African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers (1963), President John F. Kennedy (1963), former Minister of the Nation of Islam Malcolm X (1965), visionary nonviolent civil disobedience leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968) were all assassinated in suspicious circumstances. The brave struggle of African Americans for civil rights and equality, and the raging War in Vietnam, raised troubling basic questions about injustice in America, and about the genocides and system of slavery on which our “great democracy” is founded. In the mid-1960s, blacks who lived in poverty rioted in the inner city ghettoes: Harlem, Philadelphia 1964; Watts, Los Angeles 1965; Newark, NJ and Detroit, MI 1967. Later came the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party.
In 1962, President Kennedy starting bombing South Vietnam. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson received authorization from Congress – via the dubious “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” – to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States” and wage Total War against North Vietnam without an official Declaration of War ever being made. There was never any proof to substantiate the accusation that North Vietnamese PT boats fired torpedoes without provocation at the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox in international waters of the Tonkin Gulf. The Resolution nonetheless passed unanimously in the House of Representatives, and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate. In 1965, the Marines landed in Danang. The following year B-52s began bombing North Vietnam in earnest. By 1968, there were more than a half-million U.S. soldiers deployed in Southeast Asia. More than 58,000 GIs would eventually die in the War. A disproportionately large number of the fallen were African Americans. According to a recent (1995) estimate, five million Vietnamese were killed – two million civilians in North Vietnam, two million civilians in South Vietnam, and one million combatants. But do a Google search today on “vietnam war casualties,” and you will find that almost all of the websites dedicated to this topic report only on the casualties on our side.
In 1968, the enemy surprised our military strategists by launching the highly effective Tet Offensive. There was Lt. William Calley’s My Lai Massacre of innocent villagers exposed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. There was the U.S. Army officer who said that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” There was the atrocity of napalm – a jellied petroleum mixture that burns fiercely on human skin manufactured by the Dow Chemical Corp. and used on civilians in incendiary bombing runs. To this day, the U.S. is not party to the Geneva Protocol banning the use of incendiary weapons on civilians, and napalm was again used in the 2004 illegal invasion of Fallujah, Iraq. There was Agent Orange – a defoliant used by the U.S. Air Force to expose Vietcong roads and trails that caused a long-term epidemic of cancer and other “mysterious” diseases and soldiers’ syndromes. There was the CIA’s Phoenix Program – a covert operation of kidnappings, torture, and assassinations that was compared to Nazi war crimes by former CIA officer and Phoenix operative Bart Osborne when he testified before a Congressional Committee in 1971. There was President Richard M. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia.
In his farewell address to the nation after spending 8 years as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the grave danger to America posed by the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. Eisenhower spoke the following words during his speech on January 17, 1961:
“We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations…
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three-and-a-half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
In 1969, the year of Woodstock, I was 13 years old. A few years later, I met individuals who had been at Woodstock. Woodstock was fundamentally about being against the MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. It was about being against War.
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song and a celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes,
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies,
Above our Nation.
- Woodstock, written by Joni Mitchell, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and by Ian Matthews’ band Matthews Southern Comfort
All the adults I knew were in favor of the War, but my older brother and I were against it. We watched the antiwar demonstrations on the nightly TV news. There was fighting in the streets and systematic police brutality during the youth protests at Mayor Richard J. Daley’s 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Though your brother’s bound and gagged
And they’ve chained him to a chair
Won’t you please come to Chicago
Just to sing.
In a land that’s known as Freedom
How can such a thing be fair?
Won’t you please come to Chicago
For the help that we can bring.
We can change the world… (changer le monde, changer le monde)
Re-arrange the world…
It’s dying – to get better
Politicians sit yourselves down
There’s nothing for you here
- Chicago, written and sung by Graham Nash, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, from the live album 4 Way Street
At Kent State University in Ohio in 1970, National Guardsmen fired on a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding eight of them. In a speech to the nation, Nixon partly justified this act of murder.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own,
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it,
Soldiers are gunning us down,
Shoulda been done long ago.
What if you knew her,
And found her dead on the ground,
How can you run when you know?
- Ohio, written and sung by Alan Neil Young, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, from the live album 4 Way Street
But what really persuaded me that something was deeply wrong with the Vietnam War and with America was when we saw the movie Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman at the Herricks Theater near our house in 1970. The film’s inversion of the standard narrative of the Western cinematic genre overturned or reversed the 1962 Academy Award-nominated movie How the West Was Won (starring Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck and Debbie Reynolds; narration by Spencer Tracy), which I had previously seen and loved, as it aroused my white male “spirit of adventure.” Little Big Man rewrote the history of Western expansion and American conquest of the Great Plains. It revealed the truth of the genocide of Native American peoples, and our absolute disregard for the “otherness” of their lives, cultures and languages. It also showed that the Vietnam War, for the collective American psyche and the collective American addiction to the killing-madness of War, had in fact begun centuries ago. Only the shadow-name of the projected imaginary enemy of the moment with whom we refuse to break bread changes.
I identified with Hoffman’s character Jack Crabb, who was “short of stature” as I was in adolescence. The film’s story is told in picaresque retrospection by the contemporary 121-year old Crabb, who was (fictively) the only white survivor of “Custer’s Last Stand” – the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn. The film Little Big Man, directed by Arthur Penn, is based on the 1964 novel Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. The narrative structure has Crabb, towards the end of his life, recounting his tale to an interviewing journalist visiting him in his elderly care home.
After the young boy’s biological parents are murdered during an Indian raid on the covered wagon caravan of which his traveling pioneer family is a part, Jack is taken in and raised by Cheyenne. He is taught the wisdom of the tribe by his “grandfather” Old Lodge Skins, played by Chief Dan George. It is the Cheyenne who are the “human beings,” as they call themselves in their own language. In further stages of his early biography, Jack Crabb is back living among white folk. Most of his life he remains confused about his culturally divided self. Dustin-Jack becomes a lowlife alcoholic, then a backwoods hermit and trapper. In despair, he is about to commit suicide by leaping off a cliff. What summons him back to life is hearing the complacent marching flute music of the U.S. Cavalry off in the distance, presumably raising the morale of the soldiers on their way to the next slaughter of Native Americans. Jack rediscovers his will to live through feeling his nascent anger at his absent white fathers. He arrives at maximal clarity regarding his biographical challenge as a bystander to the folly of General George Armstrong Custer – played by Richard Mulligan – whose demise Jack plays a role in bringing about after Custer hires him as a scout. Custer is killed, along with many of his Seventh Cavalry troops, by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors when he is lured into a trap in the Valley of the Little Bighorn River in southern Montana. The arrogant Army commanding officer – who harbored Presidential ambitions – has the opportunity at one point to change course and avert the disaster, but that would mean having to “reverse a Custer decision,” which he excludes as a matter of principle.
I was fourteen years old and came out of the theater full of emotion. I don’t love America! We commit genocide against whole cultures and peoples! Je suis décoeuré de mon pays!
“Nothing else in the world smells like that,” says Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore – played by Robert Duvall – in the 1979 blockbuster Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning… It smells like victory.” The high-budget extravaganza “was produced exactly the same way that America fought in Vietnam,” says director Francis Ford Coppola. “War becomes film,” Jean Baudrillard writes of Coppola’s spectacularly successful cinematic creation. “Film becomes war, the two united by their shared overflowing of technology.” There is implosion or mutual contamination between “film becoming virtual reality” and War. Total or Pure War has no recollecting witnesses. Total immersion in the virtual reality of combat – without critical distance – is simultaneously the worst and the best possible “testimonial position” with respect to the Vietnam War. The VR of War enacted with a naïve aesthetics – I think also of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) – will continue to eradicate memory until we develop a lucid and intelligent aesthetics of VR. In Vietnam-Apocalypse Now, War is a Drug Trip and a God Trip, a psychedelic and pornographic carnival, a savage cannibalism practiced by the Christians, a film before the shooting, a shoot before the filming, a vast machine of excessive special effects, a “show of power,” a territorial lab for testing new weapons on human guinea pigs, the sacrificial jouissance of throwing away billions of dollars. Coppola’s film, according to Baudrillard, is the continuation of the Vietnam War by other means. It is the carrying on of an undeclared, unfinished and unending War. An interminable Heart of Darkness.
