Eyes Wide Open on the Vietnam War
- swaggertherapy
- Aug 23
- 20 min read
Trigger warning: this article contains references to and depictions of the violence of war.
The Boil-Down: Part of the mission of the Eyes Wide Open blog is to empower people to detect toxic and subversive forces that tend to escape the senses, or tend not to be understood--especially by human beings who belong to groups where free-thinking is discouraged. Narcissistic gravity and groupthink apply pressure to abandon free thought in exchange for one-size-fits-all mythical stories. Awareness of these harmful forces can lead to agency over oneself, against these forces. Institutional lies about world-changing phenomena like the Vietnam War function to prevent our learning from history and changing the future; such mythical stories conveniently allow governmental leaders to disarm the masses so that history can repeat itself for their economic and political gain. In the case of the war in Vietnam, the cost was nearly three and one half million lives, and $168 billion in war operations alone (as much as $900 billion in long-term economic effects). 1, 2, 3. A recent Netflix documentary uncontrolled by politicians empowers authors, journalists, veterans, and civilian survivors of the Vietnam War to generate a "polyocular" view of this monstrosity of history, this emergent product of the Cold War era. This blog applies the lens of integrated trauma theory to the phenomena described in the documentary, Turning Point: The Vietnam War.
The Details: The Vietnam War is said to have lasted from 1954 to 1975, and pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong (the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, or NLF), against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. For a full multi-modal immersive experience of this brilliantly-crafted account by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, I strongly encourage adults and (at parental discretion) older adolescents to watch the documentary--but don't bother to stock up on Pirate's Booty or Nutella and graham crackers; you are unlikely to hold an appetite for snacks during this show. For a condensed written contextual reference that will aid the reader in being familiar with names and other war references in this blog article, I have provided notes which can be accessed here.
In Southeast Asia, groupthink movements were part of history. Land reform campaigns in North Vietnam escalated from 1953-1956. Landowners were vilified, put on trial as enemies of the state, and often executed after frenzied crowd persecutions. Later, in the early 1960s, the South Vietnamese government repressed Buddhist communities, raided temples, and persecuted monks, fueling widespread unrest.
It seems widely understood that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara genuinely believed in the Communist World Conspiracy (which had public traction thanks in part to the John Birch Society's nationwide phone campaign) and in the Domino Theory, which held (as presented to the American public) that if South Vietnam fell at the hands of North Vietnam backed by Communist countries like China ("Red" China, as my dad and uncles used to call it), others would follow and before we knew it, San Francisco would be in imminent danger from the wiles of Communism. McNamara was a card-carrying member of a groupthink phenomenon entrenched in Washington D.C. and much of the West. But he also sweetened and stirred the very Kool-Aid he drank, applying the same power tactics he had wielded at Ford Corporation in orchestrating the war in Vietnam (narcissistic gravity). When he eventually recognized the war as unwinnable, McNamara remained quietly complicit, with an eventual graceful exit to accept appointment as President of the World Bank. Exercising what could be reasonably (if speculatively) described as some combination of cowardice, loyalty, and self-preservation, Robert McNamara eventually seemed to speak with some accountability in a 1995 memoir titled In Retrospect: "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
I find it fair to say that key figures in American leadership were malleable and susceptible to manipulation by other officials at home and abroad. To say that American leaders deceptively manipulated a susceptible, malleable populace at home and vulnerable citizens and officials of a foreign country might be the understatement of the century. North Vietnamese hero Ho Chi Minh actually expected that a country like the United States would supportively identify with his country's desire to be free from occupation by the French. However, France successfully spun the story that the biggest threat was the spread of the Communist scourge--effectively shifting any potential focus off of the way the French were enslaving Vietnamese children and adults on rubber plantations and torturing and executing them for poor performance. Eyes Wide Open concepts that apply to the French occupation of Vietnam include narcissistic gravity, groupthink, PVR triangulation, "not me," trauma, false empowerment, and the "boy code." But what follows in this article will make crystal clear that the French Third Republic and the Colonial Governor of French Indochina had not cornered the market on embodiment of the above concepts or human rights violations in Vietnam. U.S. leaders were up to their necks in similarly toxic actions.
A self-centered approach to resources and information invariably stems from a one-up "me first" stance while applying empathy-free or even contemptuous labels like "not me" and "less than" to others; if terms such as cultural prejudice, religious hatred, classism, and systemic racism spring to mind, you're damn right. These are processes common to narcissistic gravity that will lead to trauma through human rights violations. Throughout this war era, world leaders and their advisors entitled themselves to manipulate resources and information to an extent perhaps never-before seen--"seen" due in part to advances in media technology and the courageous collective will of independent journalism--in the history of humankind. Examples from the documentary ensue.
1. President Kennedy already believed in the threat of the Communist State. The Bay of Pigs fiasco has been epitomized as a textbook example of groupthink. When directly asked by the press about Project "Beef Up," Kennedy omitted information about sending aircraft and weapons to Vietnam, and about American military advisors leading tactical offensives. The American press in South Vietnam were heavily censored so that politicians could tell the American public that the United States and South Vietnam were prevailing; journalists placing themselves directly at combat locations were in a position to do what they could to protect democracy by giving lurid uncensored reports about what was really happening on the ground in battles like Ap Bac. American leadership was divided about authorizing a coup to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was overseeing Special Forces repression of Buddhist citizens in Vietnam. (McNamara reportedly hedged cautiously about this decision alongside President Kennedy, while Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge pushed for the coup.) Surreptitiously ordering the coup was done less out of empathy for the victims of human rights violations, and more about optics; the U.S. didn't want to be seen as failing at the war effort or associated with repression violent enough to prompt self-immolation by Buddhist monks (infamous journalistic images show them doused with fuel and setting themselves on fire in protest). Moreover, the coup was overseen carelessly, resulting in the assassinations of Diem and Nhu as well as other needless death and destruction (including a series of coups in South Vietnam through 1966). It further destabilized Vietnam and further entrenched the U.S. presence in that country. Kennedy's own assassination in November 1963, a national tragedy all its own, has been a widely covered subject in books, articles and documentaries from myriad theoretical stances.
2. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was considered "in command" on domestic policy but shaky and a little naive when it came to Vietnam. This made him vulnerable to persuasion, and Robert McNamara was in Johnson's ear early and often. Looking for justification to heighten aggression in Vietnam, McNamara misrepresented a August 1964 incident involving the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy to Congress and to the press. A strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam named Operation Rolling Thunder ensued.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's short-sighted military strategy was to kill enough sheer numbers of the enemy that the North/NLF would not be able to replenish its forces and would have to give up. Assigned to operate under this strategy, perhaps the most caricaturesque player of the entire Vietnam War era was General William Westmoreland, a mouthpiece who found no propagandized lie too outlandish and who personally pressured journalists in Vietnam to be good "team players." Daily press briefings had lost enough credibility to become known as the "five o'clock follies." Westmoreland began "search and destroy" missions, which involved rooting out enemy insurgents who were known to hide amongst non-aggressive villagers. It was tough to tell the enemy apart from innocent citizens. Villages were burned to the ground, and citizens were forced to encamp in "New Life Hamlets" surrounded by razor wire. Separated from their resources and unable to farm or otherwise provide for themselves, the South Vietnamese began to starve. According to integrated trauma theory, political and military groupthink will inevitably invent a dehumanized class of citizens, ultimately destroying their way of life and the citizens themselves.
McNamara's numbers game was flawed and unthinkably costly. From 1964 to 1966, the number of American troops sent per year to Vietnam rose from 112,000 to 380,000. After each battle, the enemy NLF efficiently removed their dead so they could not be counted. It is estimated that one third of the dead included in the enemy body count were innocent civilians, not dangerous opponents fighting for North Vietnam. According to former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran Mike Nakayama, post air-strike walk-throughs of South Vietnamese villages revealed large numbers of dead bodies of children, babies and the elderly. Body parts were strewn "all over the place...those are the kinds of memories that stay with me." For all the innocent people killed by the American military, the NLF killed even more, even stringing up village leaders by the neck as they moved through, said former CBS journalist Dan Rather during his interview for this documentary. Also, recruitment by the North flourished. As many as seventy percent of enemy volunteers were female.
President Johnson's approval ratings were tanking. What American leaders were telling the public differed wildly from what they were admitting in private recorded conversations; however, U.S. citizens wouldn't be privy to that specific evidence for years. What they did have access to were the stories of American journalists who risked their lives by accompanying U.S. troops in combat missions. The "credibility gap" between what the William Westmoreland-type "mouth pieces" were driveling, and what the public believed, was widening. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech opposing the war in Vietnam. Young African American men comprised about twelve percent of the U.S. population in that time frame, but as many as twenty-five percent of the soldiers sent into combat were black. Boxer Muhammed Ali conscientiously objected on religious grounds, also famously stating, "..shoot them for what? They never called me n*****." Increasing numbers of African American citizens began to oppose the war.
3. Opponents in any war will naturally take advantage of opportunities that give them an edge. Ho Chi Minh's advances against the South inevitably put more blood on his hands. Vo Nguyen Giap, a chief military architect of The North Vietnamese campaign, planned major strategies including the 1968 Tet Offensive, a large-scale surprise attack which took place during a ceasefire in honor of the Tet Holiday. The North Vietnamese had infiltrated nine cities in the South for this attack, including the city of Hue. After they eventually had to retreat, they killed all witnesses on their way out of the city (none were discovered for a year). When forced to explain the missing citizens, they blamed Allied air fire for the deaths. The mass graves uncovered told a different story, with children and youth in school uniforms executed with their hands bound behind their backs. Westmoreland also kept spinning his web of lies in this crucial election year for incumbent Lyndon Johnson.
In historically indelible and courageously inspiring fashion, key figures stepped up to demonstrate "what you can do" (the closing section for every article in this blog) when your eyes are opened to injustice. Walter Cronkite gave an unprecedented news editorial on the hideous reality of the Vietnam War. Photographer Ronald Haeberle carefully guarded his photo film after witnessing the zombie-like shift of glassy-eyed soldiers of Charlie Company under the unscrupulous command of Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai. Haeberle eventually published his pictorial evidence of the war crimes committed by members of the first platoon of the 11th infantry brigade in that village. Non-conformist free-thinkers willing to risk their lives and careers, and live "outside the influence," can overcome the power of narcissistic gravity long enough to leave a positive indelible mark on our collective history. During the Vietnam War era, figures such as Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, and Ronald Haeberle--as well as Chic Canfora quoted below--are among such influential non-conformists.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader who had spoken in support of so many young black military men was dead. His assassination was credited with catalyzing a shift in the climate of anti-war protest within U.S. borders. Protests were taking on a more militant feel. On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was also shot and killed. Activist Chic Canfora, who was thirteen when she witnessed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, commented: "it was a tough pill to swallow that anyone who was effective at speaking out against war...effective at change, was killed." There were deep divisions in the party evident during the Democratic Convention in Chicago--the one where Dan Rather was roughly handled by security outside the convention. Chicago Police clashed with demonstrators at nearby Lincoln Park. To call the brutality an excessive use of force would be a colossal understatement. War researcher Ken Hughes brought to light the manner in which Richard Nixon reassured the public that if elected, he would bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam--while behind close doors he was throwing a "wrench" into any potential peace process.
4. Self-centered men who live without empathy lead without mercy, putting their flawed schemes and political careers ahead of millions of human lives. When powerful men and women live guided by contempt, human life belonging to outsiders ("not me/mine") holds no value in their eyes. People who have been labeled as "less than" are expendable; their suffering does not matter.
Lyndon Johnson was losing to Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 democratic primary, and ultimately announced that he would not seek re-election so that he could focus on ending the Vietnam War. Soon after, Kennedy was killed. Chicago police brutalized protestors outside the Democratic National Convention, a violence facilitated by local political leanings, federal program funding and systemically racist ops like COINTELPRO, and the rhetoric and structure of Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey had led in the polls by fifteen points. There is strong evidence that Nixon supporters acted secretly on his behalf to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks (Anna Chenneault); Richard Nixon won the presidency.
Nixon's administrative policies and covert tactics painted an undeniable picture of all things "less than" his power and career. The president and the cronies in his groupthink pulled an end run to negotiate alone with North Vietnam. The South Vietnamese leadership was "less than." They promulgated violent human rights violations in the U.S. to quell protests. American citizens who disagree with him were "less than." Dissent is seminal to democracy, but democracy was "less than" (countless American presidencies, wealthy capitalists and other forces in history have acted to limit democracy while hoarding their own power, widening the distribution of wealth, etc.). Nixon himself ordered U.S. intelligence to prioritize rooting out the Communist conspiracy that had to be driving the anti-war movement in America. No such conspiracy was ever found or even detected via evidence, but the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of American citizens were "less than" (the CIA expanded Operation CHAOS while the FBI was executing COINTELPRO). Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, gave a fertilizer-shoveling speech that "peace is at hand," which is credited for facilitating Nixon's re-election, which was quickly followed by the 1972 "Christmas bombing." President Nixon also secretly ordered hundreds of thousands of bombs to be dropped on Cambodia in an attempt to neutralize the advantage of the North Vietnamese stronghold resources there. The need-to-know of the U.S. Congress and the American people was "less than." Do I need to describe the Watergate scandal? The legal rights of the opposing political party were "less than."
The concluding section of this blog article is taken word-for-word from my documentary notes transcript. The documentary's final episode begins with the governmental question: How do we crawl out of a country standing up? Henry Kissinger had advised President Richard Nixon to abandon thoughts about ending participation in the war in 1971, so as not to lose the war in an election year and hurt Nixon political. Secret negotiations with the Communists regarding "the Decent Interval" began. In the terms of C. Jack Ellis (U.S. Army Airborne infantryman and eventual mayor of Macon, Georgia), soldiers' lives were used as a collective bargaining chip to protect Nixon's political career.
The United States aggressively attacked the North Vietnamese directly across the demilitarized zone; the NLF was on its heels momentarily. Le Duan kept two demands in Paris: America pulls out, and NLF Troops remain in South Vietnam. South Vietnamese President Thieu was livid. Nixon and Kissinger were known in South Vietnam as having betrayed the country. As mentioned above, Nixon issued an implicit presidential campaign promise about imminent peace only to perpetuate widespread loss of life on both sides of the conflict in Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia.
Prisoner of War Everett Alvarez, Jr., had been in captivity over eight years. The Peace Accords arranged for his release along with the release of others. He described how the cabin erupted in cheers as the plane lifted off the ground bound for the U.S. loaded with POWs. The anti-war attitude toward the military was now gone, and the POWs were received with much acceptance and to great fanfare. Military historian Gregory Daddis pointed out that the war did not end with the Paris Peace Accords; war never ends when wars are declared over. There was no ceasefire, and thousands of South Vietnamese POWs were still being held. Hanoi was not abiding by the main provisions of the Paris Peace Accords. Human suffering from atrocious rights violations continued.
Nixon was facing the music of the Watergate scandal; Chic Canfora referred to Nixon as "evil incarnate when it comes to government corruption." On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned his office. Gerald Ford was sworn in with his hands tied; Congress had cut back involvement and the U.S. was basically out of the war. American forces would no longer be sent to South Vietnam. Graham Martin became the last U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam; the death of his adopted son in the war cemented Graham's hatred of the Communists. And though he could not provide support to the South, neither could he bring himself to square with them on the truth. The North began a campaign to test any American response; their attacks were not met with any reaction from the U.S. The dominoes began to fall, beginning with Hue, then Danang. Hordes of citizens scrambled to evacuate in mass pandemonium. The Pentagon told Martin to send the "surplus people home." Martin would not, and also kept up appearances to the press.
Further, Martin suggested a "baby lift" to rescue young children of South Vietnam. These "children of the dust" were babies born to American soldiers and South Vietnamese nationals. The mothers would not be coming along on the rescue trip. Someone had forgotten to latch a canopy lock on the plane, and the plane instantly decompress as it came free from the craft. Documentary details were graphic and grotesque about what happened to the children in the plane and civilians on the ground as the C-5 crash landed outside Saigon. Evacuation in emergency circumstances without proper planning carries such risk with it.
President Ford requested about a billion dollars of aid in the midst of this Communist offensive; Congress shot it down. The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN--the North Vietnamese Army) progressed steadily toward Saigon, consuming the territory on all sides. The South Vietnamese military fled with the others, with large numbers of people being killed trying to leave. The North acquired classified documents identifying people who had worked for the American government. Graham Martin continued to downplay the seriousness of the situation and was not moving with any urgency. He may have held hope in some agreement with the North which would never materialize. The U.S. embassy underscored Martin's denial. South Vietnamese President Thieu publicly denounced America's betrayal.
General Duong Van Minh assumed leadership after Thieu left. At that time, Kissinger finally ordered major evacuation to begin, forcing Martin to act. The North attacked and damaged the airport to be used for evacuations, with ships not being a viable option. Visual footage in the documentary depicted the tragic level of panic amidst an emergency demanding immediate evacuation which was simply not plausible, due to the sheer numbers of people needing to leave and the scarce resources available to rescue them. The images and interviewee testimonials are heartbreaking and nauseating. The USS Midway found itself accepting evacuees from American helicopters as well as small private Vietnamese helicopters, required to push several of the landed aircraft into the ocean one by one, to make room for the landing of the next. As some pilots abandoned their helicopters, one after another crashed into the sea. The Midway expected to take 7000 evacuees, but eventually took on 147,000. Refugees stampeded to the U.S. Embassy, surrounding the walls of the building, screaming to be let in. U.S. Marines shoved them back as they tried scaling the fenced walls. Embassy workers were feverishly shredding classified documents, an act Martin forbid back when it should have been done. Five million dollars in leftover U.S. cash funds were reportedly burned. Ambassador Martin and his team were among the last to be airlifted out. Scores of South Vietnamese crowded onto the roof. A journalist recorded a conversation with some of the desperate people left on the roof.
On April 30, 1975, The North Vietnamese military arrived at the Independence Palace in Saigon. Surviving members of the NLF and the PAVN were interviewed for the documentary, chronicling their sense of triumph and relief, but also profound loss at the "liberation of the South" with the fall of Saigon. Author Viet Thanh Nguyen recalled being held at a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. None could leave without an American sponsor, and no one would take his family, so he was separated from his parents. Over 130,000 South Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the U.S. Those tens of thousands who could not leave or did not leave were labeled "enemies of the people" and worked in forced labor camps, called "re-education camps" where those in control attempted to brainwash the detainees. Chung Tu Buu was held in a labor camp in Vietnam for thirteen years. In the twenty ensuing years, nearly a million more refugees arrived on U.S. shores a few at a time, in small boats. Their perilous ocean journey alone is unimaginable.
In Vietnam alone, three million people were killed during the war; another 1.7 died in the genocide in Cambodia during that period. Civil war ensued, and a quarter of the remaining population were killed after 1975. Political repression continues in that country. Relations between the U.S. and Vietnam were "normalized" officially in 1995. One thousand Americans remain missing from the war in Vietnam; the number of Vietnamese missing are estimated at 200,000-300,000. The documentary characterizes McNamara and President Johnson as inept. They underscored the enormous toll on human life taken in the name of furthering Richard Nixon's political career. The documentary briefly depicted history repeating itself during the war in Iraq. Dan Rather emphasized that a genuinely free press is the "red beating heart of democracy." The Vietnam War undercut confidence in American leadership, a condition from which the country has never recovered. C. Jack Ellis became the mayor of Macon, Georgia in 1999. During his term, he took the opportunity to meet the mayor of Hue, Vietnam, a gentlemen who had fought against him back in 1968. Honored with the closing comment of the documentary, Ellis said, "some of us carry the burden of that war to this day."
In April 1887, Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a British historian and politician, wrote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority"... Integrated trauma theory further predicts that when gatherings of corrupt men (and women, but due to the way we are socialized, especially men) enact a "closed" and/or "synchronous" (particularly rigid on the requirement that members conform to and agree with the group's leadership) group paradigm marked by privilege and secrecy, the resulting groupthink phenomena will be especially destructive, at high risk to violate the human rights of those who are outsiders to the group.
In examining the Vietnam War, narcissistic gravity and groupthink have predictably devastating results. These heart-wrenching stories and the stench of their lurid images are burned into the parchment of history, burned into the minds of the survivors and anyone who bothers to look at them with an unabetted habit of thinking. Images of plantation managers employed by French plutocrats (who owned Michelin and similar corporations) torturing and executing workers for subpar performance; impressionably frenzied poor citizens executing landowners; South Vietnamese leaders (popular minority Catholics motivated by religious hatred) raiding pagodas, burying monks alive, and opening fire on Buddhists protestors--followed by self-immolations as further protest; mass graves filled with school children; eight million villagers forced out of burning homes in systematic "search and destroy" (and similar) operations; body parts strewn among the rubble as a result of genocide (U.S. bombing) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; millions of displaced survivors suffering shock, acute stress, discombobulation and bewilderment from the ceaseless attacks on their cities, villages and farms; babies and children scattered across a swampy landscape, living and dead in the wake of the Babylift plane crash; a million terrified South Vietnamese citizens clamoring to be evacuated as Saigon fell under the encroaching North Vietnamese military; ethnic minorities displaced, executed and starved amidst forced labor via Khmer Rouge rule.
In addition to all of this death, destruction and devastation, military forces saw 58,000 Americans killed and 303,000 wounded, with about 1.3 million non-Americans dead and around two million wounded. And while a contemporary understanding of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was just emerging near the end of the war in Vietnam, more recent research estimates (when findings are extrapolated to the Vietnam War) suggest that no less than fifty percent of military troops fighting on both sides came out of the war with the debilitating impairment accompanying PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder--often largely unseen. (As a trauma therapist informed by Integrated Trauma Theory, I am willing to estimate that the vast majority of civilian war survivors have suffered with the symptom sequelae of these two disorders, to say nothing of physical disabilities.) And as final punctuation to this commentary on the indelible images of war, consider the ubiquitous images of headstrong military leaders and smiling politicians bent on manufacturing public confidence in make-believe scenarios of American supremacy in combat. These were leaders who knew they were deceiving millions of taxpayers and voters with propaganda at the microphone, while prioritizing their careers over the cost of human life during frightening secret conversations behind closed doors. The minds and hearts behind these iconic faces had no empathy for their own military draftees who were prodded in lines like cattle toward their collective duty, and contempt for faraway people who were "not them"--did not look, speak, think, or worship like them.
What You Can Do: It is stating the obvious to put in writing that past wars cannot be undone. What the public can do is learn from them. Learn what? Learn that government and military leaders who live in power without empathy will go to great lengths to misinform and mislead the public toward a devastating agenda--and that we the populace are easily misinformed and misled. Learn that the reasons for war are often not actually focused on protecting the borders of our country. Learn that people we voted for on both sides of the aisle lied to us without caring whether they would end up with blood on their hands. Learn that selfishness rises to the top. Learn that the very powerful are motivated to limit democracy because they benefit from plutocracy (one set of advantageous governing rules to apply to the very rich and powerful, and a separate set of disadvantageous governing rules to apply to everyone else) far more than they do from democracy. Learn that absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Learn to fiercely protect an independent press and the freedom of unabetted journalists to speak, write and photograph, because that genuinely defends democracy. Learn that voting equals power only when people can think freely and independently, with awareness of forces like propaganda, narcissistic gravity, groupthink--and one's own denial. Learn that the price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men. Learn that democracy is guarded by properly informed activism, and that activism comes at a cost--occasionally the ultimate cost via the activist's death, but more often the sacrifice of time and hard work, as well as persecution for one's willingness to speak out. Learn that protection of peacefully protesting is vital to human rights. Learn that citizens must require leaders in power to take responsibility for the decisions they make; the people must monitor those decisions and keep accountability laws in place (the rich and powerful often work behind the scenes and in secret to reverse laws which protect democracy).
Above all, we must learn and not unlearn that war is invariably destructive on the individual and society, and must be prevented whenever possible. War always destroys the lives of grown-ups and children it said it would not affect. Soldiers are valuable, breakable human beings who suffer greatly for their service; they are not archetypal heroes except in our mythical stories about them. In war as in every other connection space, concluding that one side is "wrong" leads to further wrongs. We must learn and not lose sight of the reality that the modern world has not really learned anything about the devastation of war--or they have not applied what they know toward prevention of war, because those in charge are unthinking, unaware of groupthink myths about war...or because they are uncaring about anyone who is "not them."
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