We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Death on Your Doorstep

by Nick Turse from Tom Dispatch. 

The author reviews a documentary film entitled, "Restrepo" by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. He contrasts their portrayal of the Afghan war, which has been received with widespread acclaim in mainstream media, with mainstream coverage of the Vietnam War, and the volunteer soldier with the citizen soldier of that earlier war.
It didn’t take rocket-scientists to figure out that you couldn’t conduct long-term, wheel-spinning occupations in distant lands with a military like that [ref. Vietnam War].  And so the long-occupation-friendly all-volunteer force that Junger has come to know was born.  That he has such a hard time understanding the citizen-soldier response to the American lost cause in Vietnam essentially ensures that the civilian story of war, especially that of alien civilians in a distant land, would evade his understanding.  This is what makes the relative isolation of the unit he deals with in Restrepo so useful, even comfortable for him as he assesses a very American version of what war is all about.
Having lived through the Vietnam War as an at-home anti-war activist, I don't recall the coverage of that war as portraying the civilian side of it very much, but these current wars have been extremely sanitized. The ruling class has learned much about how to conduct its wars.