Like John Duffy, I too lived through the Vietnam War era. Now he has added something I do not recall seeing before [Burning off the fog of history, Viewpoints, April 20]. U.S. involvement began when Eisenhower opposed the treaty after the French colonial defeat in 1954, thinking the communists would win by a landslide in the elections provided for, and deprive the U.S. of markets and raw materials. And so the more westernized southern Vietnamese set up their own government, which the U.S. supported in the war with the communist north.
The whole point of his article seems to criticize the “lies and distortions” he implies underlaid the U.S. involvement in that war, and the failure to examine historical evidence “that might create a dissonance to the too-frequent unquestioning support of war so dominant in our national psyche.”
But then he takes an unexpected turn, suggesting the same is happening now, regarding Ukraine. “The dominant national media,” he says, have offered “little help in critically understanding the historic roots” of the horrible Ukraine conflict. He calls the media “manufacturers of consent,” who have now reduced the Ukraine tragedy to Putin’s “psychotic, imperial aggression” by “unquestionably repeat[ing] the administration’s messaging with a mix of truth, lies, distortion, and hypocrisy.” His ultimate point was: The media, by focusing on Putin’s aggression, and parroting the administration’s deceptions, are hiding the fact that the U.S. bears “responsibility in bringing about” the war in Ukraine.
While Mr. Duffy was enjoying his student draft deferment, while attending college, I too enjoyed a deferment as a seminary student for eight years. Right when Mr. Duffy graduated and lost his deferment, I left the seminary and lost mine. Like him I was opposed to the war, and because of my religious education, I applied for an exemption as a Conscientious Objector, supported by those in charge of my seminary training. Since Conscientious Objector status required moral opposition to all war, I had to contemplate the morality of taking a human life in combat. About the same time that the young John Kerry uttered his famous question, “Who wants to be the last to die for a mistake?” I was asking, “Who wants to be the next person to kill for a mistake?”
My application was denied (as most were). As Mr. Duffy had done, I too contemplated the alternatives, which, in my case included refusing induction and facing federal criminal prosecution and jail, or Canada. Like Mr. Duffy, I too have contemplated the application of the lessons of those years to the current Ukraine situation. I too wrote a detailed analysis of those lessons, but from the point of view of a pacifist who had been a conscientious objector, and sent it to friends from my seminary years. I also wrote it as someone whose ancestral roots are in southeastern Poland, bordering Ukraine, and as one whose interest in the area has prompted me to learn something of its history, relevant to “understanding the historic roots” of the conflict — specifically, Russian aggression in the area.
A few salient facts: WWII began with Hitler and Stalin making a pact to invade and divide Poland, a country whose boundaries then included a large part of what is now western Ukraine (including L’viv); they implemented it when Hitler began his “blitzkrieg” on Sept. 1, 1939, and Stalin immediately followed from the other direction, on Sept. 17, with Stalin getting the part of Poland that is now in western Ukraine; (Stalin, within two months, also invaded Finland, seizing 10% of it); Hitler’s dream was of “lebensraum,” (room to live) for the “master race” of Aryans (Germans), in the direction of his weaker neighbor to the east—populated by Slavs, an ethnic group that he considered just as “sub-menschen” (sub-human) as he considered Jews; two years later, in 1941, in an astounding strategic blunder, he invaded the next group of Slavs in line (the Russians), as if determined only to teach us (about Putin) that a despot unstopped does not stop; and finally, that WWII ended with Stalin taking not only all of Poland that Hitler had agreed to, incorporating it into Ukraine, but also all the rest too, seizing it, and all of Eastern Europe too, for Russia, with popular “approval” of puppet governments by means of local referendums run, naturally, by the Russians.
Consider also a few additional details of Ukrainian history (such as Stalin’s deliberate starvation of 3 million Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s; that Putin has asserted Ukraine is not even a real country; that he seized Crimea from it and held a referendum “approving” it; that he invaded two of its other regions, setting up separatist enclaves which he has declared “independent states”; that the Ukrainians, having seen Putin’s despotism, had, by their “Orange Revolution,” rejected it in favor of democratic values).
As a result, I came to conclusions about the Ukrainians’ war that are at odds with my own prior pacifist and moral views on war.
I could not condemn the Ukrainians for their lethal resistance to Putin’s murderous assault; and I cannot object to our country’s nonviolent support with excruciating sanctions, or even its lethal support by supplying weaponry to enable the Ukrainians to succeed—a judgment which, it seems, the whole world shares. In sum, thinking for myself about the “historic roots” of the war, I seemed to have “manufactured” my own consent to it, and the U.S. support of it, without any input from the “manufacturers of consent,” or resort to “the administration’s messaging.”
As someone always skeptical about war, I searched for, but could not find, any historical fact that might support Mr. Duffy’s stark conclusion that the U.S. bears some “responsibility in bringing about” this war. True, Mr. Trump had tried to condition military support of Ukraine on “a favor,” and was always cool to aiding that country thereafter. Could this be the basis for Mr. Duffy’s allegation of U.S. responsibility?
On my fourth, fifth, and sixth reading of his last sentences, I could not conclude that he was talking about that. For he refers to “the administration’s messaging,” a clear reference to the current president’s, and to its “lies, distortions, and hypocrisy.”
Mr. Duffy decries the “fog of history,” the term he uses for such deceptions. If I have been deceived, I would certainly be the first to want to know. Unfortunately, he does not offer one piece of evidence of his charges. Which brings to mind a couple of apt quotes from popular culture: “Where’s the beef?” and “Show me the money.” Since he offers no evidence or even one fact that meets that description, his unsupported allegations contribute nothing to burning off the “fog of history” for me as a thinking individual, and I consider them of no more worth, for an informed public, than the supposed media deficiencies of the Vietnam era he decries.
Frank Stachyra is a retired attorney and 48-year resident of Oak Park.