I do not believe you were truly “liberal” beforehand, Neo. I suspect you always had a part of your mind filled with doubt, conscious and unconscious of certain inconsistencies.

Depends what you mean by truly liberal. I certainly behaved that way in terms of my voting record. From my very first vote at 21 right up until the year 2004, when I was what a lot of people might consider old, I voted only for Democrats. What’s more, I couldn’t imagine voting for a Republican, and I couldn’t imagine ever voting for a Republican in the future. Somewhere between the fall of 2001 and the fall of 2004 that changed, but it was quite a difficult transition that involved – among other things – the shock of admitting to myself that I would be voting Republican.

Of course, for most of those years, Democrats were far more centrist than they have since become. I never was a leftist, and perhaps that’s what OBloody really means. But I was certainly a “liberal” as most people thought of it back then: was in favor of unions, welfare, civil rights, free speech, and more government in general. Of course I had some doubts, and I didn’t completely toe the line, but I don’t think that was unusual among Democrat voters in those days. For me, some points of contention that I can recall were that I never was in favor of affirmative action, nor was I keen on bilingual education or dropping programs for the gifted. I didn’t think the US was an evil empire, but most liberals of the time didn’t think so either; that was a leftist belief.

Did I think conservatives were selfish, greedy, and bigoted? Maybe; I’m a little foggier on that. Plus, I’m pretty sure I didn’t know any – at least not among the people with whom I habitually spoke. However, I almost never talked politics with people, so I wouldn’t have been able to say for sure. And that was fine with me. My experience of political discussions among those who disagreed with each other was that they were nasty, bitter, and solved nothing. And political discussions among those who did agree with each other were boring. So why bother?

I got my news from the NY Times and the Boston Globe, plus the New Yorker, and believed they gave their readers fair representations of the truth. But in general, politics itself bored me. I knew it mattered, and I paid attention to it – especially to the big stories – but it never grabbed me in the sense that I wanted to know more than my usual sources were giving me.

As I’ve described in great detail in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, it took an unusual combination of factors to change all of that. My son was in college and I was separated from my husband and decided not to have the papers delivered anymore; my arm injury made it difficult to deal with disposing of piles of papers. So I had more free time than before, and with computers it was easier to read all sorts of newspapers, magazines, and even those new inventions called blogs. Link led to link, and before I knew it I was reading not only my old “liberal” sources but sources on the right, too.

Thing is, I didn’t realize they were on the right. I just knew they had unfamiliar names, but they made more sense than the Times and the Globe did. By the time I realized the sources I liked best were on the right, I couldn’t deny that they were more reliable and more logical, for the most part. That caused a lot of soul-searching, more research, and the rest is neo history.

If that particular unusual set of circumstances hadn’t happened to me – the divorce, the computer, the free time, and let’s not forget the initial jump-start of 9/11 – would I have had a political change? I think that by now I would have, but much more recently and mostly because of the extreme leftism of the Democratic Party in recent years.

But I don’t think I was all that atypical of a certain subset of “liberals’ during the last half of the 20th Century. Even now, my sense is that most of my Democrat friends are a combination of busy with other things, informed by leftist propaganda, and living in a social environment in which they know few people on the right. Add to that the fact that people on the right have been further demonized by that propaganda, and you have yourself the recipe for the perceptions of a large portion of today’s Democrat voters.

The post Why did I vote for Democrats all those years? appeared first on The New Neo.

When exactly did we lose the “courage to see things as they are”?

When FDR recognized the USSR in 1933, just after that regime murdered millions of its own people, did he “see things as they are”?…

As for Obama, he didn’t come as a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky. Before you became a “neocon” did you “see things as they are”? Did the anti Vietnam war “Peace movement”?…And yet it was in that period that the coming of Obama was prepared.
I think the West has for a very long time not “seen things as they are”.

It’s not always—probably not even often—an easy or simple thing to comprehend the “truth” of events as they are happening. Doing so requires a host of elements: correct information, sound judgment, some knowledge of the past in order to put the present in context, and yes, the courage to face what you see even if it is a disillusioning departure from a previously held belief and/or hope.

That’s a tall order, and not a simple one.

In the post in which Phil D made that comment, I had quoted a letter to the editor to a British newspaper written right after the Munich agreement with Hitler, in which the author of the letter, WWI war hero F. L. Lucas, opined on something that Lucas thought was crystal clear and not difficult to understand at all—the intentions of Adolf Hitler at the time.

It’s worth revisiting what Lucas actually wrote:

No doubt [Neville Chamberlain] has never read Mein Kampf in German. But to forget, so utterly, the Reichstag fire, and the occupation of the Rhineland, and 30 June 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives], and the fall of Austria! We have lost the courage to see things as they are. And yet Herr Hitler has kindly put down for us in black and white that programme he is so faithfully carrying out”

In other words, Lucas was contending that these events and their meaning were not hard to see or to understand. He felt it was as plain as the proverbial nose on one’s face (or the mustache on Hitler’s) what the end result would be, and to ignore that or not see it was a form of willful denial which could only come from a failure of courage.

Now, we can argue here about whether that charge against Chamberlain was justified or not. Some say that Chamberlain knew but that his hands were tied by the fact that England hadn’t yet armed itself sufficiently; others say he was a naive dupe. I’m not going to get into that side issue here; what I’m interested in now is the process of trying to understand what’s happening in the world and what it might signify.

I have written my personal story of “seeing things as they are” in fairly exhaustive detail in the series “A mind is a difficult thing to change,” and if you’re interested and haven’t read it yet you can click and read the posts (they’re listed in reverse order). In them, I also discuss at length the antiwar movement during the Vietnam years, so I don’t need to recap that here, either. Suffice to say I do think the roots of today were present then; that’s why I spent so much time talking about it.

In personal terms, I believe that I always had the courage to see things as they are, but I lacked the information and the context. In addition, I assumed that I was already “seeing things as they are,” and didn’t realize my error. What I didn’t realize is how looking at things more closely and changing my mind would affect me socially; how it would set me apart in ways small and large from most of my friends and family. I suppose if I’d known that it would have given me pause, but it never would have stopped me because I was driven by something else: curiosity and a personal need to know.

I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ve got the corner on truth or the complete story even now; far from it. But I now have easier access to much more information than during those years, and I give these topics much more time and effort than I did when I was young.

It’s a work in progress.

We all now have access to a lot more information (just for starters, many more periodicals and even books can easily be accessed online) than we did before. So now, people who turn away from learning that information, or who make excuses for the destructive actions and/or lying by certain public figures they admire, either are lazy, avoidant, or already know or should know certain truths but don’t have the courage to admit that their idols have feet of clay—or to admit to themselves that they have made errors in judgement in admiring those people or voting for them. If something is obvious (as F. L. Lucas thought Hitler’s intentions were back in the days of Munich), then to ignore it is a failure of both courage and judgment, and compounds earlier errors. If something isn’t the least bit obvious—if it’s complex or hidden or needs special knowledge to understand—then it’s not so much a failure of courage as of knowledge and judgment.

Take Obama. I think many things about him are now obvious—and should have been obvious even during the 2008 campaign. I’m happy to be able to look back at my posts from then and see that, although I certainly didn’t perceive everything about him, I perceived plenty. That’s not because I’m such a psychic or a genius, it’s because I think it was obvious to any intelligent person who was paying attention. And yet, plenty of seemingly intelligent people don’t see it, even today. Is that a failure of courage? Information? Judgment? Imagination? Is it in many cases a reluctance to admit one was wrong (I wouldn’t underestimate that motivation)? Or party loyalty? Or a fear of being accused of racism, even at this late date? I think it must be different for different people. But at this point, people do know or should know that something is very, very wrong.

I’m not a relativist. I do not think that truth is completely “constructed” and exists only in the mind of the beholder. I think there really is an objective truth. But I also think we can only see it through a glass, darkly.

That doesn’t mean that we cannot, and should not, do our best to apprehend it. In fact, we must do so, if we are to make decisions in the world. It’s not an easy task, nor is it a quick one. But it’s a necessary one that many people wrongly delegate to others.

[NOTE: F. L. Lucas was also a man of great erudition, energy, and output, worthy of some attention on his own. Here are some excerpts from his Wiki profile, which is long:

Frank Laurence Lucas (1894-1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II…

His criticism, while acknowledging that morality is historically relative, was thus values-based. “Writers can make men feel, not merely see, the values that endure.” Believing that too many modern writers encouraged men and women to flee to unreason, decadence and barbarism, he condemned the trahisons des clercs of the twentieth century, and used his lectures and writing to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom. “One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat,” he wrote in his last published letter (1966), “that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it.” The writer or artist serving up “slapdash nightmares out of his Unconscious”, “in an age morbidly avid of uncivilised irreticence”, not only exhibited his own neuroses, but fed neurosis in others. Literary critics, too, had to take more responsibility. “Much cant gets talked,” he noted of the Structuralists, “by critics who care more for the form and organisation of a work than for its spirit, its content, its supreme moments.” The serious note in his criticism was counterbalanced by wit and urbanity, by lively anecdote and quotation, and by a gift for startling imagery and epigram.

There’s more—much much more—about this tremendously erudite, articulate, profound man, whom I’d never heard of until yesterday. He was, among other things, a classical scholar who knew many languages. Clearly, he had a lot of information and context in which to place the events of his day, far more than most people. When I read the sentence in his letter to the editor where he said that “no doubt” Chamberlain had never read Mein Kampf in the original German, it almost immediately occurred to me that F. L. Lucas, whoever he might be, had done exactly that. Sure enough, from his Wiki entry:

Having read Mein Kampf in the original and taken its threats as a statement of intent, he urged in September 1933 that Nazi Germany be prevented from re-arming.

Lucas didn’t just write that one letter. He was very active in urging preparedness against Germany in all sorts of ways;

As well as letters to the press (some forty in all) his campaign included satires, articles, books, public speaking, fund-raising for the Red Cross, petitions to Parliament, meetings with émigrés like Haile Selassie and Stefan Zweig, and help for refugees. In these activities he was inspired by the example of “that grand old man” H. W. Nevinson, “one of the most striking personalities I have ever known”, “whose long life has been given to Liberty”.

Lucas also kept a journal during the late 30s. Here’s what he wrote in it about Munich:

Even if what he did were the right thing to do, this was not the way to do it. The surrender might have been necessary: the cant was not. Any statesman with a sense of honour would at least have stilled that hysterical cheering and said: “My friends, for the present, we are out of danger. But remember that others, who trusted in us, are not. This is a day for relief, perhaps; but for sorrow also; for shame, not for revelling.” But this Chamberlain comes home beaming as fatuously as some country-cousin whom a couple of card-sharpers in the train have just allowed to win sixpence, to encourage him.

There’s much, much more. But I’ll just close by offering this from Lucas, which he wrote in 1936:

A hatred of war can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries ”˜peace” where there is none.

Again, I suggest reading the entire Wiki entry.]

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I used to say that oh yes, I plan to finish it soon. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

But lately I’m beginning to realize that maybe the bulk of the story is told. I’ve described the major events, and everything else would just be elaboration and/or repetition, and has already been augmented with some of my regular blog posts that have described some of the repercussions of the change for me, social and otherwise.

What I plan to someday do with it all, though, is try to work up a book on the subject. Now, I’ve been saying that for years, and so far I haven’t done a thing about it. I keep focusing so much on current events in my writing that I don’t seem to have the time and/or energy to look back and rework that material, although it still interests me very much and I want to do it.

I’ve thought of soliciting people’s stories to add to it. If and when I ever get around to actually writing it, I’ll ask these questions in a more formal way—but for now, if anyone wants to talk about your own political change experience in the comments to this post, I’d love to hear about it. Or, if you don’t want to tell about it publicly, you can email me at jaybean33@yahoo.com with your story, and let me know if you want it kept private or if I can share it, as long as I keep your identity confidential. Thanks!

The post Hey, what about that “mind/change” story? appeared first on The New Neo.

Whenever I finish writing a section of the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, I’m amazed at how much I have to say, and how long it takes me to say it. My guess is that there are at least eight more posts coming up in the series, maybe even more.

I’m always gratified and surprised that so many people actually have the patience to hear me out. And I’m especially and deeply touched by those who take the trouble to thank me (particularly any Vietnam vets, or Vietnamese-Americans), or those who identify with what I write, or those who were too young to remember but are nevertheless still interested. I’m flattered by those who suggest this could actually be a book (although sometimes I feel like it already is a book).

And I sort of chuckle at those who say–“well, but what about this, what about that, why haven’t you talked about x, y, and z?” I want to say, “Hey, man, are you some sort of glutton for punishment? Isn’t this long enough?” Actually, if I ever do write a book, I imagine I’ll get around to answering some of the excellent questions raised by many readers.

Every response and every reader is appreciated. The real reason I began blogging, I believe, was to write this series. But I don’t think I ever would have done so if some of the people whom I originally most wanted to hear my story–certain friends and family members–had not made it clear they did not want to hear from me about this at all.

Some of those close to me have also made it clear, despite the fact that we continue to have good relations, that they will never read this blog. Is it lack of interest, fear that their own point of view might be challenged, or fear that, if exposed to my turncoat ways, they might have to cut off the relationship? Whatever it is, it is a source of sorrow for me.

But in a way, it doesn’t really matter. Because, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, it seems I am compelled to tell my tale. The Mariner faces a situation more dramatic than mine, and he meets his listeners face-to-face. But I can identify, nevertheless:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns :
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land ;
I have strange power of speech ;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me :
To him my tale I teach.

I studied that poem in junior high school. It wasn’t one of my favorites, although the cadences appealed to me, and some of the stanzas, too, particularly these famous ones:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The poem contained a mystery–many mysteries, actually. Was the Mariner under a spell? What did the Albatross represent? And why, oh why oh why, did he shoot it? I seem to recall tackling the job of writing an essay on the latter question, poring over the poem to find the answer, only to discover–it couldn’t be found there. I was a bit annoyed at that, because I guess even then I was interested in human motivation, and I couldn’t understand why Coleridge was mum on this all-important point.

Well, I still don’t know why the Mariner shot the Albatross. But I no longer think the poem is the lesser for its failure to tell us. In fact, I think the mystery is part of its appeal.

Perhaps the Ancient Mariner doesn’t even know himself why he did what he did. But he knows something happened that was wrong, and he was part of it; and that now he must tell the tale. In the end, it’s a story of redemption and healing; that much I know, too. Healing, not just for the Mariner:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale ;
And then it left me free.

…but for his listener, too:

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn :
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

The post The Blog of the Ancient Mariner appeared first on The New Neo.

The last thing I was thinking about during the buildup to the Iraq War were those two Vietnam-era photos. I was busy reading online about Iraq, trying to understand the situation there and to predict what might happen if we invaded or what might happen if we didn’t invade.

I no longer remember where, how, or why I came across the two Vietnam photos again. It was probably a random thing. Perhaps I found a link to them on a blog, perhaps somewhere else.

No matter. I saw something that caught my attention and clicked on a link that led to a piece about them. Just one of many articles I saw every evening as part of my online reading.

Here were the familiar images—the field execution, the napalmed girl. I hadn’t seen them in decades, but I remembered them well. I felt the shock and sadness again seeing them once more, even after all these years.

But the story told by the article accompanying them was different. I no longer remember the specific website I encountered that day, but what it said about the first photo was essentially identical to this. The man being shot was alleged to have been “a Captain in a Viet Cong assassination and revenge platoon responsible for the killing of South Vietnamese policemen and their families.” He had just been captured—wearing civilian clothing—after killing a South Vietnamese officer and his entire family, an officer who had served under the South Vietnamese general wielding the pistol in the photo.

Eddie Adams, the AP photographer who took it, later made this statement about it:

I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another…The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, “What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?” General Loan was what you would call a real warrior, admired by his troops. I’m not saying what he did was right, but you have to put yourself in his position.

As Adams said, it’s not that what Loan did was right—although apparently, because of his civilian clothing, the Viet Cong had unlawful enemy combatant status and was subject to summary field execution under the South Vietnamese law of the time. It’s that the whole story, which would have enabled the Americans who saw it to put the photo into context and to have understood the circumstances surrounding General Loan’s act and to have evaluated it for themselves, had not been told—or had been so de-emphasized that most people didn’t catch it. What we saw instead was the brutal slaying of a small defenseless man, shorn of all history and looking like an innocent Vietnamese peasant.

And then there was the other photo. The story I now read about that one was also different than I remembered. My recollection was that the girl in the photo had been burned by our forces, or by South Vietnamese forces under our direction. The details weren’t clear (and probably never had been), but the message delivered was that the killing and burning of countless young Vietnamese children was our fault, that we regularly bombed innocent civilians indiscriminately and perhaps even purposely, without motivation or justification.

But now I read that the incident had involved no US military at all. It occurred after Viet Cong troops had attacked and captured a South Vietnamese village, setting up headquarters among civilians in the marketplace and driving them from the scene. South Vietnamese warplanes trying to protect the village from the invaders and wrest it back—bombing not the village itself, but the perimeter—had mistaken some of the fleeing people for the Viet Cong and napalmed them. This was how the little girl got hurt.

This was not a good thing, but it was the sort of thing that was unavoidable in a war of this type, in which the enemy hid among civilians.

And this was beginning to sound vaguely familiar—not to events in the past, but to events in the present. Bombing errors in the Afghan war, for example. Few and far between compared to successes, but covered heavily by the media.

And Jenin. Palestinian terrorists had callously hidden among townspeople there, and the inevitable civilian casualties had been blamed by the media on the Israelis, who had actually exercised every possible diligence to prevent them.

All of these details about the photo of the napalmed girl had apparently been reported in a “Stars and Stripes” article back in 1972, when the incident had occurred. But who read “Stars and Stripes?” Certainly not me.

As far as my memory of contemporaneous mainstream media coverage went, it was the photo, the photo, the photo that had occupied center stage, with only a cursory description of a firefight, and nothing about the enemy and what they’d done. To most readers, it had been as though the enemy didn’t exist; just US soldiers and their South Vietnamese victims. Even the leading role of the South Vietnamese military had somehow receded into the background.

How had this occurred? Part of the mechanism was that photos tend to affect people on a visceral level. They “read” a certain way, but the deeper story behind them is far more complex, and is not always clearly told. Even if told, however, it’s not always read. That takes time and effort, but it only takes a moment to glance at a photo and to think you understand it.

In the case of the photo of the girl, there was further confusion, some of it perhaps deliberate:

Other journalists who were not there, through assumption, sloppy work, or malice, have since reported that the attack was by US aircraft, and have further embellished the story with time.

As I read the article about the photos, I felt a sense of disbelief. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading was correct. Surely, if this information about both photos were true, I’d have heard about it before this. After all, thirty years had passed.

I spent the next few hours searching the subject online and found quite a bit more information, but no serious or credible refutation of the stories I’d just learned. The facts therein did not appear to be in much dispute. I read the original article again, and then again, in a tensely concentrated state.

Then the strangest feeling came over me. I don’t even have a word for it, although I usually can come up with words for emotions.

This was a new feeling. The best description I can come up with is that it was a regret so intense it morphed seamlessly into guilt, as though I were responsible for something terrible, though I didn’t know exactly what. Regret and guilt, and also a rage that I’d been so stupid, that I’d let myself be duped or misled or kept ignorant about something so important, and that I’d remained ignorant all these years.

I sat in front of my computer and put my face down on the keyboard. I stayed in that position for a few minutes, energyless and drained. When I lifted my head I was surprised to find a few tears on my cheeks.

The experience was something akin to being married for thirty years, thinking your husband loving and faithful, and then by chance coming across evidence that he’d been living a double life all that time, with a wife and kids in another town. A sense of deep betrayal of a basic trust.

Photos are inherently emotional, and there’s no doubt that these were powerful photos, deserving of every prize they’d earned. If the point of publishing them had been to convey the idea that war entails violence and suffering, they succeeded admirably. And maybe this was what the photographers who took them were trying to say.

But that’s not a good enough message in and of itself. Killing is awful, yes. But not all killing is equally awful. And the press during the Vietnam War had been charged with the task of providing that all-important context.

Why did I only remember seeing photos that portrayed what we, or our allies, had done—photos stripped of all context and meant to maximize our feelings of wrongdoing? Photos that emphasized the victimhood of a Viet Cong terrorist, or made it seem as though we were targeting civilians when the civilians were actually being put at risk by the aggressive actions of the enemy in attacking and occupying a village?

And how was it that it had taken me thirty years to become aware of any of this?

If this knowledge had come to me prior to 9/11, I doubt it would have affected me so much. I’d always known on some level that the press was using the photos as antiwar propaganda. But I’d also felt that the cause for which the propaganda was being shown was just, and that the facts we were told were correct and essentially complete. This new knowledge of the way the press had actually used these photos and failed to properly convey the stories behind them during Vietnam had far greater significance that it otherwise would have, because there were now harmonic vibrations with a host of other incidents such as the reportage on Jenin that had already partially eroded my faith in the press.

To continue the affair analogy, this wasn’t just similar to learning of a brief and one-time fling on the part of a husband, something that was an anomaly that might be forgiven. It seemed possible that this was a pattern of deceit and/or purposefully misleading omissions, one I could no longer deny.

This idea reached critical mass during the process of reading and assimilating these articles, although it had actually been brewing for quite a while. The components were cognitive and emotional, and both were extremely intense. That synergistic effect accounted for the power of my response, the idea that this was a life-changing moment and that there was no going back. A bunch of unrelated pieces of information that had previously seemed disconnected and chaotic had suddenly fallen into place like the pieces of a puzzle and formed an image I could now read.

This image said: beware the press with an agenda. Some elements of the press seem to have had one then. Perhaps they had one now, as well.

And I found, to my surprise, that the agenda appeared to be substantially the same: to magnify our wrongdoings and those of our allies, to downplay those of the enemy, to simplify matters that were really complex, and to sensationalize.

[To be continued—soon, I hope.]

The post A mind is a difficult thing to change: (Part 7B: the Vietnam photos revisited) appeared first on The New Neo.

In the most recent segment of this series, I wrote:

…the process [of change] was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. At first I only had a few pieces in my hands, and no real way to tell what the picture was going to look like. But bit by bit I started assembling it, and began to discern the outline of a new form as it was slowly being revealed. In the end, events that were happening in the present merged with a reassessment of the past, enabling the picture to emerge ever more clearly, piece by piece.

After the Afghan war was over, I felt a sense of relief that it had gone as well as it had, and a bit of puzzlement as to why the original predictions had been so different from events as they had actually transpired. I wanted things to calm down now, but my sense was that they wouldn’t be doing that for a long time, although I didn’t yet know where the next eruption would occur.

If you had asked me what my politics were at that time—spring of 2002—I wouldn’t have perceived that any change whatsoever had occurred.

I was still a liberal Democrat, just as I’d always been. Yes, I’d supported the Afghan War, and it had been led by Bush and a Republican administration. But hadn’t most Democrats supported it as well? Yes, there’d been some antiwar demonstrations. I was not part of them, but neither were most Democrats. The participants were a fringe group of mostly young college students, plus some old hippies who were either trying to recreate or to relive the heady days of the Vietnam protests. But these new protests had nothing like the breadth and depth of the antiwar sentiment of those days, of which I’d been part. I saw no connection.

I was peripherally aware that there had been increased violence between Israel and Palestine in recent years, but I also knew that area had been a mess for decades. Signs of hope had always been followed by a return to bloody exchanges that seemed to go nowhere. It had tired me out and I’d stopped following the details of the never-ending story all that closely. In a general sense I supported the “cycle of violence” theory of what was going on there, as presented in the mainstream media: first this act and then retaliation for it, and then revenge for retaliation, and on and on in an endless spiral.

But ever since 9/11 it had seemed even more vital to me to follow international stories of all sorts more closely, and it was much easier to do so with all the sources proliferating online. And so in April of 2002, when I turned on my computer and saw the sickening news that Israelis had massacred civilians in the Palestinian “camp” of Jenin, I read the details and was extremely disheartened.

The facts were horrifying: rotting Palestinian corpses, indiscriminate firing on civilians by the Israelis, widespread destruction of homes. I understood that the Israelis had been sorely pressed, and that house-to-house fighting against an enemy whose combatants hide among a civilian population makes it extremely difficult to avoid this sort of thing, but Jenin seemed to be, quite literally, a case of Israeli overkill.

The story built for days in the press. I read avidly, including many British articles. At no point during this period did it occur to me that what I was reading was not true. There was widespread agreement on the facts, horrendous though they were. I assumed the journalists writing about them had reliable sources and independent corroboration.

But gradually—very gradually—other evidence surfaced that seemed to contravene the original story.

Now, instead of hundreds of Palestinian civilians killed, many of them presumably women and children, the report was of victims who numbered somewhere in the forties and fifties. The Israelis said many of them had been killed by booby traps their own side had set. Unlike the earlier casualty reports, now there were few women and children involved, and most of the men killed were of fighting age. And finally even Amnesty International, and later the UN, said there had been no massacre in Jenin; almost all of the dead had been enemy combatants.

Since the UN was saying it, I knew it must be so. Not because I trusted the UN’s judgment so implicitly, but because the UN was not in the habit of giving Israel a pass on anything. But here it was:

…the U.N. report said 52 Palestinian deaths had been confirmed by April 18—the same death toll reported by Israel. It called the Palestinian allegation that some 500 were killed “a figure that has not been substantiated in the light of evidence that has emerged.”

Israel was not only vindicated in its actions but in its report as well. It turned out that the original figure given by the Israelis had been the correct one. I waited for retractions to occur in the newspapers that had been most vocal and graphic, and most critical of Israeli behavior. But coverage of this new information was curiously muted.

I could never remember reading a story this big, and that had been followed this closely by this many news outlets, that had turned out to be so incorrect. This was probably more of a reflection of my heretofore narrow-sourced reading of the news, and the difference between pre-internet and post-internet ability to compare stories, than the fact that this was actually a new press phenomenon. But it had never come to my awareness before in such a dramatic way.

The journalists’ informants had lied. Not only lied, but they had set up those reporters to be the deliverers of the lie, and the reporters had cooperated, either knowledgeably or negligently. That made us, the readers, the duped recipients of that lie. And, for a while, the lie had been doing very well—until it had been revealed as a falsehood.

Or maybe it still was doing rather well.

When I talked to friends about it, many of them seemed to remember the first part of the story but not be aware of the second part, the correction. Many were very surprised when I indicated to them that there had been no massacre in Jenin after all. Many doubted what I was saying (and, if you go to the comments section of the Amazon listing for the award-winning Palestinian film that gave this post its name, “Jenin, Jenin,” you’ll see that many people continue to believe the tale of the Jenin massacre.)

I began to wonder whether this sort of thing had happened before, and if so, when. I’ve never been a fan of conspiracy theories, but I was beginning to doubt that the media was quite as careful to print only substantiated, well-sourced facts as I had previously thought it was.

You may wonder at my naiveté. From the perspective of time, I wonder at it myself. But it’s not as though I had previously trusted newspapers completely or thought they never lied. But I had assumed that the ones with the best reputations—the NY Times, for example, regarded as a sort of sacred text in my school and my home while I was growing up—had used due diligence in trying to ascertain the truth to the best of its ability. In addition, I had assumed that if errors had been made, well-respected media sources would be—if not eager—then at least willing to give an extremely prominent place to a correction of a story of such major importance. I also assumed that next time they would be on their guard and not be so easily fooled.

Shortly after the UN report on Jenin was issued I began to hear rumblings about Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and the possibility of military action against him for violations of UN agreements and nuclear inspections. Although this was not really a surprise—rumors had been floating for some time—I was dreading a war there. Afghanistan was one thing; its connection with 9/11 was crystal clear. Iraq was a different story.

The buildup to the Iraq War was a long period of chess-playing with Saddam, the board being the UN and the media. It seemed to go on for way too long; if we were in fact going to invade, the length of this game could only go to Saddam’s advantage.

This is not the place for another discussion of the pros and cons of the decision to go to war in Iraq. I’ve done that numerous times before, and so I’ll only mention once again that the war seemed to me to have been multidetermined, and I agreed that Saddam should not be allowed to defy the terms of the Gulf War armistice and the WMD inspections.

This time the antiwar protests drew more people, and I understood why. Iraq was a larger and prospectively riskier undertaking than Afghanistan, and the reasons behind it seemed more discretionary and certainly less clearly connected to 9/11. Although I was convinced—once the UN failed to act, over many months—that the invasion was necessary and right (even if WMDs were never to be found), I could see why many others disagreed.

Once again, there was the relentless drumbeat of prognosticators saying that the war would last for years and cause millions of deaths. Even though I’d heard a similar prediction prior to the Afghan War and it had not come to pass, this time it was even more plausible. Iraq had a better army than Afghanistan’s, for example. And even if the war itself didn’t last very long, this could easily be due to the fact that Saddam and his supporters would probably have chosen the route of appearing to give up and surrender, going underground. This would mean fighting a long and unconventional war, very difficult to counter. Like Vietnam.

Vietnam. Its ghost was not just hovering in my mind; it seemed to be in the minds of most of the pundits, protesters, and politicians. I remembered Vietnam only too well. A searing personal experience for me because of a boyfriend who had served there as a helicopter gunner from 1968 to 1969 and had been wounded, it was also an event that had torn apart and scarred my generation.

I thought I knew a lot about Vietnam. After all, I’d lived through the turmoil it had caused in this country from my late adolescence to early adulthood. I had read the newspapers, I had watched the TV. I remembered.

One of the things I remembered were two famous photographs that had become icons of the suffering of the Vietnamese people during that war. One had been taken at the moment of a brutal field execution of a prisoner, performed by a South Vietnamese general without benefit of trial or judge:

Another was of a young South Vietnamese girl running naked down a road, her flesh burned by napalm, her mouth an agonized scream:

I wrote briefly about both of these photos in an earlier section of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series, including the following description:

Amazingly, the [first] picture appears to have been taken at very the split-second the bullet is exiting [the victim’s] head. The prisoner is young-looking and slight, even boyish, dressed in a checked shirt. He is facing the viewer and we see his face clearly and frontally, wincing, although the shooter is seen only in profile. The Vietcong’s hands are tied behind his back, and he seems terribly vulnerable. The entire photo conveys the idea of an innocent victim put to death by a ruthless and almost faceless executioner, as well as the brutality of war in general. There is no question that this photo, presented without much context, shocked people and engendered the belief that the South Vietnamese we were defending and dying for were no better than the Vietcong in their brutality. Probably even worse.

The photos tugged at people at a deep emotional level, screaming, “War is bad. Stop it. Stop the madness.” Furthermore, they induced a deep feeling of guilt, making the onlooker somehow conspiratorial with the executioner and with those who had dropped the bombs”“–doubly conspiratorial, both as voyeur to unspeakable violence, and as a citizen of the country, the US, seemingly responsible for both acts.

[Continued in Part 7B.]

The post A mind is a difficult thing to change: (Part 7A: Jenin, Jenin) appeared first on The New Neo.

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
—-Leon Trotsky

INTRODUCTION

This segment of the story begins with a shock to the system: 9/11.

For me, that shock was just the beginning–the catalyst, as it were–of a slow process of change that took several years to complete and probably isn’t over yet. It unfolded in a manner that was mostly solitary and internal; involving watching, listening, reading, and thinking.

Looking back, I realize that two elements were absolutely necessary for this to occur: a powerful motivation, and access to information.

The motivation was provided by 9/11 itself, as I wrote towards the end of my last “change” post:

It now seemed to be no less than a matter of life and death to learn, as best I could, what was going on. I knew it wasn’t up to me to solve this; I had no power and no influence in the world. But still something drove me, with a force that was almost relentless, to pursue knowledge and understanding about this event. The pursuit of this knowledge no longer seemed discretionary or abstract, it seemed both necessary and deeply, newly personal.

The access was provided by the internet. The worldwide media was newly at my fingertips. Without it, I would never have encountered the varied sources that led me down the path of change, but would instead have stuck with the old tried and true–the Times, the Globe, the New Yorker, Nightline, and NPR–and I am certain I would not be sitting here today, writing this blog.

Prior to this, I’d been neither a news junkie nor a history buff. My consumption of such things seems to have been about average: the usual cursory high school history courses plus one or two in college; the quick reading of a daily newspaper and a weekly periodical; and the viewing of the nightly news on TV, background noise while I concentrated on cooking dinner or tending to the family.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I didn’t have a clue that my online reading and increased interest in news, history, and politics would lead to any sort of mind- or life-changing experience. It would be interesting now to be able to look at a list of what I read post-9/11, and in what order I read it (well, maybe not all that interesting, since, for one thing, it would be insufferably long). But since I wasn’t prescient enough to know what was going to happen to me as a result of my reading, I have no such list. So I’ll just have to try to recreate the general course of events as best I can, understanding that it will only be an approximation.

THE DAYS AFTER

Like so many people, I was in a state of heightened emotion and awareness after 9/11. I, who had rarely watched cable news on television, was now viewing it many hours each day, and also reading my usual newspapers and periodicals with greater intensity and focus.

For the first few days after 9/11, I watched President Bush very carefully. He seemed worried and squinty-eyed, brow furrowed in tense puzzlement, speaking words that were meant to be reassuring but sounded hesitant and uncertain. This didn’t surprise me; I’d never expected much of him to begin with.

It’s not that I’d thought Bush was stupid. Not exactly, anyway. I had disabused myself of the “stupid” notion way back during the 2000 Presidential debates. Watching them, I’d disagreed with much of what Bush had said, and I couldn’t stand his cocky manner–it grated on me. But I was grudgingly forced to admit to myself that he was at least passably able to think on his feet.

I’d heard he was dumb so many times that I fully expected him to amply demonstrate it in the debates. He was uninspiring and certainly far from eloquent, and I didn’t agree with most of his ideas, but he stated them with relative clarity. Nothing indicated brilliance, for sure, but nothing he said sounded even remotely stupid.

Some time shortly after those 2000 debates, I’d watched a TV interview with Laura Bush. Most of what I’d seen of her till then had consisted of smiling and waving; I’d heard her say only a few words here and there. She’d seemed to me to be a sort of plastic Stepford wife, controlled and bland. But during this interview there was something–some charm and sweetness, some flashes of humor and wit–and, over all of it, a warmth and ease and graciousness I could not deny.

I didn’t want to like her. But like her I did. And I had to–just had to–further admit that it was unlikely (although not impossible!) that a simpleton or a fool or a creep could have attracted and held on to a woman like that.

But that was a far cry from actually liking Bush or supporting him in any way. I did not. And when the election results had stalled in the seemingly endless vote-counting and court actions, putting everyone through tension and misery, I’d been rooting for Gore all the way–if not with enthusiasm for the man himself, then with fear of the alternative. I hadn’t really been thinking much, if at all, about world affairs during the election–they hadn’t seemed especially important for some years, since the fall of the Soviet Union. No, it was the probability of Bush’s appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, cutting stem cell research, and a host of other conservative domestic policies I was worried about.

Throughout the long back-and-forth of the election and the vote counts, the court rulings and the overrulings, I was on tenterhooks. But when it ended up going Bush’s way, I never felt cheated. Nor did I feel that he’d cheated, although I was bitterly disappointed with the results.

What did I think? I thought the election had been a virtual tie. And I thought that, in the end, the tougher man had won.

Not the better, not the smarter or the kinder, nor the most likely to be a good President–just the more hard-nosed. He hadn’t done anything illegal, in my opinion; he’d merely pushed it for all it was worth, and milked the legal system until he got the result he wanted. And Gore? He’d failed to show the sort of intestinal fortitude required to win this particular battle.

When I thought about it, I didn’t like it, nor did I like Bush. Not at all. But it occurred to me that hard-as-nails toughness might not necessarily be the worst trait to have in a President–that this had been some sort of Darwinian struggle for existence in which the winner was, if not the best man, then the fittest man for the toughest job in the world.

Now, looking back, I see that these three combined notions of mine–that Bush was not a stupid man, that he had to be at least somewhat nice to have a wife like Laura, and that the toughness he showed in the fight to win might not be a bad attribute for a President–must have been somewhat odd in a liberal Democrat. They might, in fact, have been signs of a sort, signs that I was the type of person who, like it or not, couldn’t deny certain evidence if I felt it was right in front of me, who might be ripe for a change of heart and mind if enough evidence ever happened to present itself.

But at the time, I didn’t think in those terms at all. I just figured that, after the disappointing results of the election, I’d settle in for four years of turning off the TV whenever Bush appeared. After all, I’d done that before–especially with Nixon, and often with Reagan. In fact, I was quite a pro at getting through Republican administrations, since the only Presidents I’d ever voted for had been Carter and Clinton.

So when 9/11 occurred, one of the things that had upset me was that Bush was President. I didn’t for a moment think he’d be up to the task–although, to be fair, I also couldn’t imagine that Gore would have been a whole lot better.

During the previous year, to save paper and money, I’d already begun reading my two favorite newspapers online rather than in the dead tree versions. After 9/11 I found the Times‘s series of short biographies on the lives of the WTC victims to be especially moving. I sat at my computer almost every night, weeping as I read it. The dead seemed so young, so promising, so much-loved–and such ghastly, wrenchingly violent ends, such tragic bereaved survivors left behind. Timelines of 9/11, and particularly the story of Flight 93, were riveting, and the latter inspiring, as was the heroism of the firefighters and police.

But this was just the story of the day itself. It was compelling and emotional, but it wasn’t the “why” I so craved to understand.

About a week after 9/11, I happened to turn on my car radio as a man was being interviewed. I didn’t catch his name, but he was talking about Arabs, Islam, and the 9/11 attacks, and relating the whole thing to the history, philosophy, culture, and religion of the region. After a few sentences I knew I needed to learn more about him, and to read some of his books, because here was a person who seemed to have thought long and hard about the very questions that were haunting me.

The man turned out to be Bernard Lewis. I learned that he was elderly, and that he was a leading scholar of Moslem and Arab history, culture, and literature who’d been writing on the subject for decades, unbeknownst to me. Here was someone attempting to explain the terrorists (see this, for example), embedding the whole thing in history and context.

I didn’t know whether Lewis was correct or not–how could I? But what he said sounded plausible, and had as foundation his long lifetime of scholarship. And what was most impressive to me was that his forthcoming book What Went Wrong, on which this interview was based, had already been written–although not yet published–before the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Talk about topical! You may recall, if you’ve read my previous essay in this “change” series, that I’d been puzzled and disappointed by the failure of the media and most experts in the field to have accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. So one of the things that gave Lewis credibility with me was the fact that he had seemed to “get” 9/11 before it had even happened, and to be wrestling with the “why” of it before many of us were even perceiving the extreme seriousness of the threat.

BUSH ADDRESSES CONGRESS POST-9/11

After 9/11, President Bush was to address a joint session of Congress. Only ten days earlier the building had been evacuated in panic, and by now it was strongly suspected that it had been the real target of Flight 93. The situation felt very dramatic as I turned on the TV and awaited his speech.

I knew security was tight, but that fact didn’t totally reassure me. It seemed far-fetched, but if a plane had swooped down just as Bush had begun his speech, crashed into the center of the assemblage, and brought the whole edifice down in a fiery furnace, I would not have been especially surprised.

So I was keyed up and apprehensive as Bush strode into the room and onto the TV screen. I expected nothing stirring from him, and nothing even particularly admirable. My goal was a simple one: that everyone assembled live through the speech, and that Bush not stumble and falter so badly that he’d make everyone feel even more uneasy about him.

But Bush looked resolute and seemed focused. His speech was crisp and well-delivered. Both these things were surprises to me; I found them difficult to believe. What’s more, every now and then I thought I could discern in his words the influence of that man I’d heard so recently in the radio interview, Bernard Lewis. Could it be that Bush had heard of him? Or, at least, that Bush’s speechwriters had heard of him?

The broad outlines of the fight ahead were drawn. Bush (or was it his speechwriters and/or advisors? I couldn’t decide) saw this as a global struggle that would last many years and be fought on many fronts. The first one was to be Afghanistan; no surprise there. Bush gave a list of demands to the Taliban and indicated that if those demands were not met, we would bring the war to them.

It’s not that this speech caused me to suddenly develop faith in Bush–far from it. But it went a small way towards indicating that he might have some sort of minimal competence–or rather, a possibility of minimal competence. That was all.

But I absolutely hated–detested–Bush’s message. War! My memories of the Vietnam War were of an endless and bloody struggle that had led to failure and a shameful retreat. The Gulf War hardly seemed relevant here–it had been short, relatively simple, and straightforward; the repelling of an invasion. This promised to be a very different war against a very different enemy, and much more like Vietnam.

As we geared up to go to war in the next few weeks, I found my apprehension increasing. At no point did I consider that this war was avoidable, because it was clear the Taliban would never accede to our demands and turn Bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda members over. It was just as clear that we could not back off. The articles I read in the Times and the Globe during the buildup to the war were exceedingly ominous, and the talking heads on CNN agreed: the predictions were of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people dead in indiscriminate bombing, millions more starving and/or freezing or dying of disease, and a war that echoed both our Vietnam experience and the ten-year Soviet nightmare in Afghanistan itself. A double whammy.

I’d been aware of the latter war, particularly as it had related to the fall of the Soviet Union. The Afghan War was considered to have bled the USSR dry economically and in terms of its will to fight. The almost impenetrable Afghan terrain and weather were factors, and the ferocity and tenacity of the Afghans themselves were legendary. I’d read that this war had been the USSR’s Vietnam, and that it had helped destroy the Soviet Union. Now, repeatedly, I read how these same elements would inevitably trap us there for long and bitter death-dealing years. Over and over, I read that the people of Afghanistan hated us, and had no interest in their own “liberation.” This was going to be a long, vicious, and costly struggle against an utterly implacable foe.

But, unlike Vietnam, it didn’t feel as though there was any other choice now. We had to destroy the Al Qaeda havens in Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, once we began this war there could be no turning back and no pulling out. It felt more like I would imagine the start of World War II had felt to my parents’ generation. In this, my then-87-year-old mother was a guide; she said it felt even worse than the beginning of World War II.

As the ultimatums were issued to the Taliban and the deadlines passed, it became clear that the war would begin in a day or two. I remembered old war movies from WWII in which families in England huddled around their radios, listening to the BBC for news of the war, hanging on every word. I felt that way now. Only this time I wasn’t huddled around the radio; it was the computer.

REPORTING THE AFGHAN WAR

Almost from the moment the war began, it seemed to be going very badly. First, there was the killing of Abdul Haq in late October, a man who’d been touted as the most likely person to lead Afghanistan after the war since Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, had been killed by suicide bombers shortly before 9/11.

Haq’s death seemed a strange and terrible and confusing thing, with details from a movie. Ambushed, and calling for help with a satellite phone? An unmanned drone appearing in response, but too late to help?

Shortly thereafter, in early November, there was an article by Seymour Hersh that appeared in the New Yorker (see this Slate article discussing it to refresh your memory; the original Hersh article has been impossible for me to locate online so far). The name didn’t ring a bell at the time, although I later did a search and discovered he was the journalist who’d broken the My Lai story so long ago. His Afghanistan article presented our operation there as a disorganized, incompetent tragedy of errors.

It focused on a covert operation that had occurred towards the beginning of the war a month earlier:

…a two-pronged “special operations” (that is, commando) attack last month on a Taliban airbase and on a complex of buildings sometimes used by Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Although the Pentagon presented the operation as successful (intelligence was collected at both sites), the sizzle of the Hersh piece [was] his conclusion that it was a “near-disaster” that left the U.S. military “rethinking” the future of such special operations inside Afghanistan.

I read the entire piece with mounting concern. The Vietnam comparison (although I don’t recall it as being overt) was not lost on me. If this piece could be believed, we didn’t seem to know what we were doing in Afghanistan.

But could it be believed? I trusted my beloved New Yorker, of course. But I could not escape the perception that there was something very odd about this particular article. Not only was it rather poorly written (something unusual for the magazine, as best I could remember)–disjointed and disconnected–but it read like a gossip column. It relied completely on unnamed and unidentified sources, which made a certain amount of sense for a piece about a covert operation during a war in progress. But that meant that the entire incident, and Hersh’s interpretation of it, was something that could not be checked–we had to rely totally on his credibility and reliability, and on that of the New Yorker‘s editors.

And that wasn’t all. I wondered about the point of publishing this piece in the first place. Why did we need to know this so very badly? After all, it wasn’t as though Hersh was alleging that terrible war crimes had been committed, as at My Lai. This was just a single mission ostensibly gone bad, occurring very early in a war against a terrible enemy (surely everyone agreed the Taliban were terrible?)–a war we desperately needed to win, not a discretionary one. I didn’t see that there was any overriding public purpose in exposing this mission as failed; certainly not enough to justify the breach of security and the possibility of harming our morale and enhancing that of the enemy.

So, who was Seymour Hersh, anyway? It may seem hard to believe, but in years past I had never paid particular attention to who had written a story as long as it appeared in a major media source that I trusted. The Times, the Globe, the New Yorker–I trusted that their editors would only publish reliable writers, and that all articles would be scrupulously fact-checked. Yes, I knew that all newspapers and magazines had a political slant (be they liberal or conservative), but that was only in the editorials, right? Even though I knew there might be some underlying agenda, the news pages–the facts–were sacred.

As I write this, a phrase from Paul Fusell’s book about World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, comes to mind: “never such innocence again.” How can I explain my previous naivete? How had it escaped me that bias was not confined to the editorial pages?

I can’t totally explain it. But I know that part of the answer is that I had not read many publications on the other side in order to compare. Nor had I read many original sources such as speeches on which the articles were based; I relied on the newspapers to summarize for me. To do otherwise would have taken some effort in those pre-internet days–I would have had to have gone to a library, or to have bought a great many newspapers and magazines at a newsstand, and also to have had an interest in investing a great deal of time in the endeavor.

But without any special motivation to do so–for example, everyone I knew read the Times, and I’d been taught since childhood that it was the paper of record–it simply did not occur to me that there was any compelling need to compare or to check sources. I guess that’s what’s meant by the phrase “living in a bubble.”

But the Hersh article piqued my curiosity as well as raising red flags. And now, with the internet, it was so easy to do a bit of research. When I looked Hersh up online, I discovered some odd things. Yes, he’d been the highly respected and honored journalist who’d broken the My Lai story. But I also found other facts that were profoundly disturbing. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate the exact articles about Hersh that I read at the time, but they were more or less similar to this one and this, which are more recent.)

It turned out that, after his My Lai fame, Hersh had gone on to write for the NY Times during the 70s. He was instrumental in breaking stories about the CIA’s domestic spying, reports that led to the formation of the Church Commission and, ultimately the “firewall” with which we’re familiar today. He also clearly had a leftist political agenda which he was not shy about stating.

But what was far more interesting to me was that he’d departed from the Times under a cloud of allegations that he had browbeaten sources and played fast and loose with the facts. Later, he wrote a series of suspect books (see this one and this), and was taken in by an obvious hoax and forgery during the writing of one of them, a biography of JFK entitled The Dark Side of Camelot.

Many in journalism (some of them even liberals!) had come to regard Hersh as generally untrustworthy; quotes such as the following (from a more recent article) were not uncommon:

“I don’t read him anymore because I don’t trust him,” says Holland. “I find Hersh a perplexing character,” says Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, who has written extensively about the Kennedys. “He’s done great work, but he wildly overreached with the Kennedy book.” These days, Thomas reads Hersh differently. “I read what he writes with some skepticism or doubt or uncertainty.”

The fact that Hersh wasn’t being kept on a tighter leash by the New Yorker editors made me wonder. It caused a flicker–perhaps even more than a flicker–of doubt. But at the time I wrote it off as an isolated incident.

As the war continued through November, I checked the news online several times a day. Because Afghanistan was halfway around the world, I could hardly wait to learn what had happened. In my eagerness to get the latest news as quickly as possible, I started to branch out, searching for English language newspapers in Europe and Asia. I was impatient to hear the latest news of troop movements, bombing reports, battle results, territory gained–and above all, analyses of what it all might mean and predictions of what was going to happen next. Earlier, without the internet, I hadn’t had access to all those widely-flung papers, nor felt the driving need to read the news as soon as it occurred. But now all these sources were just a mouse click away.

I still read my old standbys. But when I started reading many other papers as well, I discovered a surprising thing. The Times and the Globe and most of my previous reading sources (the New Yorker, Newsweek) had pretty much agreed with each other. But now some of the papers predicted widely different outcomes, and analyzed the meaning of events differently. As I got to know the different papers and magazines, however (news ones such as the Telegraph, the Guardian, National Review, and many more), I noticed that each paper was internally consistent, whether optimistic or pessimistic about the war’s progress, or somewhere in-between.

As time went on, the pessimistic ones–the newspapers and periodicals that had predicted a Soviet-style long-drawn-out battle–were being proven wrong. In fact, the Afghan War was over a little more than two months after it had begun (and the Special Forces-type operations that Hersh had trashed had apparently been instrumental in the victory).

The war had lasted only two months and about ten days; it hardly seemed possible. And the casualties? Although there was some variation in the estimates of the civilian casualties of the war, the most reputable ones all seemed to be somewhere between one and two thousand people, nothing like the numbers that had been predicted. Where were the refugees, the plagues, the famines, the dread winter? In addition, our casualties were very low (I can’t find an exact figure, but the total of all US combat deaths in Afghanistan seems to have been similar to that of the Gulf War, between one and two hundred).

It was extraordinary–so different from the prewar predictions as to be nearly miraculous. And to top it all off there were scenes of intense celebration by the Afghan people at what could only be described as their liberation (now, without the scare quotes). It was moving, it was a relief–it was a puzzlement.

THE AFTERMATH

What had happened? How had the media–my media (I hadn’t yet encountered the phrase “the MSM”)–gotten it so wrong? I waited for the explanation.

Where were those prognosticators now that things had gone so much better than expected? When territory had been won in such short order, and with such relatively little loss of life? When the military proved not to have been mired down in quag, but to have been exceptionally flexible and reactive in its tactics? .

Where were they? On to the next gloomy prognostication, that’s where. I never could find the declarations of “we were so wrong; things are much better than they looked just a month ago.” Here was an entire host of Emily Litellas saying, “Never mind.” And now it was on to the next thing: “the Taliban are about to return.”

This had been the first time I had ever followed a war so closely–day by day, almost hour by hour. It was the first time I’d eagerly devoured so many stories as events unfolded. And, most importantly, it was the first time I’d read a variety of newspapers, both geographically and politically. It was the first time I had been made frightened and deeply apprehensive, over and over again, by negative predictions in my favorite papers–and then discovered, to my growing puzzlement and even annoyance, that these predictions bore no more relation to subsequent reality than if they’d emanated from the I Ching. It was the first time I noticed that the more reliable papers had seemed to be the more conservative ones.

But these were only a string of incidents. They were puzzling and disconcerting, but I had no framework to make sense of them. Yes, during the Afghan war the more conservative papers seemed to have been more reliable in their predictions and their facts than the liberal papers. But this had no particular meaning to me. Surely, this was some artifact of the peculiar situation of this war; it was a meaningless anomaly.

Later, some time during the spring of 2002 I was doing a Google search. By chance it led me to my first blog, a now-defunct site the name of which I can’t even remember. The immediacy and vibrancy of the voice, talking about politics as though having a conversation with me in my living room, caught my fancy, and I started clicking on the blogroll. In short order I was hooked on blogs, a fascinating Greek chorus (or set of competing Greek choruses trying to shout each other out) commenting–sometimes brilliantly–on the action.

I was still regularly reading my old liberal sources (NY Times and Boston Globe, the New Yorker and even some new regulars such as the LA Times, the Guardian, and the New Republic). But now I was also reading the Telegraph and National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post, MEMRI and English versions of Arab papers, Canadian and Australian and Scottish ones, and the blogs–a vast cacophony of voices. And it was becoming clearer and clearer–at least to me–that the arguments in the media from the middle or the right were making more sense–and had more predictive value–than those emanating from the left.

It was as though I were sitting in a court of law as a member of the jury and being asked to decide a case. Before, I had heard only the presentation from one side. Now I heard both sides, and was trying to give both a fair hearing, and to approach my task without prejudice or preconceived notions. I was reluctantly coming to a certain distressing conclusion: more often than not, the voices on the left were less credible than those on the right.

I still had no notion of changing my point of view about politics in general. But then more events took place, and new reportage on those events. There were several turning points (which I plan to tackle in later installments of this series) in particular: Jenin and the “massacre” that wasn’t; the buildup to the war in Iraq and the reportage afterwards; and my first forays into voicing my thoughts to others, and their reactions to me .

Along the way I encountered constant comparisons to Vietnam, especially in connection with the war in Iraq. This led me to revisit the history of that war. What I found shocked and surprised me, changing my point of view about that war, a view I had thought was etched in stone as hard and enduring as the granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial .

Another metaphor: the process was like doing a jigsaw puzzle. At first I only had a few pieces in my hands, and no real way to tell what the picture was going to turn out to look like. But bit by bit I started assembling it, and began to discern the outline of a new form as it was slowly being revealed. In the end, events that were happening in the present merged with a reassessment of the past, enabling the picture to emerge ever more clearly, piece by piece.

Two of the missing pieces to that puzzle ended up fitting quite snugly: new information about those photographs, the ones that had caused such a sensation during Vietnam: the field execution by General Loan, and the little napalmed girl running naked down that dirt road so very long ago.

[Go to Part 7A]

[ADDENDUM: Links to previous posts in this series can be found by scrolling down on the right sidebar and looking under the heading “A mind is a difficult thing to change.”]

[FURTHER ADDENDUM: Norm Geras explains that there is some doubt about whether Trotsky was in fact the originator of the opening quote. Sorry, Trotsky fans.]

The post A mind is a difficult thing to change–Part 6 B (After 9/11: war is interested in you) appeared first on The New Neo.

INTRODUCTION

Although I’ve written in my “About Me” section that I was “mugged by reality on 9/11,” that’s really just a convenient and probably misleading shorthand description of a much more complex reaction, one that began that instant but emerged only slowly, over a period of several years. It’s probably still in the process of evolving and changing.

But the beginning wasn’t slow. Not at all.

It began in an instant, the instant I heard about the 9/11 attacks. Like most of you, I remember exactly where I was at the time and how I learned the news. My story isn’t a particularly dramatic one. I don’t tell it for that reason. I tell it to learn more about the process by which a mind is changed–sometimes, as in this case, through a sudden and dramatic event that sparks intense feelings and begins a cognitive process by which a person tries to make some sort of sense of that overwhelming event and those chaotic feelings.

9/11

I was having trouble sleeping that night. I don’t know why–I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t have a stomach ache, nor was I anxious about anything in particular. But I lay awake in bed for hours in a sort of unfocused but nevertheless unpleasant and restless agitation, until I finally fell into a fitful sleep from about 5 AM to 8 AM, and then woke up again.

I was visiting with friends, so I wasn’t in my regular bed. I didn’t have to get up early, so I tried to relax and sleep a bit more. But the strange wakefulness continued, and at about 10:15 I finally gave up and went downstairs.

My friend was at her job, but her husband John worked at home in a basement office. Since he was nowhere to be seen, I figured he was down there at his computer. I grabbed a yogurt for breakfast, and was engaged in eating it a few minutes later when John appeared in the kitchen.

John is one of the calmest people I know, almost preternaturally so. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, and never even seen him look agitated, despite the vagaries of raising two teenagers and assorted pets. Nor did he appear particularly distressed that day. He seemed to be looking through some piles on the countertops for something–a pen? some notepaper?–when I caught his attention and started to ask some casual question.

John stopped shuffling through the stacks, and gave me a look I can only characterize as quizzical. He seemed to be studying me. And what he said next are words that are burned into my brain, a phrase I never want to hear again, not ever: “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

I write it as a question, but it didn’t really have a rising inflection at the end. It was more of a statement, an expression of intense wonderment that anyone could be so ignorant of something so obvious. It was as though he’d said “You don’t know the sky is blue, do you?”

No, I guess I didn’t know what had happened, I said, and waited for him to tell me.

What did I suppose it might be? I had already sensed, somehow, that it was nothing good. But in the split second of innocence I had left to think about it, I might have thought John was about to say that there had been an auto accident, a bus collision, or a fire, an upsetting but ordinary and generic tragedy of some sort or another.

But instead, John’s calm words came out in one long run-on sentence, although their content was anything but calm, or calming.

“Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center, and the towers have fallen, and then another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth one is missing, and a few others are missing, too” (the final destination of Flight 93 was unknown as yet, and a mistaken report had been issued that there were further planes still unaccounted for).

If John had told me that Martians had landed in Central Park, or that an asteroid was on a doomsday course towards earth and we had only a few hours to live, I could not have been more surprised. My body reacted instantly, before my mind did–my legs felt shaky, my mouth went dry, and something inside my gut was shaking, also.

I knew immediately and intuitively that a watershed event had occurred. I didn’t know the exact parameters of it, nor any details of the direction in which we were headed, but I knew that this moment felt like a break with everything that had gone before. Assumptions I hadn’t even known I’d held were dead in a single instant, as though their life supports had been cut. I didn’t know what would replace them.

What were the main assumptions that had died in that instant for me? They had to do with a sense of basic long-term safety. Some utterly fearful thing that had seemed contained before, although vaguely threatening, had now burst from its constraints. It was like being plunged into something dark and ancient that had also suddenly been grafted onto modern technology and jet planes–Huns or Mongols or Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or Hector being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot–a thousand swirling vague but horrific impressions from an ancient history I’d never paid all that much attention to before.

I remembered having read articles within the last couple of years that had told of terrorist plans and threats, but managing to successfully surpress my rising fear and reassuring myself that no, it wouldn’t actually happen; it was just talk and boasting bravado. The nuclear nightmares of my youth now came to mind: the fallout shelters, the bomb drills, the suspicion that I wouldn’t live to grow up. I had suppressed those, too, especially in recent years when the fall of the Soviet Union had removed what had once been the likeliest source of the conflagration. It now felt like one of those horror movies where the heroine is chased by someone out to do her harm and then she gets home, feels safe, closes the door and breathes a sigh of relief–and then the murderer leaps out of the closet, where he’d been hiding all the time.

But all these thoughts and images weren’t fully formed, they were a jumbled set of apprehensions that hit me almost simultaneously with John’s news. In the next instant, I had a sudden vision of the two WTC towers toppling over and falling into the other buildings in downtown New York, crushing them as in some ghastly game of giant dominos. So the first question I asked John when I could get my suddenly dry mouth to function was, “How did the towers fall? Did they fall over and smash other buildings?

John didn’t know the answer. The reason he didn’t know was that the family television set had recently been unplugged and stored away, deemed too distracting for the kids, who’d been having some trouble in school lately. This meant that John had no visuals, and so he couldn’t answer my question.

And then John left to get his daughter, and I was left alone with my thoughts.

I had always been glad I’d been born after World War II because I had a sense that the stress of those horrific war years would have taken a terrible toll on me. I had often wondered whether I could have handled such a lengthy time of deep uncertainty about whether the forces of good or evil (not that I really thought in those terms ordinarily, but WWII did seem to present a stark choice of that type) would triumph. I wondered about the sense of impending doom and personal danger that a worldwide war with so many casualties would have entailed, especially in those early years when it wasn’t going very well for the Allies.

I’d known war, of course–most particularly, Vietnam. But as much as that war had affected me personally by affecting those I loved, and as much as I’d been upset by all the killing and struggle, the actual fighting had been far away “over there,” and in a relatively small area of the globe.

From the very first moment that John had told me the news of 9/11, there had been no real doubt in my mind that the attacks had been the work of terrorists. There had also been no doubt that this was something very different from what had gone before.

But why was that difference so clear? After all, there had been terrorist attacks before that had killed hundreds of people at a time. There had even been a previous attack on the World Trade Center, and I had known that the intent of the terrorists back then had been to bring the building down. So, why this feeling of something utterly new?

Each prior terrorist attack had contained elements that had allowed me to soothe and distance myself from it, and to minimize the terrorists’ intent. Most of the attacks had been overseas, or on military personnel, or both. Or, if the attack had been in this country and on civilians (both were certainly true of the previous WTC bombing), the terrorists had seemed almost comically inept and bumbling. Each attack had been horrible, but the presence of one or more of these elements had kept knowledge of what was really going on at bay.

Those planes that had crashed into the towers and toppled them on 9/11 also had smashed the nearly impenetrable wall of my previous denial. These attacks had been audacious. I could not ignore the fact that the intent of the terrorists was to be as lethal and malicious as humanly possible. The change in the scope and scale of the project made it seem as though they did indeed want to kill us all, indiscriminately, and it gave their motives even less grounding in any sort of rational thought that I could fathom, or any real strategic end. The creativity of the attacks (and I do not use that word admiringly, but the attacks were indeed an instance of thinking outside the box) made it seem that anything was possible, and that the form of future attacks could not be anticipated or even guessed at. The attacks had imitated an action/adventure movie far too well, the type of thing that had always seemed way too improbable to be true. But now it had actually happened, and the terrorists seemed to have become almost slickly competent in the split-second timing and execution of the attacks.

After John had left the house, I did a few practical things. I called my family in New York, who were all safe, though very shaken (my sister-in-law had witnessed the second crash from her balcony, and their small yard was covered with ash and papers). I managed to get to a television set and watch the videotapes, and it was then that I learned that the towers had fallen neatly, collapsing onto themselves like a planned demolition.

And then I did something impractical. I went to the ocean and sat on the rocks. It was the loveliest day imaginable. I had been alive for over fifty years at the time, and I cannot recall weather and a sky quite like that before. It added to the utter unreality of the day and my feelings. The sky was so blue as to be almost piercing, with a clarity and sharpness that seemed other-worldly. It made it feel as though the heavens themselves were speaking to us; but what were they saying?

All this clarity and purity was enhanced by the fact that there wasn’t an airplane in the sky. There were boats of all types on the bluest of oceans, the sun beamed down and made the waves sparkle, and it all seemed to have a preciousness and a beauty that came with something that might soon be irretrievably lost.

I thought there might be more attacks, bigger attacks, and soon. So I might as well enjoy the sky. I wondered whether I should go ahead with a house purchase I was about to make. I wondered whether it mattered. But most of all, I wondered why the attacks had happened.

I’d studied human behavior for a good many years, but I can honestly say there was a tremendous and unfathomable mystery here. I had always been a curious person, but the amount of time and effort I had spent studying world history or political movements had been relatively minor. I’d been more interested in literature and art, psychology and science.

Now, and quite suddenly, I wanted to learn what had happened, why, and what we might need to do about it. In fact, I felt driven to study these things, in the way that a person suddenly faced with the diagnosis of a terminal illness might want to learn everything possible about that disease, even if they’d had no interest whatsoever in it before. Samuel Johnson has written that the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. A terrorist attack on this scale had focused the mind wonderfully, too. That was, perhaps, its only benefit.

Even on that very first day, as I sat on the rocks overlooking the beautiful ocean that I loved so much, I thought we had entered a new era, one which would probably go on for most of my lifetime however much longer I might live. The fight would be long and hard, and there would be many many deaths before it was over. Perhaps it would result in the end of civilization as we knew it–yes, my thoughts went that far on that day. This war would encompass most of the globe. I had no idea how it would work out, but I knew that we were in for the fight of our lives.

The legal actions of the past–the puny trial after the first World Trade Center attack, for example–no longer seemed like an effective response. It seemed, in retrospect, to have been almost laughably naive. The situation didn’t even seem amenable to a conventional war. Something new would have to be invented, and fast. And it would have to be global. It would have to have great depth and breadth, and it would probably last for decades or even longer.

So for me the day began with an emotional intensity–a stunning shock that very quickly was matched by a cognitive intensity as well. It now seemed to be no less than a matter of life and death to learn, as best I could, what was going on. I knew it wasn’t up to me to solve this; I had no power and no influence in the world. But still something drove me, with a force that was almost relentless, to pursue knowledge and understanding about this event. The pursuit of this knowledge no longer seemed discretionary or abstract, it seemed both necessary and deeply, newly personal.

[Trackback to this Mudville Gazette post featuring photos of the World Trade Center on 9/11.]

[ADDENDUM: for Part VIB, go here.]

The post A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 6A (9/11: the watershed) appeared first on The New Neo.

INTRODUCTION

I thought this post would be relatively easy to write. After all, the years between 1975 and September 10, 2001 were fairly quiet for me, at least politically speaking, especially compared to the bitter and personal struggles of the Vietnam era. But strangely, it’s that very quietness that has made this post harder to write than I ever thought it would be–in fact, far harder than the previous ones–because of the absence of such drama.

I don’t want to bore you all to tears. I could summarize the whole era by saying I was otherwise engaged. But, in the end, that would be too simplistic. After all, I’m writing this to try to understand and explain what was going on for me, and for others, in the psychological/political sense: what led to change, or failed to lead to change.

So, exactly what was I thinking about, politically, during those years? Was I even thinking at all, or was I more or less on automatic? And was my experience idiosyncratic, or was it typical, representing a general trend of the times?

In other words: was I like Karel’s mother? (And who, you might ask, is Karel’s mother?)

I confess that I have been an inveterate New Yorker reader for the last thirty-five years or so. I’ve even kept my subscription in the face of my neocon conversion and the resultant fact that I can no longer stomach their political articles. I recall that the New Yorker published excerpts from expatriate Czech author Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting shortly before the book came out in 1978. All I had to do was read the very first paragraph of the work and I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary. I read with mounting excitement and total concentration, and when the book was available I immediately bought it and read it from cover to cover. It merged the political with the personal in a free-form style like no other–gripping, entertaining, profound, and totally idiosyncratic.

Certain images in that book made a deep impression on me. I’ve already discussed one of them here, in my post “Dancing in a ring.” The image of the circle dance was memorable, although it was only many years later that I even began to understand what Kundera was saying.

But the story of Karel’s elderly mother and the pears–that, I understood from the start. Here it is:

One night, for example, the tanks of a huge neighboring country came and occupied their country [a reference to the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia]. The shock was so great, so terrible, that for a long time no one could think about anything else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were nearly ripe. The week before, Mother had invited the local pharmacist to come and pick them. He never came, never even apologized. The fact that Mother refused to forgive him drove Karel and Marketa crazy. Everybody’s thinking about tanks, and all you can think about is pears, they yelled. And when shortly afterwards they moved away, they took the memory of her pettiness with them.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time passed, Karel realized that the answer was not so obvious as he had once thought, and he began sympathizing secretly with Mother’s perspective–a big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight. So Mother was right after all: tanks are mortal, pears eternal.

That’s an exaggerated version of what seemed to happen to me (and others) during those years: the tanks didn’t disappear, but they receded into the distant background; and the pears loomed, large and ripe, in the foreground. And who wouldn’t want that to happen? Who would choose to focus on tanks when they could think about pears instead? Most people seemed only too happy to throw themselves into life itself, and to leave the interminable political discussions to the politicians and the policy wonks.

LATE SEVENTIES

The military draft had ended in 1973, and Saigon had fallen in 1975. The men of my generation no longer had to face the possibility of putting their lives on the line in that difficult and ultimately tragic cause. The news from that part of the world no longer screamed in blaring headlines, but drifted in on the tide, like the boat people fleeing the Communist regime that had taken over South Vietnam. The news was not at all good. But it no longer had the personal immediacy it had had during the late 60s and early 70s, when the draft had forced us to confront it up close and very very personal. Terrible, wasn’t it, what was happening in Cambodia; and awful about the poor boat people, but what could you do at this point? The tragedies in Southeast Asia began to recede into the generalized din of human suffering all over the globe. It seemed it could not be helped; it was the human condition.

There was a general retreat from political activism. Of course, this was not true of everyone, but it certainly was true of a sizeable portion of the generation that had been so activist just a few short years before. Remember the catch-phrase “the ‘Me’ decade,” to refer to the 70s? There seems to have been a certain truth to it. With a sigh of relief, people concentrated on good times and on the self, not unlike the Roaring Twenties which had followed the horrors of World War I and the influenza pandemic that took so many lives at that war’s end.

I was only too happy to pull back from thinking about politics. I got married in the mid-1970s, and my husband and I were concerned with starting out in jobs and finding a place to live, making new friends and adjusting to life beyond college and graduate school. I remember the oil crisis mostly because it happened around the time of a trip I had planned, making it hard for me to travel by car. It was both a nuisance and a warning bell, but I was driving a small foreign car anyway, and the financial pinch wasn’t too hard, and then it was over almost as soon as it had begun. I remember the sickening feeling of watching the 444-day Iran hostage crisis, but my perception was filtered through the fact that I was very late in my first pregnancy when it began, and the mother of a barely-walking one-year old when it ended.

Starting a marriage and a family is an all-consuming period of life for most people, and it certainly was so for me, along with many of my friends. I was a stay-at-home mother for many years, devoted to the care of my child, and exhausted much of the time. I still managed to read the Boston Globe most days, and the New Yorker most weeks, and watched some TV news (I recall that Nightline got its start covering the hostage crisis). I had a vague sense that events in Iran boded no good, and watching the Iranian women don their chadors I wondered why they would be so eager to go back to what seemed to be medievalism. But what did it matter to me if they wanted to wear black robes and have a cleric for their leader? It seemed to be their choice; was it any of my business?

I could go into detail writing about this or that event, and my reaction or non-reaction (or mild reaction) to it. But more important than all of that was the fact that I had come to accept a certain level of turmoil in the world. I felt bad about it, but I no longer thought there was much I could do about it, except give money to a cause such as Save the Children or Amnesty International (which I joined over twenty years ago, back when it actually did appear to be devoted to the cause of helping political prisoners around the world). It seemed as though human misery was in a sort of steady-state mode: about the same level existed from year to year, with a dramatic surge here and there in one third-world place or another, but the overall amount seemed stable.

Part of this attitude of mine (and so many others) was the phenomenon of growing older and seeing that problems were not going to be solved overnight, if at all. Part of it was the aforementioned attention deficit: for many years, the pressing demands of family left me little time for the leisurely study of world events, and when I did have a spare moment, I wanted to relax and enjoy myself. In this I think I was probably quite typical of everyone except political junkies.

This situation fostered maintaining the status quo. If I (and others) had little time to study events in any depth or detail, there was no way my political opinions and/or my interpretation of those events were likely to undergo any changes. How could they? As I moved through my thirties and forties, I considered my political opinions to be fully formed, anyway. It never occurred to me that they might change or might need to change, any more than the color of my eyes might change at that point. They were part of who I was. I was no child or teenager in a state of searching, no young adult solidifying my sense of self; I was middle-aged, and although I didn’t think I was stagnant, I was certainly set.

What’s more, I don’t think I had ever personally known anyone whose political opinions had changed after the age of thirty or so. My parents, and the parents of most of those around me, had reached adulthood during the Depression and the Presidency of FDR. They were liberal Democrats and proud of it, and nothing in the intervening years had caused even a glimmer of a change in their points of view. Nor did I see changes in my friends–not that we ever talked about politics much, because we did not.

THE EIGHTIES

Nevertheless, in retrospect, I felt certain stirrings. Maybe “stirrings” isn’t the right word, since it indicates too much motion and awareness. They were more like glimmerings, moments of slight dislocation and questioning so mild that they only disrupted the smooth surface of my thoughts for a short while. But they did occur every now and then when an event made a deep emotional impression on me, and especially when there was some sort of cognitive difficulty on my part in understanding the meaning and/or the cause of that event.

The greatest of these dislocations occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union. The USSR had been a constant for my entire life, and had loomed particularly large in my childhood. When I was born, the Soviet Union had already been in existence for over forty years, making it seem to me at the time as though it were as ancient and enduring as Greece or Egypt. Since WWII, it had been the principle threat to the US around the world.

When the Soviet system collapsed, it seemed to me that the end came very suddenly. Oh, there were rumbles during Gorbachev’s tenure– something was indeed happening–but in 1989 it seemed as though the entire Iron Curtain came down so precipitously you could almost say it evaporated.

My question was: how can an Iron Curtain evaporate? And, even more to the point, why didn’t any of the ‘experts” see it coming?

The latter question plagued me at the time. Perhaps I was able to give it more attention because the events were so very dramatic, and involved an issue that had been a constant for all of my life. Perhaps the fact that my child was older now and his needs not so labor- intensive gave me enough energy to actually do some thinking about it. I knew that I hadn’t paid proper attention to the news in recent years, so for a while I wondered whether I had missed something. But when I tried to read more about it, I couldn’t find anything that made sense to me; when I tried to ask other people whether anyone had seen this coming, I was met with resounding silence, indifference, shrugs.

Perhaps somewhere there had been some excellent analyses of the situation, even some that had predicted the events with some accuracy. Perhaps these brilliant and prescient articles had been published in a journal such as Foreign Affairs, or something of the sort. But I wasn’t reading journals then, nor were most of the electorate. The mainstream media (I didn’t know that term at the time) hadn’t demonstrated any foresight about these developments, nor even much of a grasp of why they might be occurring at this point. All they seemed to be able to do was to describe the events of the moment.

Surely, I asked friends and family, the Soviet experts at the NY Times or even in the State Department or at Harvard, surely they had seen this coming, right? If not, then why not?

It would be an overstatement to say I became obsessed with this question. But it certainly was the world event that engaged my interest more than anything since Vietnam, and my puzzlement about it was profound. If the experts–academic, governmental, and media–had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying–I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.

What they seemed to lack was an overview, a sense of history and pattern. Newspapers could report on events, but those events seemed disconnected from each other: first this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened, and then the next, and so on and so forth. In the titanic decades-long battle between the US and the USSR, there had been a certain underlying narrative (yes, sometimes that word is appropriate) that involved the threat of Armageddon, and the necessity to avoid it at almost all costs, while stopping the spread of Communism. Although T.S. Eliot had said the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper,” who ever thought the Soviet Union would end in such a whimpery way, and especially without much forewarning? It seemed preposterous, something like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, who dissolves into a steaming heap of clothing, crying “I’m melting, melting.”

But if the Soviet Union was the Wicked Witch, who was Dorothy? Reagan? The media acted as though he’d been as clueless as Dorothy had been when she threw that bucket, and at the time I knew of no reason to think otherwise.

At any rate, I was happy about the fall of the Soviet empire, very happy. I watched the joyous scenes of Eastern Europeans celebrating, and even bought a (supposedly authentic) chunk of the Berlin Wall. Was this indeed the end of history? In a way, yes; it felt as though the big questions had been settled; all that was left was ironing out the details. Some of the darkest forces of the 20th century seemed to have run their course, and what was left to think about, politically, were humanitarian concerns around the world, possible future energy and fuel shortages, the environment, and domestic policies such as health care, welfare, and taxes.

THE NINETIES

The Gulf War of early 1991 seemed to mark some sort of return to ‘history,” although I thought (and hoped) that perhaps it was an anomaly. But by that time certain other events had taken over in my life (as they so often do in people’s lives), that once again made it very difficult for me to pay much attention to anything except the general outline of events.

In December of 1990 I had sustained a series of nerve injuries that caused severe and unremitting pain. (For anyone who might still be concerned about me now, I’m tremendously better.) Neuropathic pain is of a type that is difficult to describe. Suffice to say that, for quite a long while, I could barely concentrate on anything–not my beloved books, not even television; each minute was very difficult to get through, and I was severely sleep-deprived. It was at this point that the Gulf War began.

I watched the bombing on TV, pacing and fretting, unable to get comfortable for a moment. The thought of the suffering I knew must be occurring as a result of those bombs seemed to intensify my own suffering. I could hardly look. I understood the rationale for the war, and the necessity of it, but watching it and thinking about it seemed more than I could bear.

Although the details of my situation were particular to me, I think the general principle is a universal one. Many people move from crisis to crisis in their lives–survival, whether it be financial, emotional, or physical, then takes the lead and shuts out other considerations to a great degree.

The next year, I was improved enough to begin part-time study for my Master’s Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. With my family obligations and the substantial demands of coursework and seeing clients, my attention was well occupied, and politics took a small role–although as a Democrat, I was happy that finally, for the first time in sixteen years, “my guy” had been elected (although, interestingly enough, I was never a Clinton fan–I voted for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 primaries).

But there were other distant warning bells sounding. Some were not so distant at all. The first World Trade Center bombing certainly grabbed my attention in 1993. It “only” killed six people, but it was different from previous Islamic terrorist attacks in two ways. The first was that it occurred on American soil and targeted civilians; the second was the scope of its ambition. I read about the attack in some depth, perhaps because it moved me as a native New Yorker who remembered the building of the Towers. I was stunned to discover that the intent of the bombers had been to topple the building and kill many thousands, and that it was only through chance and incompetence that they had failed to achieved their goals.

This sobered and frightened me–as did another article (again, I no longer recollect the periodical in which I read it, or the exact time of its publication), about a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists (Osama?) whose stated aims were to launch a series of devastating attacks against the United States.

And these were not the only disturbing rumblings from the Middle East. I remember reading about changes in the Palestinian educational system after the implementation of the Oslo Accords (again, I recall that this article appeared in the New Yorker, of all places, although I’ve had some difficulty tracing it). I had originally thought that the Oslo Accords, of which I had only a glancing knowledge, were a hopeful sign. It seemed that now even the Palestinians and Israelis were starting down a path that would end up with, if not reconciliation, then a certain tolerance, a relatively benign and peaceful coexistence.

But this article chilled my blood when I read it. It detailed, for the first time as far as I knew, the intense and vicious hatred that was being inculcated in young Palestinians towards Israelis and even towards Jews in general. I did the calculations–the generation being carefully nurtured in this destructive propaganda were in the early primary grades now. They were due to come to maturity around the time of the millenium, and I felt a tremendous sense of foreboding. But what could be done about it? I couldn’t think of a thing, and the article had no suggestions, either.

What did I do with these fearful thoughts? I put them away, as I had so many years earlier tried to put away the fear of an impeding nuclear holocaust from my childhood mind. I had learned that most of the things I worried about never happened, and that much of what I read in the paper seemed exaggerated and calculated to alarm.

2000-2001

And so time passed. When the millenium came, people seemed much more worried about the threat of the millenium bug than the millenium bomber who was caught before he could carry out his plans to blow up LAX.

A big pear in the foreground and somewhere off in the distance a tank, tiny as a ladybug, ready at any moment to take wing and disappear from sight.

Except in this case, instead of taking wing, the tank crept towards us silently and stealthily, getting closer and closer, until its guns were pointed at our backs.

And then it fired.

[ADDENDUM: For the next post in the series, Part 6A, go here.]

The post A mind is a difficult thing to change: Part 5 (The quiet years: tanks vs. pears) appeared first on The New Neo.

When I try to think of the psychological/political effects of Vietnam, two things come to mind (and I could write them in huge dark capital letters, rather than just italicize them): change is the first, and betrayal is the second.

Back in this essay, I mentioned that therapists consider there are three basic aspects of change: cognition (thought), emotion (feeling), and behavior (action). During the Vietnam era, changes occurred primarily in the cognitive dimension, while the resultant sense of betrayal was mainly an emotional response. Action played a smaller part in the mechanism of change for the country as a whole–although obviously, for those who actually fought the war, it played a much larger part.

All three aspects of change worked in concert with and affected each other. Many people are still heavily under the sway of changes that occurred and perceptions that formed during and after the Vietnam War. So the Vietnam War continues to affect us greatly even today, and wounds and rifts that were caused then have deepened and reopened during the Iraq war and its aftermath.

Change

The Vietnam era represented a watershed of sorts. The resultant changes in attitudes towards the government, the military, the press, and even America’s destiny in the world were so great that, for many people, they amounted to a virtual reversal of previous beliefs.

Prior to the Vietnam War (and for the first few years of that war) the press, for the most part, had been on the same page as the government and strongly supportive of the military. World War II had been a terrible war, and attacks by the allies on civilian populations and the decision to drop atomic weapons had come in for some criticism. But that war had had a moral clarity, nevertheless. The press wrote about it in a way that indicated they considered the US as representing the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. Postwar revelations (such as descriptions of concentration camps) served only to increase that conviction.

It was only the most far-out of fringe groups that thought otherwise, and they were relatively easy to discount. The “narrative”–to coin a post-modern phrase–on which we (and our parents and grandparents) had been raised was a consistent one: America might have made a small mistake here and there, but our leaders were strong and decent, our fighting men moral and courageous, and we fought for justice and truth.

Somewhere along the line in the Vietnam era that narrative changed. In Part 4A I tried to describe the process by which that happened in a span of years so short as to be dizzying–the way we became disillusioned and confused about our goals and our methods, and even our morality. I’ll just touch on it briefly again here: the military kept saying victory would come soon, but the war dragged on; many of the South Vietnamese leaders we supported seemed corrupt; we read in the Pentagon Papers that the government and military had kept some things secret from us; reports came back that the powers that be had never been committed to fighting an all-out war to win; My Lai, and other allegations made by some returning vets (or people who claimed to be returning vets) made us wonder whether our military was committing atrocities on a regular basis; Kent State made us wonder whether we students had also been targeted as enemies; and Watergate made us lose faith in the morality of the President.

What was the mechanism of delivery for all of this news of change? It was the news itself–in particular, television and print journalism. Vietnam was the first war to be beamed instantaneously into our living rooms via the relatively new medium of TV. This fact has been repeated often enough that it has become a cliche, but I think we still don’t appreciate what a huge effect TV had on perceptions of war. Before television, people at home had been much more protected from the reality of conflict, and could idealize it, romanticize it, and distance themselves more effectively from it. Newsreels shown weekly in a movie theater, with grandiloquent narration and footage of far-off blasts, were a totally different thing from what we now saw every evening on TV.

War is not pretty, it is brutal; it involves doing things that most of us don’t like to think about and usually don’t have to watch. The young in particular tend to be softhearted and vulnerable to the sight of human suffering, not hardened by life experiences (unless, of course, they’ve been subject to great violence early in life, which the vast majority of us fortunately had not been). That kind of empathy is a good thing, by the way, not a bad one. But those reactions, which are primarily emotional in nature and go very deep, can short-circuit cognitions about why a particular war is happening, and why it might be “the lesser of two evils,” despite the horror. So the first change was in feelings about conflict: a more widespread horror of, and sensitivity to, war itself. It came from the fact that we were seeing the war every evening on TV, which was a first in US history–and, in fact, a first in human experience.

Another change was in the type of war being fought. Each war that is waged has tactical differences from previous wars–that is why the old adage that generals make the error of preparing to fight the previous war rather than the current one is so apropos. I am not a military expert, and some of you reading this no doubt know a great deal more about the subject than I (and you no doubt will correct me where I’m wrong!). But it is my impression that Vietnam represented a fairly dramatic break strategically from previous wars, offering new and different conundrums and challenges which were part of the reason the war was widely perceived as unwinnable. It seems fairly clear that a war such as WWII, with conventional armies facing each other and fighting large-scale battles over territory, had become outdated in Vietnam, which (especially in earlier years, when the Vietcong were numerous) was basically a guerilla war that even contained some elements of terrorism. There was also indisputably a lack of commitment, for political reasons, to the full effort that would have been necessary to win it. In addition, there was the insistence that much of the war be directed from Washington by civilians (such as McNamara), an idea that led to many misjudgments. These were all innovations, as far as I know.

Still another change was in the way propaganda was used by the enemy. The North Vietnamese were unusually astute and knowledgeable about the psychological and sociological vulnerabilities of the US. By the late 60s, the enemy was well aware that the US press and public were wearying of the war, and that if they could exploit this fact they could prevail. Propaganda tactics had traditionally been used on one’s own people, or on the opponent’s military (Tokyo Rose, for example). Vietnam was the first war (at least as far as I know) in which propaganda tactics were also used relentlessly and effectively to influence the press of the opposite side in order to undermine the esprit of its people. The US was attempting to fight a war of attrition in terms of bodies (we kill so many of you that you run out of willing fighters), whereas North Vietnam was attempting to fight a war of attrition in terms of time (we drag the war on for so long that you run out of the will to fight). In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won this particular war of attrition. As North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh’s aide, said to French war historian Bernard Fall in 1962: “Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars – and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war. Thus we are sure to win in the end.”

Another change for the US was that this was a war that was conceptually difficult to understand and justify. It was fought for a seeming abstraction: the domino theory, as yet unproven. As time went on (and on and on and on), the question arose in people’s minds (with the help of the press) as to whether this might be a mere civil war of local importance only, one we would do well to stay clear of. The Vietnam War was fought as a nasty guerilla war during the years of heaviest US fighting in the mid- to late-60s, with all the problems, questions, and uncertainties that guerilla conflicts usually entail: who is the enemy? what does the populace really want? how can we kill the enemy without killing many innocent people, if the m.o. of the enemy is to hide among them, uniformless? how can we fight on terrain that we are not familiar with, and with which the enemy is extremely familiar? Never had the US been engaged in such a lengthy struggle of this particular type, and the public lacked a context in which to understand it. Lacking that context, which might have been provided by better communication from the government, and better explanation in the press–how could the American people sustain the stomach for it?

Then there was the fact that, despite this lack of conceptual understanding, all of the young men in the country were vulnerable to being called up to serve because of the draft. This particular combination–lack of a strong belief or clear evidence that the war was in our best interests, coupled with the fact that any young man could be drafted to fight it–led to feelings of special frustration and even rage on the part of those who might be called on to make the ultimate sacrifice (John Kerry perfectly expressed this feeling when he asked his famous question about who would want to be the last man to die for a mistake). The war itself was perceived as being so far away as to be almost irrelevant to America, while the danger to the average young man was potentially huge, up close and personal.

This geographic distance, combined with the lack of cognitive clarity about the reasons behind the war, and the powerful emotional valence of susceptibility to the draft, were a new and volatile mix in American history. For many, the combination led almost inevitably to action: antiwar sentiment and demonstrations, many of them pitting the younger generation against the older, whom they felt were callously sacrificing them on the altar of a war whose purpose was murky and whose execution was inept. So another new element (new, at least, in its intensity) was the idea of a generational war that pitted sons against fathers, and vice versa.

The widespread and new idea of the war as a “mistake” was twofold. For example, when Kerry used the word “mistake,” he was speaking not only of the reasons behind the war, he was also speaking of the conduct and strategy of the war itself. Some moderates or conservatives (or even some liberals), who had no problem with the first (they accepted the domino theory, or felt strongly about the need to keep the South Vietnamese from Communist domination) were angry about the second–the limited war strategy, for example. So the idea of “mistakes” in this war came from all sides–left, right, and center, for somewhat different reasons for each group.

Somewhere along the line–and most agree it had certainly happened by the Tet offensive of 1968–press coverage of the war turned extremely negative. As far as I can tell, this was another huge change; to the best of my knowledge, it seems to have been the first time in American history that the press turned on a war en masse while that war was still ongoing. There are many studies of the role of the press during the war (Big Story by Peter Braestrup and The Military and the Media by William V. Kennedy, to mention two), and it is a subject far too vast for me to cover adequately here. But the general thrust of coverage changed after the Tet offensive, not because it was a military defeat for us (it was actually a military victory, particularly over the Vietcong, who after that were never again to be a major player), but because the press perceived it for the most part as both a military and a psychological defeat and presented it as such to the American people.

The reasons underlying this perception of defeat were twofold. Firstly, the press corps was mostly untrained in military matters; and, since the Tet offensive involved attacks on many of the cities in which the journalists resided (many of which had not previously been the scene of much major fighting in the war), the press corps itself felt vulnerable and frightened. Secondly, right before Tet, the Johnson administration had been boldly stating that victory was almost at hand, and therefore the huge scope of the Tet offensive seemed to indicate that this had either been a lie on Johnson’s part, or a colossal error. The new perception was instead that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong seemed willing to go on forever. This led to feelings of betrayal and depression in the press and in the US, and these feelings only grew stronger as time went on, the war dragged on, and events such as the secret bombing of Cambodia, My Lai, and the Pentagon Papers unfolded.

This article from Smithsonian magazine contains a number of specific examples of the sort of thing I’m talking about. Here it describes occurrences just prior to the Tet offensive:

As the Communists prepared their attacks, the White House was setting itself up for a political disaster with a misguided “success offensive,” claiming that victory was in sight. From the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, President Johnson declared that the war would continue “not many more nights.” Most tellingly, Gen. William Westmoreland, the handsome, square-jawed commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, said before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.: “With 1968, a new phase is now starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”

To show the magnitude of the change effected by perceptions about and coverage of the Tet offensive, here is another statistic, from an article about Tet, written by Steven Hayward : it is estimated that one-fifth of those who had been hawkish in the US turned against the war between early feb and march of that year.

The Pentagon Papers actually represented another enormous change, a shot across the bow in a new and very significant war, the war between the press and the government. A recent book review of Inside the Pentagon Papers (ed. John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter), written by Anthony Lewis and appearing in the NY Times Review of Books of April 7 2005, quotes professors Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt Jr. of the Columbia Law School as saying, “The New York Times, by publishing the papers…demonstrated that much of the press was no longer willing to be merely an occasionally critical associate devoted to common aims, but intended to become an adversary threatening to discredit not only political dogma but also the motives of the nation’s leaders.” This, I think, says it very well: during this time, the press turned from government associate to government adversary, and questioned not only tactics, theory, and judgment, but even the goodwill and motives of those in charge of decisions.

Despite all this change, it’s hard to know whether any of it translated into changes in political affiliation. Did Republicans become Democrats (or vice versa)? I have been unable to find statistics on the matter, but my guess is that there were no major trends in either direction. Congress started out as Democratic at the beginning of the war and continued to be Democratic through the end of it, while the Presidency changed from Democrat to Republican. My sense is that changes in political affiliation were not widespread because the Vietnam War was seen as the product of both sides. The details might have been different–the Democrats presided over the years of escalating troops, and Nixon, a Republican, decreased the number of US troops under the policy of Vietnamization–but both sides were seen as culpable. Both parties were seen as making poor decisions at best, and of purposely dissembling at worst. For many people, this distrust appeared to extend to government and political leaders in general, not to one party in particular.

Betrayal

During the Vietnam War era, strong emotions (fear of the draft, revulsion at the death toll) in combination with cognitions (“we’ve been lied to;” “we’re losing the war,” “this will go on forever,” “the South Vietnamese don’t even want us there,” “you can’t trust the government,” “our servicemen are committing atrocities as a matter of course”), led to one overwhelming feeling: betrayal. Betrayal, in turn, often led to rage, bitterness, pessimism, and cynicism. And these cognitions and feelings were especially powerful in people who were young during that time, because youth and early adulthood are times of great emotional intensity. They don’t call them “the formative years” for nothing–this is when lifelong attitudes begin to be shaped, sometimes as though in cement.

Betrayal is a very strong word, with a great deal of emotional valence. We can only be betrayed by those whom we once trusted; it always involves a loss of innocence, and a feeling of vulnerability. The greater the naivete and trust at the outset, the greater the reversal, and the more intense the sense of betrayal. Betrayal is generally used only to describe extreme cases–traitors, for example, or the discovery that a beloved husband or wife has been having an affair and lying about it.

But I think the word “betrayal” is absolutely appropriate here, and accounts for many of the still-powerful reactions and repercussions from the Vietnam era. Because the pre-existing trust was profound, the reversal, when it came, was exquisitely sharp also. The loss of trust in our government and military had to be dealt with emotionally and cognitively, and people dealt with it in different ways. The vast majority of liberals seem to have taken that trust and re-invested it–this time in the press, who were seen as whistleblowers, the exposers of the government’s lying, cheating ways. That is one way to respond to a loss of faith–by reinvesting in it something else perceived as replacing it (you might say it’s somewhat analogous to starting a new relationship on the rebound). Other people had a more extreme reaction, and decided to withdraw trust from both the government and the press, and to place their trust in nothing and became cynics. Still others (leftists) reacted to the betrayal by supporting whomever and whatever was against the US. Many conservatives, on the other hand, withdrew their trust from the press, previously seen as an ally of sorts, but now perceived as an enemy. They also solidified their anger at liberals and a left seen to have ignominiously betrayed the South Vietnamese people and our nation’s honor.

However, some feelings were more universally shared. Anger at having been lied to by a previously-trusted government, for example, was a feeling shared by many liberals and by some conservatives (I’m exempting leftists, since they started out feeling anger and distrust towards the government–there was no disillusionment there). The feeling of betrayal by the government because of its lack of full commitment to winning the war was shared by some liberals and many conservatives. The feeling that the soldiers responsible for atrocities such as My Lai had betrayed American values and honor was, likewise, fairly universal.

Some feelings were not universal. A very much smaller subset also felt that those soldiers themselves had been betrayed by their superiors and had been given tacit approval for such actions (this, in fact, was the general stance of Kerry towards soldiers guilty of atrocities–he felt it was the commanders and general military policy that bore the responsibility). Many returning Vietnam combat veterans themselves felt deeply betrayed by other returning combat veterans (or men who held themselves out to be such) who alleged (falsely, according to the first group) that atrocities had been commonplace and acceptable in Vietnam. So there was a sort of vet-on-vet sense of betrayal. Many veterans also felt deeply betrayed by leftist activists such as Jane Fonda, and by those citizens at home who had reviled them for having served in Vietnam (I’ll pass over the controversy as to whether returning soldiers were actually spat upon; the point is that they felt disapproval and anger coming from a large portion of the public). A significant number of veterans also felt betrayed by reportage in the press that they felt had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory–for instance, the reporting on Tet. And many South Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans felt that Congress had betrayed them by withdrawing funds from the South Vietnamese military, allowing the North Vietnamese to finally overrun the South after the long, valiant, bloody, and costly struggle.

So, what happens to those who feel betrayed? As I wrote earlier, there are quite a few possibilities: rage, bitterness, pessimism, cynicism. It is human nature to cry, as a result of betrayal, “Never again!” Never again to be deceived. Never again to trust in the person (or institution) that betrayed you. These attitudes, forged in the furnace of such emotions, and at a time of life when emotions are already strong, can become unalterable. If the government is a liar, if the military is a dehumanizing institution inevitably leading to atrocities, if the press is the only trusted truth-teller–well, then, that is the set of beliefs a person has adopted to make sense of what happened, and that set of beliefs can easily be held for a lifetime. That belief system can then be brought to every future situation, applied indiscrimately, and never re-evaluated in the face of new facts about new events (or even in the face of new facts about old events–as we shall see in future essays).

Subsequently, if the press continues to be seen as the truthteller and the government the liar, no number of press releases by the government can ever overrule what the press says about an event. These beliefs have been adopted for a reason–to make sense of a terrible experience, based on the best knowledge available at that time. Part of the “never again” reaction is that it becomes a point of pride to never again let oneself be duped, to never again naively believe. Those who no longer trust in the government are seen as sadder, but infinitely wiser.

But what if, at some time in the future, evidence surfaces that that hard-won knowledge may be wrong? How many people, having lost faith because of a betrayal, and having laboriously reconstructed a new worldview, can revise that worldview again? What if that worldview turns out to have been a house of cards? Who can stand two betrayals–trust having been placed in a rescuer, the press, who is now exposed as having been a liar and a betrayer, also? Who can return to believing that the government–although flawed (there is no returning to the initial state of naive, unquestioning trust)–is now to be trusted more than the press, after all?

For some, one betrayal is enough. They can’t even entertain the possibility of a second, or the idea that they may have come to incorrect conclusions about the first one. To say you’ve been wrong once is one thing; to go through it again (“fooled me twice”) is quite another. And the second time it is even worse, because this time you are older and more experienced, and should have known better.

So, just as some generals continue to fight the previous war, so do some people. Over and over.

Action

So far, I’ve talked mostly about cognition and feelings. But action also had its place in reactions to the Vietnam War. The behavior/action component, for those liberals who were not directly involved in the war itself (and that constitutes most of us), was the demonstration.

Getting together with like-minded people in organizations dedicated to stopping the war tended to reinforce the feeling of the rightness of the cause, in the usual way of groups. Ultimately, the actions of the antiwar liberals (and their far more extreme and far less numerous fellow-travelers, the leftists) had its effect: the withdrawal from Vietnam. And so, young liberals had the heady experience of affecting history at an early age–protests seemed to matter; they worked. Liberals considered this a success, perhaps their finest hour, something to be proud of for the rest of their lives. As I wrote here, the terrible scenes of the American withdrawal, the fall of Saigon, the reeducation camps, the boat people, the killing fields of Cambodia–all these things that came after gave pause to some of us, myself included. But rationalization is a powerful tool, and many of us were able to rationalize that it was not our fault because there had been no alternative, that this outcome was inevitable, and that the only thing that would have occurred had we stayed longer was more American deaths, and more Vietnamese deaths at American hands.

So the investment in believing this particular “narrative” of Vietnam was huge for liberals. As the years went by, decades of beliefs, affiliations, and activities were added to the mix, and the stakes grew even higher. To have disbelieved it all at some later date would have meant facing a profound disillusionment, not just with institutions such as the press and the government, but with the self itself.

The bitterness and polarization of that time had deep roots, as we discovered post-9/11. But that’s another story for another time.

[ADDENDUM: For the next post in the series, Part V, go here.]

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