Shortly before the election we will be upon the 50th anniversary of the worst of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. For those of us who lived through it, it was a terrifying time. I can remember going to sleep on some nights not sure if I would awaken, for living within a 25 miles radius of Times Square, even were we not obliterated instantaneously by the multiple nuclear blasts to be expected in the case of nuclear exchange, we might well face overwhelming radiation.
I have been thinking about that anniversary for some time, wondering what if any impact it might have upon the outcome of the election. Surely there will be specials, but will they accurately portray what those times were like, even as the American people lacked full information about how dangerous they really were, or the context in which Krushchev had ordered nuclear-capable missiles into Cuba?
I am not always a fan of Noam Chomsky, but this morning when I read the long article he penned for TomDispatch that is featured at Alternet, many of my reflections began to fall into place. I am going to suggest that Chomsky: Humanity Once Came to the Cliff's Edge of Total Self-Annihilation -- Let's Make Sure It Never Happens Again is more than well-worth your time to read. It should in fact be mandatory reading, not so much because of Chomsky's opinions, although I do believe the remarks he makes about the context in which those events occurred and their relevance to today are not merely striking, they carry a heavy moral weight for us to consider. It is also because he points at a large number of resources that when considered very much undermine a lot of what the American people who lived through that time or who have been instructed about it in school or college think they know and understand.
There are also important moral and political lessons that are very applicable in our time, even as we consider this election.
This is not going to be a well-organized set of reflections, nor will it be an analysis or review of Chomsky's article. It is a personal statement. It is something to which I think I have been coming for 5 decades, since my own service in the military, which ended on 5 October 1966.
Our politics are shaped by an illusion of American Exceptionalism, that somehow this nation is morally good, and thus justified in how it chooses to exercise whatever power it may contain. Certainly there are aspects of America that are notable, that are worthy of national pride. We have in general been willing to take in and make part of our society many diverse groups, although we have our spates of insularity and chauvinism. The current anti-immigrant fervor of the Tea Party is far from unique in our history, one that includes the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Gentleman's Agreement to exclude Japanese, the implementation of immigration quotas based on national origins to restrict those from Eastern and Southern Europe (not even thinking about Asia or Africa) who were "different" - by this mean not merely linguistically and culturally, but also religiously in b being Catholic, Jewish and Eastern Orthodox. We have the Nativist controversy of the mid-19th Century. We have the slaughter first of actual Native Americans and then of their culture. And we still have the stain of racism.
That politicians who should know better still foment some of the worst of these feelings for political advantage is far more shameful than those who seemingly do not know better. That those who seek office at any level of government, and certainly at the highest levels, do not forthrightly denounce such feelings is one reason they are able to fester.
This is part of the fabric from which the use of American power in the world stems. The same way some parts of white "Christian" culture in the United States view themselves as superior and entitled to impose their values on others living here, who demographically will soon enough outnumber them, many in positions of power in the military-industrial complex and its associated political allies have no trouble in assuming that the United States is entitled to maintain a position that allows it to impose its will wherever it deems necessary. That many choose not to be honest about either their intentions or the actions being undertaken either with the American people at large or even with many of their elected representatives is an indication that what we think we know about our democratic republic is a farce, something that is nice rhetoric to give the illusion of control by "we the people" but something ignored in practice by political, military and economic elites across most of the political spectrum.
Turning back to my younger days, being born in 1946 in the immediate aftermath of World War II, I have lived through too many examples of how this has played out. Yes, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union sought to expand its power. Yet those who do not understand Russian history totally misread much of the motivation behind the largely Russian elites who dominated that ostensibly multicultural society. Yes, it is true that Stalin was Georgian and the long-time #2 Mikoyan was Armenian, but they were the exceptions, and they understood the weight of Russian history, including the Muslim Mongol domination from the East, and the multiple Western Christian invasions from the West, including Swedes and Teutonic knights. All of this is before Napoleon, before the horrors of the two World Wars. Yes, it is true their history also included a tradition of taking control of other societies and nations as a means of expanding their powers under the Tsars. But there were three important strands in Russian culture that many Americans simply did not grasp. One was historic, which was the identity of being Russian with the Russian Orthodox Church, which was seen as the one institution to maintain Russian identity. Rulers from Peter the Great through the Soviets understood this well enough to try to maintain control of the Church. Another was a sense of paranoia, stemming from the history of invasions, which by the way included invasion by Western powers including the United States during the Russian Revolution. This culminated in the national memory of World War II, which in the USSR was known as the Great Patriotic War. Few Americans have any real idea of the cost of war that those in Europe understand. The Great War, as the First World War continued to be known, resulted in slaughter and loss on a scale that exceeds that of our greatest suffering during our Civil War. The destruction of Europe during what Tom Brokaw has labeled "The Good War" is incomprehensible to most Americans who did not live through the Blitz in London, or the firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. It is unimaginable to most Americans to have lived through the 1,000 Days of the siege of Leningrad. We may have had the siege of Vicksburg and the burning of Atlanta, Sherman's march to the Sea and Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah. Yet even these tend to pale besides the events just in the former Soviet Union, which besides Leningrad includes the Battle of Stalingrad (which did massive damage to Hitler's fighting capacity) followed by the conflicts around Kursk which led to more than a million casualties.
One must understand the mentality of one's opponent in any conflict, be it athletic, political, or armed and military. Too often Americans have failed in this regard.
In the Post-War period,we saw both the good and bad of America. The good included the Marshall Plan. It included our willingness to bring promising young people from other nations to be educated in the United States - although clearly there was also an intent to develop and maintain influence with the rising elites in other countries, as to some degree the British sought to do with us through the Rhodes Scholarships. A similar pattern of influence elites in this hemisphere could be seen in the education of military elites from Latin America. For example, Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, was a graduated of West Point. We trained military elites from many countries, especially in Fort Benning Georgia at what became the infamous School of the Americas.
We had no trouble supporting dictatorial and brutal regimes if they benefited the United Statees economically and geopolitically.
This precedes the Post-War period. One could ask Smedley Butler, two-time winner of the Medal of Honor, of his experience in Latin America and who benefited therefrom.
In the Post-War period the United States regularly intervened in the affairs of other nations for other than humanitarian reasons. The list of countries is massive, with our being involved in overturning democratically elected governments in places like Iran and Guatemala, in being involved in civil wars in Africa, in propping up undemocratic governments in Taiwan and S. Korea and S. Vietnam.
The conflict in Cuba came close to causing a nuclear holocaust. We knew that then. But in many ways we have not as a nation learned all the lessons that can be drawn from that time.
Read Chomsky to see how close we came - depthbombing Soviet submarines whose commanders considered seriously launching nuclear torpedoes in response. Chrome Dome, with nuclear armed planes constantly aloft, with no real way to stop a rogue commander from initiating a nuclear conflict (a scenario that played out in the movies Red Alert and Doctor Strangelove). Yet we continued to escalate our ability to act very quickly, with deploying Pershing Missiles in W. Europe which had a 5 minute flight time to the heart of the Soviet Union.
Yes, we ended the Soviet empire including the satellite states it established as a buffer zone on its Western front without directly firing a shot. The world lived through crisis after crisis after crisis. Yet we as a nation seemed to have learned only partially.
We have a strand that thinks we are entitled to dominate the world. Language about an American Century reflects this. We assume we can use various kinds of power to impose our will upon other nations. Then we are surprised when they act in ways that we find offensive. How offensive are some of the things we do to them?
Despite having become a Quaker I am not totally averse to the use of force. I was one of the voices here in favor of intervention in Libya because it was possible to forestall a massive humanitarian crisis. But I am also of the mind set that our actions must be reviewable, that the American people are entitled to have their elected representatives participating in the decisions for action, that no President, Democratic or Republican, has the right to subvert the Constitutional checks and balances in the name of a greater good.
Certainly there are things that must be done covertly. That saves lives, and minimizes damage.
I wonder whether this country can survive as a democratic republic when the government can do assassinations without oversight, violate rights of Americans in the name of national security without even informing the United States Congress, violate the sovereignty of other nations with impunity by using drone strikes.
I am conflicted on this.
Had we respected the sovereignty of Pakistan Bin Laden would still be alive, a festering sore. Yet an honest assessment is that the civilian government of Pakistan has at best nominal control of parts of its government - the military and the ISI, for example. That Bin Laden's compound was in the heart of the Pakistani military is troubling.
Then I must ask myself if our government has total control of its military and intelligence? Do the civilians appointed by presidents to run those agencies really have control? Are their rogue operations? Do they become captive of the mindset of the agency? Leon Panetta apparently decided that people in the CIA were not going to be punished for some of the abuses under the last administration.
And the Justice Department, in not going after the abuse of power of the previous administration in the violation of American rights, and it its continuing prosecution of whistleblowers, has weakened the protections we are supposed to have against our government as embodied in our Bill of Rights.
We are in a political time. Our focus, rightly, is on who will control the levers of political power. We rightly assess whether the men who seek to lead this nation would take courses of action dangerous for this nation, economically, politically and militarily. If one is reading these words here at Daily Kos as a regular denizen of this site, most likely it will be a clear choice of the superiority of the current president over his Republican challenger, of Democratic control of the Congress versus any alternative.
And yet that somehow seems insufficient, not fully satisfying, at least for me.
Does it matter if a drone strike that unnecessarily kills 20 civilians in the hope of getting 1-2 we have designated as terrorists occurs under a Democratic or Republican administration?
Where do we draw moral lines? Why? When are we the American people included in the discussions?
As a teacher it became clear to me that one reason we need to study poetry and drama and art and music as well as science and math is to challenge our young people to think beyond the purely self-serving and economic interests. As a nation we need to be able to see that our national interest and national security can not be so narrowly defined as to ignore the history and concerns of other nations.
If we understand that it is wrong for one religion in the United States to attempt to impose its values through the government, how can it be right for the United States to impose its values on the rest of the world through economic, political and military power?
That so many would disagree with the first part of the previous sentence - for example Paul Ryan's statement on how his understanding of his Catholic faith influences him as a politician and government official - may help us understand the real dangers of American Exceptionalism as we seem to operate within it throughout the world.
In a few days, we begin the 50th anniversary of a very scary time.
In many ways the threat to the world was so much more severe than even the terror we experienced just over 11 years ago.
YEs, what happened in NY and Arlington VA and Shenksville PA 11 years ago was terrorism. I do not deny that.
But I also cannot deny that many of the actions of my government and my nation in other nations around the world can also be classified as terrorism. If our preaching of American Exceptionalism blinds us to that, then we are deluded if we believe our "power" such as it is can ever fully protect us from further attacks, both at home and abroad.
Beyond that, there is a more basic question, and that is the one of the morality of our actions.
But this reflection is already far too long.
It is unlikely to be read by many.
Yet I felt obligated to attempt to express the thoughts and feelings I had this morning.
In my morning reading I encountered one essay framed around the famous saying of Hillel. I think it applicable to our consideration of American policy and actions.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? Any American President or other political leader DOES have a responsibility for standing up on behalf of this nation and its people.
And if I am only for myself, then what am I? Yet we cannot see our interests in isolation from the interests and needs of other. In the Republic, Thrasymachus argues that justice is the interests of the strong. In challenging that, Socrates ultimately leads those in dialog to understand that the real interests of the strong must include consideration of the interests of others.
And if not now, when? 50 years ago, for too many reasons, we came close to destroying the civilized world as we knew it. Now we risk destroying the world not only by nuclear weapons, but by global climate change, by genetically altered crops and weaponizing of disease, but economic destruction in the name of austerity.
In his song "Where have all the flower gone" the great Pete Seeger used words of a Soviet author, Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, from his monumental And Quiet Flows the Don, or rather, where the author quotes a traditional Ukrainian folksong. That song, written in 1955, includes words by both Seeger and Joe Hickerson. The refrain of that song seems an appropriate place to end.
Throughout most of the song, the refrain takes one form:
When will they ever learn
but at the end, it changes in a way relevant to this post:
When will ever learn
I wonder.
Peace?