did in Vietnam—and Laos and Cambodia—because we turned the page on it so quickly and never dared take a real look back, we never, in the phrase of George H. W. Bush, “kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” It still haunts us.
However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country—and they remain monstrously large—we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of…well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.
Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?
TWO
How to Garrison a Planet
Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy
The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the “airship”—historically, these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe’s burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance. And they continued to do so for a long, long time. Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is considered to have taken off at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rush of European powers to build ever larger, ever more powerful, “all-big-gun” battleships—the “dreadnoughts” (scared of nothings).
In “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a remarkable travel book that takes you into the heart of European darkness (via an actual trip through Africa), the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist offers the following comments on that sixteenth-century seaborne moment when Europe was still a barbaric outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:
Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the
world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tatars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.
Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns…. Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them.
For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their shipborne cannons, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits, as indicated by a well-known passage about a French warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad’s novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness :
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight.
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in
However busy we may be, whatever tasks await us here in this country—and they remain monstrously large—we do need to make an honest, clear-headed assessment of what we did (and, in some cases, continue to do), of the horrors we committed in the name of…well, of us and our “safety.” We need to face who we’ve been and just how badly we’ve acted, if we care to become something better.
Now, read that list again, my list of just the known knowns, and ask yourself: Aren’t we the people your mother warned you about?
TWO
How to Garrison a Planet
Twenty-First-Century Gunboat Diplomacy
The wooden sailing ship mounted with cannons, the gunboat, the battleship, and finally the “airship”—historically, these proved the difference between global victory and staying at home, between empire and nothing much at all. In the first couple of centuries of Europe’s burst onto the world stage, the weaponry of European armies and their foes was not generally so disparate. It was those cannons on ships that decisively tipped the balance. And they continued to do so for a long, long time. Traditionally, in fact, the modern arms race is considered to have taken off at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rush of European powers to build ever larger, ever more powerful, “all-big-gun” battleships—the “dreadnoughts” (scared of nothings).
In “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a remarkable travel book that takes you into the heart of European darkness (via an actual trip through Africa), the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist offers the following comments on that sixteenth-century seaborne moment when Europe was still a barbaric outcropping of Euro-Asian civilization:
Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the
world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tatars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.
Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns…. Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them.
For a while, Europeans ruled the coasts where nothing could stand up to their shipborne cannons, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century in Africa, as well as on the Asian mainland, they moved inland, taking their cannons upriver with them. For those centuries, the ship was, in modern terms, a floating military base filled with the latest in high-tech equipment. And yet ships had their limits, as indicated by a well-known passage about a French warship off the African coast from Joseph Conrad’s novel about the Congo, Heart of Darkness :
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight.
Well, maybe it wasn’t quite so droll if you happened to be on land, but the point remains. Of course, sooner or later the Europeans did make it inland with the musket, the rifle, the repeating rifle, the machine gun, artillery, and finally, by the twentieth century, the airplane filled with bombs or even, as in
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