With socialism sailing through the Democratic Party like a Viking ship manned by Norwegian fans at a World Cup ("Ro!"), now may be a good time to analyze how one sailor aboard that longboat understands (or misunderstands) the voyage he has embarked upon. Why does he impute such vile motives to American presidents of both parties? How does he see Karl Marx, and the stormy history of socialism?
I take for my study a young philosopher named Eric Van Evans. I hope he won't mind my picking on him again, as I have before when discussing Theology of Religions, the Resurrection,
Anyway, this is a vital set of questions, as one of America's major political parties is increasingly taken over by Marxists. The mayors both of New York City, and my hometown of Seattle, are now avowed socialists, and it looks like we'll be seeing many more in Congress next year. The arguments Eric made show why the American left is turning on the traditional Democratic Party, and demonstrate both the cynicism and historical folly behind their Marxist conversion and critique of American history.
My proximate target is Eric's recent Substack on "The Shocking Truth Behind Vietnam," In that article, Eric claimed that we are "conditioned to believe" that America is "fundamentally good."
"Here in the US, the prevailing story behind the war has always been one of good intentions, that is to say, our involvement was about protecting South Vietnam from a communist takeover by the North. If we did not intervene, not only would South Vietnam fall, but communism would continue spreading not only there, but possibly here as well."
I doubt we are universally conditioned to believe in the goodness of America. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and their disciples and comrades have exerted a different impact on the thinking of many young Americans: the older of the Boston Bombers, for instance, was tight with a friend of Howard Zinn who saw his task as a promoting a Marxist critique of America in his Social Studies class.
But it seems to me the New Left combines cynicism with a high degree of gullibility.
"The war, and this will surprise many of you, was largely fought against South Vietnam. (1) However, our intervention was framed as though we were protecting South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. According to Noam Chomsky, what US policymakers feared the most was not simply communism,(2) but the possibility of a successful and independent movement outside American influence. “Precisely what they were afraid of,” wrote Chomsky, “was that the ‘takeover’ of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal.(3) They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development, and that the whole region might work. This was clearly a nationalist movement,(4) and in fact a radical nationalist movement which would separate Vietnam from the American orbit. It would not allow Vietnam to become another Philippines. It would trade with the United States but it would not be an American semi-colony."
Let's stop for a moment for some fact-checking.
(1) I begin with the obvious: Chomsky is not telling the truth. In fact, the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam was planned from North Vietnam and began already in the late 1950s. Of course they used tried-and-true "United Front" tactics (as essential to communists as baptism is the Baptists) to rope in as many South Vietnamese as they could. But the weapons, and many of the soldiers, came from the north, often through Laos. The war was instigated by the northern government, and would likely have died out without it (along with support from the USSR and China), as communist insurgencies ultimately petered out in other Asian countries not proximate to China.
(2) Why did JFK send advisers to South Vietnam and provide air support? Not because he feared communism?
It takes just a little knowledge of history, and of Kennedy's own story, to see that the official line is overwhelmingly more probable than Chomsky's cynical yarn.
Kennedy had himself been a frontline soldier, or rather sailor, in the fight against Japanese imperialism. He skippered a PT boat, cut down by a Japanese destroyer, then risked his life to save a crew member.
The Japanese attacked their neighbors, tried to conquer Asia, occupied Vietnam, much of China, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, tortured and murdered millions, set up concentration camps, and allied with the Nazis. Kennedy insisted (with some difficulty) on risking his life to take part in the war to reverse those conquests.
Kennedy could hardly help but recognize the communists as a similar but perhaps even more dangerous force. FDR had supported the Soviet Union with vast munitions and supplies during World War II, and indeed had acted quite gullibly towards Stalin. But American leaders came to understand that Stalin was doing most of the same terrible things that Hitler had been guilty of. He ruthlessly destroyed his class and ethnic enemies. He tortured and murdered millions in slave labor camps. Early on, he even allied with Hitler and attacked Poland and Finland, the latter with 600,000 troops. The Comintern supported revolutionary parties around the world. Eastern Europe then fell to the communists, then China, then North Korea, which tried to conquer the south.
Kennedy could hardly have failed to recognize the communist attempt at worldwide revolution and expansion as being the same sort of thing he had fought against in the Pacific.
(3) Did Kennedy fear that the communist invasion "would not be brutal?"
That would have been a bizarre worry, indeed.
Communists had consistently proven quite brutal by 1962: millions murdered in the Soviet Union, a heavy hand in Eastern Europe, then in Asia, that bloody communist revolution in China, followed by mass murders, the Anti-Rightist campaign, then the Great Leap Forward (Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan tells a marvelous fantasized version of this history in Life and Death are Wearing Me Out) -- along with conquests of Tibet and ruthless suppression of minority peoples, many of whom had fled to Thailand. The Stalinist Kim cult had taken power in North Korea, imprisoning people for the lightest infractions against the image of Kim Il Sung, who also created a rigid and cruel caste system, closed churches, banned Bibles, and murdered Christians.
Nor had North Vietnam proven a complete outlier. Land reform was brutal. (For another good fictional version, see The Mountains Sing.) So was the Viet Cong, which conducted assassinations and terror in the south. Ho Chi Minh was not so great a monster as Kim Il Sung had proven or Pol Pot would prove, granted, but the fear that the communists would prove too kind-hearted in Vietnam, unlike all past experience, is a wild terror to ascribe to John F Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe may have kept him up at night, but that concern surely did not.
(4) The Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists, were of course "nationalistic" in the sense that they were Vietnamese and wanted control of their country. But they were also "communist" as "Cong" implies, and were supported by the Soviet Union and China.
The Sino-Soviet split had begun by this time, but took years to mature. While communists did quarrel and split into factions, Marx and Lenin were internationalists, and Stalin had inherited that spirit enough to lead an international communist movement. Ho Chi Mihn was also an international communist, who worked in various jobs in Brazil, Boston, and the UK, studied some in France where he helped establish the French Communist Party, and lived as a revolutionary worker in the Soviet Union, China, and Thailand. He recounted how a union leader in Brazil sang The International, the trans-national hymn of communism, after he was shot by police:
Arise, wretched of the earth
Arise, convicts of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
This is the eruption of the end
Of the past let us wipe the slate clean
Slave masses, arise, arise
The world is about to change its foundation
We are nothing, let us be everything
To depict Ho as merely nationalistic and ignore the international side of his career and movement, is ahistorical and absurd.
And why would JFK and LBJ have such intense fear that Vietnam and whatever other countries the communists conquered (the Vietnamese communists were invading Laos and working with Cambodian revolutionaries like Pol Pot) would be overwhelmingly successful and peaceful? That dark fate had not befallen any other communist country. Nor had the US attacked most other countries that tried peacefully developing outside its orbit -- say, Burma or Bangladesh.
Nor were South Korea or Vietnam, or even Taiwan, of such overwhelming economic value that American intervention in saving them from communism was an obviously clever commercial move. They were all dirt poor. None had oil or other vital resources. South Korea and Taiwan only developed long after America protected them from communist takeover.
Some more of Van Evans, channeling Chomsky, as he transitions from Kennedy and Johnson to George W Bush and an alleged Republican atrocity, to balance things out. Then we'll offer more comments, draw conclusions, and wrap up:
"One of the most crucial things to understand when examining wars is the role of what are called, 'pretexts.' If a state intends to invade a country, destroy infrastructure, and inflict enormous violence upon its people, it must first come up with a morally compelling story. (5) In Vietnam, the story was about both the defense of South Vietnam and the defense of the US. What this sort of story does, of course, is that it casts America as both a protector and a savior. This is a powerful story, and usually, the public buys into it.
"Similar rhetoric appeared decades later with the Iraq War, which many consider one of history's greatest atrocities. (6) The invasion was justified by stories about democracy, freedom, and security. The Bush administration repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat.” And yet, these weapons were never found. (7)"
(5) Again, the US didn't need to "come up with" any "story" by the presidency of John F Kennedy. Americans were heartily sick of war. But the history, and character, of the communist threat was clear to almost everyone -- up to and including nuclear weapons positioned on a newly Bolshevized Cuba and pointed at America cities. This is not any awake and aware person could ignore, not even children doing "duck and cover" exercises in school.
(6) I cannot access this interview in Jacobin Magazine. Anyone who believes that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime was "one of history's greatest atrocities," is free to try to defend it in the comments section below. Good luck.
(7) Van Evans, echoing Chomsky, accuses Bush in the same cynical and historically unimaginative manner they accused Kennedy and Johnson.
Saddam Hussein had, in fact, not only developed but his forces used WMDs on his own Kurdish citizens, killing thousands of civilians horribly. This is not a guess, it is a fact.
Why shouldn't George W Bush have believed his CIA director George Tenet when the latter said it was a "slam dunk" that Hussein still had the things? Tenet was mostly wrong, but why suppose even he was simply lying? There seemed to be evidence that Saddam was up to his old tricks again. And if Tenet did not believe his own warnings, how could he not know that his error would come around to bite him, as it did?
Saddam was our enemy, a sponsor of terror, and a man who had launched attacks on four neighbors. It is arguable that we should have merely continued sanctions and hoped for the best. (And now be hearing from the Left about all the Iraqis who had died from those sanctions, which they were complaining about before the invasion!) But why doubt that Bush saw those factors as reasons to approve the attack, along with his Clinton-appointed CIA head's confidence about WMDs, more than vague and cynical remarks about "business interests, strategic influence, and regional power?"
Eric argues:
"Such motivations are rarely, if ever, stated explicitly. Instead, governments employ lofty moral language that obscures their actual intentions."
Whereas Marx, it seems, was sincere in his concern for the downtrodden. That seems to be the rule: a foreign tyrant, or teacher of tyrants, who inspires the murder of millions, is given every benefit of the doubt, while a freely elected American leader is given none whatsoever, but rather the most far-fetched and dire motives are ascribed to him, while ignoring obvious and more creditable explanations for American actions.
If American leaders start wars merely to enhance their power, why it is always the worst regimes in the world that we end up fighting? Shouldn't we invade Canada? Why didn't we keep Iraq's oil? Why did we help Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan to prosper after those wars, importing billions of dollars of their goods?
True, it would be naive to assume that our motives were purely altruistic. Motives are almost always mixed in the best of cases. Results are usually mixed, too.
But this combination of cynicism and gullibility, not in one person but in a whole political movement, raises questions about motivation and psychology. What is going on with American young people? Besides, in some cases, a bad education?
Why the Selective Cynicism?
We must ask why young American leftists embrace such cynical and historically-dubious beliefs about the democratically-elected leaders of their own country. It is surely not because Chomsky, or Van Evans, are stupid. (Though most young socialists, including those who call themselves intellectuals, do seem to lack much historical awareness, and Van Evans may be in that position, though he has an MA in Global Security and International Affairs, whatever in particular he studied. I am told it was modern Hungary. Chomsky cannot be easily excused.)
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