-
It’s pretty clear to me that we have not begun to think through the political consequences of living in a world where sophisticated drones can be operated by lots of other countries besides the United States, and by private individuals within the US. After two large and unpopular land wars, we are shifting to a military posture that is heavily reliant on drones and special forces to carry out what amount to targeted killings of our political opponents. This is a very seductive path to follow because it is relatively cheap, lacking the huge logistics trains that accompany conventional force deployments, and seems for the time being to be a monopoly of the United States. The residual forces we are going to leave in Afghanistan will largely be of this nature.
-
In 1962, it was announced that U.S. planes were bombing South Vietnam—there was no protest. The United States used chemical warfare to destroy food crops and drive millions of people into “strategic hamlets,” essentially concentration camps. All of this was public, but there was no protest; it was impossible to get anybody to talk about it. Even in a liberal city like Boston, you couldn’t have public meetings against the war because they would be broken up by students, with the support of the media. You would have to have hundreds of state police around to allow speakers like me to escape unscathed. The protests came only after years and years of war. By then, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and much of Vietnam had been destroyed.
But all of that is erased from history, because it tells too much of the truth, which is that it took years and years of hard work by plenty of people, mostly young, to build a protest movement. But the New York Times reporter can’t understand that. I’m sure she’s being and saying exactly what she was taught, that there was a huge antiwar movement and now it’s gone. The actual history can’t be acknowledged. You aren’t supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That’s a very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.
