Year 501 (50 page)

Not unlike the Rio Sumpul massacre on the Salvador-
Honduras border in 1980, the first major atrocity of the US-run war in El Salvador, which some day perhaps the
New York Times
may even discover; and countless other operations of the elite battalions fresh from their US training, armed with US arms, and guided by the doctrines we have taught them for many years.
46

No one can accuse us of concealing the actions that cleared the New York area; the facts are, after all, readily available to everyone in
Native American Place Names in New York City
, prominently published by the Museum of the City of New York.

The spectacle of our “sensitivity to history” is too obscene to merit review, though neglect would not be quite the right word. Anyone who can recall the images and lessons of their childhood will know why; at least those whose childhood years came before the impact of the popular movements of the 1960s was finally felt, arousing a chorus of revulsion over the PC takeover of our previously saintly culture. My own memories were reawakened a few weeks after the exposure of the My Lai massacre in 1969, while thumbing through a fourth-grade text on colonial New England assigned in a Boston suburb noted for the quality of its schools. The children indeed read a fairly accurate account of the slaughter of the Pequots—which was applauded, much in the manner of the Puritan record of 1643.
47

And so the story continues right through the 500th year. In the
Times
Book Review
, historian Caleb Carr reviews a book on the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota. The “Minnesota encounter,” he explains, was “a total war between rival nations for control of a territory both groups were willing to die for.” But there was a crucial asymmetry. For one nation, “settlement was generally their last hope”; they were “staking not only their fortunes but also their very lives on the hope of building new lives in untried country.” For the natives, at least at first, “the terms of the conflict” were “less mortal”; they could, after all, trudge off further West. Carr describes the “encounter” as “less than inspiring,” and praises the author for recognizing that both nations were guilty of crimes. Those of the Sioux are outlined in gory detail (“atrocious behavior,” “sadism and blood lust,” “a particular penchant for torturing infants and children,” etc.); the tune changes markedly when Carr turns to the settlers seeking to build new lives (broken treaties, hanging of 38 Sioux, expulsion even of some who were not “guilty” of resistance, etc.). But the radical difference is only fair, given the asymmetry of need in the “encounter.”

To conjure up a nightmare, suppose the Nazis had won the European war. Perhaps some later German ideologue might have conceded that the “encounter” between Germans and Slavs on the Eastern front was “less than inspiring,” though for balance, we must recall that it was “a total war between rival nations for control of a territory both groups were willing to die for”; and for the Slavs “the terms of the conflict” were “less mortal” than for the Germans needing
Lebensraum
, “staking not only their fortunes but also their very lives on the hope of building new lives in untried country.” The Slavs, after all, could trudge off to Siberia.
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It is noteworthy that Carr's review opens with the predictable frothing at the mouth about the evils of PC, that is, the efforts of a misguided few to face some of the truths of history. That is a common posture; in the
Times
,
de regueur
on this topic (among others). In a typical case, another
Times
reviewer, with bitterness dripping from every line, writes that a novel on Columbus “adheres closely to the new multi-cultural perspective,” focusing on what the author “sees as the devastating effects that Columbus's arrival in the New World had on the native populations,” including “the supposed deaths of thousands of people.” Who but a fashionable “multi-culturalist” could believe that the effects of the conquest were “devastating” or could “suppose” that “thousands” of Native Americans died? A second
Times
reviewer of the same book, former
Newsweek
senior book critic Paul Prescott, chimes in with a hysterical denunciation of the “ideologically correct” author for daring to write that the Spanish harmed the natives of Hispaniola while suppressing “the kind of history is not politically correct”: that the natives “told [Columbus] that their immediate problem was that they were being eaten by the Caribs.” How they “told” Columbus this tale of woe, and why no record exists, Prescott does not explain; on the “immediate problem” as seen by the contemporary observer Las Casas, who denied the cannibalism charge concocted by Columbus, see pp. 273-4.
49

It is not unreasonable to suppose that the extremely crude but quite effective propaganda campaign about the takeover of our culture by PC left fascists was in part motivated by the forthcoming quincentennial, with the danger that it might elicit some “self-reflection,” perhaps even “remorse.”

7. “Thief! Thief!”

The renewal of the punishment of Vietnam for its crimes, the voices of the unheard victims, the search into the depths of the “individual human soul” (but nothing more) in the case of our admitted departure from purity, and our contemplation of “the Mind of Japan”—all of these fall on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, along with the resurgence of self-pity over our tragic fate.

Those who might believe that the POW-MIA issue reflects the profound humanitarian impulses of our leaders will quickly be disabused of this naive idea by a look at a few comparisons. Walter Wouk, a Vietnam veteran who chairs the New York State Senate Vietnam Veterans Advisory Council, writes:

At the end of World War II the US had 78,751 MIAs, 27 percent of the war's US battle deaths. The Korean War resulted in 8,177 MIAs which represented 15.2 percent of the Americans killed-in-action. Of the 2.6 million Americans who served in Vietnam, 2,505—less than 5.5 percent of the US battle deaths—are listed as missing in action. But even that figure is misleading. Of that number 1,113 were killed in action, but their bodies were not recovered. Another 631 were presumed dead because of the circumstances of their loss—i.e., airmen known to have crashed into the sea—and 33 died in captivity. The remaining 728 are missing. It should be noted that 590 of the missing Americans (81 percent) were airmen; and there were strong indications that more than 442 of these individuals (75 percent) went down with their aircraft.

Are the Vietnam MIAs in a special category because of the refusal of the savage Communists to allow a thorough search? In the major study of the MIA campaign, Bruce Franklin points out that remains of MIAs from World War II are discovered almost every year in the European countryside, where no one has hampered any search for 45 years. Remains from General Custer's 1876 battle were still being located in the 1980s, as were skeletons of Confederate soldiers and US soldiers killed in Canada during the War of 1812.
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The truth of the matter is not hard to perceive. The state-media complex has been resorting to a trick familiar to every petty crook and tenth-rate lawyer: when you are caught with your hand in someone's pocket, cry “Thief! Thief!” Don't try to defend yourself, thus conceding that there is an issue to confront: rather, shift the onus to your accusers, who must then defend themselves against your charge. The technique can be highly effective when control over the doctrinal system is assured. The device is familiar to propagandists, virtually a reflex, adopted unthinkingly. The PC propaganda operation is a transparent example (chapter 2.4).

The device also comes naturally to the corporate rulers, who commonly present themselves as pathetic and embattled, desperately trying to survive the onslaught of the liberal media, powerful unions, and hostile government forces that keep them from earning an honest dollar. Their media propagandists play the same game. During the Pittston mineworkers strike in 1989-1990, the company president ran daily press conferences, though it was hardly necessary, since the media were eager to do his work for him. In the first (and only) TV gesture toward coverage, Robert Kulwich of CBS commented that Pittston Coal Group president “Mike Odom is willing to say that the union has done a very slick public relations job, and that he has some catching up to do.” That takes care of the fact that the national media—to the limited extent that they covered this historic labor struggle at all—adopted the company point of view reflexively, deflecting union efforts to present the issues as the workers saw them with their practiced efficiency.
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The same device is standard in debate over the media. It is child's play to demonstrate their subordination to state power with regard to Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East. Accordingly, the sole issue we are permitted to discuss is whether the media went too far in their adversarial zeal, perhaps even undermining the foundations of democracy (the questions pondered in the solemn deliberations of the Trilateral Commission and Freedom House). An academic study of the media on Central America and the Middle East, led by a man with proper liberal credentials, considers only the question of the anti-establishment fervor of the media: Was it too extreme, or did they manage to keep it within tolerable bounds? As in this case, the “Thief!Thief!” technique is particularly effective when the analyst can be placed at the outer limits of dissidence. Thus long-time NPR Middle East correspondent Jim Lederman inquires into the fervent support of the US media for the cause of the Palestinians, their manipulation by Yasser Arafat, and their consuming hatred of Israel—all so obvious to any reader. Exhibiting his left-liberal credentials, he concludes that there is no proof of a conscious anti-Semitic conspiracy, despite appearances.
52

In such ways, mountains of evidence can be made to disappear with a mere flick of the wrist. The technique requires lock-step loyalty on the part of the cultural managers. But the unwashed masses are sometimes more difficult to handle.

In the case of Vietnam, by the late 1960s substantial sectors of the public were joining those whom Kennedy-Johnson National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy called “the wild men in the wings,” questioning the “first team” that was running the war, and even the justice of the US cause.
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With all the help provided by the mass media, things were reaching the point where the murderous barbarism of the US war could no longer be concealed or defended. The predictable response was to say “Thief! Thief!” Of course, there was nothing new in this. But the Indochina wars were reaching the stage where something was needed beyond the norm.

By the late ‘60s, schoolchildren were given assignments in the
Weekly Reader
, which goes to elementary schools throughout the country, to write letters to Ho Chi Minh pleading with him to release the Americans he had captured—the implication being that the evil Communists had snatched them as they strolled peacefully on Main Street, Iowa, spiriting them off to Hanoi for the purpose of torturing them. The PR campaign went into full gear in 1969, for two major reasons. First, US atrocities were reaching a scale that surpassed any hope of denial. Defense against the charges being impossible, the debate must be transferred to the evil nature of the enemy:
his
crimes against
us
. Second, corporate America had determined that the war must end. It would therefore no longer be possible to evade diplomacy and negotiations. But the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson doctrine still held firm: diplomacy is not an option because the US and its clients were too weak politically to hope to prevail in the arena of peaceful competition. Accordingly, Nixon and Kissinger radically accelerated and expanded the violence, and sought in every way to deflect unwanted negotiations. The device used was to raise demands on prisoner return that no belligerent had ever so much as considered in the past, in the hope that Hanoi would keep to traditional Western standards and reject them, so that the Commie rats could be denounced for their infamy and the negotiations could be delayed.

After the war's end, a new motive arose. The destruction of Indochina was not considered a sufficient victory: it was necessary to continue to strangle and crush the Vietnamese enemy by other means—refusal of diplomatic relations, economic warfare, and the other devices available to the toughest guy on the block. The cause was taken up by President Carter, accelerated as he made his “tilt toward China” in early 1978. It has been pursued since by his successors, with the support of the political class generally. Its current manifestations, we have just reviewed.

This resort to the “Thief! Thief!” technique was a brilliant success throughout, thanks to the compliance of the institutions of indoctrination. Franklin reviews the matter in some detail, showing how the press leaped into the fray on command while film-makers and TV pursued the ingenious strategy of selecting the best-publicized atrocities of the US and its client and rearranging personnel to transform them into crimes of the enemy. The supreme cynicism of the enterprise is highlighted by the maneuvers that had to be undertaken to shift from professed outrage over Pol Pot atrocities—itself an utter fraud in elite circles, as demonstrated conclusively by their reaction to US atrocities in Cambodia a few years earlier and to those of the US-backed Indonesian client in Timor in the very same years
54
—to a complex stand in which Pol Pot is condemned as the very symbol of Communist horror, while the Vietnamese invasion that saved Cambodia from his atrocities is shaped into a still more monstrous Communist atrocity, and the quiet US support for Pol Pot is somehow finessed. Even that task was effortlessly accomplished. And the ideological institutions shifted gears smoothly when the Cambodia pretext was lost and only the POW/MIA issue remained to justify the torture of the people of Indochina.