Two demographic and cultural turning points

What [political scientists Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, and Jonathan Auerbach] found was that the formation of presidential voting preferences was most heavily centered on the period from age 14 to 24. “At the height of their influence, around the age of 18,” they write, political “events are nearly three times as meaningful [in forming voting preferences] as those later in life.”

Philip Bump, The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Thinking of my own time in that decisive age bracket, what was formed in me was not only presidential voting patterns (I have voted consistently for Democrats including first in the ghastly Nixon-Humphrey election of 1968) but even more a suspicion of the warlike and other dishonest pretensions of authorities.  As Mr. Bump would I think agree, my generation broke patterns of conventional conformity that had characterized the 1950s for many Americans. He focuses on the sheer size of the boomer demographic elephant (born 1946-1964), which over and over demanded novelties from the society. In material terms, that meant so many more kindergartens and schools. But our arrival also meant cultural earthquakes. Reading Bump, I found myself wondering constantly about how current events of my early boomer youth shaped the society which struggled with our sheer numbers.

So, lately I've been reading histories of the U.S. Indochina imperial adventure as well as turning to more contemporary journalistic accounts from that time period. In particular, I turned to David Halberstam's The Best and Brightest, that war journalist's 1973 opus trying to explain contemporaneously the Vietnam imperial horror show and the collective folly of leaders.

That book was written in the midst of the national discovery that something about American culture had changed massively, something concurrent with the arrival into adulthood of the first wave of the enormous boomer generation, but before such an observation was simply a commonplace. So I cannot help but be arrested by Halberstam's attempt to describe what was going on among the young all around him. The times they were a-changing in Bob Dylan's lyric that captured the ethos.

Now in 1964 the cracks in the concrete were beginning to show in a variety of places, and the coming of the war would heighten the very restlessness which was just beginning to emerge. Hollywood of course had always supported the Cold War; at best a movie like High Noon was an oblique criticism of the McCarthy period. But generally certain things were sacred, and Hollywood seemed to be particularly good at grinding out films on the Strategic Air Command.  

In early 1964 nothing seemed to symbolize better the conflicting forces and changes of attitude, the new and the old, than the appearance of Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, and the review of it by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. The Kubrick film was an important bench mark; it attacked not so much the other side as the total mindlessness of nuclear war, portraying how the irrational had become the rational. It was wild black humor at its best, and it touched some very sensitive nerve ends. But Crowther, who knew where the line should be drawn, was appalled and called it a sick joke: “I am troubled by the feeling which runs all through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical commander in chief. It is all right to show the general who starts this wild foray as a Communist-hating madman convinced that a Red conspiracy is fluoridating our water in order to pollute our precious body fluids . . . But when virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane—or what is worse, psychopathic—I want to know what this picture proves . . .”

(Significantly, as the change of values intensified in the middle and late sixties, there would be almost a complete turnover in the critics for all the major publications, such as the Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek and Time. The older reviewers would be moved aside and younger, more radical critics quickly promoted in film, books and the theater. Traditional outlooks still marked those publications’ political attitudes and reporting, but publishers, realizing that times were changing, had accommodated in their cultural sections; the result was that sometimes a paper like the Times seemed to have a split personality; its political reporters hailing what its critics shunned.)

In 1964 Lenny Bruce, who a few years later would become a major cultural hero, was being prosecuted by the District Attorney’s office. Bruce would lose the case, but what he stood for—the essential change in attitude—would win. Bruce was saying that individual foul epithets were not obscene; it was the tolerance of all kinds of inhumanity by people in power which was genuinely obscene. His definition of obscenity was rapidly gaining acceptance. He was by no means simply a popular nightclub comedian; he was linked to the same broad assault on the society’s attitudes that Kubrick was part of.

There were other political reflections. Young whites went to Mississippi that summer to attack segregation, but they made it clear that they were attacking the entire structure of American life and that Mississippi was merely the most visible part. Their activity led to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, which caused the one sour note as far as [President Lyndon] Johnson was concerned at the convention. There they were quickly put down, but what the Freedom Democrats symbolized politically, deep and abiding dissent from the processes and an unwillingness to compromise on terms dictated by the existing power structure, would live and grow. By 1968 many of the people who had helped put them down at the 1964 convention were with them, and the Democratic party itself seemed threatened.

Philip Bump's The Aftermath seems in the context of Halberstam's observations a strange book. It includes only three mentions of Vietnam, those tangential rather than substantive. Civil rights gets a few more mentions, nine in total. These social upheavals were the fabric of the lives of at least half the young boomers -- had they no consequence for our subsequent trajectories? That seems impossible.

Bump's real subject is where might the current emerging generations take us that surviving boomers will find novel. We boomers should finally be superseded by millennials as the largest block in the electorate in 2024. Younger Americans are different, very different from boomer old people. Here are some teasers from Bump's demographic explorations of the contemporary transitional scene:

• Whites are generally older than the population overall because younger Americans are less likely to be White … But this is a development that has occurred within the boomers’ lifetimes. In 1920, there wasn’t a significant gap in race between the oldest and youngest: the youngest tenth of the population was about 89 percent White while the oldest tenth was about 93 percent White. By 1970 that hadn’t changed much. In 2020, though, the oldest tenth was only about 77 percent White — and the youngest tenth was more than half non - White. This intertwines with the fact that the baby boom arrived during a period of restriction on migration to the United States.

• ... Whichever direction the arrow points, it is generally the case that boomers are White and Whites are Republican and Republicans are often boomers. None of these statements is uniformly true, certainly, but the Venn diagram of the three has a lot of overlap. Seven in 10 boomers are White. Fifty-three percent of Whites in 2019 were Republican or Republican leaning. Fifty-six percent of Republicans in 2019 were aged 50 or over.

• ... America’s non-White population is now mostly not Black.  

• The poles of Whiteness are sturdy. Everything else is more fragile.

Bump looks at possible "aftermaths" in terms of the evolutions of various states:

• Sociologist Richard Alba pointed to California as it was a place “where Whites are already a population minority.” The state has already seen an “influx of people from new groups into the leadership,” he continued, “but Whites are also still extremely important in the leadership of the state. At least in many parts of the country, there’s going to be — you know, I use the word ‘mainstream,’ there’ll be a mainstream. It’ll be much more diverse than today but Whites will still be very important players in that mainstream. It’s going to be a continuation of what we have today.”

• Since Republicans “see very clearly that they cannot expect to keep dominating going forward if this country is a democracy,” the historian Thomas Zimmer told me, “they are very blatantly and openly trying to restrict the electorate, restrict American democracy in a way that will result in a sort of a stable conservative minority rule. Something like Wisconsin, basically. Where you only get forty percent of the vote, but forty percent of the vote might be enough to stay [in power].

• With its balance of disparate regions, from the deeply conservative Panhandle — essentially an extension of the Deep South — to the urban, Democratic region around Miami, [Florida] includes an unusual geographic diversity. But there is a key way in which it’s an outlier, one that certainly affects its politics and is obviously pertinent to this discussion: it is old.  … Since older voters skew more Republican and more White, that suggests an influence on state politics that other places won’t share. Though, of course, the America of the future will be similarly older and those older Americans still more densely White than younger generations. So is Florida an aberration, or is it a preview?

I experienced Bump's book as a fascinating assemblage of largely undigested demographic insights. Perhaps he thinks it violates a journalist's code to extrapolate or draw conclusions from his data? Or maybe the magnitude of the changes he summarizes just overwhelm his explanatory powers. His data show that we are undergoing a generational transition as far reaching and wrenching as the one I lived in my high boomer youth. Bump passes along observations from a diverse collection of political scientists and sociologists. But he resists pulling it all together.

If, like me, you thrive on data, this is a wonderful collection. But if you wonder what our current generational transition means, this is just a beginning and we know that we will continue to drown in divergent efforts to shape our understanding of what we are living through. Just as my elders had to in the 1960s, but all moving so much faster ...

Colonial wars past

In Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall aims to provide

a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco-Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam.

This Pulitzer Prize winning history is sweeping, thorough, fascinating -- and, perhaps most surprisingly, gentle. This is a sad narrative, but not, as it might have been, a catalogue of villains.

Logevall writes with empathy for most all the men (there were hardly any women who figure as actors) engulfed in the long running tragedy. He's particularly aware of slaughtered Vietnamese and French colonial draftees, but also of successive French and American officers and officials tasked by their countries with holding back the tide of history.

The American war in Vietnam was my backdrop growing up and coming into young adulthood. I sought then to understand the American war, tuning in to contemporary US journalism, which did convey very early on that this was a futile and probably immoral misadventure. I also dipped into alternative sources, mostly from the left, including the international relations Howard University scholar Bernard Fall and the anti-imperialist Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who reported from Hanoi. But like most engaged young anti-warriors, my real interest at the time was what this atrocious war was doing to my own country. Vietnam was a symptom of racism, and inequality, and hubris that had to be contested at home. So a very superficial narrative of what was going on in Indochina would suffice for many of us.

This book fills in background that was neither accessible nor seemed important to people like me at the time. Some random highlights, most all of which touch on points when the tragedy could have been, if not averted, played out to a different finish:

• Logevall suggests that if FDR had lived, the sort of instinctive anti-colonialism that was still part of the pre-WWII American mental furniture might have led him to try to keep the French from returning to make war on Indochinese nationalists. We didn't much hold with colonies in those days (while not admitting we'd seized a few from Spain at the beginning of the century.)

But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years.

• Ho Chi Minh, who had been jousting with French colonialism since the Versailles Conference in 1921 that concluded WWI in western Europe, saw the 1939 European war (WWII) and the German defeat of France as Vietnam's chance for independence. First the Vietnamese had to take on the Japanese; then expel the Europeans. The resurgent French wanted their colony back in 1945 and soon were fighting Ho's Viet Minh. Yet according to Logevell's account, Ho didn't give upon the hope that the Americans would let the French fail and not take up the war as late of 1949.

• John F. Kennedy toured French Indochina in 1951, seeking to burnish his foreign policy credentials. Even then, with French defeat and expulsion by Vietnamese nationalists still three years ahead, he saw where this was going in notes he wrote about the trip:

"We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people ... we will be damned if we don't do what they [the emerging nations] want."

• Yet by the time the Kennedy administration succeeded Eisenhower in 1961, the young president and his country had succumbed to the inertia of continuity that pervades our political system.

A White House aide of the time, when asked years later how the U.S. interest in Vietnam was defined in 1961, answered "it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned." The given was that Ho Chi Minh could not be allowed to prevail in Vietnam, that the Saigon government must survive, that failure to thwart the Communists here would only make the task harder next time.

And so the Americans replicated the terrible trajectory of the France's failing empire and tried to impose our own post-WWII imperium. It's a bit of an investment of time to read Logevall's whole story, much of it intricately descriptive of military folly in terrible jungles amid both bravery and stupidity on all sides. Mostly there was death -- but eventually (in 1954) there was pride in the new Vietnam in the north and determination to finish the job by winning national freedom in the south. And eventually the intruding Americans too were swept away, though it cost of at least a million Vietnamese deaths and 20 more years of suffering.

• • •

The Vietnamese siege of the French outpost at Dien Bien Phu was the first world event which stuck in my consciousness as a child. I had no idea what it was about, but I have vague memories of the 15 minute nightly TV newscast repeating day after day that the battle for this obscure jungle redoubt raged on -- and then it was over and the oh-so-foreign Vietnamese had prevailed. Reading Logevall's detailed account, I realized that I was being drawn back into my mother's feelings during that event. 

She had been devastated in 1940 by what was called "the fall of France," the overrunning of that country by Nazi Germany -- she was among the relatively small contingent of Americans who had urged preparedness to fight on an isolationist United States. During WWII, listening to the war on the radio, she developed great affection for the Free French and its leader Charles DeGaulle. Some of that carried over into her reaction to France's colonial war in Vietnam. She worried about the French and was oblivious to the dignity of Asian colonial subjects. She conveyed that to me as we listened to "the fall" of Dien Bien Phu. Reading about Dien Bien Phu, I felt again her emotions, an odd sensation.

• • •

The title of Logevall's book derives from a remark by the journalist David Halberstam that the American war in Vietnam occurred "in the embers of another colonial war." Halberstam wrote his own account of America's Vietnam quagmire, appearing in 1972 when the war had not yet ended, The Best and the Brightest. Yes, I'm rereading that one ...

Women at the wars

It's hard to imagine a more appropriate book to be reading while the U.S. war in Afghanistan staggered to its conclusion. Elizabeth Becker, a war correspondent in 1970s Cambodia and later with NPR and the NY Times, provided You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War. Her subjects are French photojournalist, Catherine Leroy; the inquisitive Frances Fitzgerald, a privileged daughter of an American diplomatic muckety-muck who cut loose from the expectations of her surroundings; and the Australian reporter Kate Webb who endured capture by enemy fighters. Their war was the sprawling conflict that spread across Indochina between 1955 and 1975. Here in the U.S., we usually call it just "Vietnam." And, as women journalists, they weren't supposed to be there at all -- reporting a war was exclusively a man's job and they were interlopers.

Because they weren't supposed to be there at all, they all arrived pretty much the same way: they paid for their own one-way tickets to Saigon and started working at whatever presented itself. Civilians could simply fly into South Vietnam and try to make a way, a notion that seems quaint today. (Though there was a moment in Afghanistan, say 2005 or so, when that might have been possible if you were bold enough.) Against long odds, they found outlets that would pay for what they saw, enough to get by on. And they followed their instincts, inventing new ways to escape military media handlers and cover a war.

Catherine Leroy spent most of her time on the battlefield taking striking photographs of war in the moment, stripped of patriotic poses. Frances Fitzgerald, the American magazine writer, filled a huge void by showing the war from the Vietnamese point of view [Fire in the Lake, 1972] and winning more honors than any other author of a book about the war. Kate Webb, the Australian combat reporter, burrowed inside the Vietnamese and Cambodian armies and society with such determination that a top journalism prize for Asian journalists is named in her honor.

These women were professionals, of necessity also adventurers, sometimes fragile, and usually remarkably courageous. Becker is a lively story teller and their stories make good tales.

But I value this book almost as much for Becker's accompanying account of the complicated, multifaceted course of the long Vietnam war. I grew to adulthood consuming reportage of this war, trying to keep track of self-immolating Buddhists and corrupt Catholics; of Communists who were building a nation and other Vietnamese who were dependents of or revolting against French and then U.S. imperialists. The boys of my generation might be drafted into the maelstrom and thousands were. Along with at least 3 million Vietnamese, 50,000 of those American boys died; many who came home were broken in body and spirit. And somehow the war spread into Cambodia and Laos. Sentient members of my generation knew it was wrong somehow, but keeping track of exactly how in real time was very confusing. On the home front, the war broke trust in the U.S. government and in both political parties.

Becker weaves the stories of these three women into a simple and readable narrative of the "Vietnam War." That's a huge accomplishment.

These women changed what was possible for women journalists in war zones. Sarah Chayes in Kandahar and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Pakistan; Anne Garrels from Baghdad; and Lynsey Addario in Libya built upon their legacy during our unlamented "War on Terror."

That entire project has been irredeemable, but I'm grateful for its women chroniclers. Every one makes the human cost more imaginable.

Timely history

Kathleen Belew, whose bio at the University of Chicago charmingly describes her as a "historian of the present," provides a window into the obscure byways of some U.S. rightwing violent extremists in Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. She's adopted some explicit definitions of her subject, which many writers have only murkily defined. She rejects such labels as "radical right" in favor of using

the term 'white power' to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies, such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995.

I've no quarrel with that. She's nailed these people. In the aftermath of the January 6 Trump coup attempt, knowledge of their origins becomes ever more significant.

Belew dates the beginning of this iteration of U.S. right wing violence to the concurrence of U.S. failure in Vietnam with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s which left some white men frustrated and more than a little lost.  

As narrated by white power proponents, the Vietnam War was a story of constant danger, gore, and horror. It was also a story of soldiers' betrayal by military and political leaders and of the trivialization of their sacrifice.

Returned conscripts who felt burned by a bad war and hippies at home were easy pickings for recruitment to violent right wing extremism. It wasn't hard for them to believe they were still righteously fighting communism, whether as American Nazis and KKK members shooting up Communist Worker Party demonstrators in Greensboro NC in 1979 or as mercenaries in US covert wars in Central America in the 1980's.

Although these men called themselves "patriots," a decade after Vietnam they came to see themselves as "at war" with the U.S. government. (They were mostly toxically masculine men though Belew tries hard to insert some reference to the women who attached to them.) They hoped the election of Ronald Reagan would restore the sort of white country they sought, but he disappointed them.

White power activists responded to Reagan's first term with calls for a more extreme course of action.

From here on out, these loosely networked terrorists saw themselves as operating underground as a "leaderless resistance" performing occasional spectacular assaults on enemies such as the assassination of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg. They funded themselves with bank robberies and retreated to rural compounds in white areas such as Idaho. From these developments came the U.S. government's lethal effort to arrest one adherent, Randy Weaver. Their image of the government as implacable foe was only strengthened by murderous siege of the Waco Branch Davidian cult compound. The white power movement was an early adopter of the emerging web, creating by the mid-1990s connections that escaped the expectations of authorities.

Rejection of the legitimacy of U.S. government by this movement reached a peak according to Belew with some 5 million members and sympathizers. Out of this milieu came the Oklahoma City federal building bombing of April 19, 1995 which killed some 168 people, injured at least 680 others, and before 9/11 was the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Belew's account left me with the question: did right wing extremist violence recede after Oklahoma City? And if so, why? As far as I can discern from this book, Belew is arguing we stopped looking for it, it hibernated underground, and perhaps can be said to have had a resurgence from similar roots when pulled into view by the honest foul racism of Donald Trump.

White power should have been legible as a coherent social movement but was instead largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology, but by madness or personal animus. It might have been treated as a wide-ranging social network with the capacity to inflict mass casualties, but was often brushed off as backwardness or ineptitude. It should have been acknowledged as producing, supporting, and deploying a coherent worldview that posed radical challenges to a liberal consensus around racial and gender equality and support of institutions including the vote, courts, the rule of law, and federal legislation. Instead, the disappearance  of the movement in the years after Oklahoma City -- engineered by white power activists but permitted and furthered by government actors, prosecutorial strategies, scholars, and journalists alike -- left open the possibility of new waves of action.

Well maybe. But from my vantage point, plenty of organizations have been digging into this nasty swamp of hate during my entire conscious political life. There's the Anti-Defamation League, Political Research Associates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Western States Center and many more. Brave researchers including Sara Diamond, David Neiwert and Vegas Tenold have been on the job. Belew has organized the same knowledge and added recently available FBI documentation to provide a solid overview of one period of the terrorist right.

I find one of her conclusions poignant as we watch the U.S. Afghanistan adventure stumble to its terrible conclusion.

The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about the war itself. War is not neatly confined in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and last long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

May war's residue of brokenness not come home yet again ...

Resistance reminiscence

Vietnam-era draft refuser David Harris has shared what he learned from struggling to end the U.S. war whose horrors shaped my generation. For refusing to be drafted into the army, and organizing others to do the same, Harris served two years in prison, including tough time in solitary.

I am now 71 and the war that defined my coming of age is deep in my rearview mirror, but the question it raised, “What do I do when my country is wrong?” lives on.

For those looking for an answer today, here are some lessons I learned:

We are all responsible for what our country does. Doing nothing is picking a side.

We are never powerless. Under the worst of circumstances, we control our own behavior.

We are never isolated. We all have a constituency of friends and family who watch us. That is where politics begins.

Reality is made by what we do, not what we talk about. Values that are not embodied in behavior do not exist.

People can change, if we provide them the opportunity to do so. Movements thrive by engaging all comers, not by calling people names, breaking windows or making threats.

Whatever the risks, we cannot lose by standing up for what is right. That’s what allows us to be the people we want to be.

Harris' movement called itself the Resistance. The war and the movement against it engulfed a generation.

By the time the feds let Harris loose in 1971, the U.S. Army itself was falling apart as young citizens simply stopped playing by the rules, however they could. I was trained in "draft counseling" (advising young men about their legal options to avoid the draft) in that year. But in truth what we were doing after years of unpopular war was often trying to help unwilling soldiers who had gone AWOL stateside to figure out what options they could find. Often, the army didn't seem to want to find them. Other men served and fought in Vietnam for a cause they seldom fully affirmed. I know vets who completed high school, were drafted into the army, and quickly became addicted to the plentiful cheap heroin that Saigon supplied. Some even sabotaged the U.S. war effort from inside, so alienated were they from a war they felt was immoral and wasteful of lives, including theirs. Many had a very bumpy return to civilian life. By the 1980s, Vietnam vets were a huge proportion of the homeless population that ballooned on city streets in that decade. Believe it or not, U.S. cities weren't home to large, visible populations of homeless people before the Reagan recession of 1982.

Not surprisingly, the last thing both political elites and the military would want today is a broad compulsory citizen draft. Unwilling and unenthusiastic draftees can ruin an army. Our rulers know they must fight their wars with some mix of high tech armament and professional soldiers. This doesn't seem to much constrain them.

I think Harris's points remain germane to our current circumstances.

Wars, lies, and peace movements

Viet Thanh Nguyen's Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War uses his inescapable habitat between nations and memories, both trapped and enriched, to try to make sense of the horror that is war.

In this post I will share some of his insights, necessarily simplifying what is nuanced, cutting, and heart-wrenching.

As signs along freeways announced during the height of George W's excellent Iraq adventure, war is a lie.

It is almost impossible for a citizen not to be complicit [in our wars.] ...Thinking of war as a isolated action carried out by soldiers transforms the soldier into the face and body of war, when in truth he is only its appendage.

Nguyen writes this while discussing the work of a U.S. artist during the heyday of our Vietnam invasion who painted a suburban housewife pulling aside her curtains to reveal a burning village. The contemporary U.S. way of war is to separate the rest of us even further from experience of combat -- combat which is seldom directly the role even of most members of the military. But it remains ours -- we pay for it, we enable it, we ignore it, we enjoy its fruits when there are any, and we experience the distortion of our "civilization" that becomes the content of permanent war.

Just as we are all complicit, we are also all among the victims. No male writer I've ever read on war has been quite so consistently discerning of war's particular injuries to women. Nguyen returns to this theme again and again, in the writers whose memoirs he dissects and in his own observations. War is rape; rape is war.

... ["good"] war stories lead boys and girls to dream of being soldiers, but no one dreams of war's costs, or of being a civilian caught in a war, an orphan, a widow, or a refugee. Children playing soldier may fantasize about glorious death, but probably not dismemberment, amputation, shellshock, inexplicable and debilitating illness, homelessness, psychosis, or suicide, all of which are not unusual experiences for soldiers and veterans.

And does anyone fantasize about being raped by marauding soldiers, which is an inevitable consequence of war? If war makes you a man, does rape make you a woman? ... Rape is an inevitable expression of the collective masculine desire that drives to war, for while not all soldiers are rapists, every army rapes. Despite the endemic nature of rape in war, few would enshrine rape in those many sterile memorials dedicated to victorious war. ... Nations are more likely to acknowledge the murders their soldiers commit than the rapes soldiers have done. Rape is embarrassing

... rape and sexual trauma are as damaging to its victims as the experience of combat, but while soldiers are at least honored for their sacrifice, no such succor is granted to the women these husbands, brothers, and sons raped. The experiences of men raped by men are even more invisible and inaudible, anomalous to the entire notion of war as a rite of heterosexual passage. Rape destroys any lingering ideas of heroism, masculinity, and patriotism, those oily notions that keep the gears of the war machine running smoothly. ...

So what is to be done? Nguyen has thought a lot about this:

Antiwar movements oppose and react. They can repeat the logic of the war machine, when, for example, antiwar activists treat victims of the war machine strictly as victims, taking away the full complexity of their flawed (in)humanity in the name of saving them. When a particular war ends, so may the antiwar movement opposed to it. Understanding that war is not a singular event but a perpetual one mobilizes a peace movement. This movement looks beyond reacting to the war machine's binary logic of us versus them, victim versus victimizer, good versus bad, and even winning versus losing.

He outlines what a peace movement is up against today:

Perpetual war no longer requires victory in warfare, as what happened in Korea, Vietnam, and now the Middle East shows. Stalemates or outright losses -- if not too dangerous -- can be overcome. The war machine can convert stalemates or losses into lessons for future wars and reasons for future paranoia by the citizenry, both of which justify continuing psychological, cultural, and economic investment in the war machine. While victories would certainly be wonderful, the war machine's primary interest is to justify its existence and growth, which perpetual war serves nicely. An endless war built on a series of proxy wars, small wars, distant wars, drone strikes, covert operations, and the like, means that the war machine need never go out of business or reduce its budget, as even some conservatives admit.

Nguyen reminds that peace is not about hearts and flowers.

A peace movement is required to confront this inhuman reality. This peace movement is not based on a sentimental, utopian vision of everyone getting along because everyone is human, but on a sober, simultaneous vision that recognizes everyone's unrealized humanity and latent inhumanity. Powerful memory from the low ground presses our noses against this inhumanity in a negative reminder of our capacity for brutality. This memory activates our disgust and revulsion. Powerful memory from the high ground reminds us of a more transcendent humanity that can emerge from looking at our inhuman tendencies. It does so through promoting empathy and compassion, as well as a cosmopolitan orientation toward the world that places imagination above the nation.

Empathy, compassion, and cosmopolitanism guarantee nothing, but all are necessary to break the connection between our identity and the war machine.

Yet all those fine sentiments can't be just about letting ourselves off the hook for the wars -- the hatred and cruelty and desire to dominate -- for which we cannot escape our participation, however attenuated.

... while compassion may allow us to disavow our complicity, without compassion we could never move the far and the feared close to our circle of the near and dear.

... Cosmopolitanism also underestimates how many of us remain viscerally attached to our nations or cultures, which compel real love and passion in a way that cosmopolitanism does not. To some, cosmopolitans seem to be rootless people, more inclined to love humanity in the abstract than people in the concrete. ... At the same time, cosmopolitanism's Western origins, arising from the Greeks, may mean it is unattractive to non-Western societies opposed to cosmopolitanism's global ambitions and belief in individual rights and liberties. ... The terrorist who does not want to talk with us tempts us to take up arms ourselves, even preemptively. Armored cosmopolitanism is the new spin on the white man's burden, where the quaint idea of civilizing the world becomes retailored for culturally sensitive capitalists ...

Living as humanely as possible requires accepting and embracing complexity.

[Yet] without cosmopolitanism's call for an unbounded empathy that extends to all, including others, we are left with a dangerously small circle of the near and dear. ...Understanding that the violent ones, our enemies, are motivated not only by hatred but also by compassion and empathy -- in other words by love -- gives us a mirror to recognize that our own compulsory emotions are just as partial, prejudiced, and powerful. ... Cosmopolitanism and compassion magnify these glimmers of peace. Just as warfare needs patriotism, the struggle for peace needs cosmopolitanism to imagine the utopian future. Without such an imagination and without the expansion of compassion beyond the borders of our own kin, we resign ourselves to the world we inherit.

... [Novelist Maxine Hong] Kingston goes on to say that "peace has to be supposed, imagined, divined and dreamed." This kind of dreaming will not happen without cosmopolitanism and compassion and their persistent, irritating reminder that waging war is easier than fighting for peace. If peace begins with the individuals, it is realized collectively with peace movements, for peace is not simply a matter of praying or hoping, although they, like dreaming, do not hurt.

Instead, peace happens through confronting the war machine and taking over the industries that make it possible ... [He points particularly to the "industries of memory" -- memorials, song and story -- which perpetuate myths of heroism and national virtue.] The strength of weaponized memory is why appeals from the high ground alone cannot stop war or realize peace. ... This is why a need remains for memory that looks at our inhumanity, which we might wish to deny.

Nguyen's book is profound; my summary does not do justice. Read and ponder if you dare.

An anti-nationalist for these times

I think of Viet Thanh Nguyen as Steve Bannon's worst nightmare, someone whose being breaks categories of nation, origin, and history. He is the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a National Book Award finalist, and far better known as the winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Sympathizer. I do better with nonfiction than fiction, but if what follows intrigues you, I recommend either book.

Nguyen is no nationalist. He's a man betwixt and between countries, histories, perspectives, and memories.

I was born in Vietnam but made in America. I count myself among those Vietnamese dismayed by America's deeds but tempted to believe its words. I also count myself among those Americans who often do not know what to make of Vietnam and want to know what to make of it. ... Today the Vietnamese and American revolutions manufacture memories only to absolve the hardening of our arteries. For those of us who consider ourselves to be inheritors of one or both of these revolutions, or who have been influenced by them in some way, we have to know how we make memories and how we forget them so we can beat their hearts back to life. That is the project, or at least the hope, of this book.

These nonfiction chapters survey memorials, fiction, film and the memories they collective construct of what people in the U.S. call the Vietnam war and people in Vietnam call the American war. His parents fled the north of his country for the anti-communist south in 1954 and, after the American war collapsed, landed in U.S. refugee camps and finally in what became the Vietnamese section of San Jose. He's been back to his ancestral country to see where relatives live, where battles were fought, and even the killing field of neighboring Cambodia. In this book, he describes crawling through what were once Viet Cong tunnels from which they ambushed U.S. GIs; these have been converted (also spruced up and enlarged) to accommodate tourist tours. He is more bemused than appalled by all sides' morphing memories.

Nguyen insists that only if we can allow ourselves the convoluted, often painful, process of rigorously examining embedded memories can we hope to create a usable past, more peaceful than what we've known. He calls this making "just memories."

...just memory proceeds from three things. First, an ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity, which leads to a more complex understanding of our identity, of what it means to be human and to be complicit in the deeds that our side, our kin, and even we ourselves commit. Second, equal access to the industries of memory [currently dominated by the wealth and reach of the U.S. capitalist world culture] ... And, third, the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared. ... The nation seduces us, particularly if we happen to be cast out of it as refugees, a population that now numbers at least sixty million, a floating global archipelago of human dispossession. ...

He doesn't think "the nation" is the answer to any of this agony. Everywhere -- on the ground and on the page -- he struggles against the worldwide hegemony of the U.S. view of what happened (this intrudes even within victorious Vietnam) and what it all meant.

... defenders of a homogenous America [have] cried out against the barbarians at the gate, those colored hordes who had climbed their way up the hill of civilization to the city of shining light. Reluctantly or fervently, we [authors from various Asian-origins], the barbarians, are also cultural warriors, demanding to be let in to civilization, haunted by the inhuman wars of that civilization. We, too, wish to tell true war stories, which are impossible to disentangle from the battles we fight to tell the stories.

Our English-speaking cultural arena can be profoundly unwelcoming to artists who insist on mixing their realities; he cites such unequivocally white examples as Kingsolver and Sontag as well as more obvious ones of color. Nguyen's recent acclaim seems a breakthrough in this context; but will it just be more tokenism?

A future post here will take up what Nguyen writes about the essence of war, of cosmopolitanism and compassion, and of the possibility of an effectual peace movement. He has a lot to teach.

Five O'Clock Follies, the Credibility Gap, and the Trump cabal

It looks as if the Trump press operation is going to replicate the Five O'Clock Follies. This label was invented by bored and increasingly skeptical journalists in Saigon during the United States' war in Vietnam. It described daily military briefings which consisted of fantastic stories of exaggerated "enemy" body counts (dead Vietnamese) meant to promise an unattainable victory. (Karl Marlantes has described the pressure put on combat leaders to inflate their kills.)

The bullshit spewed by Trump's flack Sean Spicer on Saturday was such a stew of insult and fabrication that the old gray New York Times called it for what it was:

... at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency ...

Okay, so we already knew that Trump is a hypersensitive narcissist who can't admit realities that don't cater to his inflated ego. Let's keep reminding media with microphones their responsibility is to the public and the country, not to this puny cry baby.

But back to the original Five O'Clock Follies ... In the early years of the Vietnam war, reporters dutifully reported what they were told. The shared national effort against dictators and fascism in World War II had made the government something close to a trusted source. But gradually they realized that the U.S. government was asking them to participate in a theater of the absurd. That realization was not broadly shared back home in the wars' early years. But as that era's journalists became more cynical, their stories added to what came to be called the Credibility Gap. Many of us in the US came to consider much of what the government tells us, especially about wars of empire, to be presumptively false.

The Credibility Gap born of the Vietnam years has never entirely closed. We are not accustomed to believing what official sources tell us -- because we know they lie -- especially about far-flung imperial adventures. The Iraq war brought this back with a vengeance.

Pretty much the only time the Credibility Gap has narrowed since 1968 has been when we thought ourselves under terrible immediate threat, as immediately after the 9/11 attacks. When we are very afraid, suspending habitual skepticism becomes tempting. We yearn for a good, honest government that will keep us safe -- even when we know we're not likely to get one. In such moments, we're more likely to believe false assertions if the government is peddling them.

The Trump crew is going to have a terrible relationship with the journalistic media because their boss lives in an alternative universe. And people willing to see it already know this, millions of us. The administration can't and won't earn credibility by telling the truth -- that's off the table from the get-go in Trump world.

So the Trump cabal need to keep as many of us as they can scared and helpless. That need is the source of the dire picture of the country Trump peddled at his inauguration.

The antidotes to this Trumpian worldview are courage and self-initiated action. We resist when we practice courage. We resist when we work with others in many different arenas, even if our efforts seem slow and small, to build the more equal, more just, and more loving society that we want. This is the antidote to what the con man and his enablers have to offer. Let's do it.

This is our record: Who are we now?

When I finished American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy, I rushed to the internet with a question: how old is this author? I felt as if Appy had chronicled most of my successive bouts of outrage over U.S. imperial adventurism during my political lifetime. He could have called this book something like Atrocities of Empire: Dien Bien Phu to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.

Actually it turns out Professor Appy (UMass) isn't quite old enough to have the Viet Minh's ouster of the French from Indochina as part of his childhood mental furniture as I do. But he's written an extremely comprehensive narrative of how the Vietnam war shaped and still shapes our country's behavior on distant shores. I hope younger people pick it up; this is necessary history.

Appy begins with the question that haunted this country for a couple of decades until the Vietnamese finally made it moot: "Why are we in Vietnam?" He connects the behavior of our ruling elites to the heady confidence they enjoyed after 1945.

In the years after World War II the faith in American exceptionalism reached its peak. ... No other nation emerged from the bloodbath in better shape. ... in the global context of sixty million dead, America had been spared the scale of suffering so common elsewhere, fueling the conviction that God or destiny had reserved a special role for the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth ....

... The fervent faith in American exceptionalism was the nation's most agreed upon religion in the 1950s. It was the central tenet of what was commonly called American national identity. The heart of American exceptionalism was the assumption that the United States was a unique force for good in the world.

Appy's history might have been a little more grounded if he'd explored what tarnish, if any, the unpopular stalemated Korean War (1950-53) had left on this faith. But he argues that buoyed by this bumptious idolatry, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations picked up what the French had lost by propping up corrupt, dictatorial puppets in South Vietnam in the interests of "anti-Communism." Meanwhile most Vietnamese still sought and would fight for national independence.

By the time that President Lyndon Johnson crushed opponent Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election by insinuating that the Republican was a warmonger, U.S. elites knew they were in deep doodoo in Vietnam -- and large-scale escalation had not yet even started. Internal memos admit that 70 percent of the war's aim, even in 1965, was to avoid humiliating defeat. These men (most all men in those days) felt they would lose their manhood if they pulled back.

Perhaps the most shocking moment in Robert Dallek's biography of Johnson comes when a group of reporters pressed LBJ to explain why he continued to wage war in spite of so many difficulties and so much opposition. The president "unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, 'This is why!'"

And so the full catalogue of atrocities -- napalm, defoliation, Agent Orange, cluster bombs, saturation bombing, some 58,000 dead U.S. soldiers and some 3,000,000 dead Vietnamese -- ground on. Appy draws his readers into the unfolding horror.

In his second section, "America at War" he provides a wide-ranging account of the multi-faceted, evolving U.S. citizen movement against the war. He is less thorough about the international revulsion the U.S. brought down on itself, but this is understandable given his focus on our "national identity."

The book's third section brings us up to the present asking "What Have We Become?" We had launched ourselves into Vietnam with such "good intentions." How could we have become so hated? He documents the rapid creation of

a major new American story, one that became a commonplace in the post-Vietnam era -- a story of American victimhood. The common denominator was this: an innocent America and its people had become the victims of outrageous, inexplicable foreign assaults. These attacks, whether from "rogue" nations, terrorist groups, or religious extremists, were broadly viewed as barbaric hate crimes with no clear motive or American provocation.

He goes on to write about U.S. reactions of victimhood to such incidents as the Iranian Revolution and hostage taking, the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For any who have managed to forget or never knew, Appy tells the stories understandably. All of these events killed and/or injured many and shocked the inattentive, but none presented genuine threats to underlying national security -- yet all were enmeshed in the post-Vietnam narrative of American victimization.

It's hard to tell whether this country is even vaguely ready to grow up and face the reality that the ambitious bellicosity of our elites is what endangers us, not spooky foreigners. Appy is very good at capturing data from contemporary opinion polling which shows a continuing, strong, post-Vietnam disinclination among many of us to rush to war, most recently demonstrated when Obama suggested intervening more visibly in Syria in 2013. We can be whipped up by nationalist enthusiasms, but these remain quite short-lived and shallow.

Appy finds some hope in the contortions our rulers have had to adopt to keep us willing to fight.

Since the height of the Vietnam War many Americans have challenged the idea that their nation has the right or capacity to assert global dominance. ... Yet there remains a profound disconnect between the ideals and priorities of the public and the reality of a permanent war machine that no one in power seems able or willing to challenge or constrain. That machine has been under construction for seventy-five years and has taken on a virtual life of its own, committed to its own survival and growth, unaccountable to the public, and protected by many layers of secrecy. It defends itself against anyone who seeks to curb its power. ... The persistence of warmongering in the corridors of power has systematically eroded the foundations of democratic will and governance. The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.

But the public is not blameless. As long as we continue to be seduced by the myth of American exceptionalism, we will too easily acquiesce to the misuse of power, all too readily trust that our force is used only with the best of intentions for the greatest good. ...

He's done his bit; are we all doing ours?

That damned flag still ignites rage

Historian/journalist Rick Perlstein kicked off an unexpectedly violent storm when he piggybacked on removals of Confederate battle flags from public buildings in the wake of the racist Emmanuel AME massacre in Charleston to tell the true story of the POW/MIA flag that hangs on many government buildings. He contends, with plentiful backup, that that the Nixon administration cruelly cultivated the ambiguity in the designation "Missing in Action" to rally families and war supporters behind the myth that the Vietnamese enemy was holding thousands of hidden prisoners. The U.S. military knew perfectly well that downed flyers had crashed in the jungles and were almost certainly dead. But Nixon thrived politically on exaggerating the number of U.S. troops in Hanoi's custody and backed the "National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia" as a counter to antiwar passions. The black and white banner was made into a symbol of aggressive patriotism.

[That flag] memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War ...

In other words, that flag is a tool of psychological projection: we bombed, defoliated, poisoned and burned Vietnam, but they're the guilty ones. ***
When I read Perlstein's account of Nixon's exploitation of the families of the MIAs in The Invisible Bridge, I reacted strongly. This seemed to me one of Nixon's more grotesque offenses. Yet on reflection, I think that reaction is something of an anachronism. Now that we use a small professional army which we expect to fight our wars without bothering the "Homeland," we compensate for our guilty awareness that we're passing off the pain to others by exaggerated solicitude for the irreproachable troops. In the era of mass citizen armies, I suspect there was a chronic realistic awareness that the military machine often wasted the lives of men who thought of themselves more as grunts, than heroes. Every history of broad-scale war is one of wasted lives.***
When Perlstein's article was first published in The Washington Spectator it appeared under the headline "The Forgotten Story of America's Other Racist Flag". No longer. If you follow the link above, both author and editor have appended apologies for using the term "racist." I see in the comment section that the old passions, especially from those who had lost relatives and friends in the jungles, have broken out from the flag's defenders. It was not pretty.

But I am sorry that Perlstein and his editor felt they had to retract the adjective "racist." That they reacted as they did makes me think that in addition to an N-word, U.S. usage now nearly has an R-word.

I'm not prepared to accept that linguistic prohibition. Of course the U.S. war in Vietnam was racist. The enemy (and the set we called "allies") were incomprehensible little brown people, "gooks." The notion that the U.S. had the right to take the place of the French imperialists and dictate the evolution of this complex, ancient land was a product of racist ignorance.

What I might have retracted was the article's lede, the equation of the POW/MIA flag's racism to the struggle against our country's deepest white supremacy. The Confederate flag stands for the particular racism that defended the slave status of persons of African origin. Its widespread prominence in southern U.S. state capitals some fifty years ago signaled defiance of the African American civil rights struggle. That's our domestic racism; Vietnam was more in our imperialist vein, still morally indefensible, but a differently contested territory.

Rumors of war over the South China Sea

As I walk around San Francisco, I often bemoan how soaring land values are transforming this peninsular city. There's construction everywhere and it sure doesn't look as if there will be room for immigrants and workers as it gets done. But there are still an astonishing diversity of people and concerns. Not infrequently, I come home from walking a precinct and rush to the web for answers: what are these residents so stirred up about?

Allow me to share what I learned from my superficial research into that sign. The Paracels look to be off Vietnam, but were taken over definitively by the People's Republic of China in 1974 after a naval battle. Though there's not much to the islands, including no reliable fresh water, the Chinese are developing them as a tourist destination. Meanwhile both Taiwan and Vietnam maintain the Paracels are part of their countries.

Via Wikimedia Commons

The Spratly Islands seem even less likely to be objects of international strife: no people, no arable land, and little water. All that's there would seem to be fish and guano, all that is except the possibility there is undersea oil.

That last presumably explains why six nations claim these isolated reefs: Brunei, the PRC, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. All of them maintain some military presence on the islands and there have been several skirmishes among the claimants since 1946. Most recently, China has been dredging and building an airfield which the other claimants consider evidence of aggressive intent. The U.S. and China engaged in some classic jockeying for position over the region this spring. Presumably the U.S. Navy is being deployed to protect the possibility of U.S. oil operations.

Just as the Quemoy and Matsu crisis was scary background noise for those of us who grew up in the 1950s, the Paracels and Spratlys are simmering hot spots today for those aware of these remote atolls.

UPDATE: Just in case anyone arrives here from Google -- the New York Times has published a detailed explainer and maps about these island.

The Vietnam war viewed from Hanoi

The U.S. war in Vietnam was the back drop of my youth. Like so many of my generation, I assumed during early escalations that our authorities must know what they were doing. The grinding, meaningless carnage and a rising sense that the Vietnamese had a right to choose their own direction made me a student protester by 1967. Participation by the U.S. on the ground endured for another six years ... somehow the war just kept claiming more victims and spreading further in South East Asia.

Yet for all that, I know comparatively little about this war that seared my early consciousness. In part, that is because what my generation learned was not to trust the confident voices of men in charge who kept telling us lies; reading the mainstream media about Vietnam or listening to politicians and generals made a person less informed rather than more. So for some decades, I stopped consuming mainstream news about foreign places. This lifelong habit has served my shit-detector well.

Fifty years later, Professor of History (U. Kentucky) Lien-Hang T. Nguyen provides a new narrative: Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Having acquired access to some (but not yet all) of the archives of the victorious Vietnamese state, she reconstructs a war history in which the North (DRV -- Democratic Republic of Vietnam), the various Saigon-based Southern regimes (RVN -- Republic of Vietnam) and southern insurgents (NLF-PRG -- National Liberation Front, later Provisional Revolutionary Government) take center stage.

The perspectives of the Vietnamese parties ... constitute three-quarters of the story and the United States only one-quarter. Despite that obvious, albeit contrived, ratio we know much more about America's war than we do about the Vietnamese sides of the conflict.

She aims to redress the balance in our collective picture of what happened.

Central to Professor Nguyen's reconstruction is that the North Vietnamese leadership did not function the way the outside world long believed. We even had a very incomplete apprehension of who was calling the shots in Hanoi.

The key to unlocking these puzzles lies with one individual who has managed to escape scrutiny: Le Duan. Despite being the architect, main strategist, and commander-in-chief of communist Vietnam's war effort, the former first secretary somehow resides on the historical margins of that conflict ....

... Dominating the highest rungs of Party power, Le Duan identified Vietnam's most visible leaders -- Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh -- as the greatest threats to his authority. Although credited with leading Hanoi's war against the United States, Ho and Giap were sidelined by Le Duan and Le Duc Tho at nearly all key decision-making junctures. In 1963 and 1964, Le Duan blackmailed Ho into silence when the aged leader attempted to oppose the first secretary's decision to escalate the war and attempt all-out victory. In 1967 and 1968, Giap became the target of a large-scale purge when Le Due Tho arrested the general's -- and Ho's -- deputies and friends. The two leaders thus paid dearly for voicing their disagreement with Le Duan's plans for what would become the Tet Offensive.

On both occasions, however, Ho and Giap proved correct in their call for moderation: Le Duan's 1964 and 1968 offensives exacted enormous costs on the revolution. While Ho died in 1969, Giap continued to be the recipient of Le Duan's scorn. In 1972, the general found himself once again on the losing side of the military debate, this time over the Easter Offensive.

... The common notion of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation as a unified war effort comprised of North and South Vietnamese patriots led by the Party conceals a much more complex truth. In reality, Le Duan constructed a national security state that devoted all of its resources to war and labeled any resistance to its policies as treason. Although there was vast support for the communist war effort on both sides of the seventeenth parallel, especially in the early years of the fighting, opposition and later war weariness also existed. ... While "North-first" moderates in the DRV objected to Le Duan's southern war as a means to reunification, local southern communists resented orders from Hanoi that often put the insurgency in peril.

This book is the story of how the uncharismatic, somewhat unimaginative, Le Duan led the Hanoi government through Washington's deadly assaults, encouraged competition between Russia and China in their support, and built international sympathy. These were all elements in the DRV victory in 1975 after the U.S. finally pulled out. She believes the last element tipped the balance in favor of the DRV:

The key to Hanoi's ultimate success in the war lay not in launching general offensives or even winning hearts and minds in South Vietnam; rather, it resided with its world relations campaign aimed at procuring the support of antiwar movements around the world. ... The Vietnam War ... witnessed the pinnacle of power enjoyed by the revolutionary Third World on the international stage, and Vietnamese communist diplomacy during the war constituted the key catalyst to this "diplomatic revolution." Hanoi tapped into a revolutionary network of relations that managed to bridge the Global South with the progressive segments of the West. In the end, Hanoi's radical relations -- fueled by the global antiwar movement taking place in the streets of Washington and Paris, Havana and Algiers, and even New Delhi and Tehran -- as well as its shrewd small power diplomacy, managed to blunt not only Saigon's regional relations but also, and more important, Washington's superpower diplomacy. This is perhaps the greatest legacy of Hanoi's war.

... Hanoi and Saigon were not only active agents in their own destinies, but they also heavily influenced the terms of American intervention and ultimately the outcome of their war.

Oddly, I feel less equipped to assess whether Professor Nguyen has written a "good" history of the Vietnam war than I might if she'd written about some more distant conflict. What was really going on then outside Washington is still not common knowledge or assimilated understanding, at least in the U.S. Those who care to revisit that agony still have to wait for more Vietnamese points of view. This 2012 volume has been well reviewed by the experts. Though Professor Nguyen's style takes on some of the turgid qualities of the Party prose she so diligently explores, she is offering a fascinating new vantage point.