The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace, Paul Thomas Chamberlin
Finishing this book really solidified for me the impunity of the leadership of military and government regimes (I mentioned this yesterday). Whether it was Giap or Khomeini sending massed human wave attacks at fortified positions, Rhee or Saddam Hussein executing scores of political rivals, or Begin and Sharon or Nixon ordering invasions or bombing raids that were guaranteed to kill innocent civilians, the key thing one notes is that all of these people escaped accountability for their actions. (Saddam was eventually executed and to some extent it was for his crimes, but 15+ years of running around after the massacres of Kurds and others is not enough punishment, in my opinion.)
I think I’m going to move onto other topics soon enough. All of this war stuff is really getting me down. School starts next week though, and I’m really going to have to keep my head down in my books in order to get the straight As I’m aiming for. So maybe books will have to wait. Or maybe I’ll just break up my day with short stories? Maybe I’ll start some Raymond Chandler, people really like him and the spines of his novels seem tiny.
Meditating on grim things
Lately I’ve found myself reading and viewing a lot of material on conflict in the 20th century, which necessarily involves reading and viewing a lot of material on the immiseration of various human beings in the course thereof. Reading The Cold War’s Killing Fields, (which I’ll post more about later) led me down the rabbit hole of conflicts both famous (the Vietnam War, the Korean War) and little-known in the US (Operation Searchlight, the mid-1960s massacres of Indonesian communists and those affiliated with them).
Besides adding a huge list of books to my “to-read” pile, I also found a ton of interesting videos on YouTube. Besides some analyses of particular battles (I saw a really good one about the Battle of Ia Drang,) I’ve been watching archival and documentary footage. It’s really something, watching washed-out, grainy footage of civilians piecing through piles of shattered buildings, weeping over the bodies of their loved ones. You begin to realize how much of your life was assembled around you in its particular configuration by the whims of fate. I could have been a Bengali student executed by roving Pakistani soldiers in the opening maneuvers of Operation Searchlight, or a protester shot by police at the outset of the Iranian Revolution. Or I could have been a soldier or a cop myself. Or even a nameless farmer or craftsman or mother or father or child, immolated or gassed or annihilated by weaponry.
Two interesting documentaries I watched parts of were The Laughing Man and Pilots in Pajamas. The first is an interview with an ex-Wehrmacht soldier who had enlisted as a mercenary in Africa in the 1960s. He is quite ebullient about having committed the most grotesque crimes on the native African population. The other is a series of interviews with American pilots (the documentary refers to them as “air pirates”) who were shot down while bombing North Vietnam. What struck me about these men, again, was how not much separated me from them. These are guys ranging from their mid-20s to early 40s, most married with children, most with college degrees. They enlisted for various reasons, and they wound up attacking the civilian population of North Vietnam, and they were shot down and likely tortured and paraded in front of East German cameras for propaganda purposes, and then eventually some of them went home. Watching this last one in particular really showed me that anyone could rationalize themselves into committing acts of horror against their fellow man. How many children had these men blown to pieces in the course of their bombing runs? (One of the pilots had flown over 100 raids combined over North and South Vietnam.) You begin to see why the idea of Christ is so powerful. To think of one person who takes all of humanity’s sins upon their shoulders… but really it should be humanity’s suffering that they take on instead. It’s tough to think of the way in which humanity shatters its own lives, often without even realizing it or thinking about it that much.
Part of me wants to move onto lighter subject matter, but it almost seems like a betrayal of the stories of those who have suffered and died. I know that me gravitating on the immiseration and death of all these people doesn’t really do anything. But to live life blithely, without a care for what happened before I was born just because it’s not proximate to me: is that conscionable either?
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Alistair Horne
I thought A Savage War of Peace was so interesting. Very well-written as well. The book covers the entirety of the Algerian War, from the roots of the conflict all the way to a modern (i.e. mid-’90s) perspective.
To me, an American, the Algerian War mirrored in many ways the coming Vietnam War (which Horne points out; other points of comparison include South Africa/Rhodesia and Northern Ireland). The French colonial history is way longer, obviously, but in Algeria you see obvious comparison points: an occupying military racking up huge body counts but failing to achieve political objectives; modern technology and tradecraft being used to fuel the occupation; violent interplay and conflict between indigenes and colonizers (literally colons); and above all, the ultimately pointless immiseration of the masses, from the poorest flower-merchants and peddlers to intellectuals, novelists, and doctors.
The Algerian War was one comprised of atrocity after atrocity. Whether it was FLN executions of fellow Algerians, the ratissages (“rat hunts”) that the pieds noirs would carry out against their Muslim neighbors, or French paras torturing and machine-gunning innocent Algerians (both indigenous and French), the conflict really showcased man’s ability to justify almost anything in pursuit of his avowed goals.
It felt like a bit of a slog by the end, but ultimately this book was very rewarding. I really liked the last chapter, which had a where are they now? vibe with all of the surviving personages of the conflict, from the French and Algerian politicians to OAS terrorists. Also, this book made me want to learn French (always very fun to read French terms and speech out loud), and I added a ton of books to my to-read list.
Miscellany, 5/3/23
I feel like I’m in a bit of a rut, only posting here when I finish reading a book. After all, I do so much during the week that’s not book-related, and it really feels too sporadic for my tastes. So here’s a round-up of what I’ve been doing.
- I watched the Prime Video series Dead Ringers a week or two ago and it was fantastic. Rachel Weisz is perfect as Elliot and Beverly. I thought the supporting cast was insanely good as well. The show is very well-written, and each episode makes unique choices in terms of theme, cinematography, and mood that nonetheless support the overarching whole production. Highly recommend.
- Tried and failed to read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The speeches were cool, and I thought the history of the military and diplomatic maneuverings was somewhat interesting, but ultimately I found the whole project a bit too dry. I try not to give up on books, but this one really tested my patience. Not only that, but I even went at it with two separate editions: the Landmark edition which includes maps and a whole lot of appendices (which were interesting) but has incredibly turgid prose, and an Oxford edition which somewhat modernizes the dialogue but still didn’t catch my interest. Maybe I’m just not a primary source guy.
- I have queued up Vol. 1 of the Army’s official investigation into the My Lai massacre. For whatever reason, I am still fascinated and shocked by this war crime. Like a car accident, I cannot get myself to look away. Or maybe it’s more like poking at a traumatic memory over and over again, like I can’t help myself. I’ll probably work on this in between stints of reading actual books over the next month or so. It doesn’t seem like something I want to focus all my attention on–mostly because I’m heading to summer school in a couple of weeks and I don’t want this to be the last thing I read. Similar rationale to why I abandoned Thucydides.
- One tip I have for the world: get your to-read list off of Amazon! I used to put all the books that interested me in one Amazon wishlist, which I would often share with my sibs around the holidays. It turned out that I never actually reviewed the list for more books to read, because the whole thing was so unwieldy to navigate through; paginated as well. Now I just put my to-consume list in a note file I constantly add to. What’s more, I can add things to investigate that aren’t books: movies, musicians, recipes, general trends and phenomena. Way better way of doing things.
- Trying to eat in a more “wholesome” way (defined as not eating take-out or prepackaged food). My two faves are nước chấm, which I like to put on rice along with a fried egg in the mornings, and Ugandan rolexes. Frozen chapatis and a bag of cabbage seem to last forever in the fridge (either that or my tolerance for food that’s going bad is scarily high).
Huế 1968, Mark Bowden
I picked this book because I was in the mood to circle back to the Vietnam War, a conflict that has really stuck in my craw over the past couple of years. You can probably pick any arbitrary conflict in US history and point to it as primogenitor of The Way We Are Now, but many of the characteristics of the war–guerrilla warfare, atrocities committed against civilians, political malfeasance, the interface of warfighting and novel technology–seem particularly important. For whatever reason, the war haunts me.
Reading about the Battle of Huế reminded me of another book I read in the past few months, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. Both do a very good job of establishing the chaotic, surreal, dehumanizing aspects of the war. In the Vietnam War in general, and the Battle of Huế in particular, you see what happens when human beings, or their deaths, are viewed merely as means to an end.
In the epilogue to Huế 1968, author Mark Bowden points out that the greatest toll was paid, not by US or NLF or ARVN troops, but the civilians in Huế. It’s shocking how blithe American soldiers became to the suffering of innocent people, and it puts paid to the lie that we cared at all about the lives of the Vietnamese. By the end of the battle, commanders had effectively initiated a gloves-off policy whereby anyone who looked Vietnamese was a valid target. Old men, children, pregnant women, students: all were subject to naval shells or M-16 bullets, or worse torments, not to mention the desecration of their bodies and the shattering of their surviving families. The NLF too comes off very poorly; they too committed atrocities against their own people, crimes which to this day are not properly acknowledged in unified Vietnam.
US leadership also comes in for a well-deserved pummeling from Bowden. The commanders on the scene often wasted their men’s lives or enacted policies which led to innocent deaths. Their leaders in the Pentagon and the White House come off way worse. General Westmoreland, leader of the MACV until shortly after Huế and the Tet Offensive, seems willfully ignorant, even decades later. His quotes from the time of the battle and from his autobiography show the thinking of a man who knows there will never be accountability for his terrible decisions. Willful blindness from LBJ, McNamara, Rostow, and other civilian leaders is also on display here. If there was any justice in the world, all of these men and many more would have been tried for war crimes a la Nuremberg. We see in their impunity an example that continues today with the architects of the Iraq War and our remaining involvement in the Middle East and Africa–an example that no doubt inspires the leaders of other conflicts in the world to this day.
What I found most alarming about the Battle of Huế was that, in reading about it, I found myself getting a thrill out of the whole thing. It’s like the alleged quote from Truffaut about how there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie. Reading about the battle, knowing how much suffering resulted from it, understanding its pointlessness; I nonetheless found myself imagining myself as one of the Marines, thinking about what it would be like to roam through the city under fire, smoking cigarettes and launching attacks and shooting at whoever I saw. It feels like some kind of primal instinct for conflict that I cannot remove from myself. There’s this raw animal nerve that is activated by reading about death and destruction, almost a yearning to be its agent. It feels sick, like I’m the kid from Apt Pupil who finds himself unduly fascinated with the crimes of the Nazis. Because of my age and lack of fitness, it’s far more likely that if I were ever to find myself in a conflict like this, it would be as one of the innocent civilians, either dying myself or mourning the loss of loved ones. But being an American insulates one from having to really grapple with these issues. When you live in a society for the past several decades has only fought wars of choice, it’s difficult not to see yourself as a “protagonist,” in some sense of the word.
One thing reading about modern conflicts has done for me is cemented the notion that there is no such thing as a good or noble war. Inevitably, military leaders are going to start authorizing civilian death, and if they’re American leaders, they will NEVER be held accountable for it. Instead they’ll just make money from their sinecures in American industry. I hope there’s some accountability for them when they die. Will there be accountability for their fellow citizens, people like me who, questioning or otherwise, benefit from or are blind to the effects of these murderers’ actions? It feels like I would go insane if I stare into this abyss too long.
Stay True, Hua Hsu
I was looking for another book to read while I was waiting for a particular library book to arrive when I found this. Stay True had been on my Amazon wish list and I received it last Xmas, but hadn’t felt compelled to read it until now.
Stay True is a memoir about Hsu’s experience at UC Berkeley, in particular his relationship with his friend Ken who was murdered the summer after Hsu’s junior year. Undoubtedly, I was initially interested in this book because of a) Hsu’s writing for The New Yorker, and b) all the accolades it was receiving in the press last year. Stay True is festooned with plugs on its back cover from some quite notable writers.
I have to say, I wasn’t especially moved by this book. Maybe it’s because I’m incredibly sleep-deprived right now. Ken seems like he was a pretty cool guy, and he clearly affected Hsu in many ways, more so because of his tragic and early death. But as Hsu seems to point out in the final pages of the book, maybe the reason for Ken’s impact on his life is precisely because of the yawning lacuna that was left behind in his absence. Maybe Hsu and Ken would have grown apart in the years after they had graduated from Berkeley, similarly to how Hsu’s other friendships from that time diminished in importance. Perhaps when it comes to the recesses of memory, it’s “better” (or weightier) to burn out–or be put out–than to fade away.
My favorite part of the book is a discursion on a French academic journal, L’Année sociologique, and its first issue that was published after the First World War. Marcel Mauss, who helmed the journal’s reestablishment, had written and included an essay about the various other sociologists and scholars who might have appeared in its pages, had they not perished on the battlefield. Instead of being able to contribute to humanity’s knowledge of itself, these men had been shot or dismembered in various infantry charges and trench war misfortunes. This part to me tied Ken’s story to the larger story of humanity and capitalism. There are untold billions of humans whose potential has been blunted or wasted, people whose possible gifts to society were stolen from them and us both. Whether drafted into unjust war, murdered by delinquents, or merely sentenced to die in “cotton fields and sweatshops”, we are surrounded by the absence of what they could have given us. We can’t touch these anti-contributions–they are void, or negative space–but we are inexorably shaped by them.