UNWANTED MEMORIES ERASED IN ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY EXPERIMENT1
FRANK JOYCE
Get Your FREE VIETNAM War 50th Anniversary Coin.
It’s the headline of an ad at the back of the Sunday paper coupon inserts. It sits forlornly below “THE HOTTEST CONCEPT IN HAIR REMOVAL—NO! NO! HAIR.” It is soliciting money for a group claiming to support the “missing” POW-MIAs from the Vietnam War.
I feel sorry for the vets trying to keep the POW-MIA issue alive. As with so many chapters in the ugly U.S. past, the electroconvulsive therapy machine is hard at work trying to erase our memory of the Vietnam War.
It won’t work. Not in my case, for sure. Viet Nam as a nation and an experience is an integral part of my personal history. I have no desire to forget it. To the contrary, I think revisiting our history with the country and the war is an opportunity to learn a great deal about how we can become more powerful in waging peace.
A good place to start is by understanding how the United States came to make war on Viet Nam in the first place. More than 45 years ago I wrote a piece called, “Racism in the United States, An Introduction.” In that article I said:
The settling of the West did not stop at the Pacific Ocean, but continued on to Hawaii, the Philippines, Samoa (still called American Samoa), Japan, China, and ultimately Viet Nam. Many of the same generals who fought to the Pacific also fought in the Pacific campaigns. And although the reasons for expansion changed as the nation became industrialized, the process of expansion is so inexorable that the United States has never had any “foreign policy” whatsoever, at least regarding the Pacific. United States Pacific and Asian involvement is, perhaps more obviously than is usually the case, simply an extension of domestic policy. In this sense, the United States is in Viet Nam because it is in California.2
As I write today, I stand by that analysis. It is even clearer now than it was then that we are a warrior nation. For as long as I have been alive, the United States has been making war somewhere. I was born during WWII. Since then, the U.S. military has attacked Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq repeatedly, Panama, Grenada, Afghanistan, and Libya. That’s not counting innumerable other military interventions by clandestine forces, surrogate armies, air power, drones, and subversion. Nor does it count the 800-plus military bases the United States has outside its own borders.
Our culture is saturated with the worship of war and violence. It’s so common that we mostly don’t notice it. It is at the core of much of our entertainment. Likewise, the invention, manufacture, and distribution of every kind of weapon plays a key role in our economy. From handguns to grenade launchers to airplanes and missiles, we supply killing power to individuals, governments, and freelance “freedom fighters” such as Osama Bin Laden, as long as we believe they are aligned with U.S. geopolitical objectives.
Reverence for war is insinuated into every nook and cranny of our daily lives. One of my favorite examples is the TV visual of service men and women who stand by the greens in the final holes of big golf tournaments. The players and the announcers are required to gush about our “heroes” and glorify their “service.”
Also illuminating was the reaction in 2014 to the disclosure of a conversation between two State Department diplomats about U.S. efforts to engineer regime change in the Ukraine (as we now know, they were ultimately successful). In the weird way of the hyper-news cycle we live in, the exchange made headlines because neo-con state department operative Victoria Nyland used the f-word in dismissing the negative reaction of the European Union to U.S. goals.3 What caught my attention was what did not make news. To the best of my knowledge, not one mainstream media pundit or reporter remarked on the notion that the United States gets to decide who should be leading the government of Ukraine in the first place. It’s just accepted as normal that the U.S. powers-that-be can determine the destiny of any nation they choose.
The Enduring Power of White Supremacy
Somehow this hiding-in-plain-sight reality is invisible to a majority of U.S. Americans. Every military intervention is treated as a discrete event unconnected to anything that came before. Buried most deeply is the link to the ideology of white supremacy baked into the very origin of the nation. There are two overlapping elements of the experience that shapes U.S. white supremacist culture to this day. Demonizing blacks was an essential component of the justification for slavery and then Jim Crow segregation. In a modified form it rationalizes the matrix of advantages delivered to whites today. Validating genocide against Indigenous people is also part of the DNA of the United States.
For an account of how the multiple campaigns against Indigenous nations shaped the identity, culture, organization, and strategy of the U.S. military in particular, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is essential reading. Understanding the arc of that history puts the U.S. war against Viet Nam in context. In one of many telling details illustrating this continuity, Dunbar-Ortiz points out that the team that assassinated Osama Bin Laden assigned him the code name Geronimo. She also points out that military use of the term “in country” is a direct descendant of “in Indian country.”
Another example of the core policies and practices of the U.S. military was the use of Agent Orange to “defoliate” Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. This was not a mere “echo” of the extermination of the buffalo in “settling” the U.S. American West. It is a direct descendant of the total war policies devised early in U.S. military history to decimate Indigenous people by eliminating the source of their livelihood—likewise, Operation Phoenix, the targeted assassination program in Viet Nam, and the multiple massacres of women, children, and the elderly, of which My Lai is only the most well-known example.
Total war violence was also the brutal methodology intrinsic to the U.S. brand of slavery. From ships that carried the slaves, through the slave patrols that enforced the rules of slavery, to the highly militarized twenty-first century police departments from small towns such as Ferguson, Missouri, to big cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, violence toward civilians was routine. The works of Gerald Horne, including The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, are essential reading for understanding the military intersection of the suppression of slaves and Indigenous people in the creation of the first-ever apartheid state.
As the theory and practice of white supremacy has evolved over 500 years, it has infected and affected how most U.S. Americans, especially white Americans, see everything. The combination of genocidal behavior toward First Nations and the machinery of slavery required a belief system that justified the behavior. That belief system is that whites are intellectually, morally, and otherwise superior to Native Americans and African Americans. (The attitude of superiority extends to Asians and other people of color, but on a somewhat different trajectory.)
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the synergy of attitudes toward Native Americans and blacks than the viewpoint of one L. Brooks Patterson. Patterson first came to public prominence as an attorney who defended KKK members charged with burning school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1971. The Klan targeted the buses because they were going to be used to racially integrate schools under a federal court order. Since 1976, Patterson has served continuously as an elected official of Oakland County, Michigan, a collection of predominantly white suburbs just north of Detroit. In 2012, he was elected to his sixth consecutive term as the county’s chief executive.
Patterson once expressed his attitude toward African Americans in Detroit like this: “What we’re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” In an interview with a writer from the New Yorker in 2014, he reaffirmed that perspective.
How I Got This Way
For me, the remarkable thing is that the better I understand this history, the more extraordinary the movement against the Vietnam War becomes. Why? Of all the U.S. wars, only the Vietnam War engendered such widespread resistance from the Anglo population. I am convinced that the movement helped make the war shorter. Given the enormous viciousness visited upon the citizens of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, this may seem hard to believe—but it could have been even worse were it not for the restraining force of the antiwar movement.
What made Vietnam the most opposed U.S. war before or since? The seeds were sown by the Civil Rights Movement. Without the modern struggle against Jim Crow, which I date first from the Montgomery movement in 1955 and then the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, the U.S. assault on Viet Nam would have unfolded like Korea or other wars that drew little protest. This is true in ways big and small.
Looking at the big picture, the courage and creativity of the Civil Rights Movement proved that effective opposition to a long-established status quo was possible. It engaged blacks and whites too. It helped to stimulate the white student movement, most dramatically expressed by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Civil rights activists also led the way in challenging the war as an expression of colonialism and racism.
The arc of the cut-short life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King traced his path from opposition to Jim Crow to his later words condemning the triple evils of racism, militarism, and materialism. My own personal evolution, starting from civil rights activism, followed a similar path. My first overt act of political resistance was to join a picket line against a segregated swimming pool in Oak Park, Michigan, in 1960.
I did not come from a liberal or progressive family. My father especially was a right-wing and racist Republican. Like others who became ’60s activists of one kind or another, as a student leader, I had already participated in some challenges to the authorities at Royal Oak Dondero High School. I think many of us “rebels without causes” later found them. The causes, that is.
It was not a long trip. If there is a cauldron in which the theory and practice of post–WWII Northern urban racism was formed, Detroit, Michigan burned the hottest. My parents were white flight pioneers, leaving Detroit for a brand new suburb in the 1940s. In that context, challenging the whole apparatus and ideology of racial segregation was for sure the most rebellious thing I could do.
I guess it worked. The immediate consequence of joining the swimming pool picket line was to get me thrown out of the house when my father saw me protesting segregation on TV news coverage. Fortunately, I had a fulltime factory job at the time so I was economically self-sufficient. I was able to work and attend classes at Wayne State University in Detroit. At first, I commuted from a suburban apartment but later moved into the city to be close to campus.
At Wayne State I continued to participate in student government, as I had in high school. But I also connected to the emerging Civil Rights Movement, becoming first involved in the Northern Student Movement (NSM). That later led to my helping to create People Against Racism (PAR) in 1966.
Shortly after PAR was formed, we had our first internal conflict. It was about the Vietnam War. Ultimately, we reached a consensus and issued a statement of opposition to the war. We based our case on the racism inherent in invading Viet Nam, a non-white country and on the disproportionate casualties being suffered by African-American soldiers.
Somewhere in that time frame I became a draft resister. That led to my becoming punitively inducted into the Army (a practice later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court). I did report for duty as ordered, but thanks to some creative activity on my part, the military at the induction center decided then and there that I was “unfit for service.” Had my plan not worked, I was prepared to refuse induction, face arrest, and then deal with those consequences.
As a result of becoming a draft resister and seeing antiwar work as an extension of anti-racism, my engagement in the antiwar movement brought me into contact with the Vietnamese. I went to meetings in Canada, Paris, and ultimately to Viet Nam in the spring of 1970. Going to Viet Nam was an especially life-changing experience. It provided an extraordinary prism through which to look at my own country.
Looking up at the sky from a village south of Hanoi at risk of being bombed at any time by B-52s, my country seemed as grotesque to me as did that segregated swimming pool in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, Michigan. What was it about U.S. American culture that required such a permanent state of fear that a small nation 9,000 miles away represented such a big threat?
As it happened, I was in that village on a significant day: May 4, 1970. When our group of four antiwar activists was awake and gathered for breakfast, we could tell our hosts were troubled. They said they had some important news. Four students protesting the invasion of Cambodia had been killed at Kent State University.
My recollection is that the Vietnamese seemed more upset by this than we were. I was deeply moved by their distress. It may sound hokey or naïve, but I remember thinking at the time that their concern was completely genuine and authentic. It reinforced as strongly as anything that they meant it when they said they differentiated between the people of the United States and the U.S. government.
My own feeling was that I was not surprised. It was only a matter of time, I thought. The mere fact that we were in Viet Nam was proof to me that the rift at home over the war was intensifying.
I was well aware of how many Civil Rights workers had been killed. Part of my work as a staff member for the Chicago 8/7 trial had been to compile a list of those who had died in the struggle. (I use 8/7 here because the government originally charged eight activists for organizing protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. Early in the trial Black Panther Bobby Seale was separated as a result of his defiant courtroom behavior. The trial then continued without him.) Most U.S. Americans were aware of high-profile deaths such as Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964. But my research surprised even me. As of late 1969, the list ran to well over 100 names and included several whites in addition to Goodman and Schwerner. Even if you are white, I realized, if you push the government too hard, it will respond with violence.
Antiwar protest in Detroit, Michigan, 1970.
Courtesy of Fifth Estate.
In the days following May 4, both in Viet Nam and when we got back to the United States, it became apparent that a line had been crossed. TThe national consensus of support essential to sustaining the war was over once and for all. Many friends and acquaintances, especially older people, who had been indifferent or “on the fence” about the war were now openly opposed.
The antiwar movement had changed the public mind. It was poised as never before to challenge government policy.
Even before then, and more so after my Viet Nam visit, I wondered about bigger questions. Just why are nation-states so important? What is the source of their enormous power to demand our loyalty? Why are so many U.S. Americans so obsequious toward our military? Is a nation such as Viet Nam, evolved from more than a thousand years of history, albeit fraught with its own conflicts, different than our own, descended as we are from colonialism and slavery?
I wrestle with these issues to this day. Should a “peace” movement try to end war one nation at a time, or is a transnational appeal more effective? At a time when human aggression threatens the eco-system of the planet, shouldn’t our first loyalty be to all life-forms? Certainly, the late peace activist Lillian Genser thought so when she composed a pledge that has become a touchstone for me: “I pledge allegiance to the world, to care for earth and sea and air, to cherish every living thing with peace and justice everywhere.” Vincent Harding, sadly now also deceased, used to say, “I am a citizen of a country which does not yet exist.”
Got a Hold on Me
Throughout my lifetime of political activism, Viet Nam kept a hold on me. I returned in 2006 and again in 2013. These trips affirmed my respect and affection for the people, the culture, and the beauty of the country. I remember a powerful moment on a small boat on the Mekong River in 2006 when I marveled all over again about what could possibly have led the U.S. military to think they could even dominate the physical terrain, let alone the spirit of the people. Did it go all the way back to the frontier experience of decimating the Native Americans, also on unfamiliar terrain? Was it the legacy of thinking that U.S. prowess in weaponry, up to and including nuclear bombs, would always win the day?
Many who go to Viet Nam today, whether as returning war veterans, returning peace veterans, or tourists, are struck by the openness of the people and the lack of bitterness and resentment toward U.S. Americans. Almost everyone has a story about being told by one or more Vietnamese that the U.S. invasion was but the blink of an eye compared to the centuries of long struggles with previous invaders, especially China.
Visitors to Viet Nam are invariably impressed with the sheer energy that rises up from the streets of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, smaller cities, or even rural areas. Nevermind the nauseating pettiness and mendacity of U.S. politics and the media that enables it—compared to Viet Nam, the United States seems just all around tired. Exactly what noble purpose or vision is the U.S. government fulfilling these days?
To be clear, I do not think that Viet Nam is utopia. Neither do the Vietnamese. On both of my trips back I was struck by the quality of the discussion about the direction of the country. Problems from corruption to labor unrest to income inequality to democratic participation were freely acknowledged and openly discussed.
Frank Joyce receives a gift from Vietnamese friends in Quang Tri, 2013.
Courtesy of Frank Joyce.
The New Case for Pacifism, or Is It the Case for a New Pacifism?
I credit my engagement with Viet Nam for helping me form a realistic picture of what is wrong with the United States. But it has also been a powerful source of hope for change as well. The “David vs. Goliath” ability of Viet Nam to repel the U.S. invasion is itself inspiring. But so is the movement that arose around the world to support Viet Nam in its struggle.
I am proud to have been a part of that movement. And I believe that it proves that U.S. Americans can transcend the passivity and confusion that allows the worst aspects of our national history of racism, settler colonialism and imperial conquest to repeat themselves. Beyond that, people’s diplomacy can play a part in containing war-loving policy makers.
One of the things I realized while participating in the observances of the 40th Anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords in 2013 was the continuity of the Vietnamese practice of people-to-people diplomacy, first with the French and then with U.S. Americans after the U.S. military took over the front-line job of suppressing the Vietnamese. In part, that was a legacy of the ties between Ho Chi Minh and the French Communist Party, of which he was a founder.
I am well aware that the U.S. antiwar movement and the French Communist Party were very different. At the risk of stating the obvious, the French CP was well established, disciplined, and held political power in government from municipalities to parliament. None of those things was true of the amorphous components of what came to be the antiwar movement in the United States. It was far less structured. And it took considerable time before the war became a significant issue in the electoral arena.
The “Hanoi 9” peace veterans who traveled to Viet Nam for the 40th Anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords provide a good snapshot of the makeup of a large section of the antiwar movement. As represented in this book, we were Yippies, pacifists, and new leftists. Alex Hing represents a connection both to Asian-American and African-American activism.
The dominant narrative about the Vietnam War is that it differs from virtually all other U.S. wars because the U.S. “lost.” Often the “loss” is blamed on the antiwar movement. American exceptionalism requires the belief that all U.S. wars are good wars. Throughout my lifetime, World War II has been portrayed as the finest hour of the greatest generation. As a lifelong Michigander and therefore a “Yankee,” I was also raised to believe in the nobility of the enormous bloodshed required to end slavery.
To be sure, emancipating slaves and defeating fascism were worthy causes, but that does not change the fact that slavery was followed by Jim Crow segregation and a century of economic exploitation of African Americans described so effectively in the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name. Nor does it justify the pervasive institutional racism that oppresses African Americans today. Neither does it vindicate the abuse visited upon the planet by the global hegemony the U.S. government sought and obtained by using nuclear weapons to crush Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If anything, the Civil War and World War II stand out as the exception to the rule of virtually constant U.S. war against Indigenous people in North America as well as other nations all over the planet—an endless war that has been underway since the first white colonial settlement in Jamestown, Virginia.
The purpose of the “all U.S. wars are good wars” narrative is to create a culture in which opposing war is always unpatriotic and successfully mitigating the military’s ability to fight and “win” any war is thus characterized as intrinsically treasonous. Blaming the antiwar movement for the “loss” of Viet Nam serves more than one purpose. It diverts attention from the military successes of the Vietnamese. There is no denying that from a conventional wisdom perspective the failure of the enormous firepower of the U.S. military to subdue the Vietnamese is humiliating to the military establishment. Blaming war opponents for the loss also seeks to prevent opposition to present and future wars.
There is conflict between those who want to “forget everything,” and those who want to use the history in support of one agenda or another. Some of the tension is individual, some institutional. Many soldiers who fought in the Viet Nam, Laos, and/or Cambodia war repress those memories as best they can. Whether they have a “clinical” version of PTSD or not, they don’t talk about the war and don’t like it when others bring it up. Young civilians don’t have any direct experience with the war and are rarely inclined to pay attention unless required to do so in an academic setting. Older U.S. Americans, especially whites, are part of a culture that systematically operates to obliterate anything about the nation’s past that is ugly. That requires a lot of obliteration.
The military has a different set of interests. It’s hard for them to write Viet Nam out of their history books altogether. And so it weaves together a story to fit the war into the triumphal narrative of U.S. empire. It is from this necessity that we get the ongoing 50th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon’s Vietnam War Commission tells a story of sacrifice and heroism that ignores the opposition to the war altogether.4 That effort is being challenged by an ad hoc coalition of veterans of the antiwar movement. Ironically, the Pentagon and the antiwar veterans share the need to combat the tendency to just forget the whole thing.
The New Case for Pacifism
Back in the day, I opposed the war against Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. I would have had no problem being described as an antiwar activist, meaning that my focus was a particular war. These days, I describe myself as a pacifist. That does not mean that I have undergone training in Gandhian philosophy or the theory and practice of deep non-violence as advocated by the Rev. James Lawson and others. I have great admiration for those who do.
Nevertheless, I have reached the pacifist conclusion that there is no problem for which violence is a solution. I agree completely with the position recently taken by Steven Hawking that the supreme threat to the planet is human aggression. I concur with his observation that whatever value it once served in our evolutionary history as a species is now counterproductive.
Human violence of all kinds dominates the daily news. That is discouraging because it reinforces an apparently self-fulfilling prophecy; that such behavior is an immutable trait of our species. Admittedly, violence does beget more violence. That truth, however, also supports the possibility that peace can beget more peace.
And for those willing to look, there are many developments that seem to be leading a way to a less violent future. Perhaps most surprising are recent steps toward curtailing the mistreatment of animals. I include the decision by the Ringling Brothers circus to phase out the use of elephants in their circus performances as an example. The push-back against the exploitation of whales by Sea World is another. For many reasons, including the arguments advanced by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson in his book Beasts, I am persuaded that our abuse of animals is directly related to the propensity of humans to mistreat other humans.
Also heartening is the attention now being paid to the devastating impact of bullying. Concern over the injuries intrinsic to contact sports also growing. There is probably nothing that would bring our species to a more peaceful future than the elimination of all forms of child abuse. Here, too, there is mounting awareness of the issue, if not yet that much progress in curtailing it.
The destruction of the earth by fracking, filling the oceans with trash and pollutants, damaging coral reefs by various human actions, and the manipulation of plants by genetic modification are other examples of human supremacy that threaten not just the existence of humans but the viability of all life-forms on Earth.
Finally, it is a mystery to me that anyone can deny the connection between the violence we inflict on the people of other nations and the violence that we inflict on each other within the borders of the U.S. of A. They are woven into the same cloth.
Is it not obvious that the glorification of violence places the United States—as a culture and a government—squarely on the wrong side of history? A letter written to the New York Times captured succinctly how we are perceived by others: “Dear America: Not that I expect to persuade you, but just so you know, most of the rest of the world regards your obsession with guns and executions as barbaric. Don’t say you weren’t told.” Vince Calderhead, Nairobi, Kenya, April 30, 2014.5
It’s easy to talk about “paradigm shifts.” Trying to deliberately bring them about is difficult. Nevertheless, conditions are ideal for a new kind of pacifism born of the reality of our time.
Here is the contradiction we face. The urgency of onrushing ecocatastrophe compels humans to cooperate as never before. Drought and flood, water and air pollution, declining precious resources, hunger and pandemics will undoubtedly create tensions across the globe. The prospects for murderous conflict are obviously great. So is the human instinct for survival. As the crisis deepens, will it bring out the worst in humans or something better? I support something better. I don’t assume it happens automatically, but that we can make it so.
A deliberate campaign by supporters of slavery, especially in the United States, elevated “whiteness” as a key component of identity in order to win support for race-based chattel slavery and capitalism. In doing so, whiteness replaced apex identities more tied to religion, ethnic heritage, or cultural interests. The point is that identity concepts are not static. Clearly, therefore, it is possible to reorder our identity priorities now to favor the unity and integrity of all life-forms.
Conversely, the power of the old identity hierarchies of patriarchy, white racism, and wealth are obstacles to achieving the cooperation necessary to save the planet. There are promising signs here, too. Most dramatic is the unprecedented speed with which the West is coming to accept a new paradigm (there’s that word) of acceptable sexual identities. If that can be reordered, so can race and other categories.
As for materialism, that too must pass. Why? Global capitalism as it is currently organized is leading to extinction for humans and other lifeforms. The system of producing for the sake of production and consuming for the sake of consumption is not sustainable. The only question is, how does that system end? Does it end in catastrophe or by achieving a different way of defining the purpose of an economy and a better way of organizing it? I vote for something different. Idealism and survival pragmatism can combine as never before to shape our future.
The People Make the Peace
We face a great opportunity. Appearances to the contrary, U.S. Americans are weary of war abroad and violence at home. And whether we like it or not, the temperature of the ever-simmering debate about Viet Nam is going to be turned up in the years ahead. No less a force than the Pentagon itself with the full support of Congress and the Presidency are going to see to that.
When I first became aware of this, my knee-jerk response was something like, Oh good, we get to have arguments about Viet Nam all over again. Only now, with benefit of hindsight, we can convince even more people that we were right about Viet Nam. I said as much in articles and speeches. But now, I think I was wrong.
Many signs from disparate places are pointing in the same direction. The point is not to engender more conflict. The point is to find the places where healing and learning can take place. In order to address the global crisis of ecocide and econocide we need to overcome divisions of all kinds—race, gender, excessive nation-state loyalty—the whole dang thing. On the other hand, working to overcome such divisions is itself a valuable contribution toward generating the unity of purpose that will allow us to transition out of destructive behaviors that threaten human and other life on earth.
This is not the place to lay out specific strategies and tactics. But some perspective, guidelines, and goals are appropriate:
The people can make the peace. As a peace veteran, I look forward to working with my children, grandchildren, and others to make it happen.