My blog:  The War Department and Peace Heroes

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/ 

Newsletters on Peace, Justice, and Ecology:

Index:

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See: Fulbright, Imperialism, Language for War, Lying, Militarism, Pentagon, Recruiting, and more.

WWII under President Roosevelt released not only indescribable, immeasurable destructive energy, but also an enormous wave of idealism for the future: workers union rights, the Four Freedoms, the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   But soon, by 1946 the reaction swept in just as following WWI against the League of Nations.   Instead of the dream of ending wars by nations united for peace and cooperation, nations resumed their old us and them.  The United States empire, already established in the Pacific, took flight as the Leader of the Free World—Taft-Hartley legislation, Truman Doctrine, Cold War.  

Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the USbegan to developed new nuclear weapons, most of them over several decades, each matched by the Soviet Union (US/SU), which innovated once or twice itself in the world’s most dangerous arms race.  In 1947 the foundation was laid for the US National Security State:  the Armed Forces  united under the Pentagon, the War Department euphemized into the Department of “Defense,”  the CIA and the National Security Administration established.    

NATO was formed for the “Free World “ against the Soviets.  The Soviets created their bloc against Western invasion—from Napoleon to Hitler and, they feared, to NATO.    And the Cold War shifted into high gear.   But Victorious WWII was not to be repeated by the US.   The Korean War ended in stalemate.   And then the Vietnam War  torpedoed the US Imperial Ship of State.   How measure victory and defeat?   If your goal was body count, then the USwon:  between two and three million Vietnamese were killed; tens of thousands more if you count fetuses aborted.  But by other measures the USlost, and retreated back to the mainland. 

 This defeat has rankled military leaders and the warrior patriots in government.   It became important to them to regain the confidence commensurate to an Empire based upon armed force, invasion, and eventually occupation.   Like football teams that play sure losers to start the season, the US began with victories in the 1950s—including overthrowing the elected Iranian and Guatemalan governments.   But Vietnam surprised the imperial Pentagon, for how could an impoverished country withstand the firepower of the US of A?   

The withdrawal was a humiliation for the gunslingers.  They would not rest until the stain was erased.   President Reagan invaded Nicaragua and Grenada.  President Bush I invaded Panama and Iraq.   President Clinton invaded Serbia.  And President Bush II invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Thus President Obama’s policy statement  May 2012 was no surprise as much as it was a culmination  of long Pentagon and other warrior pressures.  In May, 2012, President Obama signed a proclamation establishing the “Commemoration of the 50^thAnniversary of the Vietnam War” to begin this year, to last for thirteen years (to Veterans Day 2025), and to be conducted by the Pentagon.   (2012 is the 50^th if you mark the war’s beginning in January 1962, when open combat by US forces began.)    Why this attention?   It is certainly not to acknowledge the deaths of several million civilians,  atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, war-crime chemical weapons (Agent Orange: dioxin),  or the use of twice the explosive tonnage as employed by all sides in WWII  and against a mainly peasant people who had fought  to liberate themselves first from French colonialism and then from US neocolonialism.   No, for Obama, campaigning for the presidency, the “national shame” was failure of the US to fully honor our killed and surviving troops, and the commemoration is meant to assuage guilt fully and finally by commemorating each battle of the war (Hue, Khe Sanh, Saigon, and on and on) and those US soldiers who fought in each, whether guilty of atrocities or not.   Thus it is an attempt to delete from the national memory, according to one historian, the “basic facts about the most horrendous imperialist (North-South) war of the twentieth century, as well as the most unpopular war in U.S. history.”  Erasing the Vietnam Syndrome forever, Obama asserted, would make the US“stronger than before.”

Obama’s effort to efface responsibility for massive UScriminal behavior and to blame the victim is inseparable from the history of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and similar memorials around the country).  For example, in 1977 President Carter, who authorized the establishment of the Memorial, denied any USobligations to Vietnam, because the destruction, he said, was mutual.  

The eventual memorial as finally assembled offers mixed purposes and affects.  The original Wall, designed by Maya Lin, does not heroize warriors; it is the antipode of the Marine Corps Memorial.  It softens the divisiveness of the war by omitting opponents of the war, patriotic effusions, or signs of defeat and humiliation.   Rather, by listing the names of the killed soldiers, the monument neutrally permits to each visitor their private reflection on personal loss.   Ordinary people interpret the discourse of the dead without national intervention..

Of course, such a monument for people, not nation, outraged many.  One Pentagon officer wondered why “we” should build a memorial to losers.  Like him, many saw Lin’s Wall as a counter-monument to national glory and soldiers’ heroism, some approvingly, others disapprovingly, some of those vehemently: they wanted a triumphal monument, like the Iwo Jima monument.   The monument’s chronological, democratizing, equalizing (for Lin “the heart of the design”) differed from traditional hierarchical war monuments and the hierarchical orientation of officials. The conflict resulted in the present compromise:  the addition of a sculpture of three combat soldiers and a USflag.  Finally was added a sculpture of women, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, another arrangement of three figures.   In the opinion of some commentators, these additions, even the women’s memorial, obscured the Wall’s inclusivity and equality with “patriarchal demands.”

But these debates and these additions do not grasp the disquietude many of us feel morally when we contemplate the immense absence the Wall displays.  The Wall of Names, in its original spare design and especially with its additions, expresses the assumption that the US is the sole injured party, because it deletes reference to the devastation of Vietnam and the slaughter of two to three million Vietnamese, not to mention those killed earlier by the French with our financing     It is the Wall of US names.   The Vietnamese youth killed for US anticommunism and Sovietphobia, the Vietnamese children lost and injured by bombs and dioxin for US nationalist and commercial expansion westward, deserved no remembrance, no pity.  The arrogance of our leaders, their patriotic rhetoric and duplicitous justifications for mass killing made them incapable of perceiving the enemy’s children as victims.   

Given all of these failures, Chris Burden’s sculpture, The Other Vietnam Memorial, takes its place as  the great alternative to the Vietnam Memorial Wall and as the greatest memorial shaming of US nationalist barbarism.   First shown in 1991 in the Museum of Modern Art, Burden’s art symbolically registers the estimated 3 million casualties by using a basic catalogue of nearly 4,000 Vietnamese names permutated by a computer.   These names were then etched onto 3 by 6.5 foot copper plates sandwiched together in pairs and mounted into steel frames hinged to a 13-foot-high steel pole.  Imagine a giant, Rolodex, symbolically listing the enemy‘s casualties—names that US Pentagon and president after president would expunge from US collective historical memory.

Even more significantly, Burden’s great monument to memory and empathy reminds us not only of US Vietnam War crimes but of the similar crimes in the several dozen US invasions of other countries since WWII.   Instead of the glorification of chauvinism, killing, soldiers, military glory, and jingoistic nationalism, Burden, by offering an alternative, inclusive vision of species unity, calls into question the past 70 years of fear-and-hatred-mongering and its product, permanent war.   It does not offer consolation and closure, as does Maya Lin’s Wall, at least to some.  Rather, it calls for sympathy and justice for innocent “enemies,” for the abolition of jingoistic monuments, for resistance to present and future US wars of aggression, and once seen it will not let us sleep.

References:

---Boime, Albert.  The Unveiling of the National Icons: A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist Era.   CambridgeUP, 1998.  Epilogue: The VietnamVeterans Memorial..

---Foster, John Bellamy.   “Notes from the Editors.”.   Monthly Review (Sept. 2012).

---For a list of recent books on US imperialism and militarism see the 46  references for OMNI’s US Imperialism Book Forum (Sept. 21, 2012).   Especially recommended: Blum’s Killing Hope and Rogue Nation, Nicholas Davies’ Blood on Our Hands, and Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback tetralogy.

Russ Bynum.  (AP).  “Budget Cuts Ground Jet Shows.”  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (March 11, 2013).   The relevance of this article is how many expensive but free shows the Navy’s Blue Angels, the Air Force’s Thunderbirds, and the Army’s Golden Knights skydivers perform.  190 were scheduled for this summer.   The expected host communities are wailing at the loss of revenue, so popular are the shows, always a “tourism bonanza.”    One city reported they would lose “a $2 million weekend for the area.  That’s for hotels, employees, restaurants, souvenirs.”  And the military regrets the loss of a great recruiting tool.  [Enjoying the day with the killing machines, all at public expense.]   –Dick