnoticed here. Unlike in the Vietnam years, it's never really come home. In
an era in which successes have been in short supply for two administrations,
consider this a major one. War without an antiwar movement turns out to mean
war without pause, war without end.
Admittedly, American children can no longer catch the twenty-first-century
equivalents of the movies of my childhood. Such films couldn't be made.
After all, few are the movies that are likely to end with the Marines
advancing amid a pile of nonwhite bodies, the wagon train heading for the
horizon, or the cowboy galloping off on his horse with his girl. Think of
this as onscreen evidence of American imperial decline.
In the badlands and backlands of the planet, however, the spectacle of
slaughter never ends, even if the only Americans watching are sometimes
unnerved drone video analysts. Could there be a sadder tale of a demobilized
citizenry than that?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
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