Review: 1968 by Mark Kurlansky

How much we forget. 1968 was a monumental year in many ways.  I got married that year. There was a police riot at the Democratic National convention.  Two assassinations.  Riots in cities. A spirit of rebellion against authority all around the world. The Vietnam War got worse with the Tet Offensive. The president decided not to run for reelection.  The capture of the Pueblo by North Korea. Prague Spring followed by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. And the election of Nixon.  Many people were sure it was the end not just of the United States, but of civilization as well.

 

Media attention was essential for the non-violent movements to succeed.  Something they learned quickly was that in order to get that attention, non-violence had to be met with violence.  If the response was equally non-violent, the media would yawn and go elsewhere.  Martin Luther King learned this from the police chief of Albany, GA, Laurie Pritchett, who thwarted the "Albany Movement" in 1961-62 by responding to King's demonstration in a completely non-violent manner. It completely undercut the movement there.  They were forced to target cities with hot-headed police chiefs and mayors. Video of police beating up peaceful demonstrators was priceless. It's a lesson that police in many communities still have not learned.

 

1968 was the beginning of a new era in television. Videotape immediacy and satellite transmission meant that the war could now be seen almost live from the battleground. The Tet Offensive, a military defeat for the Viet Cong (they were never to mount a cohesive campaign again) was a media victory for them. Westmoreland's staff had been talking about a light at the end of the tunnel, but the public now realized it was an oncoming train.  The police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago were broadcast live.  That had never happened before.  People could see Mayor Daley call Abraham Ribicoff a Jew motherfucker on the convention floor.  Those in power didn't like that unedited version of reality.  Hubert Humphrey announced that "when" he became president he would have the FCC "look into that." The great liberal as authoritarian. Then again, the violence against the Hippies probably helped Nixon win the election.

 

Abbie Hoffman understood the power of television.  Many people thought he was just a clown, but he understood that clowns attracted attention and that brought TV.  TV didn't just report the news any more, it shaped it, and Hoffman, older than most of the other radicals at the time understood its importance.

 

In the meantime, a perfect metaphor for the bifurcation of society happened in the White House when Lady Bird Johnson invited Eartha Kitt, born in the cotton fields of South Carolina, to a dinner attended mostly by rich white liberal women.  Topic of the day was how to address the crime wave (translation: blacks out of control in the cities.) She took it upon herself to suggest that having predominantly black army you sent to fight a war they didn't believe in might be part of the problem. After an uncomfortable silence, Lady Bird graciously suggested she wasn't able to see the world the same way not having had the same experience as Kitt. There it was in a nutshell. *

 

2020 looks like a walk in the park in comparison.

 

Slogans are always useful in helping to garner support and defining an issue.  The Democrats have failed rather miserably in picking slogans recently, "Defund the Police" being an excellent example.  You should not have to explain a slogan. The civil rights movement picked cogent ones.  "Freedom Riders" has such an appealing ring to it and needs no explanation. The non-violent movement had the moral high ground and the example of the protester who took his shoes off before leaping on top of a police car to give a speech because he didn't want to scratch the car was emblematic. Running a non-violent movement takes so much more work and planning than just being violent and reacting with rage.

 

Anyone over fifty will be riveted. Those under should read it to understand why we are where we are today. A must read.

 

 

 

• Kitt's comment: "The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don't have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons – and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson – we raise children and send them to war."   As a result the CIA put together a phony dossier on Kitt, that was later unearthed by Seymour Hersh in 1975, that branded her as a "sadistic nymphomaniac" and got her blacklisted. (https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/03/archives/cia-in-68-gave-secret-service-a-report-containing-gossip-about.html)

 

'The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory' by Andrew Bacevich

"Without the Cold War, what's the point of being American."  (from Rabbit, Run by John Updike)

 Removing Trump will not solve the malaise afflicting the United States, this state of endless squabbling and tribal hatreds.  For that Bacevich says must look at the changes in the United States following the sudden end to the Cold War. That victory led to an emphasis on globalization (which would make us rich, the elites theorized),  and over militarization when we were already too militarized. We had everything riding on a unifying posture of struggle with the powers of evil epitomized by the Soviet Union. When the reason for that antagonism ceased to exist, no self-examination took place, just an opening up of the throttle. His remark that support for globalization was a con seems dissonant, “The promotion of globalization included a generous element of hucksterism,” he writes, “the equivalent of labeling a large cup of strong coffee a ‘grande dark roast’ while referring to the server handing it to you as a ‘barista’.”  Cute, but true?

 

Bacevich argues we fell for three illusions:

• the more we embraced capitalism the better off we and the world would be;

• with overwhelming military superiority, we now had the right to dictate the terms of global peace and enforce that peace through war;

• because freedom won, the lesson we learned was that there should be no limits on our autonomy, especially individual autonomy.

 

The elites he disparages were think tanks (ironically, Bacevich just started one, the Quincy Institute, devoted to the theory we fight too many wars), major east coast newspapers, and political figures who shape the public discourse. The elites came to believe that military superiority defined leadership. Those ideas don't seem to me to be particularly new or revelatory. Turner and Mahan laid the groundwork for American expansionism (the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines) so perhaps the end of the Cold War simply exacerbated existing tensions.

 

It was the failure of these illusions that resulted in first the Obama and then Trump voter. The voters recognized that failure and voted for what they perceived was an alternative, a repudiation of the establishment consensus. The illusions had given us the Iraq and Afghan wars (now beginning its 18 year) and the global recession of 2008. Obama was the first repudiation, Trump the second after Obama failed to complete his promise.  "Draining the swamp," resonated. Bacevich sees Trump as a demagogue fully embracing the illusions rather than providing any useful response. His incompetence prevented any realization of his stated goals. He argues the political elites' reaction to Trump focused on the trivial rather than the larger problems that gave rise to his election. Trump and Hillary will be the Rosenkranz and Guildenstern of the future, comic characters of little significance.

 

But one might argue that Bush (both of them) and Obama did little better.  Obama and Trump both paid lip service to reducing the American presence overseas but their efforts were thwarted by those who benefited from that presence. The imperative of supporting the troops and not blaming soldiers for misguided policies created a barrier to critical discussion of national foreign policy. We appropriate money to keep the war going because no one wants to be blamed for its failure. Military superiority was (is) confused with global leadership.  Americans don't care because we no longer have the draft and the military is all volunteer and isolated from everyone else; wars are funded on the credit card. If all had to serve and pay for the wars the general population might think twice. Bacevich flatly states that if we got rid of the enlistment and reenlistment bonuses, the volunteer army would collapse in six months.

 

I can't help but be reminded of two other books I read years ago: The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years by Tad Szulc who revealed the covert efforts of Nixon and Kissinger to "democratize" the world, reminiscent of Wilson, and Arthur Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency who argued that the US Presidency was out of control and the Presidency had exceeded its constitutional limits.  Not to mention Eisenhower's fear of the military-industrial complex. Bacevich claims the Cold War was the uniting factor, the glue holding us together. I think its roots lie in the great Depression, WWII and finally the Cold War, but the thesis that  the lack of a common enemy has driven us into disparate parts certainly resonates.

 

 

 

 

Review: The Fire and the Darkness, The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 by Sinclair McKay

 

The bombing of Dresden (one of my favorite cities) has been told many times.  This book focuses on background and experiences of a variety of individuals, some quite well-known such as Kurt Vonnegut of Slaughterhouse-Five fame.  The publisher's blurb makes it sound as if the fire-bombing of Dresden was unique.  It wasn't.  Firebombing was a deliberate campaign to destroy the citizenry and their morale.  The Germans tried it, the Americans under LeMay utilized it extensively in Japan before the A-bomb, and the British bomber command under Harris made no bones about it (see Bomber Command by Max Hastings.)

 

The ethical debate over this practice was not new.  It had been discussed during the 1920's and it was known as "terror bombing." The idea was to overwhelm the fire-fighting capabilities of the city demoralize the population, and thus force capitulation. Civilian casualties were considered perfectly justifiable as the girls in the factory manufacturing shells were just as much combatants as soldiers in the field. Killing them in their homes prevented them going to work.

 

The physics of these infernos was only beginning to be understood, especially following the horrible fire in Wisconsin in 1871 near Peshtigo. Dry conditions and wind and multiple fires combined to create what was called a "fire whirl." The air became so super-heated (the wall of flames was a mile high, some 2,000 degrees Celsius) that it was hot enough to melt sand into glass. It created its own weather system included tornadoes of flame. It became known as the Peshtigo Paradigm, and that's what the war planners wanted.

 

Following an earthquake and tsunami near Tokyo in 1923 a similar fire happened spreading over many miles. Flames reached skyscraper heights, boiling water in the river.

 

A western trader called Otis Poole observed: ‘Over everything had settled a thick white dust. And through the yellow fog of dust, still in the air, a copper coloured sun shone upon this silent havoc in sickly reality.’ 18 The death toll was prodigious, in the region of 156,000 lives, though once again it was difficult to be exact when so often, all that remained were fragments of jewelry and headless naked husks.

 

The goal of military strategists had always been to find the super weapon that would make winning "easy," and force rapid surrender. Dresden was just the latest in a series of terror bombings.  It had become a war fought by physicists as well as soldiers.  Not to mention meteorologists.  The atmospheric conditions for fire-bombing had to be correct.

 

Freeman Dyson was a statistician for Bomber Command. His first job was to analyze the statistics of the planes that had not returned. He and his colleagues faced the bitter truth of the matter: experience made absolutely no difference to chances of staying alive. A crew that had flown 29 sorties deep into the heart of enemy territory was every bit as likely to become a flashing orange fireball as the crew that was just starting out. By the time they reached thirty sorties, this crew would have only a 25 per cent expectation of survival.  McKay provides eyewitness accounts of not just the victims but the airmen as well

 

"In part, they knew because of the newly adjusted nature of the bombs: as well as high explosives and sticks of incendiaries, here were weapons that deployed burning corrosion: bombs with jellied petroleum and magnesium Unleashed on bricks and mortar, these would create fires that could not be extinguished, but this was also true of human flesh. Anyone touched by these searing substances would find no escape, not even by jumping in rivers or canals.

 

In Operation Thunderclap , the attack on Berlin, there was an underlying assumption that the virus of Nazism lay deep within the flesh of German society as a whole; this was no longer simply a military force to be vanquished but an entire people. "

 

"The gesture was human (and possibly widespread – there were accusations of explosives being deliberately offloaded in the North Sea), but the fact remained that few bombs that night were going to land harmlessly. This second wave was to bring with it many more 4,000lb ‘Cookies’ and other varieties of explosives and incendiaries: in total, an additional 1,800 tons of bombs were to be dropped by the second wave, and many in areas that were not yet glowing with that lethal light."

 

We see not just the horror of the raids but also the resilience of the people.  It's a tragic story, well told, scary and emblematic of how the nature of war has changed technologically.  My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy.  It affected my opinion not one whit.