In Search of Monsters
This week: a conversation with Andrew Bacevich about the sorrows of empire. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
When you tune into Open Source over the next few months, you’ll hear about the disasters of empire; the failures of militaristic foreign policy; and the possibilities for peaceful, diplomatic solutions. During this time, Open Source is proudly collaborating with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; we’re calling this sequence of shows In Search of Monsters: The Rise and Fall of American Empire. And this week’s conversation with the institute’s president, historian Andrew Bacevich, establishes what In Search of Monsters is all about.
Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, describes his moments of recognition and revelation about the calamities of American foreign policy, including revelations on the Vietnam War. In 1965, he says,
I would be among those who accepted that the cause was an important one, that the United States had a vital U.S. national interest in ensuring the survival of the Republic of Vietnam. Why did I believe that? Because I believed in the domino theory, because I believed that communism was a monolith and that therefore a communist North Vietnam aspiring to reunify the country—that that represented a direct threat to the well-being of the United States. That’s what the United States government said. That was their justification for the war. That’s what I believed. By the time I got there in 1970, that was a difficult belief to sustain. And once Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic in 1972, of course, it was impossible to sustain notions of of monolithic communism . . .
Things would change especially after the war:
I began to think more deeply about Vietnam. Not so much about my personal role, which was really insignificant, but about where Vietnam fits in our national narrative. And I really have come to believe that it wasn’t simply a mistake. Obviously, it was a mistake. Obviously, it was an unnecessary war. I think it was a crime. And of course that’s what the people on the other side of the barricades back in the 60s, meaning the antiwar movement, the protesters, that’s what they were saying at the time, that this was a criminal undertaking. I wasn’t willing to accept that then. I think that they were certainly right.
A related turn has defined Bacevich’s work as a public intellectual. Recently, he co-founded the Quincy Institute, a think tank inspired by the John Quincy Adams line that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Bacevich explains the legacy of JQA:
So John Quincy Adams as secretary of state is warning the country against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. That is to say, to embark upon militaristic or imperial adventurism, because, he said, to do so would be to put at risk our own freedom and our own democracy. And we in the Quincy Institute believe that’s happened. That’s where we are. We have put at risk our freedom, our democracy because of our ill advised wars, in particular in the aftermath of 9/11.
The word that we emphasize in describing what we believe in is restraint. Restraint is not disarmament. Restraint emphatically is not isolationism. But restraint means to be prudent, realistic, skeptical when it comes to the use of force, and we believe the United States in recent years has been anything but prudent. It’s been reckless. It’s cost us. It’s cost us by the estimates of some upwards of eight trillion dollars. That’s an astonishing sum of money, not that anybody seems to care in our country these days about fiscal irresponsibility. But we spent something like eight trillion dollars in our post-9/11 wars. We’ve lost thousands of our own soldiers, tens of thousands of wounded. The VA is being swamped with veterans who are suffering the damage of their war service. Physical, psychological. There’s an epidemic, we know this, there’s an epidemic of veteran suicides. And of course, that focus on what we have suffered ignores the consequences that we have visited upon others that we profess to liberate, that we profess to want to rescue from tyranny. There are estimates that we’ve killed something on the order of 900,000 people since 9/11, with millions displaced.
Listen: L’Histoire du Soldat
On the subject of soldiers’ travails and grim recognitions, listen to Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, a theatrical collision of sounds, characters, and musical traditions that amounts to a confrontation with the devil. Some history, from the Santa Fe Symphony:
Stravinsky spent the difficult period of World War I in Switzerland. The war prevented productions of Stravinsky’s music, halting his income, and the Russian Revolution cut him off from his homeland. Stravinsky became friends with the Swiss novelist C.F. Ramuz and suggested that they create a theater piece based on two Russian folktales about the devil and a soldier. The version that Ramuz and Stravinsky created became L’Histoire du Soldat―The Soldier’s Tale―completed in 1918. L’Histoire du Soldat reeks with the angry disillusion generated by World War I. The tale is a bitter one: the soldier―it does not matter which country or army he is from―battles the devil and even wins a few rounds, but the ultimate triumph must belong to the devil.
Read: The Pugilist at Rest
Find the entirety of Thom Jones’s story of war, anguish, and introspection over at Lit Hub. It is likely unforgettable; it does about fifty things at once, in a way that’s hard to make sense of outside “The Pugilist at Rest” itself, but makes some strange kind of sense within the story. Here’s one passage, an essayistic rumination that, on its own, cannot prepare you for other aspects of the story:
The peculiar and most distinctive thing about his epilepsy was that in the split second before his fit — in the aura, which is in fact officially a part of the attack — Dostoyevski experienced a sense of felicity, of ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to imagine. It was the experience of satori. Not the nickel-and-dime satori of Abraham Maslow, but the Supreme. He said that he wouldn’t trade ten years of life for this feeling, and I, who have had it, too, would have to agree. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it — it becomes slippery and elusive when it gets any distance on you — but I have felt this down to the core of my being.
The Quincy Institute
Visit the Quincy Institute’s website to learn more about their multifaceted work, their vision, their emphasis on peace. From their “About” page:
As a research institution, we expose the dangerous consequences of an unaccountable, overly militarized American foreign policy and present an alternative approach that promotes local ownership and resolution of local issues. We connect and mobilize a network of policy experts and academics who are dedicated to a vision of American foreign policy based on military restraint rather than domination. We help increase and amplify their output, and give them a voice in Washington, including through our publishing platform Responsible Statecraft.
This week’s ephemeral library
Losing ambition. Richard Brody on “The Automat.” “Vax 2 the Max.” “The Republicans Are Also in Disarray.” On “Sovietwave.”
