WEBVTT NOTE The Culture War 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.000 This talk and the one immediately following by my good friend Eugene Sledge, a former United States Marine, 2 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:21.000 I think you'll find illuminating about what actually happens in war, which is by no means an abstraction. 3 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:28.000 My friends and I sometimes play a game that you might enjoy too. 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:52.000 We call it oxymoron. The object is to come up with phrases which, while superficially plausible, prove on skeptical examination to involve intellectually comical contradictions in terms, like, for example, creation science. 5 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:01.200 How about the journalistic ethics? 6 00:01:01.200 --> 00:01:07.680 That's right up there with the Maoist concept of a cultural revolution. 7 00:01:07.680 --> 00:01:18.160 How about the phrase scholar-athlete, or, looking toward the university faculty instead 8 00:01:18.160 --> 00:01:26.760 of the Students, the phrase Scholar Activist. That's actually a phrase the Washington Post 9 00:01:26.760 --> 00:01:32.880 saw no contradiction in when it recently designated that way the newly appointed president of 10 00:01:32.880 --> 00:01:40.200 the University of the District of Columbia. And speaking of that sort of thing, some deeply 11 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:47.880 cynical players of this game oxymoron contemplating the compromised, uncertain and sentimental 12 00:01:47.880 --> 00:02:05.880 The title, sane, of much of the higher learning today might go so far as to propose as the winning oxymoron the phrase, college education. 13 00:02:05.880 --> 00:02:13.880 Now I start this way because my title, The Culture of War, might be regarded as that kind of flagrant oxymoron. 14 00:02:13.880 --> 00:02:21.880 And so it would be if I were invoking the term culture in any artistic or intellectual sense, 15 00:02:21.880 --> 00:02:29.880 implying within the armed forces a considerable amount of viola playing, classical acting, 16 00:02:29.880 --> 00:02:38.880 liberal drawing and painting and modeling, poetry and fiction writing, and difficult reading. 17 00:02:38.880 --> 00:02:43.880 But actually, it's not things like that I'm trying to suggest by the word culture. 18 00:02:43.880 --> 00:02:50.880 I'm using it in a quasi-anthropological sense, the way T.S. Eliot used it when he wrote a book called 19 00:02:50.880 --> 00:02:58.880 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, a book in which he considered the possibility of a healthy and interesting society 20 00:02:58.880 --> 00:03:03.880 based on something like religious principles. 21 00:03:03.880 --> 00:03:27.880 In that book, Eliot understands how much, as he puts it, how much is embraced by the term culture, a term designating not merely artistic or ennobling activities, but the general forms and usages and techniques of a given society, including military society. 22 00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:39.380 To Eliot, culture includes, as he says, all the characteristic activities and interests of a people, and using the British people and their culture as his examples. 23 00:03:39.380 --> 00:03:57.380 He goes on to instance, as components of British culture, these things, Derby Day, Henley regatta, dog racing, dark boards, boiled cabbage cut into sections, a rather disgusting idea, surely. 24 00:03:57.380 --> 00:04:08.380 19th century gothic churches and the music of Sir Edward Elgar, and he adds the reader can make his own list. 25 00:04:08.380 --> 00:04:14.380 Well, in the same way, probably any one of us could make a list of things comprising the culture of war. 26 00:04:14.380 --> 00:04:26.380 But at the outset, I should warn you that the items I'll mention are collected not by any military strategist or theoretician or historian or scholar. 27 00:04:26.380 --> 00:04:34.580 There are the views, some of them doubtless embittered, of a superannuated, badly wounded 28 00:04:34.580 --> 00:04:41.380 former infantry lieutenant, a one-time rifle platoon leader who fought the Second World 29 00:04:41.380 --> 00:04:50.340 War in Europe, commanding 40 terrified young Americans, many of whom were killed or cruelly 30 00:04:50.340 --> 00:04:51.340 wounded. 31 00:04:51.340 --> 00:05:03.060 Thus, if the word culture presents some problems, the word war will present even more. 32 00:05:03.060 --> 00:05:08.680 The truth is that very few people know anything about war. 33 00:05:08.680 --> 00:05:15.420 In an infantry division, for example, fewer than half the troops actually fight, that 34 00:05:15.420 --> 00:05:22.020 Mises with rifles, mortars, machine guns, grenades, and trench knives. 35 00:05:22.020 --> 00:05:28.020 The others, thousands on thousands of them, are occupied with truck driving, mimeograph 36 00:05:28.020 --> 00:05:37.020 machine operating, cooking and baking, ammunition and ration supplying, and similar housekeeping 37 00:05:37.020 --> 00:05:39.020 tasks. 38 00:05:39.020 --> 00:05:45.540 Now those things are no doubt necessary, but they're hardly bellicose, and they hardly 39 00:05:45.540 --> 00:05:51.340 provide the sort of experience which can issue as trustworthy testimony about what the word 40 00:05:51.340 --> 00:05:53.800 war might mean. 41 00:05:53.800 --> 00:05:59.300 This is a reason why most combat veterans tend to smile cynically and sardonically 42 00:05:59.300 --> 00:06:06.020 at veterans' reunions when those reunions are attended by very large numbers. 43 00:06:06.020 --> 00:06:16.980 For most soldiers participating in the Second World War, the war meant inconvenience, rising 44 00:06:16.980 --> 00:06:25.580 sometimes to hardship, enforced travel and residence abroad, unappetizing food, absence 45 00:06:25.580 --> 00:06:32.900 of tablecloths, and often bedsheets. But for those unlucky enough to be in the forward combat 46 00:06:32.900 --> 00:06:42.580 Units, the war meant death or maiming and in extraordinarily dirty and undignified circumstances. 47 00:06:42.580 --> 00:06:49.540 At the very least, for most it meant a rapid and shocking metamorphosis from boyhood innocence 48 00:06:49.540 --> 00:06:55.300 to adult cynicism and bitterness. 49 00:06:55.300 --> 00:07:02.860 is an experience remembered vividly even at this distance that has inducted me into my 50 00:07:02.860 --> 00:07:06.820 understanding of the culture of war. 51 00:07:06.820 --> 00:07:13.280 It is a culture hard for civilians to understand, and it's not their fault that they can't, 52 00:07:13.280 --> 00:07:21.140 because civilians occupy a world, thank God, which is in large part rational and predictable, 53 00:07:21.140 --> 00:07:26.020 A world which makes sense in an old-fashioned way. 54 00:07:26.020 --> 00:07:27.740 Now let me illustrate what I mean. 55 00:07:27.740 --> 00:07:34.140 A while ago, I was telephoned by a lawyer in New York City. 56 00:07:34.140 --> 00:07:40.540 He indicated that he was conducting a course for cadets at West Point, a course in the 57 00:07:40.540 --> 00:07:45.420 relation between language and violence. 58 00:07:45.420 --> 00:07:50.300 This course focused on the deformations of language required for the registration of 59 00:07:50.300 --> 00:07:54.300 of Non-Rational Violent Behavior 60 00:08:20.300 --> 00:08:28.200 For example, what euphemisms, if any, were employed in these after-action reports? 61 00:08:28.200 --> 00:08:35.020 What were the temptations that I felt to provide rational motives for violent or inexplicable 62 00:08:35.020 --> 00:08:36.020 events? 63 00:08:36.020 --> 00:08:47.540 As this phone call went on, I confessed to an outburst of extreme angry discourtesy, the 64 00:08:47.540 --> 00:08:55.540 The sort of thing that's common among infantrymen reinstalled in an optimistic and unimaginative civilian culture. 65 00:08:55.540 --> 00:09:01.540 I asked with some passion, I asked this lawyer, have you ever been in combat? 66 00:09:01.540 --> 00:09:03.540 He answered, no. 67 00:09:03.540 --> 00:09:13.540 I then explained with elaborate sarcasm that I never heard of such things as after-action reports from small assault units. 68 00:09:13.540 --> 00:09:26.660 How, after all, could one pull oneself together to compose an after-action report with pencil 69 00:09:26.660 --> 00:09:34.060 and paper when you had the following after-action features to attend to? 70 00:09:34.060 --> 00:09:41.300 First, the question of what to do when the six German prisoners the assault has just 71 00:09:41.300 --> 00:09:42.700 yielded. 72 00:09:42.700 --> 00:09:48.700 How can one keep a very angry private who had seen his buddy's eye shot out from doing 73 00:09:48.700 --> 00:09:53.700 what he very much wanted to do, to kill all the prisoners? 74 00:09:53.700 --> 00:09:59.000 Second, after action you had to clean up the mess. 75 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:04.500 This meant taking care of the wounded, some of whom were in intense pain and the morphine 76 00:10:04.500 --> 00:10:07.300 is already exhausted. 77 00:10:07.300 --> 00:10:15.540 Three. After action, you had to reposition your soldiers to repel a German counter-attack, 78 00:10:15.540 --> 00:10:23.220 and you had to jolly them up to make them want to continue fighting the war in the prescribed manner. 79 00:10:23.220 --> 00:10:32.340 Fighting the war after action is going to be very difficult because your sergeant is over there crying. 80 00:10:32.340 --> 00:10:39.940 Fourth, how could a junior officer like me write an after-action report when his hand was covered 81 00:10:39.940 --> 00:10:45.540 with the blood of one of his men whose wound in the back I had ineffectively tried to bandage 82 00:10:46.100 --> 00:10:54.260 while the bullets and shell fragments were flying around? Given all this, and this is item five, 83 00:10:54.260 --> 00:11:01.300 given all this, how could such a person have waited a day or so to file his after-action report 84 00:11:01.300 --> 00:11:06.260 In a calmer mood, when a third of the men whose testimony would be required were gone, 85 00:11:06.260 --> 00:11:10.020 killed or wounded, and where would he find the quiet to write it? 86 00:11:11.060 --> 00:11:15.300 By that time he'd be engaged in further violence himself. 87 00:11:16.820 --> 00:11:24.740 The point is that producing after-action reports is the privilege of leaders who are non-combatants, 88 00:11:24.740 --> 00:11:33.580 and the usefulness and authenticity of such reports can already be sensed to be adjacent 89 00:11:33.580 --> 00:11:37.980 to the usefulness of works of fiction. 90 00:11:37.980 --> 00:11:46.460 My point is less that than the instructive naiveté of the lawyer, a very representative 91 00:11:46.460 --> 00:11:48.140 human being. 92 00:11:48.140 --> 00:11:52.500 One would expect a lawyer in New York City, especially, to be quite sophisticated about 93 00:11:52.500 --> 00:11:54.700 the facts of life. 94 00:11:54.700 --> 00:12:01.160 And here is one who imagined that the conduct of combat was rational. 95 00:12:01.160 --> 00:12:08.480 He was a victim of what I call inappropriate rationalism, with a bit of inappropriate optimism 96 00:12:08.480 --> 00:12:09.480 as well. 97 00:12:09.480 --> 00:12:18.620 Those who find it hard to understand how often soldiers kill their own comrades, I'm talking 98 00:12:18.620 --> 00:12:26.380 about Friendly Fire episodes are victims of the same intellectual and emotional error. 99 00:12:26.380 --> 00:12:33.420 The culture of war, in short, is not like the culture of ordinary peacetime life. 100 00:12:33.420 --> 00:12:41.300 It's a culture dominated by fear and blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous 101 00:12:41.300 --> 00:12:44.400 and usually ironic results. 102 00:12:44.400 --> 00:12:50.840 It has more relation to science fiction or to ironic theater than to actual life, and 103 00:12:50.840 --> 00:12:55.560 that makes it hard to describe it. 104 00:12:55.560 --> 00:13:01.500 If you like, you can regard what I've said about this bizarre and ignorant concern with 105 00:13:01.500 --> 00:13:03.960 after action reports. 106 00:13:03.960 --> 00:13:09.120 If you like, you can regard it as just another bureaucratic intrusion into a place where such 107 00:13:09.120 --> 00:13:15.120 intrusion is entirely inappropriate, and even worse, stupid. 108 00:13:15.120 --> 00:13:20.980 It's especially unfortunate because it simply underlines the unpleasant facts of the military 109 00:13:20.980 --> 00:13:23.220 class system. 110 00:13:23.220 --> 00:13:29.080 On the one hand, remote and privileged staffs and administrators. 111 00:13:29.080 --> 00:13:37.080 On the other, the troops, mostly sad conscripts, we must remember, the troops who must do the 112 00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:46.980 The distance between serious survivors of World War II fighting and optimistic onlookers can 113 00:13:46.980 --> 00:13:52.300 be measured by a current controversy in Britain. 114 00:13:52.300 --> 00:13:57.720 This controversy is between veterans of the Second World War and the government. 115 00:13:57.720 --> 00:14:03.280 The veterans want D-Day commemorated with solemnity and sorrow. 116 00:14:03.280 --> 00:14:10.600 After all, it marked the beginning of a battle in which 37,000 people, most of them pathetically 117 00:14:10.600 --> 00:14:13.800 young, were killed. 118 00:14:13.800 --> 00:14:18.920 The government, avid for tourist dollars, takes a different approach. 119 00:14:18.920 --> 00:14:28.560 It proposes not a commemoration, but a celebration involving street parties, dances, cute reenactments, 120 00:14:28.560 --> 00:14:45.560 The Quarrel is between those who know the culture of war and those who think they know it, or who are prepared to profit from a misrepresentation of it. 121 00:14:45.560 --> 00:14:50.560 In between these two groups, a reconciliation is hardly possible. 122 00:14:50.560 --> 00:14:56.480 A spokesman for the veterans in this quarrel has said the event is being trivialized. 123 00:14:56.480 --> 00:15:02.760 Those who actually took part feel it was just a battle, albeit a successful one. 124 00:15:02.760 --> 00:15:11.360 Many of their comrades lost their lives in the process, and many ladies were widowed. 125 00:15:11.360 --> 00:15:17.440 That the Allies won the Second World War doesn't oblige us to be cheerful about it. 126 00:15:17.440 --> 00:15:24.080 Wars are won by distinction in the techniques of mass murder, and that's hardly something 127 00:15:24.080 --> 00:15:32.280 for people pretending to civilization to be proud of. Tolstoy's words are worth recalling. 128 00:15:32.280 --> 00:15:37.440 War, he said, is not a polite recreation, but the vilest thing in life, and we ought 129 00:15:37.440 --> 00:15:44.840 to understand that and not play at war. It will be years, perhaps decades, before it 130 00:15:44.840 --> 00:15:50.280 It becomes clear whether the Cold War was really necessary, or was a gratifying and 131 00:15:50.280 --> 00:15:57.400 profitable playing at war, whose beneficiaries were not the people of the earth, but the 132 00:15:57.400 --> 00:16:05.560 makers of armaments designed to become rapidly obsolete and quickly replaceable. 133 00:16:05.560 --> 00:16:12.560 If focusing the economy on armaments bankrupted the Soviet Union, think what it did to the 134 00:16:12.560 --> 00:16:20.660 Thus, if the culture of war solidifies those who fight and alienates them from those who 135 00:16:20.660 --> 00:16:26.360 do not, it has other regrettable aspects. 136 00:16:26.360 --> 00:16:30.280 One of them is censorship. 137 00:16:30.280 --> 00:16:36.740 War kills people, obviously, and the culture of war does not, but the culture of war kills 138 00:16:36.740 --> 00:16:42.740 Freedom is something precious and indispensable in a civilized society, that is freedom of 139 00:16:42.740 --> 00:16:47.740 utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of knowledge. 140 00:16:47.740 --> 00:16:54.460 Recently, I think you're going to like this, recently an official of the Pentagon explained 141 00:16:54.460 --> 00:17:02.720 why the military had censored some TV footage depicting Iraqi soldiers cut in half by automatic 142 00:17:02.720 --> 00:17:12.880 Fire for U.S. Helicopters. He explained, if we let people see that kind of thing, there 143 00:17:12.880 --> 00:17:25.680 would never again be any war. I got that quotation from a comical gift book titled, The Seven 144 00:17:25.680 --> 00:17:34.400 176 stupidest things ever said. 145 00:17:34.400 --> 00:17:42.920 But that remark, of course, is far from stupid, it is very true, and its implications spread 146 00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:45.280 very far. 147 00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:51.540 It's obvious that tight censorship is a necessity in any modern war. 148 00:17:51.540 --> 00:17:57.200 It's usually rationalized by the need to keep the enemy in the dark about our plans, but 149 00:17:57.200 --> 00:18:04.200 it's also valuable to conceal military blunders and fatalities and war crimes from a public 150 00:18:04.200 --> 00:18:07.540 that in the absence of censorship might learn to be critical. 151 00:18:07.540 --> 00:18:14.620 And my point is this, if you are trained to be uncritical of the military, you can easily 152 00:18:14.620 --> 00:18:21.180 go just a little bit further and learn to be uncritical of government and of authority 153 00:18:21.180 --> 00:18:24.740 and of all established and received institutions. 154 00:18:24.740 --> 00:18:30.260 The result is, of course, the death of the mind, the transformation of the higher learning 155 00:18:30.260 --> 00:18:37.580 and independent scholarship into a cheering section for whatever popular notions and superstitions 156 00:18:37.580 --> 00:18:41.540 prevail at the moment. 157 00:18:41.540 --> 00:18:48.260 During wartime and during the cold wartime, we've all had to pretend that the military 158 00:18:48.260 --> 00:18:55.620 is a force for some kind of social good. I wonder if it is. Is the habit of unthinking 159 00:18:55.620 --> 00:19:02.860 obedience a good one to instill in young Americans? For one thing clear about the culture of war 160 00:19:02.860 --> 00:19:08.740 is that it's necessarily an obedience culture. And as one critic has noticed of armies in 161 00:19:08.740 --> 00:19:14.620 general, in organizations where there must be unquestioning obedience, there must be 162 00:19:14.620 --> 00:19:17.300 and a passive injustice. 163 00:19:17.300 --> 00:19:22.580 And not just that, the obedience culture is certain over the long run to shrivel originality 164 00:19:22.580 --> 00:19:31.260 and constrict thought, to encourage witless adaptation and social dishonesty. 165 00:19:31.260 --> 00:19:37.540 The culture of war is the only culture where the concept of morale is crucial. 166 00:19:37.540 --> 00:19:40.580 And that's a significant point. 167 00:19:40.580 --> 00:19:46.620 Money is crucial in the culture of war because at all times the troops are engaging in activities 168 00:19:46.620 --> 00:19:52.220 sure to undermine cheerfulness and hope. They are either being bored picking up cigarette 169 00:19:52.220 --> 00:19:58.080 butts or they are being dehumanized by killing their fellow creatures, who like them are 170 00:19:58.080 --> 00:20:03.820 for the most part helpless conscripts who have done nothing for which they deserve to 171 00:20:03.820 --> 00:20:08.680 be blown to bits. 172 00:20:08.680 --> 00:20:17.860 In wartime culture, censorship has the assistance of general euphemism and programmatically 173 00:20:17.860 --> 00:20:26.960 inaccurate language. Before long we are calling war making peace keeping and believing it. 174 00:20:26.960 --> 00:20:34.360 What used to be designated aerial bombing has been euphemized into airstrikes and even 175 00:20:34.360 --> 00:20:41.160 Surgical Airstrikes, dishonestly implying a degree of accuracy which will make combat 176 00:20:41.160 --> 00:20:44.400 veterans laugh out loud. 177 00:20:44.400 --> 00:20:52.140 Originally artillery or mortar shells fired by mistake at our own troops were called terrible 178 00:20:52.140 --> 00:20:57.400 mistakes or tragic errors. 179 00:20:57.400 --> 00:21:08.440 Then a euphemism was devised, incontinent ordinance, and finally some Pentagon genius 180 00:21:08.440 --> 00:21:14.340 hit upon the warmer and cozier term, friendly fire. 181 00:21:14.340 --> 00:21:21.120 During the Gulf War, friendly fire caused over one-third of the American casualties. 182 00:21:21.120 --> 00:21:26.400 Twenty-three percent of the American dead died from friendly fire. 183 00:21:26.400 --> 00:21:31.840 Fifteen percent of the American wounded were wounded by friendly fire. 184 00:21:31.840 --> 00:21:35.760 Now, of course, blunders are the very essence of war. 185 00:21:35.760 --> 00:21:43.280 This is why the culture of war is so far removed from the culture of predictability and rationality. 186 00:21:43.280 --> 00:21:48.560 Soldiers know that blunders are the very essence of war, 187 00:21:48.560 --> 00:21:54.480 Because they know what's likely to happen when you arm a lot of frightened boys with deadly weapons, 188 00:21:54.480 --> 00:22:06.000 but the public must not be told, lest their simple faith in military authority and rationality be shaken. 189 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:15.840 Transforming the ugly and shocking into the noble and bright is the business of the most popular illustrated history of the Second World War. 190 00:22:15.840 --> 00:22:34.200 In those volumes, clear and noble cause and purpose are assigned systematically to events 191 00:22:34.200 --> 00:22:39.680 which are really accidental or which are embarrassingly demeaning. 192 00:22:39.680 --> 00:22:44.840 Readers of those books are insulted by being presumed to be incapable of confronting the 193 00:22:44.840 --> 00:22:53.840 In truth, everything must be transformed into fairy tales of heroism, success and nobility. 194 00:22:53.840 --> 00:22:59.160 That series of books has thus conveyed to the credulous a satisfying, orderly, wholesome 195 00:22:59.160 --> 00:23:05.680 and optimistic view of catastrophic occurrences, like for example the shooting down of hundreds 196 00:23:05.680 --> 00:23:11.800 of American paratroopers during the invasion of Sicily by frightened and undisciplined 197 00:23:11.800 --> 00:23:18.760 American sailors convinced that the large airplanes flying overhead held enemy troops. 198 00:23:18.760 --> 00:23:24.480 The presentation of war by such dishonest means is a fine way, actually, to encourage 199 00:23:24.480 --> 00:23:30.480 a moralistic, nationalistic and bellicose international politics. 200 00:23:30.480 --> 00:23:41.700 Now, it's customary to maintain that American wars are all fought on behalf of freedom. 201 00:23:41.700 --> 00:23:56.700 There is few notice that for the sake of freedom, millions of young men are enslaved for years, shying hide by conscription into a life whose every dimension is at odds with the idea of freedom. 202 00:23:56.700 --> 00:24:06.260 Flags, uniforms, bugle calls, band music, all the trappings of military glory hardly 203 00:24:06.260 --> 00:24:12.540 suffice to persuade the hapless conscript that he is involved in the defense of freedom, 204 00:24:12.540 --> 00:24:17.980 especially when his weekend pass has just been canceled at the last minute in payment 205 00:24:17.980 --> 00:24:23.700 for a heartfelt satiric remark which his sergeant has just overheard. 206 00:24:23.700 --> 00:24:37.220 Indeed, the culture of war is hardly separable from the culture of chickenshit, to invoke 207 00:24:37.220 --> 00:24:43.420 a rude term which I hope will offend no one here, all of whom I take to be expert in the 208 00:24:43.420 --> 00:24:48.420 facts of life, in addition to the facts of economics. 209 00:24:48.420 --> 00:24:53.320 During the Second World War, an Australian poet, John Manifold, wrote a poem titled 210 00:24:53.320 --> 00:25:01.440 Ration Party. It dramatizes the irony of slaves in uniform defending freedom, and it adds 211 00:25:01.440 --> 00:25:08.060 the irony by being a sonnet of poetic kind normally associated with delicate or beautiful 212 00:25:08.060 --> 00:25:09.060 sentiments. 213 00:25:09.060 --> 00:25:14.140 Here is his poem, Ration Party. 214 00:25:14.140 --> 00:25:19.300 Across the mud the line drags on and on. 215 00:25:19.300 --> 00:25:25.540 Tread slithers, footholds fails, all ardors vanish. 216 00:25:25.540 --> 00:25:33.380 Rain falls, the barking NCOs admonish the universe more than the lagging men. 217 00:25:33.380 --> 00:25:37.460 Something like an infinity of men plods up the slope. 218 00:25:37.460 --> 00:25:44.860 The file will never finish, for all their toil serves only to replenish stores for tomorrow's 219 00:25:44.860 --> 00:25:48.260 labors to begin. 220 00:25:48.260 --> 00:25:55.740 Absurd to think that liberty, the splendid nude of our dreams, the intercessory saint 221 00:25:55.740 --> 00:26:01.980 for us to judgment, needs to be defended by sick, fatigued men brimming with complaint 222 00:26:01.980 --> 00:26:13.240 and Misery, who bear till all is ended every imaginable pattern of restraint. 223 00:26:13.240 --> 00:26:19.300 Now the final thing I want to point out about the culture of war is that it is necessarily 224 00:26:19.300 --> 00:26:27.820 and resolutely only adversarial, only dualistic. 225 00:26:27.820 --> 00:26:35.420 We are here, the enemy is over there, and a no-man's land, either literal or figurative, 226 00:26:35.420 --> 00:26:39.300 as in ideology, divides us. 227 00:26:39.300 --> 00:26:45.340 The divisiveness at home, occasioned by the Vietnam War, is an example, and that divisiveness, 228 00:26:45.340 --> 00:26:49.020 as you're aware, almost ruined this country. 229 00:26:49.020 --> 00:26:50.020 You remember how it went. 230 00:26:50.020 --> 00:26:54.900 If you opposed the war, you were dishonoring the flag, and were practically a traitor. 231 00:26:54.900 --> 00:27:02.020 If you favored the war, you were a true American. You had thus to be either a dove or a hawk. 232 00:27:02.020 --> 00:27:09.560 Take your choice. No room for compromise, conciliation, or even very subtle discussion. 233 00:27:09.560 --> 00:27:15.600 If you were not for the war, you must be for communism. It was that attitude that finally 234 00:27:15.600 --> 00:27:19.560 brought down the Nixon White House. 235 00:27:19.560 --> 00:27:29.960 If earlier invasion or physical pressure against American territory would lead to war, now 236 00:27:29.960 --> 00:27:33.520 the U.S. became kissing her eyes. 237 00:27:33.520 --> 00:27:40.580 Now threats to American, quote, national interest were a sufficient reason for sending the troops 238 00:27:40.580 --> 00:27:43.260 into bloody action. 239 00:27:43.260 --> 00:27:50.920 National interest is constitutionally an interesting term because it is legally meaningless and 240 00:27:50.920 --> 00:27:58.820 constitutionally undefinable, hence popular. 241 00:27:58.820 --> 00:28:06.140 The evanescent phrase the national interest is the best gift ever awarded to those Americans 242 00:28:06.140 --> 00:28:12.080 who are neurotically bellicose, but who like Henry Kissinger always seem to avoid being 243 00:28:12.080 --> 00:28:19.320 on the front line, preferring to serve their country by getting others to drop bombs on 244 00:28:19.320 --> 00:28:25.920 people, and the people they drop bombs on, and this is notable, are always more primitive 245 00:28:25.920 --> 00:28:32.520 and unfortunate than themselves. They're always smaller in stature, they always have, or usually 246 00:28:32.520 --> 00:28:40.040 have darker skins. That is what the current culture of war seems to amount to, and I think 247 00:28:40.040 --> 00:28:47.040 I think we should abhor it. Thank you.