PAGE SIB 'THE MICHIGAN DAILY WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1965 PAGE SIX THE MICHIGAN WIlLY WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 12. 1~5 ti {.IV.4f NYa" a " \,/y; }a.pL Y LVf ~Lal F United States Involvement in Viet Nnam- Today in Viet Nam, there is so much of everything available that almost any kind of military error, no matter how stupid, can be retrieved on the rebound. In the case of the recent battle near Ankhe the misdropped unit was reinforced by another helicopter outfit and progressively surrounded by a protective wall of American fire- power until the enemy, unable to maintain his position, broke off contact. At Bong- son, on Sept. 24, the VC overran a government outpost, but in the "reaction" oper- ation they allegedly lost 600 men-500 of whom were killed by American aircraft. Against that kind of slaughter, the teachings of Mao Tse-Tung, superior tactics, popular support for the VC or, conversely, poor motivation among the Arvins (Army of the Republic of.Viet Nam) and patent ineptness among many of their officers, and even.the "mess in Saigon" are totally irrelevant. If tomorrow morning Mickey Mouse became prime minister of South Viet Nam it would have precious little influence on the men of U.S. Army Task Force Alfa (in fact, a full U.S. Army Corps in everything but name) or on the fighting ability of the 3rd U.S. Marine Division. -Bernard Fall in The New Republic /:' iir i:sTitia"TT's:4:6""ss#im #AiN #Iiiss#N Nitts~ssgsiis aimiks V... ~~...................................r.. . . . * * * * * * * * * The Tragedy of A merican Unreason By PROF. ERIC WOLF Anthropology Department and PROF. MARSHALL SAHLINS Anthropology Department 'WE ARE concerned in these paragraphs not so much with the war in Viet Nam and its pos- sible outcome, but with what the actions of our government in Viet Nam tell us about the pres- ent condition of the United States. As one of our students put it so concisely: "The teach- ins have all been about Viet Nam; they should have been about the United States!" The case of Viet Nam has as- sumed the proportions of a para- ble for 20th Century America, just as the case of the American Indians was a parable for us of our past dealings with non- industrial societies. We solved the American Indian "problem" with repeating rifle and colt revolver. These great equalizers established the per- manent inequality between the quick and the dead, between us -the living-and the only good Indians, whom we fed to the buzzards. IN THE meantime, the United States has come to be the most powerful nation on earth; but in Viet Nam we are enacting a pas- sion play that shows that while our armament has changed, our response has not. The only good Vietnamese are dead, not red. ' What is involved is the relation of the United States , to Viet Nam, and through Viet Nam to the other noifindustrialized and poor countries of the Third World. We seem to have a brown thumb in dealing with these people. WE SUCCEEDED in shoring up Western Europe through the Marshall Plan, but there we are dealing with nations with whom we share a common history and common understandings. Else- where in the world, we seem to be laboring under some kind of jinx. Our gardens, so carefully ma- nured with capital and goodwill, and so neatly graded and bank- ed to maximize their spread, keep breaking out in crops of re- bellious red flowers. We are on the defensive: we fought a cost- ly, undeclared war to maintain a partitioned Korea, just as we are now fighting to maintain a partitioned Viet Nam. Former allies are turning away from us, against us. Defeat and attrition breed fear, and fear is a poor teacher. We reflect on our defeats: they can't possibly be our faults. We worked hard and wished people well. There must be hid- den enemies who undo by !night what we do in the day time. The answer is at hand: our hidden enemies are the agents of the in- ternational Communist conspir- acy. SOMETHING MUST be done; there must be a gimmick, a magic wand. But if we do not have it, someone else does. In "Why Not Victory?" Senator Goldwater writes: "I would suggest that we ana- lyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not." It is the Communist conspira- tors who have the magic wand; its owner turns out to be none other than Mao Tse-Tung. Hence a new scnool of battle- field literati who peruse the Maoist texts for sources of mili- tary enlightenment. These new Maoists speak knowingly of fish and water-the guerrilla are the fish, the people the water in which they swim - and of rais- ing or lowering the, temperature of the water, or of draining it en- tirely. BUT THEY do not-any of them-come to grips with Mao's key pronouncement that, above all, we do not understand revo- lution. We are apt pupils and we eas- ily assimilate technical advice: we turn the problem of revolu- tion into Military exercises; we give lip-service to the idea that one must be cognizant of eco- nomic, social and political fac- tors, but apparently we cannot assimilate the idea that counter- insurgency or psychological war- f a r e or counter-revolutionary warfare are not enough. A military gimmick is just that, no more, no less; what is required of us is a much greater exercise of the imagination. the money for the apple busi- ness. We do not see them as men en- gaged in the task of mobilizing political and communication pro- cesses. We do not look at these processes: therefore we never ask what is the matter, only who is the matter? IF YOU ASK what is the mat- ter, then you take upon yourself the understanding of a revolu- tionary situation in terms of his- tory and social science. If you ask who is the matter, then you look kfor bad buys and good guys. The bad guys are obviously the Communist conspirators who go about the world sowing dissen- sion and disseminating Commu- nism. "Communism," says W.W. Rostow, Chairman of the State Department P o 1 i c y Planning Council, "is best understood as a disease of the transition to mod- ernization." The Communists are germ car- riers, Typhoid Marys who pollute the wellsprings of stable national life. To fight them you must ally yourself with the good guys: Bao Dai? Diem? Khan? Quat? Ky? But for the Communists, the un- derdeveloped Third World would presumably be a Garden of Eden, with all the nations burgeoning healthily towards fnodernity. THEREFORE we enact upon the foreign scene the ridiculous dramatics of a Grade-B Western. Foreign policy consists of police actions, in which the good guys clear the world of bad guys and make Tombstone, South Viet Nam, a, happier place to live in for the home folks like you and me. In this simplistic drama, the complexities of the Third World vanish among the hail of cliches and bullets. Never a word about the fact that "underdevelopment" does not consist merely in the ab- sence of steel mills, refrigerators and shampoo to bring out the natural luster in your hair, but in a specific relationship between the rich and the poor countries, a relationship which distorts the economies of the poor countries in favor of the rich. You do not have to be a revolu- tionary to point out, with Robert L. Teilbronner, that ' in the eyes of the imperialist nations, t h e underdeveloped regions were essentially seen as immense supply depots for the cheap production of raw ma- terials from which their in- dustrial economies could pro- fit. Accordingly, the economies of the underdeveloped areas were often deformed into mere subsidiaries of their W e s t e r n masters. Malaya became a rubber plantation, Rhodesia a copper mine, Ceylon a huge tea plan- tation, Arabia an oil field. Without doubt, the existing re- sources of the regions and the natural advantages of an inter- national division of labor en- couraged this tendency. But the direction of econom- ic development was determined by their Western overlords, rather than by the peoples of the colonial lands, and the po- tential benefits of specialized industrial production failed to materialize for the underlying population. BUT THE relation between the poor world and the world of the rich is not merely one of econo- mics; it is also one of political inequality. Major decisions af- fecting t h e people in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in Africa, are not made by Latin Americans, Asians or Africans, but by outsiders, by foreigners, by "Whites." Why is it so hard for the Unit- ed States to understand the re- sentment of people who want to be masters of their own destiny? Did not the colonists of the in- fant 13 colonies rise against a for- eign master under the slogan'of "no taxation without represent- ation?" But the demise of colonialism and semi-colonialism is n o t merely a matter of transferring economic options into the hands of the locals. It is also a mora- torium on the persistent inequal- ity between rulers and natives. WHY DO WE forget so easily that the Third World was found- ed on colonial rule, and that colonial rule implies a basic act of violence? The relation between native and foreign settler rests, as French - Algerian a u t h o r Frantz Fanon saw so clearly, on "a great array of bayonets and guage he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, the settler has shown him the way he should take if he is to become free. "The argument that the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turn- ing of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colon- ialist understands nothing but force." HERE FANON spoke of the French, but in Viet Nam it is now we who are the colonialists. Tech- nically, we are just advisors, but this is r~more than a "psych-war" label for international and home consumption. At one level, it is a concession to Vietnamese national feeling; at the same time, Americans en- tertain a complementary need to believe that they are merely ad- vising. As a denial of any colon- ial status of intentions, it pro- vides for Americans an accept- able meaning of their presence in Viet Nam. Beyond that, it serves as a con- venient institutional means for personal dissociation from the sufferings of Viet Nam, suffer- ings largely inflicted by the Amer- ican presence-which is one's own presence. To be an advisor is to be involved yet free of the place, to indulge a sense of duty yet disdain responsibility. It becomes a prefabricated bar- rier to be put up readily to hide whatever ugliness intrudes into consciousness, a ready-made de- nial that one is implicated in what goes on. It is a moral anes- thetic. INSTITUTIONALLY, however, the function of the "advisory" role must be judged from its ef- fects. The effect at every level of organization-from hamlet to nation-is to interpose obstacles to American direction of Vietna- mese affairs, and so give play to indigenous forces and interests, especially self interests. The par- adox is novel: even as America generates powerful economic and political power in Viet Nam, it turns around to deny itself the leverage of that power. The free-flowing resources re- leased by the American presence are appropriated instead by local collaborators who hope to con- struct their own version of Viet- namese society. We give them the advice to do good and the power to do as they please. We say we are "helping the Vietnamese to help themselves," and that's exactly what they are doing, help- ing themselves. The Screaming American Ea- gle appears on only one side of the coin: on the other side we meet the Fat Cat of the Vietna- mese comprador. Thus our "advisory capacity" in Viet Nam opens a new chapter in the relations between the West and the underdeveloped Third World. For all our anti-colonial protestations, we are hard at work perpetuating the ,colonial condi- tion in Viet Nam. IS IT SO HARD for us to un- derstand that modernization is not merely a matter of export- import statistics, of a rising Gross National Product, or even a mat- ter of diffusing purchasing power to enable people to buy transis- tor radios, rice or life insurance -that it is also a matter of hu- man rights? Fanon has said it appropriate- ly: in the course of revolution, "the 'thing' which has been colon- ized becomes human as it frees itself." For the first time in his life the native faces the foreign- er as an equal. Why is it so dif- ficult for Americans, at this point in history, to accept this asser- tion of equality? We are evidently quite com- fortable with natives as long as they are Chinks or Gooks, funny men who wash our laundry and bake wise sayings into fortune cookies. But when these laundry- men and fortune cookie bakers take ,up arms to assert their right to self-determination and esquiv- alent power, we see the devil at work and strive to drive him out with fire and brimstone. IT NEEDS hardly be said, once more, that revolutions-like all violent upheavals of the human condition-are costly in human life and happiness. They are like great mudslides which carry away the established order, including the mansions of the well-meaning and even sound experiments-because they are not merely movements towards eco- nomic modernization, but mora- or to bribe them into collusion, but as men who have come into full possession of equality with ourselves? APPARENTLY we are unwilling' to do so, because-as Mao says -we do not understand revolu- tions. We do not understand rev- olutions, as we do not understand our responsibilities for them. The crippled and violated world in which they arise is of our own making. Responsibility means under- standing this basic fact and act- ing upon it to change it. In- stead, however, we invoke' word magic and practice exorcism. In our magical view of the world Viet Nam does not really exist at all. What exists is the worldwide Communist conspiracy, specifically its Chinese wing. The Vietnamese we are killing in Viet Nam possess no reality for us: they-are but bodily envelopes pos- sessed by the Chinese demons., By shooting Vietnamese we are really killing Chinese and halt- ing Chinese expansion. One encounters this belief among, fighting men in Viet Nam and their officers, among mem- bers of the U.S. civilian establish- ment and its officials. The spe- cifics of Viet Nam hardly con- cern these visionaries. The possi- bility that not all revolutionaries are Communists, that some rev- olutionaries may be nationalists, that some Communists may be na- tionalists means nothing to them. The devil takes many forms, but we shall not be deceived by any manifestation in which he chooses to show himself. We are hard-headed-we take the devil at his word. He has said that he aims at world domination; there- fore it must be true. OF ALL the world's peoples, we Americans ought to be able to distinguish between ideology and reality, between advertising and ple's beliefs is no longer some- thing that only "they" do. Confessions forcibly exacted and conversions engineered by torture are no longer the things v e fight against. These are now instruments in our own tool kit: the new body mechanics, the new engineers of pain, walk among us. WE MAY WIN the war in Viet Nam by such means, but in the process we shall lose the hearts and minds of Americans. As we draw out the evil spirits by let- ting the blood of the victim, we emerge covered with that blood. We shall have attempted to rid the land of demons only to be- come demons ourselves. Medicine-man and demon are kin to each other. They share a set of assumptions about the means of inflicting and relieving ills. As they struggle for suprem- acy over a living body, only they seem real to each other; the vic- tim's body becomes humanly ir- relevant, merely a thing that each possesses and manipulates to de- feat the other. The most horrifying circum- -stance is that the evil spirit is an obsession of the medicine-man -and the patient may die from the treatment. HOW WILL the world judge us when this episode is over? What will it say of the failure of the imagination and compassion which has led America to prefer the inhuman peace of the grave- yard to its human obligation to aid in the reconstruction of a world that requires revolutionary changes to redress imbalance and the inequities of imbalance? The American failure to per- ceive the realities behind Commu- nism and to act upon these reali- ties abroad may have serious con- sequences also for us living in these United States of America. AI WHEN UNITED STATES PLANES ATTACKED Viet Cong guerrillas at Phung Hiep in July, local peasant women and children had to take shelter in mud holes to protect themselves. After the attack--as after all such attacks-they emerged from their hiding places; often cold and often meeting drenching rain. Phung Hiep, 100 miles south of Saigon, was hit by Navy and Air Force planes. U THE BOMBING OF A U.S. OFFICERS' HOTEL in Saigon last De- cember, gave local children an ideal place to play. Two Americans were killed in the Christmas eve bombing, and Americans as well as Saigon area residents have'been subject to many more such at- tempts to make the U.S. presence in Viet Nam uncomfortable. the product advertised, but we have suspended our critical fac- ulties in this struggle. Communists are no longer men for us; they are supernaturals. Therefore we need pay no atten- tion to the real-life conditions which turn men into Communists, or to the way Communists act in real life. That Communists wrestle with mundane problems that often defeat them no longer concerns us. We are demon-figlters who have discovered the sources of the demon's strength. These sourc- es are the demon's powerful ideol- ogy and his means for taking pos- session of the victim: his tactics of warfare and terror. But we shall not be defeated. We shall learn from the devil, in order to exorcise him. The latest form of this exorcism is "popula- tion control," combined with pur- ification by napalm and Lazy Dog sliver bombs. THUS, in fighting the enemy with his own weapons, we become like the enemy. This transforma- It Ais not a very long step that leads from reliance on the gim- micks of population control and coercion abroad to the temptation to deal with people at home as things to be controlled and coer- ced. We already have human engi- neers aplenty, hard-headed sur- realists ever eager to peddle a whole tool kit of t"practical" do- it-yourself ways of exorcising do- mestic and international demons. We shall increasingly hear the chorus of the tin-horn totalitar- ians who would have us develop a Know-Nothing Americanism, capable of fighting with fire the fires of Communist ideology, Increasingly we shall be under pressure to substitute for those forms of human and scientific inquiry which alone could uncov- er our responsibilities for the state of the world, the writing and reading of Anti-Communist Man- ifestos and Special Forces man- uals. YET, sad to say, none of this will make the demons go away; I. :, _ ....a. : :.