[Peace-discuss] Another view re. Kerry and the election

[Morton K.Brussel]

[Note. Schell seems to accept Kerry's bravery in Vietnam and 
afterwards, which runs somewhat counter to what we heard from Jeffrey 
St. Clair last week. Yet I found the article interesting.  MKB]


Published on Thursday, April 22, 2004 by TomDispatch.com and The Nation

Politics and Truth

by Jonathan Schell

Halfway through Tim Russert's hour-long interview with Democratic 
presidential nominee Senator John Kerry on April 18, there was an 
exchange that revealed in microcosm some of the fundamental unspoken 
rules of American politics in our day. Russert played a clip from 
Kerry's 1971 appearance on Meet the Press following his testimony as a 
leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee. A longhaired Kerry, in uniform, was seen saying 
that he stood by the essence of his testimony, in which he had said 
that veterans had admitted that they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off 
heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and 
turned up the power." He added that under the Geneva Conventions such 
acts were war crimes.

  Russert did not play the tape to congratulate Kerry for his 
truth-telling. On the contrary, he was clearly calling him on the 
carpet. He even suggested that "a lot" of Kerry's allegations had been 
discredited. In fact, every word that Kerry spoke then has been shown 
to be true in an abundance of testimony. Even now, new revelations pour 
out. For example, the Toledo Blade just won the Pulitzer Prize for 
unearthing the story of an army company that went on a seven-month 
rampage in Vietnam, routinely killing peasants, burning villages, 
cutting off the ears of corpses. Troops in the field can hardly engage 
in such conduct over a period of months without the knowledge and at 
least tacit approval of higher authority.

  Kerry answered warily. He began by trying to make light of the clip. 
"Where did all that dark hair go? -- that's a big question for me," he 
joked. He went on to say that although some of his language had been 
"excessive," he was still proud of the stand he had taken. His 
predicament is worth pondering. The powers that be, with the approval 
of mainstream opinion, had sent him into a misbegotten war whose awful 
reality they covered up. When he helped uncover it, it was not they but 
he who was punished. In short, by sending young men into an atrocious, 
mistaken war, they created a truth so distasteful to the public that 
its disclosure, by discrediting the discloser, keeps them in power.

  Was Kerry "flip-flopping" -- the Bush Administration's main campaign 
charge against him? Was he all-too-characteristically trying to back 
off from a position he had once taken while at the same time embracing 
it? And didn't this performance echo his complicated and equivocal 
stance on the Iraq war, in which he has said that his vote in the 
Senate to authorize the President to use armed force against Iraq was 
"not a vote to go to war" and that in 2003 he voted "for" the $87 
billion supplemental authorization for the war "before" he voted 
"against it" (a statement the Republicans are making political hay with 
in a current TV ad)?

  Kerry's equivocations are indeed related. For if as a soldier in 
Vietnam in 1968 and '69 he was brought face to face with one reality -- 
the human reality of the war -- then as a presidential candidate in 
2004 he has been driven up against another -- the political reality 
that no antiwar candidate of modern times has ever made it into the 
White House. One might think that Kerry's good sense and bravery in 
opposing the Vietnam War three decades ago might stand him in good 
stead today. (How many Americans now think getting into Vietnam was a 
good idea?) But as the Russert interview shows, just the opposite is 
the case. It is Kerry's bravery as a soldier fighting the mistaken war, 
not his bravery as a veteran opposing it, that helps him in his bid for 
the presidency.

  And so just as Kerry bowed to political reality by distancing himself 
from his old testimony while expressing continued pride in it, so he 
bowed to that same reality by voting for the Iraq authorization (while 
expressing opposition to "the way" the President went to war). Even 
today he will not acknowledge that his vote -- and the war -- were a 
mistake. Kerry is stuck between politics and truth. After the 
Congressional vote on the war, however, a peculiar thing happened. 
Kerry's political sails, far from filling with a fresh breeze, began to 
flap idly in the wind. Polls and pundits agreed: His nomination was 
dead in the water.

  The action shifted elsewhere. For while opposition to a crazy war 
might not be a ticket to the White House, it was still good for 
something. It swelled a powerful popular movement. Huge demonstrations 
against the war took place in the United States, as they did throughout 
the world. In the time of Vietnam, antiwar sentiment propelled first 
Eugene McCarthy, then Robert Kennedy and later George McGovern into the 
forefront of Democratic politics. Now antiwar sentiment propelled 
Howard Dean into his brief moment of front-runnership. In the game of 
politics and truth, truth was sneaking in the back door. Suddenly, 
everyone was saying that the Democratic Party had recovered its energy, 
its "backbone."

  But then came another surprising twist. A shrewd, or possibly 
over-shrewd, Democratic primary electorate, steaming with indignation 
against the war but apparently fearful of history's lesson that the 
antiwar man cannot win, shifted its allegiance from Dean to Kerry. All 
at once, the apparently political calculation that had underlain 
Kerry's vote for the war in the first place paid off, and he became the 
candidate.

  Such is the archeology of the dilemma that Kerry and the Democratic 
Party face today. Their flip-flopping, which is real enough, is between 
the truth as they see it and politics as they know it to be. The party 
is an antiwar party that dares not speak its name. Its candidate is 
energized, but with a borrowed energy. He has a backbone, but it is a 
borrowed backbone.

  The antiwar movement that has lent Kerry and his party this energy and 
this backbone faces a dilemma, too. On the one hand, it needs Kerry to 
win, even though he refuses to repent his vote to authorize the war. On 
the other hand, neither the movement nor Kerry can afford to let the 
antiwar energies that were and remain a principal source of their hopes 
and his, die down. The movement must persist, independent of Kerry and 
keeping him or making him honest, yet not opposing him. If truth must 
be an exile from the mainstream of politics, let it thrive on the 
margins.

  Jonathan Schell, Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, 
is the author, most recently, of 'The Unconquerable World: Power, 
Nonviolence, and the Will of the People' (Metropolitan).

  This article was originally published in the May 10 issue of The Nation

  Copyright C2004 Jonathan Schell

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