Maggie's Farm

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.

The New York Sun editorial on the Tony Kushner now you have it - now you don't - now CUNY's Chairman will get it for you honorary degree (my sum up and links here):

It looks like the executive committee of the board of the City University of New York is going to convene on Monday to approve an honorary degree for the playwright Tony Kushner that the full board was not prepared to approve a week earlier. In announcing this dodge, CUNY’s chairman, Benno Schmidt, said it was necessary because the trustees had made an error of principle in declining to approve the degree for Mr. Kushner the first time around. But if principles are the issue here, what is the logic of the decision of a full board of trustees being overturned a few days later by a subset of the trustees?

Richard Louv is not an environmental extremist but a lover and appreciator of nature. A review of his latest book, The Nature Principle, contains his question:

“What would our lives be like if our days and nights were as immersed in nature as they are in electronics?”

Another quote reminds me of a friend who would take me on nature walks:

Louv takes us along with him on a walk near Lake Hodges, where the guide, a botanist, shows him the stunning biodiversity of this region. “Your eyes don’t know what to look at,” the botanist says, “so you don’t see.” By the end of the afternoon, Louv has discovered “a world that suddenly seemed as exotic as a rain forest.”

Louv used to be a columnist for the San Diego Union Tribune. I miss his columns and the walks with my friend.

I wrote about Louv previously, A Treatment for Cultural Depression.

For mothers who have lost a child to wars, to ill-health, to accidents, there is no consolation that will ever fill their hearts as did their child. If you know such a mother, you know what I mean. If you don't, count yourself fortunate. Either way, take a moment with her or with yourself to count the blessings during life of a child. Hallmark should have a card for this, but there are no words that can communicate the sharing of such a loss. There's only your quiet embraces for the mothers who feel such sorrow on Mothers Day.

A nation feels the loss today. And, the origins of Mothers Day:

Mother’s Day couldn’t seem farther from Yom Hazikaron, but it turns out that it didn’t start that way. The 19th-century poet and feminist Julia Ward Howe, best known for penning the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” began crusading for a Mother’s Day for Peace in the wake of the horrific devastation of the Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars. Around the same time, Anna Reeves Jarvis was advocating for a Mother’s Work Day with a similar purpose. When Jarvis died, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, took up the mantle. But the second Jarvis was more concerned with honoring mothers and less concerned with promoting peace....She successfully lobbied Congress for her cause (no one wants to be on the record against mothers), and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution that made the second Sunday in May officially a day to recognize mothers. Anna Jarvis soon became disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday she had helped create, noting that “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit.”

The book review in the New York Times of the new edition of Friedrich Hayek's Constitution of Liberty credits his thought -- at core, distrust of central government and its ability to coordinate society better than the agglomeration of individual and local choices -- as winning since the 1980s. As the reviewer says, "President Obama’s return to “big government” didn’t last more than a year before it was met with fierce ­resistance."

The reviewer, still, raises limitations on that core thought as presented from Left and Right, but moreso from practicalities and realities in some cases, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed central government to correct a long-lasting wrong.

All well and good. But, doesn't undermine Hayek's core point, except in cases of major and agreed need.

The criticism from the Left is spurious. The economic and social schemes of government to increase the freedom, as the Left sees it, of the population have proven largely failures and counterproductive.

The criticism from the Right bears more weight, although the reviewer doesn't delve deeper than this:

A second critique of Hayek has tended to come from the right. He is necessarily a moral relativist, since he does not believe that there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends. Morality for him is more like a useful coordinating device than a categorical imperative. But surely the Western tradition that Hayek celebrates is as concerned with virtue as with freedom, whether from the standpoint of Christianity or that of classical republicanism. One searches in vain through this or any of his other books for a serious treatment of religion or the moral concerns that animate religious ­believers.

Just as Big Government is a slippery slope, so too is moral relativism.

Read the review for yourself, and comment. (I've omitted the reviewers name from this post so as not to have it, one way or the other, influence the reader's consideration.) Above all, I think Friedrich Hayek would want you to think for yourself.

In that vein, The Institutional Risk Analyst, presents an essay on Keynesianism corrupted by "today's econometricians pretending they are." The essay requires subscription, so it is presented below (via one of the co-authors blog; and don't miss the real story of Gunnar Myrdal, Hayek's co-winner for economics of the Nobel Prize). First, an excerpt:

It is true that Keynes was an interventionist, that he believed government had a role and should employ it, to curb and limit the business cycles which have dominated modern economic life since The Industrial Revolution began with the advent of capitalism -- and perhaps before. But Keynes set strict limits on how governments might borrow and toss capital into the machinery to get it up and going again.