While the rest of the Maggies Farm truants are off somewhere sawing ZZZZZZZs or something, it occurs to me to insert this easier way to chop firewood:

Yesterday it came out that at the City University of New York City College's (CCNY)  graduation ceremony, the Palestinian flag will be hoisted among those flags of UN members, although it is not a UN member. This singular honor speaks volumes about the moral and political rot within CUNY.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who’s been at the center of the Kushner controversy, said that the flag issue seemed to point to a double-standard at the university.

“I would think if we were going to fly the flags of aspiring nations, then we should certainly those of aspiring nations that have been in the mix even longer, like Tibet, like Kurdistan,” Wiesenfeld said. “In other words, whatever the policy is, it should be based on a consistency, but not a fashion of the moment.”

One City College faculty member said it reflected a deeper problem in academia....

Flying the Palestinian flag is not a problem in itself. But flying it alongside the flags of UN member countries, at a public university, makes a particular statement. It says that CUNY’s City College is recognizing the state of Palestine, and its quest for UN member status, regardless of the outcome of the peace process. The college is free to argue that this has “nothing to do with foreign policy,” but the reality speaks for itself.

If CUNY really wants to speak up for repressed peoples -- many really ruthlessly oppressed -- it might raise the banner for these members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), which are not UN members. The UNPO is accredited by the UN as an NGO.

What distinguishes these peoples from the one honored by CUNY's City College is that: 1) they are not favored or in most cases even paid attention to by liberal elites -- or others (several years ago I asked the leader of a major refugees NGO why it paid no attention to the Hmong; he answered that the NGO had other prorities.); and 2) The Palestinians would not subscribe to the Covenant of the UNPO, which includes:

Convinced that the principles, methodology, and practice of Gandhian nonviolence and nonviolent civil-resistance are the most effective means of pursuing and enforcing both collective and individual rights, we, the undersigned Nations and Peoples, reaffirm our unreserved commitment to such principles, rejecting in the process terrorism, extremism, and violence in all its forms;

See Agitprop in America.

[T]he New York cultural elite, which may be caricatured in this case as an interlocking directorate of playwright, pundits, and professors, the presumption of impunity is absolute. Academia, in particular, has a "sacred mission," to be defined solely by the faculty and under no circumstances to be questioned. That the faculties themselves tend to be monolithic in their political and ideological orientation may help to explain their wild overreaction in the present instance and others like it. Delusions of infallibility combined with well-deserved insecurity and profound authoritarianism make for a potent brew.

Yesterday, CUNY's Vice President for Communications said:

CUNY's Vice-President for Communications today digs deeper.

CUNY’s City College VP of communications Mary Lou Edmondson emails this response: “I regret that I misspoke about the flags flown at the United Nations."

So, CUNY's CCNY chooses to fly the flag of its "chosen" people, the Palestinians. Need I say more?

In Israel, its Memorial Day, today, fittingly precedes by one day Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut), tomorrow.

What Memorial Day Feels Like in a Country at War

Though America has been at war for the last decade, the size of our standing army is such that most of us don’t know anyone serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, let alone someone who died there. By contrast, Israel is a small country that has been at war for every day of its existence and most people there serve in the military or perform national service after high school. Most men then do time in the reserves. It seems as if everyone there either has lost a relative or knows someone who has. The price that has been paid for Israel’s survival against the odds is measured in the long rows of soldiers’ graves to which families journey to this day. Perhaps after the Civil War, from which our Memorial Day derives, or during subsequent mass conflicts, Americans felt about the day the way Israelis do now but that understanding has clearly been lost.

Too harsh, I think. But, for too many of us the connection between our freedoms and those who fought for them and gave the ultimate has been lost. Not for these Israeli young people, waving their flag for freedom.

Happy 63rd birthday, Israel, and happier ones to come, please dear G-d.

Bottom Line: “We lost the war in Vietnam.” That is irrefutable. The continuing arguments are about: who “we” are, why, who is responsible, and what could have been.

As someone who has been deeply involved in these debates since the 60s (including serving in Vietnam, USMC intel at 1st MarDiv HQs), I have to recommend an enlightening book and an essay.

The book is better than the Pentagon Papers which presented a hodge podge of US decision makers comments during the earlier phases of the war. This book is the candid after-action, after fall of South Vietnam, considered writings by leading South Vietnamese generals. The Vietnam War: An Assessment By South Vietnam’s Generals  is edited by highly regarded historian Lewis Sorley.

The monographs cover every conceivable aspect of the war, from combat operations to budgets, from relations with advisors to logistical support, from uniforms to pay to desertions to refugees to bombing to pipelines to prisoners of war to combat rations to family support and even South Vietnamese society. A considerable amount of this material, based on the firsthand observations of these highly placed Vietnamese authors, is to be found nowhere else.

 

By no means can supporters of the US in Vietnam take comfort in the book. The authors provide enough quotes to fill any anti-war essay. Lewis Sorley comments: “I think, for one, that they are in many instances far too hard on themselves and on the Vietnamese in general, both politically and militarily. They make few excuses, and instead are forthright in assigning, and assuming, blame.” That is, also, a strength of the book. It is an honest assessment, which if actually read by critics of the war and today’s students, cuts through the perplexities about our ally and battleground in the Cold War. Sorley: “Now, we know, however, that when well armed and equipped, and well led, they performed gallantly and with spirit.”

At almost 1000 pages, the book is comprehensive, well-written, and possibly the most valuable on the war.  For length and price ($60), and for failing to meet one-sided prejudices, few will read it. But, anyone at all serious about understanding the perplexing questions and arguing with any integrity must read it. I’ve taken weeks to read it, at almost every page learning something new, and at many pages having my prior views enlightened. Similarly, noted and knowledgeable critic of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom Ricks, in preparing his own forthcoming book on the Vietnam War calls this book “terrific (and massive).”

Fortunately, historian Mark Moyar presents an enlightening essay that will help students of the Vietnam War understand the conflicting historical accounts, Vietnam: Historians at War.  It is an invaluable survey of the “orthodox” historians of defeat (“…most academic and journalistic accounts of the war written during and shortly afterwards depicted Vietnam as a bad war that the United States should not have fought. Antiwar history of the Vietnam War thus acquired the label of “orthodox” history.”) versus the “revisionist” historians who disagree and have unearthed formerly unreleased or unknown facts.

The recent revisionist histories, in contrast to some earlier revisionist works, have generally been backed by voluminous research, captured in numerous footnotes. Although not all of their authors are excellent scholars, they are generally more rigorous in their analysis than their orthodox counterparts, because they are so often challenged that they have become adept at anticipating and countering contrary assertions. Because experience has given revisionists a better understanding of the importance of wrestling with differently minded people, they have also been much more willing than orthodox historians to invite the opposing side to conferences they organize….Slowly but surely, the revisionist view is gaining ground.

 

If a student needs an understanding of the historiography of the Vietnam War and a guide to differing accounts, Mark Moyar’s essay is a great launching point.

P.S.: For historical record, below is the never before published look back at the last diplomatic days of South Vietnam as told by its longtime Ambassador to the US, Bui Diem, at a conference last year.

The editorial follows:

MAY 9, 2011

'A Mistake of Principle'

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld never had a chance against Tony Kushner.

So it now looks as if the City University of New York is going to overturn a decision by its own board of trustees to refuse to give an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner. The ironies of modern academic politics here are too rich to pass by without notice.

Start with the Friday announcement by CUNY "Chairperson"—that's his official title—Benno Schmidt that he plans to convene a meeting today of the board's seven-member executive committee to reconsider the decision the full board made against the Kushner degree only last week.

"I would not ordinarily ask for reconsideration of a decision so recently taken," said Mr. Schmidt, who was once president of Yale. "But when the board has made a mistake of principle and not merely of policy, review is appropriate and, indeed, mandatory."

As it happens, Chairperson Schmidt was on hand when this "mistake of principle" was made but didn't raise a voice at the time. In the course of considering a slate of honorary degrees, trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld asked for a moment to speak and objected to the honor for Mr. Kushner due to his extreme anti-Israel views. His full remarks are available on the CUNY website.

After Mr. Wiesenfeld spoke, a board majority did not prevail for the full slate of honorees. The board then voted on a motion to table Mr. Kushner's degree, and the other nominees were approved. Whereupon the CUNY faculty and the New York arts and media world rose in fury to assert that the school had done a grievous wrong by failing to honor such a pillar of the theater as Mr. Kushner.

So now Mr. Schmidt wants a subset of the board to overrule a decision taken by the ostensible overseers of CUNY. If there was ever definitive proof that university officials see their trustees as mere check-writing rubber stamps, this is it. Even on the symbolic matter of conferring university prestige, the trustees get put in their place when they don't meet the politically correct standards of the faculty.

Mr. Schmidt's statement includes the implication that the trustees had violated the right to "freedom of thought and expression" and that they had offended university norms by letting "politics" interfere with an honor intended to recognize Mr. Kushner's "contribution to the American theater."

But no one is denying Mr. Kushner's right to say whatever he wants about Israel, or anything else. The point is whether he should be honored by CUNY, and Mr. Wiesenfeld was invoking his own right to freely express his opposition. As for the separation of art and politics, the New York Sun wryly notes that "you would need a late-model electron microscope spectrometer" to separate the two in Mr. Kushner's work. It is precisely the liberal politics in his art that has caused the academic elites to rise up on his behalf.

Mr. Wiesenfeld's "mistake" was not appreciating that hostility to Israel has become such a deeply embedded principle of the modern academy that objecting to it earns you denunciation as a censor and philistine. The only greater uproar might have come if CUNY's trustees had voted to award an honorary degree to, say, the CIA interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.