The Myth of the Lost Cause

One of the things that continue to amaze me about our involvement in Iraq is that the lessons of Vietnam we have talked about for thirty years have been so utterly ignored -- as we entered the conflict and as it continues each day to spiral out of control. When Vietnam does come up, it is always the creature of the right-wing, waving a bloody shirt wrapped in a black flag in our faces. Napoleon said that “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” The guys on the right have rewritten history to suit their agreed-upon ideology. They have transformed a foreign policy blunder that cost millions of lives into a noble “Lost Cause” where the military and the United States government itself was betrayed by the left-wing antiwar movement. This construct thereby denies credibility to any opposition to the Iraq war and demonizes those who oppose the war as unpatriotic or even traitors. More amazing is that given the actual facts there is anyone who would believe this distorted view of history.

In American history, the “Lost Cause” is the myth created by a handful of former members of the defeated confederate leadership in the years following the Civil War. It has been propagated widely and although almost entirely fictional it retains a real currency as popular history, especially in the south. The Lost Cause maintains that the Civil War really had very little to do with slavery. The writers of the Lost Cause myth frame the entire conflict as a constitutional issue -- states rights vs. federal domination -- with a poignant sidebar to northern industrial hegemony over the more genteel, pastoral, agricultural south. In fact the latter subjects made up only a tiny part of the causes of that brutal war. Any solid contemporary historian would underscore that the south’s obsession with slavery was absolutely the central "casus belli." The slave-holding southern states not only wanted to retain the institution of slavery, but they demanded the right to extend human bondage to the territories and the absolute right to transport their “property” to any state in the Union, regardless of its “slave” or “free” status. When they became frustrated with legal efforts to further the expansion of slavery, these states seceded and baldly and unabashedly proclaimed the world’s first “slave republic” in their constitution. Only later did a defeated south attempt – quite successfully – to downplay slavery as anything but a subset of the conflict. The Lost Cause saw extensive resurrection during the civil rights era, when the mayors and governors of the segregated south again tried to demonize the north in general and the federal government in particular as trying to impose its views upon “sovereign states”, and it was echoed again just recently in Trent Lott’s eulogy to Strom Thurmond.

The point here is that fictional history is not any less fictional if it is repeated and accepted widely.

Over the years, right-wing revisionist historians have promulgated a Lost Cause myth of their own about the war in Vietnam. There is not enough space here to address all of their points, but as one commentator to this blog has summarized it, the United States entered the Vietnam conflict “to help the cause of freedom and stop the spread of tyranny.” Well, there is some truth to that, at least to some of the intentions that motivated our government as we tumbled headlong into a sticky conflict that was to have no satisfactory resolution. The US got involved in Vietnam against the backdrop of the cold war and what was seen as a “Lord of the Rings” style battle of the free democratic west versus the evil monolithic communism of the east. Our strategic intelligence was poor – the CIA has never been very good at it – and we failed to grasp the complexity of loose alliances (as between China and the Soviet Union) and nationalism (Vietnam’s determination to overthrow foreign domination, either by its colonial master, France, or any other power such as the US or China). We also wildly exaggerated the stakes of this little civil war in Southeast Asia and predicted a kind of Armageddon if South Vietnam should fall.

But as we forgive presidents and senators for not knowing any better, we must remember not to cut them too much slack, as it were, because there were plenty in and out of government who did know better and who did warn Lyndon Johnson, for example, that a full scale American involvement in Vietnam could turn into the debacle it was to become. I would suggest Stanley Karnow’s "Vietnam: A History" as the bible on this subject, but since I realize that the right wing is likely to attack anything that counters their views as nothing but liberal revisionism, I would also suggest the actual transcripts of Lyndon Johnson’s secret white house tapes as edited by Michael Beschloss: "Taking Charge" and "Reaching For Glory" as indisputable primary sources to my points above. Plenty of people remembered what happened in Korea; many people wondered whether it made any sense to draw another line in the sand somewhere in Asia most Americans never even knew existed.

Part two of the right wing “Vietnam Lost Cause Myth” is remarkable: they would have you believe that we could have “won” in Vietnam if we had simply let the generals have their way. If we had let the military fight the war the way they wanted to, if the politicians hadn’t lost their resolve, if the antiwar movement hadn’t encouraged the enemy, if the American people hadn’t grown weak and weary. Etc., etc., etc. All bullshit that is based on neither history nor reality. We dropped more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam than we dropped during all of World War II! Nearly 60,000 Americans died there over ten years, and over 5 MILLION VIETNAMESE (combatants and civilians) were killed by best estimates. We used every terrible weapon at our disposal short of nuclear weapons (which only would have devastated our side and theirs and provoked an end-of the-world scenario with the Soviets and/or Chinese nuclear response). Our involvement destabilized the entire region and indirectly resulted in millions of more deaths. And we achieved nothing of consequence.

When we withdrew, South Vietnam was in fact overrun by the north in short order, but it was far from the strategic calamity once predicted. The world went on. The communist “side” was little stronger than before. The Soviets and the Chinese had become enemies. The Chinese and the newly united Vietnam fought border wars. The United States remained a world power and only fifteen years later the Soviet Union basically “went out of business” and dissolved itself without a shot being fired. All the predicted dire results were illusory.

As the right-wing continues to construct its present-day myth of Iraq, keep these other myths of the past close in mind.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

While the holiday itself is a mixture of history and myth, it is a good myth that speaks to the best parts of what we celebrate as America and being “American.”

Like all nations, we have long acted to further our interests in the foreign policy arena, but we have also set ourselves apart from other nations as advocating a higher ideal and often implementing these ideals when appropriate. No one can deny the miracle of freedom and prosperity that the United States delivered to the its defeated foes in World War II, Germany & Japan. Contrast that with what China, the former Soviet Union, and most other nations throughout history had in store for those who fell under the arcs of their dominance.

Ideals are what define us as that “shining city on a hill.” Even in my utmost opposition to the Iraqi war, I cannot disagree with the President that bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East should be our ultimate goal in that troubled region. (Although I cannot disagree with him more on the road we have taken to that end.)

Freedom is not free, and a lot of our blood was shed for that freedom sixty years ago in a great war that was not optional, not negotiable, and not open to discussion. War should be a last resort, and that war was a last resort, its victory earned and authentic. In the same vein, I part company with many liberal friends who opposed our invasion of Afghanistan. A terrible villain and his followers who cost many innocent American lives in an unprovoked attack upon us was being sheltered by a government of like-minded villains and it was our right and duty to confront and defeat this enemy. It is tragic that our response was so delayed and its execution so faulty that we let the bad guys slip away, leaving us in a fragile pointless occupation.

Freedom is not free, and that doesn’t just mean defending it with a gun. It also means incurring the wrath of others to loudly disagree when what you know in your heart that what your country is up to is wrong. Daniel Ellsberg and a number of others did that yesterday when they were arrested for defying a new Crawford, Texas statute that bans “camping” to prevent Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar group from assembling near Bush’s ranch and distracting him from his dose of turkey. In a more modest way, I am trying to do the same thing by launching this blog. That too is patriotism, Mr. “five deferments” Dick Cheney. Pay attention.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and give thanks for being an American, give thanks for having the right to use your voice in protest -- and use that voice!

Frodo Has Failed!

Bush Foreign Policy Jeopardizes Our National Security

It is great to see that someone has already posted a comment to my blog. Go Bob! Though I disagree with much of what he has to say, it was well written and thought-provocative. I would like to encourage all of you to post comments with your views.

The following is my letter to the editor as recently published in the Springfield "Republican" newspaper, which further underscores my strong feelings about our current "lost in the wilderness" foreign policy:

"To the Editor:

Recent polls show that only about 35% of Americans support the President. I have to assume it is the same 35% that don’t believe in evolution.

No modern American President has jeopardized our national security as severely as has George W. Bush. Our real enemy -- al-Qaeda – has grown stronger rather than weaker in the last four years. While we strut about on the international stage in an almost comic gung-ho mode, the truth is that our un-winnable war in Iraq has dangerously compromised our ability to respond to a real crisis elsewhere. A once stable country run by a mediocre third world bad guy has now become a kind of Lebanon with lots of bad guys running amok.

And what have we become?

While the United States has often fallen short of its ideals, those ideals used to be unshakeable. Now we detain people for years without trial or even formal charges in deplorable conditions, we run a chain of “gulags” in former Soviet regions, and just the other day the President was threatening to veto a bill that did not formally permit the use of torture. An American president in favor of torture? Whoever thought the day would come?

A mature leader of global democracy & freedom should champion freedom & human rights and use war only as a last resort. We have no foreign policy today except for bully & bluster, and we are less safe than ever before."

Take America Back 2006

It is fitting that I should launch this blog today, the sad anniversary of Jack Kennedy's murder in Dallas forty-two years ago.

That was the end of an era and our country has never been the same. It seems that little has gone right and much has gone astray in the United States in the years that followed that awful day. A lot of lesser men have walked in Kennedy's shoes -- of both parties -- and we can't help but wonder where are the leaders of his caliber in today's political world?

At the same time, we must face the reality that the current President -- and the administration he heads -- is perhaps to the most damaging to our national stature at home and abroad that our nation has endured in many a year.

Somehow -- and it seems almost unbelievable to me -- a right-wing fringe of anti-government outsiders has managed to hijack our nation's foreign policy and put us into an unnecessary war that is destabalizing international geopolitics and jeopardizing our national security. Predicated upon a tissue of lies, driven by the clever manipulation of the natural fears wrought by 9-11, marketed as a crusade against an enemy that cannot be clearly outlined, the war in Iraq has fractured our alliances, squandered global support in the wake of September 11th and put us on a dangerous course that could well lead to World War III. Yet, those who oppose it are characterized as terrorists, supporters of terrorism or simply unpatriotic. Well, if Samuel Johnson was right -- if "Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels" -- then this administration is full of scoundrels who delight at demonizing those of us who disagree.

So we need to make a change.

Bush will be President for three more years, but it is his majority in Congress that permits "W" and his rogue right-wingers to ride roughshod over the real values that define America. In the short term, we must focus our energies resolutely upon defeating every Congressional supporter of the administration in the '06 mid-term elections a year from now. We need to plot, plan and organize in the best spirit of the American republic to effect the electoral defeat of every Republican representative and senator up for re-election in November '06 who supports the party line. It will be hard work. We are not easily united. We often view the world through complex lenses, while theirs is a raging black-and-white tug of war between good and evil and they always do a great job of marketing themselves as the good guys with an unabashed grin, like the smiling cartoon cat with the fish in his mouth professing innocence while he loudly gulps the prize.

But they can be beaten nonetheless! Let this blog celebrate our little parts in the great drama to come. We are the patriots. They are the scoundrels. Let's "Take Back America 2006"