(06-09-2016, 06:56 AM)Anthony Wrote: Politics stops at the water's edge - and it was not a Boomer, but rather the Lost Arthur Vandenberg, who said that.
Who is/was "good" or "evil" has nothing to do with it. The foreign enemy of your domestic political opponent is not your friend - unless you are a traitor.
The Vietnam War became a domestic disaster when Boomers became the draftees. In the 1960s Boomers were much more naive than older generations about foreign policy. Already judgmental, they were vulnerable to such slogans as "War is harmful to children and other living things", at least on the Left. On the Right, they really believed in the reality of the Communist menace. Yes, the Boomer division was already severe.
Avoiding military service, or at least service in Vietnam, was easy for those who had the brains to do something other than wait for the draft board to call one's name. One could get deferment after deferment as S-2 (college student). By the time one had one's PhD the military no longer wanted one. (Harmful effect: instead of doing military service and going home to build a business or begin a skilled trade one got to participate in the flooding of the job market for white-collar workers to the detriment of people too young to fight in Vietnam... like me!) One could do one's military service (a six-year enlistment, four active years and two reserve) in Europe with the understanding that if the Soviet Union really invaded Europe one would not last long, but in the meantime one might get to visit Germany. If one fouled up badly in Europe one might be shipped off to Vietnam.
America got the foul-ups in Vietnam, including above all others Lieutenant William Calley. Even if he was the scapegoat for My Lai, on the whole it was not the "peace, love, and dope" people who messed up the American cause. We need not go into the details of My Lai. American opinion on the war crashed about then. We could no longer see ourselves as the unqualified good in Vietnam.
....I'm going to make a distinction that you, Anthony, do not make. Three sorts of people oppose a war. The first is the cautionary who may believe that participation in a certain war is wrong because participation therein is ultimately contrary to the national interest, a pointless waste of men and materiel, and hence government funds that could be more wisely used elsewhere (even if on tax cuts that stimulate business). The leadership may want war for all the wrong reasons, like achieving its own glory or creating easy and corrupt profits for merchants of war. A particular war is thus wrong and avoidable. The cautionary may have no qualms about wars necessary for the defense of one's own country or its obvious allies. Defending one's colonial position after the people in the colony want one's colonial officials to leave or propping up a vile and unpopular regime could easily violate the sensibilities of a cautionary. The cautionary may see situations in which military heroism is necessary for the survival of his nation or its values, and often has the rectitude to wage righteous warfare.
Second is the pacifist, someone who opposes war on principle -- all war. The pacifist may believe that even the most brutal invader might come to the realization that the people that it has defeated is unworthy of cruel treatment and might as well be treated with respect. Obviously that failed with the Mongols and the Nazis, demonstrating that pacifism taken to its logical conclusion can fail. Of course a pacifist world is a peaceful world.
Third is the defeatist, often a traitor who wants his country defeated in war and sees a potential conqueror as the solution to his problems (like his opportunity to achieve power or to participate in the looting and exploitation of his own country, or at the least to bring about a political order of his desire through a revolution that will never be popular). France had many such people at the start of World War II, and they served the Nazis ably. They wanted a reactionary, illiberal government; they wanted their fellow Frenchmen to be cheap labor on their aristocratic estates; they wanted to consign the Jews to the same mistreatment as Jews got in Germany -- and gladly turned Jews over to the Nazis. They were not anti-war; in fact they recruited French troops for the "Struggle against Bolshevism". They hated Britain and America and served as mouthpieces for anti-British and anti-American propaganda. They were definitely not cautionaries.
Usually a traitor, I must say. Participants on the July 20 plot to overthrow Satan Incarnate knew well that if they succeeded they would realize a German defeat and would end up consigning large numbers of German war criminals to Soviet Gulags and to the harsh judgment of the bloodthirsty* Polish Home Army (the non-Communist resistance in Poland). But Nazi war crimes would end, and the Allies would surely have other concerns than punishment of what remained of Germany, like economic reconstruction or the defeat of Japan. But Nazi Germany is the extreme case in any political debate about alternative social orders. In the case of the July 20 plotters, they recognized that the war was going badly and that its objectives and practice was contrary to the Christian values that they were brought up with. Shiites who collaborated with the US Armed Forces as Saddam Hussein was defeated? Completely understandable, as the US Armed Forces put an end to a hideous regime. Cautionaries or defeatists? In the Third Reich or Saddam Hussein's Iraq one almost had to be a defeatist if one was a cautionary to be morally clean. Demonic regimes might as well go down.
Sleeper agents of a foreign power set on conquest are defeatists if they betray their own country or its allies. Such people are traitors who deserve to be weeded out at the first opportunity.
The pacifist and the cautionary have some ethical defense even if they are wrong at the time. The defeatist, except in the extreme position of finding oneself in an abominable social order, is a traitor. Can defeatists exploit the sentiments of the pacifist and the cautionary at times? Of course. But they can also foster military recklessness and administrative brutality that themselves bring defeat.
The pacifist and the cautionary can be very heroic. Standing up to the numbing din of militarism can take great courage, especially when the consequences for anti-war stances can include capital punishment, economic ruin, and a long prison term. Militarism always begins as a joyous spectacle of glorious pageantry; war is numbing awfulness. The defeatist, unless seeking the demise of a horrific regime, is by any standard a traitor.
*but fully justified in view of what the Nazis did in the slaughterhouse that they made of Poland
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.