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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Vietnam War

Who Wants It More?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on Who Wants It More?

Tags

Alon Peled, Bravery, combat, David Ben-Gurion, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Patton, IDF, Israel, Israeli Army, Israeli History, Meir Amit, Mossad, Napoelon Bonaparte, Vietnam War, War, warfare, World War Two

Soldier at Wailing Wall

“The willingness to fight and die, to sacrifice for a cause, has often been vital in changing history. Napoleon Bonaparte remarked that in war the mental is to the physical as 3:1. George Patton demurred that the mental to the physical is closer to 5:1. In many revolutions (English, American, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranian), the side weaker in weapons and numbers but superior in will to fight triumphed. This will to power, as Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, was critical to success. Alon Peled observed that, in modern armies, the most important factors for success are internal cohesion and the dedication of soldiers. Mossad chief Meir Amit asserted that, ‘the human factor is the biggest and most crucial for our society and our security services.’

A weak will to fight has repeatedly led to disaster. In 1940, the French, despite equal numbers of tanks and manpower to the Germans, lacked a will to fight and were defeated in a six-week campaign. In 1975 the South Vietnamese army, despite massive qualitative and quantitative advantage, was rapidly routed by an inferior North Vietnamese army which lacked airplanes, tanks, or sophisticated equipment — but had a greater will to fight…

After millennia of persecution, the Holocaust and Arab terrorism, the Jews had a very strong will to fight. They were well aware that they had nowhere to go. They saw the struggle as a life-and-death one determining the fate of the Jewish people. David Ben Gurion told his commanders that ‘We will not win by military might alone. Even if we could field a larger army, we could not stand. The most important thing is moral and intellectual strength.’ Yigael Yadin, Israel’s first chief of staff, assessed the will to victory as the most important factor in the victory in 1948, for:

If we are to condense all the various factors, and there are many, which brought about victory, I would not hesitate to credit the extraordinary qualities of Israel’s youth, during the War of Independence with that victory. It appears as if that youth has absorbed into itself the full measure of Israel’s yearning, during thousands of years of exile, to return to its soil and to live in liberty and independence, and like a giant spring which had been compressed and held down for a long time to the utmost measure of its compressibility, when suddenly released — it liberated.

During the 1945-48 period they fought against the British Mandatory government and then the Arabs. The British had almost 100,000 soldiers and police, first-class equipment, international legitimacy, Arab support and the halo of their great successes in World War II. The far fewer Jews, unable to mobilize openly, with little military experience, without uniforms or heavy equipment, fought off first the British and then the numericaly superior Arabs to achieve independence in May 1948.”

__________

Pulled from the twelfth chapter of Jonathan Edelman’s The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State. The picture: an IDF soldier after recapturing the Wailing Wall in 1967, 18 years after Israel’s independence.

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The Wisdom of Paul Newman

26 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Film

≈ Comments Off on The Wisdom of Paul Newman

Tags

Acting, Eugene McCarthy, Films, movies, Oscars, Paul Newman, quotes, Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon's Enemies List, Vietnam War, Wisdom

Paul Newman

“A man with no enemies is a man with no character.”

“You only grow when you are alone.”

“It’s more of a challenge.” (In response to being asked why he chose to identify with the Jewish side of his ethnicity)

“It’s like chasing a beautiful woman for 80 years. Finally, she relents and you say, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I’m tired.'” (After winning his first Oscar after so many losses)

“When you see the right thing to do, you’d better do it.”

“Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”

“If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”

“I had no natural gift to be anything — not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, not a painter of garden porches — not anything. So I’ve worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.”

“I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being… by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.”

“Who’s to say who’s an expert?”

“Acting isn’t really a creative profession. It’s an interpretative one.”

“Newman’s first law: It is useless to put on your brakes when you’re upside down.”

“Newman’s second law: Just when things look darkest, they go black.”

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

“The problem with getting older is you still remember how things used to be.”

“I’ve repeatedly said that for people with as little in common as Joanne and myself, we have an uncommonly good marriage. We are actors. We make pictures and that’s about all we have in common. Maybe that’s enough. Wives shouldn’t feel obligated to accompany their husbands to a ball game; husbands do look a bit silly attending morning coffee breaks with the wives… Husbands and wives should have separate interests, cultivate different sets of friends and not impose on the other… You can’t spend a lifetime breathing down each other’s necks.”

“Show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.”

“Every time I get a script it’s a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It’s like falling in love. You can’t give a reason why.”

“I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried – who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn’t complacent, who doesn’t cop out.”

Paul Newman

__________

Paul Newman was born on this day in 1925. If I could live the life of anyone in the past century, I’d probably go with Newman’s.

If you want to know more, pick up a copy of Shawn Levy’s biography Paul Newman: A Life. If you want to see more, flip through Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures.

Despite his Oscar, Emmy, and six Golden Globes, Newman claimed that his greatest accomplishment was being number nineteen on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. He garnered this “accolade” due to his support for Eugene McCarthy, for whom he campaigned in 1968. Newman was also a vocal and highly visible opponent of the Vietnam War. In the short video below, you can hear him forcefully criticizing both the war and the American public’s insulation from its human toll.

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Dissent, Not Disloyalty: MLK’s Immortal Words on Vietnam

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics, Speeches, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

America, American History, American Politics, citizenship, Dante, Dissent, Divine Comedy, Government, Imperialism, Inferno, Law, Martin Luther King Jr., MLK Jr., Opposition, Patriotism, protest, Vietnam, Vietnam War, War

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ says Jesus, ‘and the truth shall set you free.’ Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…

Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition…

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death…

MLK and Lyndon Johnson

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love…

America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are bothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State — they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America’s strayed away…

And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.'”

MLK and Lyndon Johnson

__________

Some favorite sections from Martin Luther King’s sermon “Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, spoken at Riverside Church in New York, on April 30th, 1967. Find it in his collected speeches.

As a small note: King was channeling John F. Kennedy when he cited Dante above. In 1963, when he was signing the charter that established the German Peace Corps in Bonn, West Germany, Kennedy remarked, “Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” This comment is probably based on a simplistic reading of the third canto of The Inferno.

But since I’ve just slogged through the relevant part of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Dante, I feel I can be petty enough to say that both King and Kennedy seem to have never picked up The Divine Comedy. In Dante’s vision of the underworld, it is traitors — not cowards or equivocators — who get it the worst. In Kokytos, the ninth and final circle of the underworld, there are four concentric rings, starting with Caina, for traitors to blood relatives (hence, “Cain”), and ending with Judecca, for those who are traitorous to their masters. I’ll let you infer the namesake of that circle. And one more thing, the punishment isn’t fire; it’s ice.

…Well, that got morbid. Back to King. His opposition to Vietnam was so unwavering and so cogent. Dissent is not disloyalty; but, then as now, people don’t seem to get that. They assume that supporting government policy, even in its most baseless and ruinous permutations, is equatable to supporting the people whom government is tasked with representing. And as one of the vast majority of Americans who explicitly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can’t help but overlay his comments atop the decade-high pile of imperial waste we have just burned through.

Watch a short clip of King discussing Muhammad Ali in the context of the Vietnam War:

Listen to the entire opposition speech:

More from Dr. King:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and His Wife and Daughter

The Mountaintop: Martin Luther King’s Last Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested.

How You Should Break the Law

Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching

Loving Your Enemies

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“On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth

29 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Assad, combat, Hayden Carruth, Military, On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam, Plato, Poem, poetry, Syria, Vietnam War, War, Wilfred Owen, Writing

Hayden Carruth

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don’t remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

__________

“On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth, which you’ll encounter in his Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991.

“Mortui solum finem belli viderunt”; Plato, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” As Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous modern war poet remarked (in a phrase now inscribed above ‘Poets’ Corner’ in Westminster Abbey), ”My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

I am, of course, bearing in mind the impeding and it seems inevitable U.S. intervention in Syria. I wish I had gone on the record earlier about this — and at least some of my friends will know what my position was — but I was in favor of a U.S. or multilateral strike on Assad’s armaments in May of last year. I have since changed my mind, as I now think the Obama administration is making a grave mistake in focusing on a narrowly tactical rather than broadly strategic, coalition-based course of action. But then again, the real Catch-22 of the matter stems from Assad’s alliances with Russia and to a lesser degree China, which dictate that no matter what the U.S. decides to do, our actions will not have the official sanction of the UN Security Council. So there’s no workable path which would involve a legally constituted, united coalition, as we had in the First Gulf War.

The above picture is of Hayden Carruth.

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