War Culture
– Gun Culture: They’re Related
By
Lawrence Davidson
Vietnam and America’s War Culture
October 08,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- If you go to the Wikipedia page that gives a
timeline of U.S. foreign military operations between
1775 and 2010, you are likely to come away in shock.
It seems that ever since the founding of the
country, the United States has been at war. It is as
if Americans just could not (and still cannot) sit
still, but had to (and still have to) force
themselves on others through military action. Often
this is aimed at controlling foreign resources, thus
forcing upon others the consequences of their own
capitalist avarice. At other times the violence is
spurred on by an ideology that confuses U.S.
interests with civilization and freedom. Only very
rarely is Washington out there on the side of the
angels. Regardless, the bottom line seems to be that
peace has never been a deeply ingrained cultural
value for the citizens of the United States. As
pertains to foreign policy, America’s national
culture is a war culture.
It is against this historical backdrop that the
recent Ken Burns eighteen-hour-long documentary on
the Vietnam War comes off as superficial. There is a
subtle suggestion that while those American leaders
who initiated and escalated the war were certainly
deceptive, murderously stubborn and even
self-deluded, they were so in what they considered
to be a good cause. They wanted to stop the spread
of Communism at a time when the Cold War defined
almost all of foreign policy, and if that meant
denying the Vietnamese the right of national
unification, so be it. The Burns documentary is a
visual demonstration of the fact that such a
strategy could not work. Nonetheless, American
leaders, both civilian and military, could not let
go.
What the Burns documentary does not tell us – and it
is this that makes the work superficial – is that
none of this was new. Almost all preceding American
violence abroad had been rationalized by the same or
related set of excuses that kept the Vietnam
slaughter going: the revolutionary War was about
“liberty,” the genocidal wars against the Native
Americans were about spreading “civilization,” the
wars against Mexico and Spain were about spreading
“freedom,” and once capitalism became officially
synonymous with freedom, the dozens of bloody
incursions into Central and South America also
became about our “right” to carry on “free
enterprise.” As time went by, when Washington wasn’t
spreading “freedom,” it was defending it. And so it
goes, round and round.
Understanding the history of this ghastly process,
one is likely to lose all faith in such rationales.
However, it seems obvious that a large number of
Americans, including most of their leaders, know
very little of the history of American wars (as
against knowing a lot of idealized pseudo-history).
That is why Ken Burns and his associates can show us
the awfulness of the Vietnam war to little avail.
The average viewer will have no accurate historical
context to understand it, and thus it becomes just
an isolated tragedy. While it all might have gone
fatally wrong, the American leaders were assumed to
be well intentioned.
Describing the Vietnam War in terms of intentions is
simply insufficient. In the case of war the
hard-and-fast consequences of one’s actions are more
important than one’s intentions. The United States
killed roughly 2 million Vietnamese civilians for
ideological reasons that its own leaders, and most
of its citizens, never questioned.
Most of its citizens, but not all. There was, of
course, a widespread and multifaceted anti-war
movement. The anti-war protesters were, in truth,
the real heroes, the real patriots of the moment.
Along with the accumulating body bags, it was the
anti-war movement that brought an end to the
slaughter. However, once more Burns’s documentary
comes off as superficial. Burns leaves the viewer
with the impression that the only truly legitimate
anti-war protesters were veterans and those
associated with veterans. But those were only a
small part of a much larger whole. Yet the millions
of other Americans who protested the war are
essentially slandered by by Burns. The documentary
presents them as mostly Communist fellow travelers.
We also see various representatives of that
non-veteran part of the movement apologize for their
positions. There is the implication that the
movement had bad tactics. Here is an example: one of
the points that the Burns documentary makes is how
distasteful was the labeling of returning soldiers
as “baby killers.” Actually this did not happen very
often, but when it did, one might judge the charge
as impolitic – but not inaccurate. You can’t kill 2
million civilians without killing a lot of babies.
If we understand war in terms of the death of
babies, then there might be fewer wars.
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants -
This Is
Independent
Media
|
U.S.
leaders also sent 58,000 of their own citizens to
die in Vietnam. Why did these citizens go? After
all, this was not like World War II. North Vietnam
had not attacked the United States (the Bay of
Tonkin incident was misrepresented to Congress). The
Vietcong were not Nazis. But you need an accurate
take on history to recognize these facts, and that
was, as usual, missing. And so, believing their
politicians, the generals, and most of their civic
leaders, many draftees and volunteers went to die or
be maimed under false pretenses.The inevitable
post-war disillusionment was seen by subsequent U.S.
leaders as a form of mental illness, and they
labeled it “the Vietnam Syndrome.” The “syndrome”
was as short-lived as popular memory. In March of
2003 George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false
pretenses and U.S. forces proceeded to kill half a
million civilians.
In the end, American behavior in Vietnam was not
just tragically flawed – it was criminal. But it was
also historically consistent – an expression of a
long-standing and deep-seated war culture, a culture
that still defines the American worldview and has
become the very linchpin of its domestic economy.
That is why the wars, large and small, never stop.
Gun Culture to Complement the War Culture
America’s
propensity to violence in other lands is but one
side of a two-sided coin. Callous disregard for
civilian lives abroad is matched by a willful
promotion of violence at home. That willful
promotion is the product of a right-wing ideological
orientation (stemming from a misreading of the
Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) that
demands a nearly open-ended right of all Americans
to own an almost unlimited number and types of
firearms.The result is gun regulation laws that are
embarrassingly ineffective.
Again, the consequences of this position are much
more profound than any claim that its supporters’
intentions are to defend citizens rights to own
guns. Since 1968 about as many Americans have been
killed in-country by gun violence (1.53 million) as
have died in all of America’s wars put together
(1.20 million). The numbers are too close to be
dismissed as coincidence. Both reflect a culture of
exceptionalism that grants at once the United States
government, and its citizens, extensive rights to
act in disregard of the safety and security of
others.
You would think Americans would recognize an obvious
contradiction here. You cannot maintain a safe
population and, at the same time, allow citizens the
right to own and, largely at their own discretion,
use firearms. Nonetheless, some Americans imagine
that they have squared this circle by claiming that
their guns are for “self-defense” and therefore do
make for a safer society. This is just like the U.S.
government’s constant exposition that all its
violence is committed in the name of civilization
and freedom. In both cases we have a dangerous
delusion. Ubiquitous gun ownership makes us unsafe,
just as does the endless waging of war.
The inability to see straight is not the sort of
failing that can be restricted to one dimension. If
you can’t grasp reality due to ideological blinkers
or historical ignorance, you are going to end up in
trouble both at home and abroad – not just one
place, but both. And, the more weaponized you are,
both as a state and as a citizen, the greater the
potential for disaster. In the end the United States
cannot stop killing civilians abroad unless it finds
the wisdom to stop killing its own citizens at home
– and vice versa. That is the U.S. conundrum,
whether America’s 320 million citizens realize it or
not.
Lawrence
Davidson is a retired professor of history from West
Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic
research focused on the history of American foreign
relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in
Middle East history, the history of science and
modern European intellectual history.
http://www.tothepointanalyses.com
|