Passing Things Down.

Keeping The Past Alive: The durability of Commando comics testifies to the extended nature of the generational passing down of the images, music, and ideology of the Second World War. It has remained fixed in the Baby Boomers’ consciousness as “The Good War”: the conflict in which, to a far greater extent than any other, the stakes were as high as the morality was simple. 

WHEN “COMMANDO’ WAR COMICS first started appearing in the newsagents of New Zealand, the war depicted was just 16 years ago. Think about that for a moment. Cast your mind back to the events of 2007. Helen Clark was Prime Minister. George W. Bush was President. Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government was still ruling the United Kingdom. Our memories of these people (all of them still alive) and their deeds remain vivid.

Memories of “The War” – everybody knew which war you were referring to – remained equally vivid for the men and women who had lived through it. That their experiences would be passed down to their children – the “Baby Boomers” – was inevitable. Commando war comics were an important part of that passing down.

Commando’s impressive stable of graphic artists worked in black and white. This seemed fitting to their young readers, since the images vouchsafed to them of the War were similarly monochromatic. Indeed, as the comic’s readership aged – peaking in number during the 1970s – they found it difficult to conceive of the past as happening in anything other than black and white.

Perhaps that’s why the war films emerging from the studios of the United States and the United Kingdom in the postwar decades never seemed quite real to their Baby Boomer audiences. Too much colour. Many of them felt the same way about the “colourisation” of film footage shot during the First and Second World Wars. It seemed, somehow, a violation.

The founders of Commando were all veterans of the War, a fact which explains their insistence on accuracy, and their eye for anything that contradicted their own recollection. It mattered to them that their boy readers (not many girls read Commando comics!) imbibed as truthful a representation of their fathers’ and mothers’ experiences as was compatible with compassionate discretion and commercial success. By and large they succeeded – although it is most unlikely that the expletive phrases of the average German soldier under fire were limited to “Gott in Himmel!” and “Donner und Blitzen!”

The durability of Commando comics testifies to the extended nature of the generational passing down of the images, music, and ideology of the Second World War. It has remained fixed in the Boomers’ consciousness as “The Good War”: the conflict in which, to a far greater extent than any other, the stakes were as high as the morality was simple. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the war against the Axis Powers is still accepted as a straightforward battle between Good and Evil.

That so much of the History Channel’s schedule is devoted to programmes about World War II is proof that this colossal, world-shattering event’s absence of moral ambiguity is as much appreciated by Boomers in their old age as it was when they were twelve.

But, as the war-fighters’ children entered their late-teens and early-twenties, the black and white certainties upon which they’d been raised, the anti-fascist ideas they’d imbibed with their mother’s milk, appeared to have been rejected by the very same “good guys” who’d won the war.

When the blood, tears, toil and sweat of Vietnam were captured in all their true colours, and broadcast into the living-rooms of World War II veterans and their families, they arrived from a very different historical place. Everybody knew that these dreadful images no longer came from “then”. They depicted the horrifying realities of “now”. And all the Commando comics in the world could not dismantle the wall behind which the so-called “Greatest Generation” – the men and women who had defeated Hitler – had so irretrievably sundered the past from the present.

For better or worse, the Baby Boomers’ “passing down” has been a mighty warning about the ease with which heroic men and women can pass from the side of the “good guys” to side with the “bad guys”. When the Boomers saw what their parent’s generation was doing to the world they had won – and on whose behalf – they did everything within their power to persuade their own children to question the historical and ethical narratives passed down to them from the past – including those of their own parents.

This is why the comics of the post-Boomer generations are all about deception and betrayal. About superheroes who fail, and turn bad. About the world which the dead heroes of Commando comics could not save.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 November 2023.

Teaching Their Parents Well.

Marching For Their Lives: The huge achievement of the young organisers behind March For Our Lives is to have recognised in the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its political enablers, the same malign constellation of social and economic forces responsible for visiting the Vietnam conflict upon American youth fifty years earlier. The same glorification of physical force that gave rise to such obscene military expressions as “body count” and “search and destroy mission”, is today locked and loaded into the political Right’s fanatical reverence for the Second Amendment.

AS I WATCHED HUNDREDS-OF-THOUSANDS of young Americans marching for their lives on Saturday 24 March, these were the words in my head.

And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.

Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.

Yes, I know, the song “Teach Your Children” is nearly 50 years old. Even so, there’s something so bitter-sweet about Graham Nash’s composition; something so touchingly intergenerational and solidaristic; that the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit simply took up residence in my skull and refused to leave.

 Released in 1970, on the CSNY album Deja Vu, the song climbed to No. 16 on Billboard’s Pop Singles Chart. Tellingly, the social and political context of “Teach Your Children” was every bit as polarised as that into which the March For Our Lives organisers decanted so many young Americans last weekend.

In the same month that the song was released, May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University had opened fire on unarmed students protesting President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, killing four and wounding nine. CSNY band-member, Neil Young, upon learning of the so-called “Kent State Massacre”, sat down and composed “Ohio” which was recorded and pressed with record speed to come out just days after the release of “Teach Your Children”.

From both an emotional and a political standpoint, the two compositions could hardly have been further apart. Nash’s “Teach Your Children” speaks tenderly to the shared hopes and fears of young and old alike, and to the need for honest communication between the generation of “parents”, who had grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, and their post-war baby-boom “children” (the oldest of whom were then in their early-20s). Young’s song, by contrast, is a raw and angry cry of protest, capturing perfectly the shock and horror of witnessing “Amerika” – “The Establishment” – literally turning its guns on its own children.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon coming,

We’re finally on our own.

This summer I hear the drumming,

Four dead in Ohio

 The huge achievement of the young organisers behind March For Our Lives is to have recognised in the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its political enablers, the same malign constellation of social and economic forces responsible for visiting the Vietnam conflict upon American youth fifty years earlier.

The same glorification of physical force that gave rise to such obscene military expressions as “body count” and “search and destroy mission”, is today locked and loaded into the political Right’s fanatical reverence for the Second Amendment.

The same authoritarian, quasi-fascist, worship of toughness which mandated full-scale war in Indochina, manifests itself today in the compulsive need of all those Americans who cannot cope with difference to amass deadly “defensive” arsenals of semi-automatic weapons and handguns.

And just as the 1969 My Lai Massacre made clear what happens when young men are encouraged to believe that the hearts and minds of civilian populations are best won by pumping them full of lead; the deadly, twenty-year epidemic of US school shootings has demonstrated the horrific consequences of arming the narcissism and nihilism of alienated and aggrieved young men at home.

The assignment which today’s young anti-violence activists have taken on is, however, a much tougher one than the anti-war crusade of their parents’ generation. The decision to fight “international communism” in Vietnam was strategically and politically motivated. As such, it could be reversed and the war it propagated brought to an end. America’s gun culture is a considerably more intractable phenomenon. Born out of White America’s deeply-entrenched fear and hatred of “the other”, it can only be successfully overcome by completing the cultural revolution begun in the 1960s.

This is a very big ask for 15-20-year-olds. In a very real sense, the political history of the United States since the end of the 1970s has been the history of the American Right’s unceasing effort to halt and roll-back the kinder, gentler America that Graham Nash, and thousands like him, were attempting to sing into existence in the 60s and 70s.

But, if the mission confronting this new generation of activists is enormous, it is not impossible. Crucial to its success will be the extent to which today’s young activists are able to teach their parents well. And that can only mean persuading them to confront the truth about what’s wrong: about what’s always been wrong; with American society.

Forty years of right-wing counter-revolution has left its mark on the Baby-Boomers. For too many of them it proved a lot easier (and much more profitable) to give up the fight for a kinder, gentler America. For those “of tender years”, the trick will be to convince their parents and grandparents that the March For Our Lives is a march for their lives too.

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been done long ago.

What if you knew her

And found her dead on the ground?

How can you run when you know?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 27 March 2018.

Is There A “Youth Vote”?

When Youth Was King: But the “Youth Vote”, even in the 1960s, was never much more than journalistic shorthand. It was born out of liberal wish-fulfilment and made vaguely plausible by left-wing academics. Discovering that many of the Left’s supporters are young does not mean that the young support the Left.

 

DO YOUNG NEW ZEALANDERS vote in ways that diverge markedly from the voting patterns of older New Zealanders? Does it still make sense to talk about winning the “Youth Vote”? And, if it does, which of our political parties stands the best chance?

 

There was a time when people took the notion of a Youth Vote very seriously indeed. By the mid-1960s, the early cohorts of the Baby Boom Generation were entering their late teens and early-twenties. Middle class children in unprecedented numbers were pouring into new and expanded university campuses. By the end of the decade, the impact of decolonisation and the Vietnam War had transformed, “students” into an important political category.

 

The oft-demonstrated political activism of college students, when combined with the explosion of what Time magazine called “Youth Culture” (forever associated in the minds of “anyone over thirty” with popular music, long hair, sexual licence, recreational drug-taking and Dr Timothy Leary’s infamous formula: “turn on, tune in, drop out”) encouraged the notion that “anyone under thirty” shared a common set of generational expectations and interests. Without this “Youth Vote”, it was suggested, the electoral success of mainstream political candidates could not be guaranteed.

 

This was by no means as fanciful as those living fifty years after the watershed year of 1968 might think. Had not President Lyndon Johnson been routed by Senator Eugene McCarthy’s “Children’s Crusade”? Supported overwhelmingly by young anti-Vietnam War student activists, McCarthy had run the President embarrassingly close in the New Hampshire primary of January 1968. Days later, Bobby Kennedy, also running on an anti-war platform, entered the race for the presidency. By March, Johnson was telling Americans that he would not seek, nor would he accept, his party’s nomination. The “Youth Vote” had driven LBJ from office.

 

Four years later, right here in New Zealand, the “Youth Vote” was being taken just as seriously. Mass demonstrations against the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War had been a feature of the early 1970s. University students comprised the overwhelming majority of these anti-war protesters. Few political scientists questioned the importance of the anti-war movement in securing the Norman Kirk-led Labour Party’s landslide election victory of 1972. Two years later, Labour attempted to lock-in the Youth Vote by lowering the voting age to 18.

 

But the Youth Vote has always been a political illusion. Middle class university students in the 1960s and 70s made up only a small part of the Baby Boom Generation. Most young Americans and New Zealanders of that era did not go to university. By the time many of them turned 18 they had been working full-time for two or three years. Factory workers and shop assistants had much more in common with their parents and co-workers than they did with placard-waving varsity students. If they voted Labour it wasn’t on account of the Vietnam War, but because voting Labour was what Mum and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, had always done.

 

And even among the university students themselves there were sharp divisions. The long-haired, left-wing radicals might be the ones everybody saw on the television news, but back on campus there were thousands of politically conservative students who thought and voted very differently. A university education was – and remains – a middle-class rite-of-passage. And most middle-class people then, as now, support National – not Labour.

 

In truth, the “Youth Vote” has never been much more than journalistic shorthand. It was born out of liberal wish-fulfilment and made vaguely plausible by left-wing academics. Discovering that many of the Left’s supporters are young does not mean that the young support the Left.

 

So, why the Greens believe that positioning twenty-somethings Jack McDonald and Chloe Swarbrick high on their Party List will attract the support of “Millennials” (the latest journalistic coinage) is anybody’s guess. To be young does not necessarily make one Green – just ask David Seymour and Todd Barclay!

 

The best evidence for something called the “Youth Vote” is, paradoxically, the large number of young people who do not vote at all. Whether out of ignorance, indolence, or principled resistance to a perceived lack of credible electoral alternatives, tens-of-thousands of 18-25-year-olds simply do not make it to the polling booths on Election Day.

 

Of those who do make it, the vast majority come from voting households. Ballots, like apples, seldom fall far from the family tree.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 April 2017.

Nothing To Celebrate.

An Unjust War: New Zealand’s participation in the Vietnam War, no matter how marginal, represented a shameful capitulation to American pressure. It was an immoral war which we should never have joined, and the idea of “celebrating” its fiftieth anniversary should be repugnant to all thinking New Zealanders.

PHUOC TUY PROVINCE, VIETNAM, 18 AUGUST 1966. For a period of 48 hours, around one hundred soldiers from D-Company, Royal Australian Regiment, risked annihilation at the hands of a much larger force of Vietnamese guerrillas. Had it not been for the deadly artillery shells dropped upon the Vietnamese positions by Australian and New Zealand gunners, and the crucial air support supplied by the Royal Australian, and the United States’, air forces, the first serious engagement involving Australian and New Zealand forces in the Vietnam War could have ended in disaster. As it was, the 18 Australian soldiers killed in and around the Long Tan rubber plantation on 18 August 1966 only served to deepen the domestic divide between supporters and opponents of Australian participation in the Vietnam conflict.

 

Quite why the New Zealand Government has decided to “celebrate” the Battle of Long Tan which (the participation of Kiwi artillerymen notwithstanding) was an overwhelmingly Australian engagement, remains something of a mystery. Perhaps it’s because Long Tan represents one of the few examples of Australian and New Zealand soldiers engaging the National Liberation Front (also known as the Viet-Cong) more-or-less independently. As such, it makes it easier to represent the Vietnam War as just another of the many conflicts in which New Zealanders have fought, and its veterans as essentially no different from the participants in all our other wars.

 

Except, of course, that the Vietnam War was very far from being ‘just another’ war. It was the largest and the most destructive of a series of military conflicts waged to prevent the “spread of communism” in South East Asia.

 

That the people of Vietnam were fighting for their national independence every bit as much as they were fighting for communism cut little ice in Washington, Canberra and Wellington. The nations of the so-called “Free World” were convinced that the slightest sign of weakness in the face of national liberation struggles backed by the Soviet Union and/or the People’s Republic of China would only result in more and more of the world’s newly independent nations denying their markets to capitalist exploitation. To prevent that from happening the United States was willing to hurl at the unfortunate Vietnamese people all the non-nuclear weaponry it possessed. Millions were killed.

 

Vietnam was an unjust, ideologically-driven war of aggression against a nation of peasant rice-farmers, and the revulsion it created – especially among the young – gave rise to an international anti-war movement of extraordinary intensity. In attempting to defeat the Vietnamese, the US armed forces committed appalling atrocities and the US Government  revealed to the world America’s ugliest features. Eventually, the American people, along with the people of Australia and New Zealand, refused to back the war. With the withdrawal of American military support, the US puppet government of “South Vietnam” collapsed. By 1975 Vietnam had, at enormous cost, finally freed itself from the clutches of western imperialism.

 

New Zealand’s participation in the Vietnam War, no matter how marginal, represented a shameful capitulation to American pressure. It was an immoral war which we should never have joined, and the idea of “celebrating” its fiftieth anniversary should be repugnant to all thinking New Zealanders. Those who participated in the fighting for reasons of “adventure”, or on account of the “big money” offered, were a far cry from the conscript soldiers of the First and Second World Wars. Their participation in the conflict did, however, leave many of them physically and psychologically scarred. For that they deserve our pity, but not our respect. The cause they were fighting for was not a good one. It should be remembered only as a lesson in the perils of participating in imperialist aggression.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 17 August 2016.

War And Democracy

Gallant Deeds: New Zealand SAS troopers returning from a bitter fire-fight at the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan, June 2011. The NZ Defence Force is fanatical in its determination to control the totality of information emerging from the theatres in which its personnel are engaged. Independent journalism, of the sort so vital to the workings of a viable democracy, is aggressively discouraged.
 

WAR AND DEMOCRACY do not mix. They never have and they never will.
 

Even during World War II – the “Just War” to beat all Just Wars – a drastic curtailment of domestic civil rights was deemed unavoidable by fascism’s democratic opponents.
 

The Cold War, similarly, engendered a climate of fear and suspicion. Tremendous courage was required to challenge the “Free World’s” interpretation of international affairs. At home, dissidence of any kind was met with vicious persecution. Failure to toe the official line on “the communist threat” could seriously threaten your career; your liberty; even your life.
 

 Governments have always preferred to fight their wars in black and white. Shades of grey are regarded as, at best, confusing, and, at worst, demoralising. In the fraught aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the United States, President George W. Bush made it chillingly clear that the Global War on Terror would be waged uncompromisingly on this crude binary basis. “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make”, intoned the President. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
 

Such statements are hostile to the very essence of democracy, which, since its earliest manifestation in Ancient Athens, has been about the people’s right to deliberate upon all matters relating to their interests; about weighing the options carefully and responsibly; and, most importantly, about their right to disagree.
 

But these, the fundamental tenets of democracy, are not the fundamental tenets of waging war. Soldiers do not deliberate. They are not encouraged to weigh their options. And they are absolutely forbidden to disagree.
 

America’s experience in Vietnam demonstrated how rapidly the efforts of the armed forces can be undermined by democratic disagreement at home. The moral ambiguity of the Vietnam conflict made some degree of tension between the battle front and the home front inevitable. The justifications offered to the American public for the fight against fascism, which had kept them behind the war-effort for the duration, simply weren’t available to America’s leaders in their brutal struggle against Vietnamese peasants. Such justifications as they did attempt were routinely demolished by the uncompromising journalism of America’s war correspondents.
 

Never again. Less than ten years after America’s final, panicked retreat from Vietnam, the British were waging a war in the Falkland Islands from which any chance of independent and uncensored war journalism was being ruthlessly excised. The concept  of “embedded” journalism (if not the expression) ensured that the content and supervision of the war’s media presentation would remain firmly in Mrs Thatcher’s hands. The Americans were only too happy to follow the lead of their British cousins. By the time Uncle Sam was ready to pull on his desert camouflage gear, independent war reporting had joined long hair and flared jeans as just another icon of the seventies.
 

British and American politicians were as keen to apply the new techniques of media management on the home front as the military had been on the frontlines. Understandably so, since the military and civilian impacts of war are impossible to separate. As the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, said of the horrors of World War I:
 

“If the people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds.”

The True Face Of War:

"If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow" - Lloyd George

 

The depiction of gallant deeds lies at the heart of the New Zealand Defence Force’s media brief. It is what their political masters demand, and their commitment to the task borders on the fanatical. Nothing strikes fear into the NZDF like the news that an independent Kiwi journalist is in the field asking questions, interviewing locals, following leads and painstakingly assembling stories that owe nothing to, and may sharply contradict, the official narrative. Operating in regions where New Zealand forces are deployed, unembedded war correspondents are considered little better than terrorists.
 

This is how New Zealand’s wars are brought back home. Ultimately, “managing” the media means subverting the media. It’s about co-opting and corrupting the profession upon whose independence and integrity a healthy democracy depends. A journalist persuaded to pull his or her punches for the sake of “our men and women on the ground” may prove equally cooperative in relation to other, equally “sensitive”, government policies.
 

And it doesn’t stop there. New Zealand’s coroners will soon be legally prevented from inquiring too closely into battlefield deaths. In the interests of “national security” future investigations will be left to the NZDF. According to an NZDF spokesperson, it is important to strike a balance between independent investigation and ensuring judicial scrutiny does not encroach into “matters of state”.
 

War’s aversion to democracy could hardly be more plainly stated.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 March 2015.

Debating America's Wars

The Price Of Principle: Labour's new leader, Norman Kirk, follows his party's defeat on Election Night 1966. Labour's opposition to New Zealand's military involvement in the Vietnam War was an important factor in the National Government's re-election. Polls taken in 1965 indicated that upwards of 70 percent of voters favoured Keith Holyoake's decision to send New Zealand troops. By 1972, however, public opinion had shifted decisively in favour of withdrawal.

A PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE on whether or not New Zealand should participate in America’s latest war is long overdue. That New Zealanders will soon be going to the polls makes it even timelier. The deployment of New Zealand troops overseas is much too important to be left to National Party Cabinet Ministers alone.

 

The Leader of the Opposition, who will argue against participating in America’s war, has not been leader of the Labour Party for very long. Nor is he especially popular. The man he replaced as leader may not have been well-liked by the public, but he was beloved by the more forward-looking and liberal elements of his party. They resent the way in which the newcomer’s been foisted upon them with the near unanimous support of Labour’s powerful trade union affiliates. Many fear that, as the unions protégée, he will drag Labour back to the attitudes of the 1930s and 40s. They worry that the much-needed “modernisation” of the party, which his predecessor promoted, is destined for the dustbin.

 

If you’re thinking that the Leader of the Opposition described above is Andrew Little, then you’re wrong. Nor is the American war referred to the one threatening to flare up again in the Middle East. The set-piece parliamentary debate described above took place not in 2015, but during the penultimate week of the 34^th New Zealand Parliament, in October of 1966. The war in question was raging across South Vietnam. The new Leader of the Labour Party was Norman Kirk.

 

Rather than go on escalating New Zealand’s military involvement in Indo-China, Kirk argued strongly for a humanitarian, aid-based response to the conflict. He remained unconvinced that a just peace in Vietnam could ever be secured simply by administering ever-increasing doses of military force.

 

Little’s current assessment of the most effective contribution New Zealand can offer to the struggle against Islamic State is remarkably similar to Kirk’s 1966 position on Vietnam. He, too, favours a humanitarian, aid-based response; arguing that only an economically strong, socially cohesive and religiously tolerant Iraq can hope to lure away Islamic State’s aggrieved Sunni supporters.

 

The parallels do not end there. If Andrew Little’s foreign policy and defence assessments mirror those of Norman Kirk’s, then the Prime Minister’s, John Key’s, position is remarkably similar to that of Keith Holyoake’s.

 

As New Zealand’s National Party Prime Minister from 1960-1972, Holyoake distinguished himself as an astute “consensus” politician. Pressured by President Lyndon Johnson to add New Zealand footwear to the steadily increasing number of US “boots on the ground” in Vietnam, Holyoake did his best to limit this country’s involvement. He rightly suspected that even his minimal offer of a single artillery battery would generate vociferous opposition from a sizeable minority of the electorate.

 

Token Force: New Zealand troops load an L5 howitzer on to an armoured personnel carrier in Vietnam circa 1965.

 

That the trade unions would oppose military involvement was a given, but Holyoake and his colleagues were genuinely surprised and dismayed when Labour opted to follow the unions’ lead. Up until the 1965 decision to send troops to Vietnam, National and Labour had maintained a solid bi-partisan consensus on foreign-policy and defence matters. Holyoake’s decision to hold a set-piece parliamentary debate on the issue, just a few weeks prior to the 1966 General Election, was not made in the hope that consensus would be restored, but that it would remain broken. He was betting that Labour, by holding fast to its principles, would cause the 70 percent of Kiwis who backed the Vietnam intervention, to also back his government. He won the bet.

 

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is clear that Holyoake and National lost more than they won. The shattering of the bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy and defence presaged the even greater fissuring of New Zealand society. It was Labour, not National, which rode the radical changes of the late-1960s and early-70s to victory.

 

Nowhere was this radicalism more apparent than in Labour’s changing view of New Zealand’s place in the world: “Circumstances dictate that, while we preserve the warmest ties and closest sentimental attachments between our country and the United Kingdom,” said Kirk, in 1972, “we recognise that we have come of age and must now stand on our own feet to reject the role of the dependant and at every opportunity seize the initiative.”

 

“Big Norm’s” declaration of independence is reaffirmed in Andrew Little’s principled position on Iraq.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 20 February 2015.

Unfortunate Sons

 

Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969

 

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL's Fortunate Son stands alongside the very best of the anti-war songs to come out of the United States tragic involvement in Vietnam. Written by John Fogerty and released in September 1969 (as the B-side to CCR's runaway hit Down On The Corner) the song so accurately captured the spirit of the times that by December it had climbed to No. 3 in the pop charts. Rolling Stone magazine rates Fortunate Son No. 99 of its 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time.

The accompanying video montage features some of the most iconic images of the era. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the troops pictured fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are professional soldiers and reservists - not conscripts. Uncle Sam had to learn something from Vietnam - even if it was only the unwisdom of forcing the sons and daughters of registered voters to fight and die in faraway places!

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

A Professional Engagement

Somebody's Son: There is a world of difference between deploying professional soldiers to kill the State's enemies and shipping out the conscripted sons (and nowadays daughters) of its citizens. The Vietnamese, unlike the Japanese and the Germans, posed no imminent and/or existential threat to the United States, which is why the decision to send tens-of-thousands of young conscripts to fight and die in its paddy-fields proved to be such a huge historical mistake. (Photo: Horst Faas/AP)

 

NEW ZEALAND’S PARTICIPATION in the war against Islamic State has already prompted angry criticism from the Left. This country boasts a pacifist tradition extending back at least 100 years, to the First World War and the persecution (among many others) of the conscientious objector, Archibald Baxter.

 

Less honourable, perhaps, and certainly less grounded in the pacifists’ profound ethical objection to the taking of human life, is the Far Left’s historical opposition to “imperialist wars”. Significantly, their protests against these conflicts were generally organised on behalf of “the victims of capitalist aggression” – whose victories in such “wars of national liberation” were eagerly anticipated. These were the unabashed revolutionaries, who, in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, chanted: “One side right, one side wrong. Victory to the Viet-Cong!”

 

Somewhere in the “middle” of the Left stand those who are willing to accept that in some circumstances (World War II being the most cited example) the taking up of arms is not only an urgent, but also a profoundly moral, necessity. This idea of the “Just War” goes all the way back to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments are still drawn on by members of the UN Security Council whenever decisions have to be made about whether or not to authorise the use of military force.

 

The greatest anti-war movement of the last century was undoubtedly the international movement against the US involvement in Vietnam. All three of the great anti-war traditions: the Christian prohibition against waging “unjust war”; the revolutionary socialists’ objection to “imperialist war”; and the pacifists’ uncompromising opposition to the taking of human life; were intermingled in the global “mobilisations” against the Vietnam conflict.

 

What elevated the anti-war struggle in the United States to a cultural watershed, however, wasn’t opposition to US imperialism, or even the appalling loss of life, although both of these considerations played a part. No, what really transformed the anti-war protests into a genuine mass movement was conscription. Overwhelmingly, the young men sent to fight and die in South-East Asia were draftees – conscripts whose “number” had, quite literally, come up.

 

Not In My Place: American university students whose call-up had been 'deferred' strove to rescue their conscripted brothers by ending the war in Vietnam.

 

One of the few ways to avoid the draft was to enrol in a course of university study. It is only when one grasps the importance of “deferment” that the crucial role played by university students in the American anti-war movement makes any historical sense. As the number of American soldiers in Vietnam began to escalate, those whose service had been deferred felt an increasingly urgent obligation to bring the conscripts home. Young working-class Whites, Blacks and Hispanics were literally dying in their place – and for no good reason. The US wasn’t battling Hitler in Vietnam, it was napalming and carpet-bombing peasants whose only crime was an iron-clad determination to rule themselves.

 

America’s experience in Vietnam brought home to its leaders the huge risks entailed in fighting what came to be seen, increasingly, as an unjust war with conscripted citizens. If a government’s intention is to use its military resources for any other purpose than national defence against an imminent and existential threat, then it is best that the soldiers, sailors and air personnel employed are professionals – not draftees.

 

Doing Their Job: New Zealand's highly professional special forces personnel in Kabul, Afghanistan.

 

A professional standing army, precisely because it is not composed of the voters’ conscripted sons and daughters, may be deployed in relative political safety for any number of purposes (many of them, these days, decidedly dark). The usual left-wing suspects will complain – but with considerably less effect than during the war in Vietnam.

 

Professional soldiers look forward to war. Fighting for their country is exactly what they signed-up to do. Should they fall in battle, their families, their comrades and their country’s leaders will mourn and honour them, but at the back of everybody’s mind will be the thought: “They knew this might happen, but they weren’t deterred. They died doing the job they’d always wanted.”

 

Try making an anti-war movement out of that!

 

True pacifists are few and far between. Anti-imperialists almost always have a dog in the fight. And unjust wars, providing the “enemy” is rendered sufficiently terrifying, and providing the participating military forces are made up of highly-trained professionals just itching to get amongst it, are unlikely to cause the governments that wage them very much in the way of serious political bother.

 

Few Kiwis will march in the streets for Islamic State.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 November 2014.