As if to highlight the point, the
New York Times
Science Section ran an article headlined “Study of Dioxin's Effect in Vietnam Is Hampered by Diplomatic Freeze.” The “diplomatic freeze” is depicted with the symmetry that objective journalism demands (“Vietnamese and American officials move at a glacial pace in negotiations to improve ties,” etc.), but the article is unusual in noting some unfortunate consequences of this curious mutual disorder. The problem is that the “17-year freeze in relations between Vietnam and the United States is hindering vital research into long-term effects of Agent Orange and other sources of dioxin on both military and civilian populations.” This is most unfortunate, since much might be learned “about the potential dangers of industrial dioxin in the West by studying the people in areas sprayed during the Vietnam War with large doses of American defoliants containing dioxin.”
“Vietnam is an ideal location for more research into potential links between dioxin and cancer, reproductive dysfunction, hormone problems, immune deficiencies, disorders of the central nervous system, liver damage, diabetes and altered lipid metabolism,” the article continues, and may help solve the “critical” problem of determining “the level at which it might become dangerous to humans.” That the creatures under inquiry might have some needs to be addressed, perhaps by the hidden agent, is a thought too exotic to be addressed, even hinted.
There are two reasons why “Vietnam could provide excellent opportunities for study.” “First, a large number of Vietnamese of all ages and both sexes have been exposed to dioxin,” including “many women and children,” while in the West, industrial accidents or “neighborhood contamination” as in Seveso, Italy, and Love Canal “have involved small groups in confined areas,” mostly men. Second, Vietnam “furnishes an extensive control group,” since northerners “were not sprayed.” Another useful feature is that “Many Vietnamese had substantial exposures to dioxin.” “Eighty percent of the Vietnamese lived in rural areas and were frequently barefoot or in sandals,” an American researcher comments. “Cooperation in Vietnam couldn't be better,” but “we're letting a unique opportunity fade” to “study the health consequences for all of us” because of the continuing freeze; “Time is running out for studies of people exposed to spraying.”
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Perhaps this interesting research project might include a look at the children dying of cancer and birth defects or the women with rare malignant tumors in hospitals in the South (not the North, spared this particular atrocity), the sealed containers with hideously deformed babies, and other “terrifying” scenes reported occasionally in the foreign press or far from the public eye here. That inquiry too might yield benefits for the United States.
39
This critique of the mutual disorder departs from convention in at least suggesting that something may be awry. Like all too much else, it may raise in some minds the question whether the intellectual culture is real, or a script by Jonathan Swift. The critique recalls the occasional complaints about the heavy censorship in Japan under the American occupation, imposed in secret (references to it were censored) while the US designed a Constitution for Japan stating that “No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated,” and General MacArthur “was emphatically telling the Japanese people and Japanese journalists that freedom of the press and freedom of speech were very close to his heart and were freedoms for which the Allies had fought the war” (Monica Braw). The censorship had been instituted at once and was maintained for four years, by which time the purge of dissidents made it less important. One motive, from the first days, was to prevent any discussion of the atom bomb or its effects. These were kept as secret as possible within Japan because of concerns that the truth might “disturb public tranquility” and imply that “the bombing was a crime against humanity,” one censor declared as he barred an eyewitness account of the Nagasaki atrocity. Even Japanese scientific papers were barred. That did elicit some objections, but not because the censorship hindered treatment of survivors, an issue largely ignored; rather, because a unique opportunity to learn more about radiation damage was being lost.
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As America contemplated Japan's crimes on the fiftieth anniversary, a new book appeared on the one American atrocity that has indeed been recognized: the My Lai massacre in March 1968. American reviewers were shocked to learn that “the infamous Lt. Calley,” who commanded the killers, “served less than three years of confinement in his bachelor officer quarters before he was paroled” and now enjoys life as a Georgia businessman, driving his Mercedes sedan from his pleasant home to the shopping mall where his jewelry store is located. Concluding his reflections on the massacre, the
Washington Post
reviewer observes: “Any book on this subject ultimately shirks its responsibility unless it clearly tracks the fault down to the complex light and dark of the individual human soul.”
In the London
Financial Times
, Justin Wintle had a different reaction:
Like nearly every other book about Vietnam published in the West,
Four Hours In My Lai
focuses on America, and the damage done to the American self-esteem. The other half of the equation is marginalised. Although [the authors] dutifully record the eye-witness accounts of a handful of survivors of My Lai, the engulfing sorrow that still pervades Quang Ngai as a result of eight years' occupation by US and South Korean forces is here unsung. Instead the reader is swamped by any amount of often trivial biographical detail pertaining to the lives of nearly every American mentioned in the text.
That pattern had been set early on. Few winced when the
New York Times
published a think piece from My Lai on the fifth anniversary of the massacre, in March 1973, noting that the village and region remained “silent and unsafe,” though the Americans were still “trying to make it safe” by relentless bombardment and shelling. The reporter quoted villagers who accused the Americans of killing many people, adding philosophically: “They are in no position to appreciate what the name My Lai means to Americans.”
41
The
Washington Post
review observes the laws of Political Correctness by enjoining us to plumb the depths of “the individual human soul” with its dark complexities, to seek the answer to My Lai in some universal fault of the human species, not in US policies and institutions. The laws prescribe that the US only reacts to the crimes of others, and has no policies beyond a general benevolence; in Quang Ngai province, no policies beyond “trying to make it safe” for the suffering Vietnamese who we are “protecting.” True, there was destruction in Indochina, but, quite commonly, with no agent. There were “substantial tracts of land made fallow by the war,” the
Times
leading Asia hand, Fox Butterfield, reports, coining a phrase that would have made Orwell gasp. His colleague Craig Whitney summarized “the legacy of the war”: “the punishment inflicted on [the Vietnamese] and their land when the Communists were allowed to operate in it” and the villagers “driven from the ancestral homes by the fighting.” It was all some natural disaster, inexplicable, except by musing on the darkness of the individual human soul, perhaps.
42
The British reviewer recommended a step beyond: a look at “the objectives of Washington's policy makers,” not merely the soul of Lt. Calley and the half-crazed GIs in the field who carried out the brutal massacre, knowing only that every Vietnamese in the ruins of a Quang Ngai villageâman, woman, or childâwas a potential threat to their lives. As a first step in determining these objectives, we might inspect Operation Wheeler Wallawa, in which the official body count listed 10,000 enemy, including the victims of My Lai. In his detailed study of this and other mass murder operations of the period,
Newsweek
Bureau Chief Kevin Buckley writes that My Lai was “a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times,” for example, in one area of four villages where the population was reduced from 16,000 to 1,600, or another where the US military command's location plots reveal that B-52 bombings were targeted precisely on villages, and where helicopters chased and killed people working in the fields. “Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant,” Buckley commented: “Calley was an aberration, but âWheeler Wallawa' was not.” Or many other operations like it, a fact that brings certain thoughts to mind.
43
North American relief workers in Quang Ngai knew of the My Lai massacre at once, but, like the local population, took no particular notice because it was not considered out of the ordinary. Retired army officer Edward King wrote that “My Lai represented to the average professional soldier nothing more than being caught up in a cover-up of something which he knew had been going on for a long time on a smaller scale.” By accident, the military panel investigating the My Lai massacre found another much like it a few miles away, at My Khe, but dismissed charges against the commanding officer on the grounds that it was a perfectly normal operation in which a village was destroyed with about 100 people killed and the remnants forcibly relocatedâmuch like the remnants of My Lai, sent to a waterless camp on Batangan Peninsula over which floated a banner reading: “We thank you for liberating us from communist terror.” There, they were subjected to Operation Bold Mariner, which “tried to make that region safe” with probably even greater slaughter and ecological devastation.
44
Could there be another candidate for war crimes trials, beyond General Yamashita and 1000 others executed for their crimes in the Pacific War?
6. On Sensitivity to History
Recall that one of the character flaws we discover in exploring “the Mind of Japan” is their “clumsy attempts to sanitize the past” and “the complete absence of a sense in Japan of their own history,” much like the Soviet officials who mobilized “every conceivable weapon...to suppress the public's memory” of the “grisly episodes” that form “the larger cancer” of history, finally in vain, because “You Can't Murder History.”
Or can you? The fate of the Indochina wars in US ideology illustrates our right to pontificate on this issue. A still more recent example is the Central America episode of the past decade: some future historian will gaze in wonder at our self-adulation over the monstrous atrocities we perpetrated there, surpassing even the earlier achievements that have helped to keep our “backyard” in deepest misery.
The very idea of an American intellectual judging others on how they come to terms with their history is so astounding as to leave one virtually speechless. Who among us, from the earliest days, has failed to come to terms with the truth about slavery or the extermination of the native population? Can there be a resident of civilized New England, for example, who has not committed to memory the gruesome details of the first major act of genocide, the slaughter of the Pequot Indians in 1637, the remnants sold into slavery? Who has not learned the proud words of the 1643 Puritan account of these inspiring acts, describing the official dissolution of the Pequot nation by the colonial authorities, who outlawed even the designation
Pequot
“so that the name of the Pequots (as of Amalech) is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is, or (at least) dare call himself a Pequot”? Surely every American child who pledges allegiance to our nation “under God” is instructed as to how the Puritans borrowed the rhetoric and imagery of the Old Testament, consciously modelling themselves on His Chosen People as they followed God's command, “âsmiting' the Canaanites and driving them from the Promised Land” (Nell Salisbury). Who has not shown
hansei
while studying the chroniclers who extolled our revered forebears as they did the Lord's work in accord with the admonitions of their religious leaders, fulfilling their “divine mission” with a pre-dawn surprise attack on the main Pequot village while most of the men were away, slaughtering women, children, and old men in true Biblical style? In their own words, the Puritans turned the huts into a “fiery Oven” in which the victims of “the most terrible death that may be” were left “frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same,” while the servants of the Lord “gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.” Can there be anyone who has not asked whether our history might offer some later resonances of this exultation over the extermination of those who had “exalted themselves in their great Pride,” arrogantly refusing to grant us what they have?
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Or if southern Connecticut is too remote for intellectual and moral guides in our greatest city, then surely they could not have failed to immerse themselves in the records of the actions that cleared the New York region of the native scourge only a few years later. For example, the account by David de Vries of his experiences in Lower Manhattan in February 1643, while Dutch soldiers massacred peaceful Algonquin Indians right across the Hudson, finally exterminating or expelling almost all Native Americans from the New York Metropolitan area. The killers in this case preferred another favored model of the Founding Fathers,
considering they had done a deed of Roman valor in murdering so many in their sleep; where infants were torn from their mother's breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small [cradle] boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown.