Teaching about war in a time of war.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is most to be dreaded because it comprises//////// *** and develops the germ of every other.

~ James Madison, 1788

Until Americans reach college they should not be exposed to the blunders, foibles, frailties of prominent heroes or patriots, or even learn about unsavory aspects of the nation's past such as slavery or the displacement of Indians ... an undiluted patriotism should be inculcated through triumphal and heroic storytelling.

~American Legion Magazine, 1923

No one could accuse James Madison, fourth president of the United States and chief author of the United States Constitution, of lacking patriotism, yet his warning of the dangers to liberty posed by war would be rejected as much by the self-styled guardians of children's minds today--such as the powerful veterans lobby on Capitol Hill--as yesterday. Those who manipulate our civic culture now go to great lengths to suppress the knowledge that Madison and others knew was essential to the protection of the rights they enshrined in the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Nothing is more important to a nation than war and peace for the obvious reason that warfare produces the scourges of killing, dying, and suffering. Beyond the critical matters of life and death, nothing can set members of a society at odds, and create deep and painful cleavages even within families, so much as the inevitable controversies and embitterments that surface when questions of war are debated. Yet ignorance abounds, and alarming misinformation circulates widely in our society today, despite the presence of more information about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than has ever been available to the public previously. Of the stated rationales for war in Iraq not a single one has been verified. Of the stated purposes in Afghanistan none has succeeded. The responsibilities falling to teachers attempting to teach about war in this time of war are therefore exceedingly vital, and, yes, daunting, because of the inevitable charges of disloyalty and "un-Americanism" that emerge when the central premises employed by elites for war are challenged.

The current wars are shaping a future that will be fraught with crisis, not least of which will be the continued menace of terrorist attacks, endless military deployments, and economic hardship for many, perhaps even economic collapse as oil prices continue their frightening rise. As a teacher at the University of Massachusetts Boston for two decades, I can assert that most of what too many young people think they know about the wars of the nation's past is really myth, effectively "Disneyfied" fantasies learned in the service of a national ideology asserting that warfare is an aberration in the American experience, and that the United States goes to war only when enemies (or "evildoers" to use the current catchphrase) leave no other choice.

These myths sustain a false sense of purpose about and justification for conflict in the present and future, to which there appears no likely resolution soon. To teach adequately about war in the present we must not flinch from examining these legends of the past, critiquing standard texts that convey them, and attempting to explode them, particularly in the case of the more prominent wars among the many the United States has waged. We must look closely at who benefits from wars, and who pays the most terrible costs and consequences; we must also dissect the process, and hold it up to the standards of truth, about how those with the political power to go to war shape and deliver their rationales and justifications to the public.

Depending upon the media source, and with varying degrees of veracity, students today are witnessing what they have never seen before--real wars fought in real time, with real casualties, and with far ranging social and political consequences yet to unfold. Because, however, many have grown up in the cyber age and have played computer games for much of their lives--and for boys, often games that purport to simulate warfare and other forms of violence--an atmosphere of unreality has been established that carries over into everyday life. The mass indifference to the suffering and casualties depicted on television screens is a telling indication of desensitization that elicits little more emotional or intellectual impact on viewers than the virtual images generated on computer screens. My own sampling of university students, to say nothing of younger, less sophisticated ones, indicates that few are reading on their own about these wars with any depth, or seeking out detailed reportage or analysis.

This mystifies and annoys many of their elders, from both the generation that witnessed World War II and Korea, and the Vietnam generation, where key issues were central and some measures of sophisticated knowledge about them was of vital importance. A much larger proportion of the population during these wars had a direct relationship to their consequences, either because they were in the armed forces personally, or had close relatives who were, or because they may have been subject to military conscription themselves at one point.

This is not true today. Despite the glorification of the military and martial culture that the mass media have developed, a shrinking number of Americans have real experience of war, and a very small percentage of the population is serving in the current wars, though the probability is high that measures to recruit more will ensue, or, absent a radical shift in policy, even that a draft will be reinstated. Mass media culture itself is also an enemy of critical awareness and analysis since electronic imagery and the "sound bite" have steadily eroded verbal literacy since the end of World War II.

Many teachers have seen the antiwar film (U.S., 1930), All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the important novel (Germany, 1929), both of which, though written and produced decades ago, have lost none of their power and impact. The film's initial scenes involve German citizens parading in the streets, ecstatic that World War I has come. We are introduced to a group of callow high school boys who become subject to the dishonest blandishments of a teacher, who, though never near a battlefield himself, regales them with highblown rhetoric and stories of patriotism and glory, encouraging them to enlist in the Kaiser's army--dulce et decorum est. We then follow a number of these boys who, accepting their teacher's counsel, are quickly injected into the broiling cauldron of the trenches. Later, when the main character, disillusioned and despairing, returns home briefly for leave, he visits his old school, hoping to address those he knows are the new crop of the dead and maimed. Believing his former pupil will reinforce his own propaganda, the teacher assents, only to recoil as the young man begins a sorrowful litany of the terrors, falsehoods, and waste of the war. He is quickly scorned, by his former teacher of course, but more importantly by the naive and hopelessly romantic boys who will have none of his bitterness and reject his harrowing facts, demanding tales of heroism and glory.

Like the students on the receiving end of the methods outlined by the American Legion in the epigram above, the boys in All Quiet have been victimized by an essentially false, yet widely indoctrinated, "patriotic" history common to all national ideologies. Not long ago, while demonstrating against the war in Iraq with a Veterans for Peace contingent outside Boston's Park Street subway station, I and my fellows were approached by excited kids of junior high school age, who were quite curious about our signs, and flyers, and what we were saying. We had no sooner engaged them than they were shepherded rapidly away by their teacher, a man in his thirties, who declared, "Come along kids, these guys hate their country!" What a lost "teaching moment!" What profound irresponsibility on the part of that teacher who abused his considerable power to effect critical thought by suppressing an opportunity for students to participate in a direct and active learning encounter! It was chilling to contemplate what these impressionable minds might be "learning" in their classroom about the all-Important events that are shaping their futures. Certainly not the principles embodied in the First Amendment, and certainly not respect for the men and women demonstrating who were trying to tell their fellow citizens something about which they had profound knowledge.

It is a rare student, including we who were students once ourselves, who has not been subject at a critical stage of intellectual development to such deformations of knowledge about the present and about our collective past. Often the crystallized idealism resulting in the minds of the young from such falsification is very difficult to overcome when teaching about a subject as loaded with discord or confusion as war. Students may become resentful when exposed to information that contradicts or threatens their cherished ideas. On the other hand, teachers must also be prepared to challenge the cynicism (one might say "anti-patriotism") one may encounter among students who, for one reason or another, have disabused themselves of idealism, and, as a result, may reject political activity, and even retreat into anti-intellectualism. Other difficulties, as noted, involve the ideological tenet that has long been embedded in American civic culture and school curricula, the doctrine of "American exceptionalism," which asserts that, unlike most other nations, the United States was founded exclusively on high-minded principles and has always conducted itself according to those ideals. With specific reference to war, the doctrine holds that the United States has always been a peace-loving nation that goes to war only when evildoers leave us no other option. Thus, another central dogma is that the United States always wages war according to the principles of justness.

Such naive idealism often masks very serious misinformation about specific wars, and too often serves as cover for egregious omissions of important facts, as James Loewen has documented in his important study, Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), showing clearly how many widely used high school history texts "get it wrong." Also, though First Amendment principles are often given lip-service, in many schools students who challenge teachers' or curricular assertions, or ask probing questions, are openly discouraged.

At the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where I teach in the American Studies program, all of my courses involve war and its many consequences. Most students at UMB come from the bottom half of American society--lower-middle class, working-class, racial minorities, and significant numbers of veterans, including many students who had joined Army Reserve or National Guard units in order to get free tuition and were forced to drop out when they were called to active duty suddenly. Thus, UMB students (and students at most public colleges and universities) are most likely to be among those who, one way or another, pay the costs of the current wars, and therefore deserve the best and fullest information possible.

I offer courses that deal with the War in Vietnam, World War II, and the Cold War, but my approach in all these courses follows a model encompassed in a separate course entitled "War in American Culture." In this course we examine numerous cultural productions from different eras and perspectives--essays, stories, poems, films, novels, political cartoons--and begin with the central question, "Is the United States an inherently peace-loving nation that goes to war only when others leave no option; or is war the American way of life?"

We examine three different paradigms of "the American way of war" in brief (2-3 pages) essays that I have written myself to outline the basic tenets of each model (Teachers who wish copies of these should feel free to contact me). The Idealist creed encompasses the doctrine of exceptionalism; the Dissenter's version scrutinizes the claims of the idealist and subjects them to the test of evidence; and the Jingoist school of thought is essentially the "might makes right" version, which has a long history (just think Teddy Roosevelt and his Big Stick), though these days is usually packaged in idealistic rhetoric.

Each of these treatments examines numerous aspects of American warfare, including rationales for war, questions of patriotism and constitutional guarantees, especially of free speech, issues of conscription, the treatment of veterans, and attitudes toward enemies. The Idealist, for example, makes the following argument about military recruitment and the draft that students analyze and discuss.

   We are surrounded by other nations
   which are inimical to our way of
   life ... (thus) the voice of the people
   has always been the final authority
   in decisions to go to war. Likewise,
   the people themselves have always
   been ready to sacrifice, through
   their taxes or their very lives, to
   ensure that our way of life survives
   ... our armed forces, therefore,
   have always been staffed by volunteers
   willing to make the ultimate
   sacrifice. Even when conscription
   has been in force, the draft laws represent
   the will of the people.

The Dissenter addresses this particular unsupported assertion with countervailing evidence.

   Ironically, in a nation devoted to
   the arts of war, universal military
   service has often been dodged.
   Congress allowed the rich to purchase
   draft deferments for $300
   during the Civil War, thereby
   ensuring the poor would serve in
   their place.... The student deferment
   during the Vietnam War
   ensured that those who could
   afford college would not serve
   while the working classes and
   minorities were drafted. Many of
   those in positions of power
   today, who argue for a strong
   military, and who supported the
   Gulf War, avoided military service
   themselves during Vietnam.
   Today we have an all-volunteer
   army because of widespread opposition
   to the Vietnam War. Yet
   those who serve in today's military
   are drawn overwhelmingly from
   the same classes which characterized
   the Vietnam era.

For my treatment of jingoism I rely mainly upon the words of the Jingoes themselves. The all-time archjingo/nationalist is Teddy Roosevelt. It is difficult to escape the implications of many of his statements.

   I should say that personally I
   would rather welcome a foreign
   war. It is very difficult for me not
   to wish war with Spain for such a
   war would result at once in getting
   a proper navy ... in strict confidence
   I should welcome almost
   any war....

   All the great masterful races have
   been fighting races ... and the
   minute that a race loses the fighting
   virtues then ... it has lost its
   proud right to stand as the equal
   of the best. No triumph of peace is
   quite so great as the supreme triumphs
   of war.

Another statement from the era of "honest" jingoism is from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

   We have a record of conquest, colonization
   and expansion
   unequalled by any people in the
   19th Century. We are not to be
   curbed now ... for the sake of our
   commercial supremacy we should
   control the Hawaiian Islands.

The expression of such reactionary and openly imperial sentiments is today politically impossible. While the current administration couches its rationale for war in Iraq with the usual platitudes about democracy and freedom, behind the scenes the real goals have been expressed quite clearly. Citizens and students need to be aware of this. The most influential members of George W. Bush's administration have styled themselves The Project for the New American Century. In their manifesto and other documents, published on their website, they are quite open about the real agenda, which includes preventing the rise of any power that could rival the United States (including allies), establishing economic, political, cultural and military dominance (including of outer space), establishing key bases across the globe from which to strike potential threats to the agenda, and control of Middle East oil reserves and refineries. As New American Centurists put matters, they want "full-spectrum dominance," another word for global dominion.

A good source for the words of decision makers across the breadth of United States history is Joel Andreas, Addicted To War: Why The United States Can't Kick Militarism (AK Press, Oakland, CA, 2004), a work endorsed by Veterans for Peace. This is a critical examination of the history of American militarism in comic book form and is filled with useable quotes. Some teachers may have the leeway to use the entire book itself, at least in tandem with the relatively few texts most often used in school systems. Using alternative texts like Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1990) or Mickey Z's Seven Deadly Spins (2004), or the essay by Major General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket!(2003) or Loewen's study, in comparison with standard texts, can be illuminating, or at least can open students' minds to critical questions.

It is difficult to offer exact advice to high school or junior high teachers who may wish to experiment with this approach, since the new

emphasis on teaching to high-stakes tests is trumping more critical approaches, and teachers at the lower-levels usually don't have time to spend on the many wars the United States has waged, or even the ones more relevant to the present like World War II and Vietnam. A teacher committed to teaching honestly about war might try to explode the myths and legends that have been fostered with respect to key conflicts like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam, thereby building a questioning approach to the conflicts today, though public school teachers must be cognizant that this can have negative consequences for a teacher's tenure (itself a gloomy commentary on "freedom of speech"). Some citizens of the wealthy and "liberal" Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, angrily objected to guest appearances in the city's high schools by even so renowned a figure as Howard Zinn because he was "undermining patriotism." Given the real history of this nation's founding by active dissenters, it is vitally important for teachers to demonstrate that dissent is patriotic.

Examining the issue of patriotism is critical. We are all aware of the implications embodied in the Patriot Act and asserted by its proponents, that opposition to current policies is unpatriotic. What is Patriotism? Is marching in lock-step unquestioningly to the wishes of elected officials patriotism? Are members of an administration drawn largely from the Vietnam generation, who supported that war but who declined to serve in it, thereby ensuring the less affluent and less well-connected would do all the killing and dying, patriotic? Are those who favor war and offer lies and deceptions to promote it, yet want others to shoulder the risks and costs, patriotic? Is a President who exploited his status as the son of a congressman to get a coveted and safe slot in the Texas National Guard, precisely to avoid service in Vietnam, a war he wholeheartedly supported, patriotic? Is that President, who now asks another generation to take the kinds of risks he would not assume himself at their age, patriotic? Or is patriotism really about responsibility--the duty of citizens to govern themselves best by actively seeking out information and holding their elected officials to the standards of truth, honesty, and integrity?

War has historically been a threat to democracy; it has also forced citizens to come to grips with that threat and progressively to legislate or otherwise institutionalize even more safeguards against dangers emanating from sources of power. Few students study the United States Constitution in any depth any more, a sad curricular failure in my estimation. Some school districts are prosperous enough to send children on field trips to Washington, D.C., and the National Archives where the original, hand-written Constitution and Declaration of Independence are enshrined in a quasi-religious setting. Indeed, to get close enough to read the scripts a pilgrim must kneel as if at an altar. But as I tell my students, unless the principles and civic rights enunciated in the documents are permanently set in their minds and hearts, they possess no more value than empty scraps of paper.

Clearly, there is no practical problem in demonstrating that the United States as an independent nation was established by war and bloodshed. Americans celebrate this fact every Fourth of July by emphasizing the effort to be liberated from the tyranny of England as primary evidence for the Revolution as intrinsically a "just war." Throughout American history this event has always served as an essential paradigm for the American way of war writ large (as has World War II), that our wars are and were, from the beginning, waged for "freedom" or "democracy" and not, as in the case of other nations, for motives so base as greed for booty or blind aggression. But, of course, long before independence we were engaged in war, ethnic cleansing, and the annexation of the lands of others.

While the Founders' objections to "taxation without representation" certainly had merit, that taxation imposed by the British Parliament was intended to cover the cost of fighting the French and their aboriginal allies, in order to protect the American colonists, a war in which George Washington served as an officer less than a generation previous to the Revolution. Thus, in taking up arms against his government in 1776, this founding father was committing treason and would have been hanged had he lost the war. If we examine the backgrounds and words of most of those who played key roles in the Revolution, and the subsequent creation of these United States, we see pecuniary and selfish motives at work constantly, papered over with high-sounding rhetoric. As Charles Beard showed, in his groundbreaking An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), a majority of the founders wished to replace the British and profit from control of the continent's riches themselves.

But the all-important lesson that the nation was founded upon dissent presents itself too. Opposition to unjust and oppressive government policies is the very centerpiece of "Americanism," and it was this that fostered the addition of the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. Far from being evidence of disloyalty or "un-Americanism," the right to dissent is enshrined in the First Amendment precisely because it is the primary guarantor of all the other rights. Without the liberty to speak out against the wrongdoings of the powerful, "we the people" would have long since lost the other rights.

Discussion of the reasons the Second Amendment was established may also lead students to understand the principal source the authors of the Constitution saw as the threat to rights, namely government itself. Today this Amendment is usually associated with hunting rights, or the right to protect oneself from street crime, etc. Yet the founders institutionalized the right to bear arms as the safeguard of the peoples' liberties against the unlawful encroachments or abuses by government. This is a fact seemingly lost on modern generations, but it remains as true today as 200 years ago.

Some case studies may work to inspire students to think about key issues. Teachers, especially of history, should be knowledgeable about certain events. Loewen's discussion of key facts omitted from many standard texts on the Civil War is highly useful. Other cases might be the imposition of the Espionage and Sedition Acts during World War I; the jailing of Eugene Debs and others for exercising their right to free speech; the consequent articulation of the Supreme Court's "clear and present danger" doctrine, whereby speaking out against war was equated with shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. The sinking of the British passenger ship, the Lusitania, in 1915, opens questions about President Woodrow Wilson's real commitment to neutrality.

World War II offers much stimulation to critical thought because it is so cavalierly called the "Good War": President Franklin Roosevelt's dissimulations about the de facto naval war waged in the North Atlantic in 1940-1941 against Nazi Germany in hopes of provoking a crisis to reverse public opinion against American entry into the European war; the half-century long naval preparations for war with Japan, in which Pearl Harbor was known to be the key--for both sides; the information that the code-breaking system known as Magic and Radio Direction Finders gave the United States government with respect to Japanese intentions on Pearl Harbor, thereby casting doubt on the "surprise" nature of the attack; the case of the internment of Japanese-Americans despite critical intelligence in the government's possession that they did not constitute a national security threat; the failure of Washington to do anything substantial to rescue Europe's Jews when it knew in late 1941 of the beginning of the Holocaust; finally, the essential questions surrounding the military "necessity" of the atomic bombings is of enormous importance. All of these issues resonate with events today.

The Vietnam War, despite its massive polarizing effects on the nation, remains terra incognita to most youngsters today, who know little or nothing of the war's origins in the 1950s when the United States supplanted France in Indochina. President Lyndon Johnson's cynical lies to the public about events in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, in order to build support for a war he and his advisers had been planning, bears comparisons to FDR's deceptions about events in the North Atlantic in 1940-1941, as they do to the current President's lies about Iraq. Suppression of the My Lai massacre in 1968 by the army can be compared to the attempt to cover up what transpired at Abu Graib in 2003/2004. Though no organized group of veterans had ever before returned from any war in American history to condemn it and urge the citizens to stop it, Vietnam Veterans Against the War were a major factor in convincing many Americans to do just that. A number of documentary films are available that treat the views of VVAW, including Winter Soldier, Citizen Soldiers: Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Unfinished Symphony: Democracy And Dissent.

In the cases of Gulf War I, and the present debacle in Iraq being waged in the name of the "war on terror," emphasis should be placed on Washington's longstanding relationship with Saddam Hussein, including the Central Intelligence Agency's efforts that resulted in Saddam's rise to Iraq's presidency; the United States government's complicity in providing him with the arms to invade Iran, and with the weapons and materials that Saddam used to create banned chemical and biological weapons there were then used against Iranians and Kurds within Iraq, all in violation of international and United States law. Donald Rumsfeld's infamous handshake with the Iraqi butcher speaks for itself and is available in video and still photos. So too should teachers expose the funding by the CIA of the Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1970s, and then turned their weapons against the United States.

Consider urging students to parse provocative statements by military officials or veterans such as from Butler's pamphlet noted above (in the years just prior to WWII Butler was a widely respected military figure, having won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and who spoke strongly against the coming war) or from General Anthony Zinni, at one time the commander of the United States Central Command in the Middle East, and President Bush's handpicked special envoy to the Middle East who, after resigning, said the following with respect to war in Iraq to an audience of military officers:

   My contemporaries, our feelings
   and sensitivities were forged on the
   battlefields of Vietnam, where we
   heard the garbage and the lies, and
   we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it
   happening again? (1)

Compare this quote to one made by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Shoup, in 1964, on the eve of the Vietnam War.

   I believe that if we had, and
   would, keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked
   fingers out of the business
   of these nations so full of
   depressed, exploited people, they
   will arrive at a solution of their
   own ... and not the American
   style, which they don't want and
   above all don't want shoved down
   their throats by Americans. (2)

Neither of these statements, despite the prominence and military experience of their authors, were reported widely. Why not?

As teachers we know that our students encounter the drumbeat of official rationales for war first and most loudly. We know too that, as the saying goes, war is so important to its proponents that it must be accompanied "by a bodyguard of lies." If "speaking truth to power" is the responsibility of the educated and the intellectuals, then this burden and responsibility falls most directly on the educators.