Pacifists, then and now: ‘Uncle Sam in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam’

Unintended consequence: That is invariably the great pitfall of any government policy, but there is an even greater horror in human affairs, that of the intended consequence, when evil, lawless men capture entire societies and play exotic games with them. The perfect binary fusion comes when the unintended consequence of pacifism meets the intended consequence of totalitarianism.

Outcome, catastrophe.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Country Joe McDonald of the Californian rock band Fish, who died last week. He and his generation of hippies truly embodied the Western pacifist tradition. The song they performed in the legendarily happy mud bath of Woodstock in 1969  became one of the anthems of the anti-war movement in the USA, and is still played today whenever old and dewy-eyed hippies gather to remember their victory over the Pentagon and Congress. The unintended consequence of that victory, but the intended consequence of the Vietcong, the Pathet and and the Khmer Rouge in Indo China, was the murder of millions of people.

Unsurprisingly, Country Joe’s parents were communist, with his mother, Florence Plotnik, coming from a Russian Bolshevik family. Despite her unashamed support for the Soviet Union, she was elected auditor for San Francisco and later a city councillor. How mad is that? So naturally, her son was named after Joseph Stalin, who had just finished his purges and his Winter War against the Finns, in which millions were murdered, when Joe was born. He – Joe – was later to describe his most famous song as being equally against the American involvement in the Vietnamese war and leftists: But that is the kindly varnish of hindsight. In neither presentation nor lyric is there anything other than scorn for the US involvement in the war. The Soviet Union and Red China which armed and incited the communist terrorists in Indo-China of course got a free pass. 

The Vietnam war is now a minor historical footnote, even though the sheer scale of the fighting reveals the enormousness of the communist operations: Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed and aside from the tens of thousands of Americans killed, US losses included 209 B-52 bombers and 678 Phantoms. Yet this madness occurred even as the Soviet Union and China were “normalising” relationships with the USA. This peace-with-war duality would become the template for Iran’s diplomatic game-playing with successive US administrations through much of this century.

I’m not saying that the US was right about how it fought communist terrorism, but it was surely right to oppose it militarily. For murder was what communists did: It’s what they usually do. Class enemy, et cetera. It’s what they did across the Asian landmass, from the Baltic to the Bering Straits to the South China Sea, an imperium constructed on the millions of corpses of the vanquished. Yet we know now that those who seriously opposed their murderous ambitions such as Barry Goldwater and Joe McCarthy, were themselves called “warmongers”. 

This is the great flaw of democracies. Those who propose arming themselves against a deadly foe are themselves accused of embodying their enemy’s vices. The “war-monger” allegation is the opening bid by leftist-pacifists in any political auction that is called an election, and from thereon, the language of pacifism grows more hate-filled, for few political causes are quite as verbally warlike as “pacifism”. 

Marxist economic theory has virtually vanished from the perversions of communism that remain active in the world today, with the weird lamprey of North Korea being the exception. The post-communist despotisms of China and Russia have struck tactical and – until recently – mutually beneficial alliances with Iran. There can be hardly a more illuminating example of the almost boundless western appetite for peace than Donald Trump’s undertakings during the 2024 campaign trail that the USA would cease to be the world’s policeman, and that American soldiers would no longer be sacrificed in the interests of other states. Tell that to the families of the six US soldiers, one of them a woman, and four them reservists, who died after an Iranian drone slammed into a logistics hub in Shuaiba Port, Kuwait, who all no doubt thought they would be safe in a rear-echelon posting.

So where is Trump’s legitimacy in this war? What is his goal? What is his exit strategy? He certainly never spelt out his intentions for the Middle East  after the Iran-backed minigenocide in Gaza, though this had revealed both Teheran’s evil atttude towards Jews and the sheer futility of following the diplomatic route  with such a regime. Yet what have the medium-term consequences of the Hamas attack on Israel achieved? The alienation of much public opinion in Europe against Israel, which was no doubt intended by the architect of the Gaza pogrom, Yahya Sinwar. He knew the West better than did the West’s leaders, with the almost insatiable and largely feminised search for, and then canonisation of, victimhood, which – in a curious perversion of Christian values and one which Sinwar fully understood – excludes Jews.

But could Trump really have intended his war on Iran to send oil-prices to over $100 a barrel, so liberating Russian oil sales from the worldwide embargo, and opening up Putin’s energy-sales to India again?  It’s hard to feel sorry for sluggish, smuggish Europe living perpetually within the comfort-blanket provided by the US, but did it really deserve to be slammed by increased energy costs, spiralling inflation and interests rates, all accompanied by lower growth? Surely to God, this is not what Trump actually intended? 

So what then about the mid-terms in November? Whatever legitimacy that he retains now, despite having donned the mantle of the world’s policeman, can hardly survive another six months of war against a prostrate but unsurrendered Iraq. His munitions will by then be down to zero, with no capacity to replace them because the necessary supply chains are dominated by everybody’s dear friends in China. 

Meanwhile, British Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike, will continue their consolidation into a permanent anti-western bloc, with a comparable Islamomagnetism doing likewise across the EU. Their overall veto might not be all that electorally powerful, but Muslim extremes are not usually slow to express themselves through terrorism. Indeed, Britain’s Muslims not merely have a veto on British foreign policy, but London’s abject Labour government is even appointing a mono-causal Islamophobia Tsar to monitor and punish the expression of opinions that Muslims might not like. Naturally, there is no Judaeophobia Tsar.  That, surely, is the most surprisingly unintended consequence of Islamic terrorism, that quasi-Christians would elevate Muslims into a protected community within societies that many Muslims rather despise. And why wouldn’t they? Wasn’t Country Joe revered for his cultural role in bringing about the defeat of the US policy in South East Asia, while never penning  a single anthem in honour of the millions slain by the victorious communists? Neither the purpose nor the outcome of silence is never unintended. 

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.