W.J. Astore
In November 1971, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt published “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” in the New York Review of Books. Earlier that year, Daniel Ellsberg had shared those highly classified government papers with the U.S. media. They revealed a persistent and systematic pattern of lying and deception by the government about U.S. progress in the Vietnam War. By undermining the people’s trust in government, lies and deception were destabilizing democracy in America, Arendt said. Furthermore, America was witnessing two new and related categories of lying. The first was lying as public relations, the creation and distribution of images substituting for facts and premised in human manipulability (a Madison Avenue approach to war and foreign policy). The second was lying tied to a country’s reputation as embraced by professional “problem-solvers” as the basis for political action. Both categories of lying constituted a crisis to the republic.
Widespread lying during the Vietnam War, Arendt explained, had not been aimed at the enemy, as lies often are in war. Rather, governmental lying had targeted Americans. The enemy could hardly be fooled, but most Americans could – at least for a time. Throughout the war, Arendt noted, senior U.S. government and military officials made decisions about Vietnam with the firm knowledge they could not be carried out, a form of self-deception facilitated by constant goal-shifting. As goals changed and chaos mounted, U.S. officials then became driven by concerns about saving face. Image-making and image-saving took precedence over reality. The truth about Vietnam – that the U.S. was losing the war – hurt, therefore it was denied, especially in public discourse.
Official lies can fool even the officials themselves, a fact Pulitzer prize-winning reporter David Halberstam noted in his prescient book, “The Making of a Quagmire,” published in 1965. With respect to the Kennedy Administration’s support of the corrupt Diem/Nhu government of South Vietnam, Halberstam wrote that:
Having failed to get [the Diem/Nhu regime to make needed] reforms, our officials said that these reforms were taking place; having failed to improve the demoralized state of the [South] Vietnamese Army, the Americans talked about a new enthusiasm in the Army; having failed to change the tactics of the [South Vietnamese] military, they talked about bold new tactics which were allegedly driving the Communists back. For the essence of our policy was: There is no place else to go.
When reporters began to file stories which tended to show that the [U.S.] policy was not working, its authors, President Kennedy and General [Maxwell] Taylor, clung to it stubbornly. At least part of the explanation for this apparent blindness is that although they knew things were going wrong, they felt that the alternatives were worse.
This “blindness,” a sustained willingness to deny harsh truths about the Vietnam War, persisted throughout the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. U.S. leaders continued to package and sell a losing effort as a winning product. It helped, in Arendt’s words, that U.S. officials had “a truly amazing and entirely honest ignorance of the historically pertinent background” when it came to Vietnam. Their ignorance was “honest” in the sense they did not believe facts were all that important to success. What was needed, U.S. officials concluded, were not incontestable facts but the right premises, hypotheses, and theories (such as the infamous Domino Theory) to fit Vietnam within prevailing Cold War orthodoxies. Overwhelming applications of U.S. military power would serve to actuate these premises, facts be damned.
Upon taking power in 1969, the Nixon Administration, which had promised a quick and honorable end to the war, continued the lies of previous administrations. Even as Nixon and Henry Kissinger spoke publicly of peace with honor, they talked privately of a lost war. To shift the blame for defeat, they cast about for scapegoats (as corroborated recently in the HBO documentary, “Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words”). Kissinger settled on South Vietnamese “incompetence” as the primary scapegoat. He reassured Nixon that, after a “decent interval” between U.S. withdrawal and the inevitable South Vietnamese collapse, most Americans would come to see Vietnam as a regrettable (and forgettable) “backwater.” Naturally, harsh facts such as these were ones Nixon and Kissinger refused to share with the American people.
For Hannah Arendt, truth as represented by verifiable facts is the chief stabilizing factor in politics. Lacking truths held in common, action is compromised, judgment is flawed, reality is denied. Deception feeds self-deception until politics is poisoned and collective action for the common good is disrupted. Yet lies cannot be eliminated simply by moral outrage, Arendt noted. Rather, truth must be fought for even as humility before truth must be cultivated.
The American people must fight for the truth: that is the lesson of Arendt’s essay.
Next Week: Part II: More Lies and Deception in the Iraq War of 2003
Bracing Views 
That looks like Eleanor Roosvelt.
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On a recent Russia Today “Crosstalk” program, panel participant Eric Kraus had a great line describing the organized, endemic lying by goveernment officials and diplomats. “They lie to reporters and then believe what they read in the papers.” I would go much further and say that lying has become such an unquestionable way of life within the largely privatized, corporate subsidiary known as the U.S. Government, that if our “public servants” had a choice between lying and telling the truth, with no adverse consequences either way, then they would lie, just to keep in practice; just so they wouldn’t forget how.
To illustrate the point, a bit of history from only the two U.S. administrations before the current one. And with You-Know-Her and You-Know-Him soon back for an encore performance of that “two-for-the-price-of-one” thing, expect no changes to the accepted American policy of:
Boobie Official Mendacity
(from Fernando Po, U.S.A., America’s post-literate retreat to Plato’s Cave)
The characters in government
Will change from time to time
As fashion colors change from green
To slightly lemon-lime
But lying never changes, like
The meter of this rhyme
The former Clinton government
Once wanted to inflict
The normal needless bombing on
A country it had picked
Because its petty potentate
Our boots had never licked
It seems that of the suspects whom
We normally accuse
One stood apart in infamy
Thus him we would abuse
Because he could not stop us so
That made him great to use
Inspectors roamed across his land
Discovering not much
Of mass-destructive weaponry,
And gas, and germs, and such
Thus did Saddam Hussein refuse
To come through in the clutch
So in frustration Bubba Bill
Turned Madam Albright loose
To use up some “diplomacy”
Much like a hangman’s noose
To threaten peace with war until
War seemed our only ruse
A decade’s worth of sanctions failed
To bring the tyrant down
But only starved his children which
Caused few of us to frown
If hungry Arab kids can’t swim
We say: “Then let them drown”
“We think the price is worth it,” said
Ms Albright in her way
Yet glib and airy phrases left
No food upon the tray
Just surly scorn for diplomats
Who never have to pay
But still those damned inspectors caused
Our President to pout:
To bomb might make them hostages
Which could extend the bout
To something more than half a round
And not the hoped-for rout
This Bubba Bill could not abide:
So he asked the UN
To have its people leave and tell
Him where and how and when
So he could blame their absence on
Saddam and all his men
To pull off this duplicity
He needed lies to spout
And so he took the muzzle off
Of Madam Albright’s snout
So she could lie and say Saddam
Had forthwith “kicked them out”
And so with the inspectors gone
And nothing more to say
The bomber pilots got to fly
Three miles above harm’s way
And blitz some helpless cities
Just to earn their monthly pay
Just so with Boobie Bumbler George
Who also wanted in
To knock about the whipping boy
And all his clan and kin
Yet once again inspectors proved
An obstacle to spin
They’d gone ahead and done their jobs
And found no smoking gun
Which vexed another President
Who so much needed one
To validate more lies and his
Vendetta left undone
“He tried to kill my daddy!” swore
The vengeful Boobie Bush
“I know because the CIA
Has searched the Hindu Kush;
And found out lots of stuff, so now
I say shove comes to push”
So Boobie George told the UN
That its men hadn’t found
What Boobie George and Dick and Don
Knew lay somewhere around
Someplace where only they could see
On undiscovered ground
And Boobie Condoleeza Rice
And Colin Powell, too,
Proved once again that Black folks lie
Just like the White ones do
Repeating what no one believed
Exactly right on cue
With summer coming on so soon
And springtime cool so short
The bombing had to start at once
Lest hot weather abort
Mad plans to land upon a ship
Sent steaming back to port
And so once more the snoops and hounds
Packed up and left Iraq
The UN wished to take no part
In Bush’s planned attack
Yet still the obvious and bald
Required a little slack
To cover for their rush to war
The Bush Bunch needed spin
They claimed they had no choice because
They wanted so to win
And bad Saddam had not allowed
Inspectors to come in
Thus here we have a sorry tale
Of two groups sworn to tell
No truth if they could help it
And they could, so what the hell?
And Boobies, anyway, had grown
Accustomed to the smell
Saddam Hussein had let a host
Of spies stay at his inn
But yet it didn’t change a thing
Or mitigate his sin
Bill lied about the “kicking out”
And George the “letting in”
The Presidents who work for us
Decline to let us know
The things we need to supervise
Their fumbling tell-and-show
So wars begin on schedule and
The piles of bodies grow
Bill Clinton swore one type of lie;
George Bush another kind
They both had lied so much that each
Thought none would ever mind
With Boobies all so fast asleep
The bland could lead the blind
If once their lips commence to move
A lie we should suspect
And if their lips should move again
We should at once reflect
That we can — in their moving lips —
A naked lie detect
Their lying we should not expect
To bother them that much
To make them tell the truth would be
To rob them of their crutch
If they could choose, they’d lie so that
They wouldn’t loose their touch
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2005
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Reblogged this on Bracing Views and commented:
In today’s New York Times, there’s an obituary for Donald Duncan, a Green Beret and master sergeant who became an early and outspoken critic of America’s war in Vietnam. The obituary is at this link http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/donald-w-duncan-79-ex-green-beret-and-early-critic-of-vietnam-war-is-dead.html, and I want to highlight some of what Duncan said about that war. Here are two excerpts: “The whole thing [the war] was a lie,” Mr. Duncan wrote. “We weren’t preserving freedom in South Vietnam. There was no freedom to preserve. To voice opposition to the government meant jail or death. Neutralism was forbidden and punished. Newspapers that didn’t say the right thing were closed down. People are not even free to leave, and Vietnam is one of those rare countries that doesn’t fill its American visa quota.” Another quotation: He concluded that America was destined to lose the war. “I don’t think Vietnam will be better off under Ho’s brand of communism,” he said. “But it’s not for me or my government to decide. That decision is for the Vietnamese. I also know that we have allowed the creation of a military monster that will lie to our elected officials, and that both of them will lie to the American people.” These words, coming from a decorated combat veteran with direct knowledge of events in Vietnam, must be remembered. Yet as the NYT obituary makes clear, Duncan died in obscurity, all but forgotten. We need to remember people like him: people who are willing to speak up and tell uncomfortable truths.
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Appreciated that you made electronic copy of Donald Duncan’s obit and written words about Vietnam War lies available. Thank you.
Vietnam War Drafted-for-Combat Honorable Service
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Well done. Important. Timely. Needed. Thank you. The dejasvu US Militarism of today is sickening.
-draft age during ‘Nam, gassed in Chicago’68, and sick of the “America” that is epitomized in the Michael Ware documentary Only The Dead See The End Of War.
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