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.
Columbine, Dave Cullen
While waiting for a library book to arrive, I picked Columbine as a quick book to work through. It has been on my radar for several years. After working through some of the early chapters, I found that I wasn’t loving the prose, so I tried to get through it pretty quickly so that I could at least get the factual content out of it.
This book functions well as a corrective to some of the erroneous information that has circulated since Columbine. Most notably, Harris and Klebold were not bullied, nor part of the Trench Coat Mafia; and the well-traveled story of Cassie Bernall’s martyrdom is false. Why these falsehoods have spread in the decades since Columbine is also a big part of the book (besides the mechanical description of the attack, which wasn’t particularly novel for me). The Jefferson County Sheriff seems to have been a real blowhard, and he appeared to be conducting media interviews off the top of his head, with scant preparation; that led to a lot of unfounded rumors becoming established in the press.
The evangelical community also really glommed onto the attack. Both evangelical leaders who used the attacks to target vulnerable students for conversion (this really bugged me) and the emotionally-wounded parents who coped with their children’s deaths by propagating stories of martyrdom or becoming stridently anti-abortion reacted to the mass murder in ways that I would consider to be wrong. The parents are somewhat more forgivable–I don’t know how I’d react to losing my kid in that way–but other people were clearly being hurt by their actions, and you can understand without condoning their actions. But the pastors were clearly predatory. The book’s afterword points out that levels of church attendance eventually fell back to their normal levels after Columbine, which makes me hope that at least not too many people dramatically changed their philosophy of living to incorporate the idea of “Satan living within their community.”
Columbine shows that people will approach any event, even mass murder, with an agenda. Media, cops, politicians, parents, priests: no one came at the murders as a tabula rasa. Their inherent motivations and prejudices inflected their actions, and those actions bounced off everyone within the event horizon of the event and caused even more chaos. We still feel that chaos today. And as new killers and communities are inspired by the Columbine shooters, their actions redound unto us still, and forever.
In the closing pages of Columbine, author Dave Cullen mentions that interviews with Harris’s and Klebold’s parents were sealed in the National Archive until 2027. I won’t be setting a timer or anything to see what what mentioned, and it seems likely that the parents weren’t entirely forthcoming (Wayne Harris especially). But we’ll see if there are any new insights in four years.
Libra, Dom DeLillo
I selected this as my next book because I’d been wanting to read one of the more modern celebrated authors. Maybe the movie adaptation of White Noise was lingering in my consciousness? What sealed the deal for me was an Amazon review stating that Libra was recommended by James Ellroy, who wrote the incredible American Tabloid which also deals with the JFK assassination.
American Tabloid stands as an obvious comparison point to Libra. I think I like Ellroy’s novel more, because of the insane plot and action. Plus the dialogue is a bit punchier. But DeLillo’s take reaches deeper places because of its focus on Lee Harvey Oswald. By sticking with one character for the most part and really exploring his idiosyncrasies, DeLillo is better able to lay bare the psychological aspects of being America’s most famous assassin.
Reading Libra, I found myself connecting to Lee, which is disconcerting because he is obviously such a heel. Lee lives in a series of fantasies, and he hurts himself and others by trying to enact those fantasies onto the real world. He fancies himself a Marxist and a spy, but blunders about in his attempts to defect to the Soviet Union and marks himself as someone who cannot be trusted by anyone. Lee clearly wants to be a great man of history, someone who is studied in classrooms and books (something he envisions for himself as he sits in a jail cell after shooting Kennedy). But his lack of character keeps him from making any progress–as the book posits, he isn’t even the one who finally assassinates JFK. Lee is a twisted version of the American aspirational loser archetype, the guy who always has another get-rich-quick scheme around the corner (for him it’s fame and importance that he’s most after), and fuck you if you think he doesn’t have what it takes.
I did very much like Libra because it demonstrates that the facts of the JFK assassination–facts which will likely never be known in their entirety–are less important than what we as a nation took away from the act. As DeLillo says, “There are only two things in the world. Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.” The real truth of what happened on 11/22/63, or on any day, matters less than the deeper machinations which fueled it, those actions which we cannot describe with any real clarity but whose pulse we can feel under the skin of reality and which ultimately drive our understanding of our lives.