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Sometimes it does seem as if the past were indeed the present or even the future. Im thinking most recently of photos of the destruction of Gaza. When you look at them, you know, of course, that the devastation there was done bit by bit over the last almost two years by Israeli air force planes using U.S. bombs and missiles, artillery, tank fire, and god knows what else. And yet the destruction is now so staggering the estimate as this year began was that 92% of residential housing and 70% of all structures in that 25-mile strip of land had already either been obliterated or damaged, while only 1.5% of its cropland still remains accessible and cultivatable that parts of it now look eerily like the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each devastated by a single atomic bomb on August 6 and 9, 1945.
And sadly enough, all of this, though never a given, was eerily predictable. Even in the increasingly unsettling era of Donald Trump, so much that we human beings do especially our inability to exist on this planet without making grim war on others (check out the Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan right now, if you doubt that) seems both unpredictable in the moment and distinctly predictable in the long run. Which is why we should honor those who have seemed most capable of predicting our strange long-run future while situated in our ever stranger present.
With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon take you on a little bit of time travel into a past where a few of us did indeed see the future clearly enough, even if so many of the rest of us were then unwilling to grant that such a future was even possible. Tom
For Once in Our Lives
Were Right Again
I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for U.C. Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, major in history and minor in rioting. Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up incident in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the Civil Rights movement.
As it turned out, we were both right.
Our summer camp subscribed to the Boston Globe, which I read daily, probably when I was supposed to be doing something more physically edifying like playing tennis. I remember the day the Globe ran a story quoting an informal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson it might have been Dean Acheson suggesting that, even if the South Vietnamese government were to ask the United States to withdraw its forces, it wouldnt do so. I cut the article out (property damage is not violence!) and ran to show her. See? I was right. Theyre lying about the war.
Its been 60 years since that summer and she and I are still arguing about politics, now as life partners of more than four decades. (Dont worry: it took me another 14 years to convince her I was a grown-up and therefore a legitimate object of romantic affection.)
The Vietnam War Was Wrong and Some of Us Knew It
Although she and I are indeed still arguing about politics, like millions of people in this country and around the world, we were right then about Vietnam. We may not have foreseen it all the assassinations, carpet bombing s, tiger cages, and the Phoenix Program (the CIAs first mass torture scheme) but we were hardly surprised when it all finally came out. Today, theres a consensus in this country that the Vietnam War was more than a mistake; it was a decade-long exercise in overreach and overkill.
That war would eventually result in the deaths of 58,000 members of the American military and millions of Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. Wed see a generation of Vietnam veterans come home with visible (and invisible) injuries: amputations; cancers born of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Air Force to defoliate jungle terrain; heroin habits; the illness we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD; and moral injuries caused by following orders to murder civilians. It tells you something about that war that Vietnam vets would prove more likely to become homeless than the veterans of previous or later wars. They would also suffer contempt from many of their fellow Americans for having been drafted into a vicious and ultimately pointless conflict.
Many who actively opposed the war also suffered. I knew young men who went to jail for resisting the draft. Others took on false identities it was easier in those pre-internet days or moved to Canada to avoid being drafted. My college boyfriend never registered for the draft (also easier before networked computers permeated the country and when you had to apply for a Social Security number rather than being assigned one at birth). Since many employers demanded to see your draft exemption or, after the war ended, your discharge papers, he worked for his housepainter father until President Jimmy Carters 1977 amnesty for draft evaders.
A friend I came to know during the 1980s had spent nine months in the womens federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, for pouring blood on draft board records. Thousands were beaten bloody during the police riots outside the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where activists had gone to protest the nomination of pro-war presidential candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey. And on May 4, 1970, four students were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University during antiwar protests. They were all right about the war, but too few Americans believed them until decades later, when just about everyone did.
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