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Docta Ignorantia LXXXIV Why The "Anti-War" Demonstrations During The Vietnam Conflict? I do not agree with the assessment, widely shared in the military and the civilian sectors, that the anti-VN demonstrations started because the sons of the middle class got draft notices. This assessment is based on a view which measures fundamental causes as essentially political. I cannot agree that politics or economics are fundamental causes. Causes, yes. Fundamental ones -- and it's about these that VN compels us -- no. The anti-VN demonstrations were caused by the politicians' refusal to fight VN as a war. They were using Kennan's concept of containment -- which is a questionable police concept -- instead of a military concept. The police concept is inappropriate in the context of international relations. When they did this in Korea MacArthur said "It seared my soul." There are reasons Kennan developed this concept and reasons both Democratic and Republican parties adopted them -- all unsavory reasons that hurt the military and everyone else, ourselves and an enemy. So we got our military force engaged in a totally inappropriate manner: to keep an enemy at bay instead of what it should be, to destroy an enemy's ability to wage war. Inappropriate military engagement is definitionally immoral and it was this immorality of the VN conflict that caused the demonstrations and their success in ending the VN engagement. "Containment" was a colossal immorality derived from a colossally wicked conceptuality and no fault of the military's. It was a political immorality for unsavory political reasons, which I won't detail here. That immorality produced the anti-VN demonstrations and guaranteed their success. The draft on the sons of the middle class was a derivative cause, not a fundamental one. We should exert ourselves always to deal with fundamental causes, so far as we are able. (The enemy of our country -- and specifically of our military -- is Harvard University, in toto. Any time the military are having troubles, the cause is in Cambridge. Harvard University is the locus classicus of evil in our country. Has been since the turn of the century.) I believe that this discrimination of causes is extremely important, to all purposes, and I sorrow not a little that it is not a regular part of the military's own estimate of the times. It should be. It's never too late. Thanks for indulging these thoughts of an old anti-VN demonstrator -- who demonstrated not to avoid the draft but to save the military from getting ground up in the politically caused immorality of not letting the military do their job, which is to win our wars as quickly and with as few casualties as possible -- which in practice means destroying an enemy's capacity to wage war. There can be no "DMZ" in a war. "DMZ" is a questionable police concept. Its use in war is immoral. Truman called Korea a "police action," accurately describing US operational conceptuality, which was immoral for being inappropriate. VN was the same thing, different area but still on the Western littoral of the US defense perimeter: keeping an enemy at bay, using an Army as a police force when the context is of belligerent international sovereignties. Kennan's "Doctrine" was preposterous! (I volunteered for the Navy Chaplain Corps (family precedent) and would have gone -- Navy wanted me, academically pedigreed, etc. -- except the denomination's clergy felt I wasn't a company man (read, homosexual), as indeed I wasn't.) I feel it's important for the military to assess VN demonstrations not fundamentally as anti-draft but as anti-immorality. If I am right about that -- and I am -- the distinction is vitally important and should be disseminated. It will heal scars as well as wounds.
Adwaitha Hermitage
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