Tie a Yellow Ribbon
Jul. 25th, 2003 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinue"Polyakov's intelligence [on the sino-soviet split] was so detailed, it played an essential role in the Nixon administration's decision to exploit the rift and forge the "opening" to China: the singular event that would lead to the ending of the Vietnam War." - Ernest Volkman, Espionage: The Greatest Spy Operations of the 20th Century
It's funny. I've studied great deal of history in my lifetime, especially American military history. I know a hell of a lot about how various wars started - I can talk about Black Tom and the Zimmerman telegram, the tea act and unlawful imprisonment, the secession of the southern states. I can even tell you about the obscure wars, French & Indian, 1812, Spanish-American, Texas Revolution. The Korean War is one big blank in my mind, beyond that it involved Chinese communism, but I can give you the exact chain of events that led from WWII to Vietnam, and I can pinpoint to the day when the Cold War began.
Something I don't know shit about is endings. Sometimes, they're pretty clear cut - Lee had a bad heart and he'd lost too many men (including Stonewall), so he surrendered the Army of the Potomac, after which it was just a matter of sweeping up the remaining opposition and instituting the Reconstructionalist government. Military hostilities had ended. Monroe realized 1812 made him look like an ass, and apologized to the British. Nukes went off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; MacArthur's island-hopping secured the islands around Japan. What was the end of World War I? The Treaty of Versailles. Now tell me: whose idea was it, and how on earth did they convince everyone to show up and sign it?
It's strange; textbooks devote whole chapters to beginnings. They have titles like "Gearing up for War," "Mounting Hostilities," "The Tinderbox in Europe." As for the wars themselves, they glaze over a couple of big-name battles - usually in the course of a few paragraphs - put the war's end up to nebulous socio-political forces, and move on to reconstruction and sweeping social change, (which sometimes leads up to yet another "Ticking Timebomb" chapter). Why? To be sure, one should know the warning signs - not that they don't tend to be obvious, like bombing the shit out of Hawaii or invading Poland. However, I should think that endings are notably more important; how else can you know your objectives, your options and your possibilities? How can you enter a war without wanting to know the likely price of victory?
I can only conclude that it's the usual subtle propaganda. We need to know why the war started so we can prove we were right to enter it. We don't want to know about the blood, the loss of life and the moral compromises. We don't want to know what we lost, only that we won, or that we pulled out because the "human cost was too great." (Isn't that a good one? You can make it fit any situation you like, even if no one dies. On the other hand, if you want to continue the war, it's a "noble sacrifice for the ideals of democracy.") So after we skip all that nasty "war" part of the war, we want to move on to the wide-ranging social changes that prove we made a difference and changed the world for the better. (And it's always better, even if you have thousands of homeless veterans wandering the streets, ducking to avoid their invisible attackers.) We learned from our mistakes; we are moving forward.
But how can we if it never ends?
It's funny. I've studied great deal of history in my lifetime, especially American military history. I know a hell of a lot about how various wars started - I can talk about Black Tom and the Zimmerman telegram, the tea act and unlawful imprisonment, the secession of the southern states. I can even tell you about the obscure wars, French & Indian, 1812, Spanish-American, Texas Revolution. The Korean War is one big blank in my mind, beyond that it involved Chinese communism, but I can give you the exact chain of events that led from WWII to Vietnam, and I can pinpoint to the day when the Cold War began.
Something I don't know shit about is endings. Sometimes, they're pretty clear cut - Lee had a bad heart and he'd lost too many men (including Stonewall), so he surrendered the Army of the Potomac, after which it was just a matter of sweeping up the remaining opposition and instituting the Reconstructionalist government. Military hostilities had ended. Monroe realized 1812 made him look like an ass, and apologized to the British. Nukes went off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; MacArthur's island-hopping secured the islands around Japan. What was the end of World War I? The Treaty of Versailles. Now tell me: whose idea was it, and how on earth did they convince everyone to show up and sign it?
It's strange; textbooks devote whole chapters to beginnings. They have titles like "Gearing up for War," "Mounting Hostilities," "The Tinderbox in Europe." As for the wars themselves, they glaze over a couple of big-name battles - usually in the course of a few paragraphs - put the war's end up to nebulous socio-political forces, and move on to reconstruction and sweeping social change, (which sometimes leads up to yet another "Ticking Timebomb" chapter). Why? To be sure, one should know the warning signs - not that they don't tend to be obvious, like bombing the shit out of Hawaii or invading Poland. However, I should think that endings are notably more important; how else can you know your objectives, your options and your possibilities? How can you enter a war without wanting to know the likely price of victory?
I can only conclude that it's the usual subtle propaganda. We need to know why the war started so we can prove we were right to enter it. We don't want to know about the blood, the loss of life and the moral compromises. We don't want to know what we lost, only that we won, or that we pulled out because the "human cost was too great." (Isn't that a good one? You can make it fit any situation you like, even if no one dies. On the other hand, if you want to continue the war, it's a "noble sacrifice for the ideals of democracy.") So after we skip all that nasty "war" part of the war, we want to move on to the wide-ranging social changes that prove we made a difference and changed the world for the better. (And it's always better, even if you have thousands of homeless veterans wandering the streets, ducking to avoid their invisible attackers.) We learned from our mistakes; we are moving forward.
But how can we if it never ends?
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(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 07:49 am (UTC)Indeed. However, by the time we get to the end of the war the mess is so great, and so...messy (for want of a better word) that a lot of the time it's hard to see how we got there. It's nigh on impossible to pin point any one event that marks the end of any conflict which has torn up countries and claimed lives - better just to sweep all that aside and focus on the political implications which came after. Which, chances are, somewhere along the line led to yet another conflict.
History is so messy.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-07-25 05:28 pm (UTC)I think the same thing applies to other things, as well. Take relationships. No one is good at breaking up - thats not the point of the relationship.
Or mergers and acquisitions - It makes sense to Larry Ellison why he wants to buy PeopleSoft - but that doesn't mean he has a plan on what to do afterwords - the rumor is he'll just shut them down and move their customers over to Oracle products instead. Messy.
We humans don't think about consequences, so pass the crawfish and damn the heartburn.