“The Time of Illusion” (1975) by Jonathan Schell is an attempt to make sense of the Nixon years in the US, 1969 to 1974, right after the Watergate scandal brought out the truth about President Nixon. Schell wrote for the New Yorker in those years.
The Nixon years, as Schell presents them, were like an unfaithful marriage: at first you did not know, then you did not want to know, then the ugly truth came crashing down on you, wave after wave.
Newspapers circa 1972:
“The footnotes of current American history were in the headlines, and the chapter headings were buried in the back pages or were absent altogether.”
What you saw in the news was theatre, play-acting, a show, a lie. Nixon went so far as to send himself telegrams of congratulations and write the lines that loyal Republicans were to mouth on television. Pat Buchanan was an executive producer.
The theatre hid Nixon’s huge abuses of power, like secretly bombing Cambodia or secretly shaking down ITT for money. But just like in VeggieTales, one lie leads to another till you break into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. If it had not been Watergate, it would have been something else.
Sooner or later Nixon would run up against the courts, the police and the press, which are supposed to get their facts right. And in this case they did, pulling back the curtain.
But that is hardly the end of the story.
Nixon’s character only determined how he would be brought down. No matter who was president, he would have been forced out, one way or the other. And that is because of the Vietnam War, a war that president after president fought even though it had little public support. That is what led to the lies and the abuse of power in the first place.
President Johnson was not all that different. He too sat on a mountain of lies, as the Pentagon Papers later showed. Public outcry over the war forced him out of office.
But the root of it all was not even the Vietnam War.
Down the rabbit hole:
The US fought on in South Vietnam long after there was any reasonable hope of saving it from communism. But then why was the US destroying Vietnam? For what?
To save itself.
The madness that was Vietnam was driven by the madness of – MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. The only thing to keep the Soviet Union from destroying the US with atom bombs was the threat that the US could and would destroy it too. But to make that threat believable, the US had to act kind of mad in limited wars like Vietnam. That would give the US “credibility”.
This mad idea was cooked up by a Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, in 1957. He became Nixon’s top adviser on foreign affairs, but Presidents Kennedy and Johnson believed much the same thing.
Just yesterday I saw Kissinger visiting President Trump:
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- Richard Nixon
- Martin Luther King Jr: Beyond Vietnam
- Chomsky: The Responsibility of Intellectuals
- military-industrial complex
- deep state
- Donald Trump
- Pat Buchanan
- atom bomb
- Soviet Union – the communist Russian empire
573
“The US fought on in South Vietnam long after there was any reasonable hope of saving it from communism.”
Did you really write this nonsense Abagond? Did the US invade the Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, DR, Nicaragua, etc. before there was a communism to speak of, to save them from communism, or is it just the nature of the beast? How about Native Americans, were they also destroyed to convince the USSR that the USA would retaliate if attacked?
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Reblogged this on IBHE Collaborative University and commented:
A good piece for Political Science
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@ gro jo
That is Schell, not me. I am summarizing the book while it is fresh in my mind.
The two stated aims of limited war were credibility and to save the world from communism. Schell takes that pretty much at face value. Chomsky and Dr King had a somewhat different take, and I did posts on those too:
King is closest to how I think of it.
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All of the great music that came out of the sixties and early seventies was the death knell of Amerikka. We as a nation experienced moral and spiritual death during those turbulent times and we never recovered, but we sure did sound good.
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“America no longer stands for freedom and democracy. The Vietnam War makes that crystal clear to most of the world. Instead it stands for profits and property rights, for machines and computers, for racism, materialism and militarism. It needs to offer mankind a better hope than that to fight communism.”
The US should have fought communism with peace, democracy? You and MLK like to pretend that the democracy of the USA wasn’t based on “…racism, materialism and militarism.” Good luck with that!
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” But to make that threat believable, the US had to act kind of mad in limited wars like Vietnam. That would give the US “credibility”.”
wow! that is madness. is this schell or you?
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@ nomad
That is Schell.
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so whats that? a couple of million people? ‘limited wars’. a couple of million people. lets just conservatively say a million. a million people have to die in a ‘limited war’ to give credibility to the idea that the us was capable of using nuclear weapons? has he not met us? does he not remember that weve done it before? if that doesn’t give us credibility I don’t know what does. that’s the reasoning of a psychopath. a million people have to die to show we’re not bluffing? that’s not just mad. that’s madness. down the rabbit hole indeed.
is schell attributing this strategy to Kissinger?
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My family is currently hosting a Vietnamese exchange student from a smallish coastal town in what would have once been called “North Vietnam.” Her parents were born in 1971 and 1979 and have only ever known a unified Vietnam. To our student, the “American War” is an abstraction, taught in history class, sort of like I learned about WWII in my high school (my parents were both very young when WWII ended). And very much like my WWII lessons, our student was taught that the Vietnamese side was the “just” side against the evil would-be colonizers, and that even though Vietnam was tiny and poor they were able to defeat the awful, giant, military beast of the United States because of the justness of their cause.
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Blanc2, Why the quote marks around just and American War? Was the US the aggressor or not? Did the Vietnamese have the right to defend themselves or not?
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we have always been at war with eastasia.
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