Too Small to See....

Careful now. Are you following me? Tread gingerly around that chap there, trumpeting moderation; his blasts so loud my voice lost to his horn. The bombast, as he bangs out his tunes; how can he be aware of others, listen to my flautist, coaxing Debussy from her basket? I walk to the far side of the square. Barricade my ears behind two thick doors. Pointless! This brassy music bashes, bangs and blows; bwwwaaaaasssssh! 

A moment of relief, as Trumpet-man bows to his audience, and passes the cap around. He seems a fine fellow. His band well-dressed. Yet Lord Tinnitus is grumbling inside my head…so easy to hide bias in the cloak of reasonableness; dress up faulty arguments in a uniform you will not be asked to remove. When the trumpet blows again, I suggest to my flute-player that we leave plaza for park, a quiet place, where her faun can find the sky.

How confident are we in our ideas? The Schloss stares twice at the mirror to assure himself of his self. But then Schloss is a buffoon, questioning his own shadow, whose answers always disappoint. A question mark in his back-pocket, where the identity card should be. So what about the sensibles? Well, such is the times, its cool sophistication, that many believe they should appear more sceptical than certain; show more caution than the confidence they actually feel. It is to play the piccolo not the trombone. Yet their tone gives them away. Even when playing a bum note, I’m told they know exactly what they’re doing; ‘that squeak, guv’nor, your avant-garde, innit.’ When they look in the mirror they know who they see. Such characters absolute in their doubts, intimate with a literalism that protects them from all comers: ‘it’s the truth mate, can’t argue with that.’ The reason they find it hard to grasp an alien point of view; why their scepticism can become the most dogmatic of absolutes. An idea or a theory not seen as intellectual play but a zero sum game where one’s self is at stake. I suggest some idea is not a fact…‘Stuff and nonsense your lordship. Fairy dust.’ It is to diss interpretation and the speculative view, believing them but fictions of the mind, mere mental imaginings. Facts. ‘Facts is what we want. It’s cash in the hand.’ Not to build their own house but to tear my one down. The idea you can have two homes standing on the same spot: ‘You’re mad mate. Completely off his rocker!’ Now it is the turn of Schloss to hesitate: am I talking nonsense…. Trumpet-man and band blow and bang through the park gates. Faun dives back into the basket, my flautist turning to me in despair. 

A moment of respite for the Schloss, who can’t hear a doubt for blow, bang and bash. Whoomph! The band disappears into the crazy golf. Time for new doubts to emerge…that lot of facts look like a mob to me. The flautist smiles encouragement. That’s right, how much can a fact tell us? Can it tell us anything at all? The faun pokes his head out of the basket. I turn to him: facts: aren't they fictions? He scampers around the grass in delight.

Facts alone cannot establish a truth. Indeed, alone they are apt to hide it. Because truth, belonging to another intellectual level, adding an extra layer of meaning, transcends a fact, to give it rational sense. Oh no, those crazy golfers are chasing out Trumpet-man…. Even here I must tiptoe through the epistemological minefield: facts too are abstractions, created by our minds. Extracted from an environment - human, animal, plant - a thing turns into a fact, when needed to prove a theory, evidence an opinion, win a quiz show. Facts, ceasing to be matter, are conceptual objects; a sign not the place the sign points to. Poor Doris Factly. Picked out of the daily flow by our analytical forceps, separated from family and friends, she is stripped under our microscopic gaze. Ouch!…she cries, as we chop off the loose bits to fit her onto a slide. Later we chop her up some more, to put her into an abstract idea. Ouch! Ouch! Help! Help! As we top and tail and squeeze our Doris into a conceptual retort; where she at last acquires significance; for now, when added to other facts - those suitably mutilated neighbours, strangers, enemies - she proves a theory, confirms a belief, or (most deliciously of all) demolishes a rival’s precious beliefs. Once part of the physical world, in a living relationship with other organisms in a natural habitat, Doris now exists in a wholly artificial realm, a gallery of ideas, where she exhibits the sanctity of truth. Truth. A network of arguments, theories and facts that fit together to form a man-made order, a harmonious whole; which confirms a theory, proves an obsession, pays the bills. Truth. That human invention. The mind’s geodesic dome.

You see the difficulty. When talking about facts we are also talking about ideas. When Doris looks in the mirror she’s not some butcher’s meat. No, she is a woman clothed in a green dress designed by Erika Eee. Think of a fact think of the theory behind it. Yes, my friend, you have to keep your eyes open…when the Schloss walks down the street he’s forever peering over his shoulder. ‘He’s a nutter mate, don’t listen to him.’ Trumpet-man heads off to the ornamental pool. I know. It’s a tough life being an intellectual. Philosophers have it easier; their ideas always in full view. So what happens if Schloss gets a crick in the neck; forgets, does not think about, the philosophy of knowledge? He falls into a simple literalism. The artificial nature of facts is overlooked and are believed to do the business alone; Doris manufacturing that dress herself.

Be wary of those overly keen on facts. Be suspicious of those who blast out notes without a melody (you know who I mean, don’t you Trumpet-man?). Epistemological innocents. In scholarship they tend to be collectors and antiquaries. Useful in their way. Consuming knowledge not creating it, they give us objects that we can rub our minds on. I get the genie out of that antique lamp….

Marshall Poe. A skim through his piece suggests a colleague in my laboratory: a cautious and careful handling of unstable chemicals. Then I look again, longer this time. The doubts creep across my workbench. Our chap starts off well. This professor doesn’t like ‘big pictures’, which he equates with misleading simplicities. Whoopee! a man wearing my kinda of coat. But when read again I find that he doesn’t want any large pictures; there to be no historical narratives that give meaning and a moral to the past. Dismissing them as politically biased, Professor Poe advocates what he calls capital letter History, which free of a narrative frame will liberate itself from political homiletics. Liberated from large-scale ideas the past can show itself as it really was…we find the real Doris by her removing dress, petticoat and underwear to reveal her nakedness, which I explore with a magnifying glass. Thighs, breasts, stomach, are these all Doris has to offer? What about her opinions, her ideas, her PhD in American foreign policy…. No, no says my interlocutor, they have no place in this bedroom; they might, especially if she's less than fifty, nobble the historical judgement. We must look at the body. Remove the mind that controls it.

There can be no such separation. Moreover, it’s not so easy - is it possible? - to separate the views of today from the actions of yesteryear; this theme brilliantly explored by Adam Thorpe’s Still. Today’s beliefs, the contemporary zeitgeist, always to seep into one’s study of the past; and this especially so in those who think themselves immune from their times.

This professor insists on facts. Then does a volte-face, saying facts are unreliable. What’s on going on! the Schloss cries. I take a closer look. Facts are questioned if they support a big picture, of what he calls the ‘Little Big Horn’ type. It’s almost as if narrative itself calls these facts into being, or, if this too extreme for your taste, the story, in fitting facts to a plot, distorts them badly out of shape. No big pictures and we can’t trust the facts. Wow! What’s left of history? Scratching my head, I stumble into the maze….

Can I find a way out? Yes! Follow that trumpet!

The doubts all point in the same direction. Professor Poe accepts American soldiers committed atrocities, but labours his scepticism over actual accounts, questioning if victims and witnesses can really remember the fine details. Trumpet-man is making a racket; thank God! For - Yes! Yes! - I see the end of this maze…in putting so much negative emphasis on one ‘big picture’ - the Little Big Horn view of evil and incompetent Americans killing innocent natives - he can reduce this version still further by suggesting the details are exaggerated, imagined, or tastelessly highlighted (‘war porn’). That there were atrocities at My Lai or the Battle of Huế, he does not deny; but in throwing his doubt around, we are left with the impression that these books are not to be trusted. Of course prof doesn’t say this; for that would be too controversial. Instead, we are told the books are not worth reading if we want to learn something new. The liberal version is rinsed out moralism; a damaged vase that doesn’t show the flowers to best advantage; while some of those flowers may not be real. Politics not history. Stuff for the academic archive not the layman’s shelves.

For sure, some scepticism is in order, but Professor’s Poe’s emphasis is so heavy-handed and crude - it is that of the clever schoolmaster ticking off his dumb pupils - that I start to doubt his doubts. Why stress the obvious quite so much?

Out of the maze, and with Trumpet-man losing his band to the funfair, I embrace the free air of speculation. Pulling down a cloud of thought, out falls a concept…in donning his professional guise - the impartial, objective technocrat - our chap can obscure American culpability in Vietnam. It is why the facts are lauded; until the story they tell is disagreeable. Not that the professor is necessarily wrong; for who can seriously argue with this:

…”she was tired from a long day day of driving.”… I found myself frequently asking “How in the world could he remember a detail like that after almost fifty years?” (Forget the big picture, TLS 10/11/2017)

He qualifies this statement, by admitting that war can sear incidents into the memory. However, by stressing such doubts it strengthens the impression that the books under review are best avoided. Leave them to the academics (and we know what they’re like, don’t we?). Yet why so keen for us to forget this war? Surely, US citizens need to understand it; the historian the best person to do this job.

I look again at Trumpet-man, as he blows himself around the carousel. Such heavy emphasis on one kind of interpretation suggests its own biases. Which in turn suggests a background picture, hidden from view. Let’s go further. In my experience such strong-minded sceptics are usually standing on very firm ground indeed. High up on their granite cliffs as they question the sea.

Sure enough, Sir Digby Doubt is in my face selling me his pamphlet: Skepcize It All! A typical case of excessive scepticism. Starting from rock-solid certainties - his reason, his facts - Sir Digby destabilises the entire landscape, until he earthquakes himself. It’s time to doubt the doubter. For such epistemological nihilism creates strange paradoxes, as the content of the ideas - a chaos of facts, a totalitarian reason - plays against the actualities of our mind, its need for form, its permanent engagement in an ever-changing scene. Without the life raft of its own ideas a mind will drown in an ocean of facts.

Rest awhile reader, and listen to my friend play Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. 

Think of this need for cognitive order. If the interpretive lines connecting facts are broken, our instinct for pattern, form, story, becomes evermore urgent and self-conscious. We create our own patterns and forms to compensate. A conceptual oasis in a narrative desert. It is more pattern not less. That’s right! No longer am I trying to understand events I am manufacturing an order; one closely aligned to my feelings and concerns, increasingly anxious and fragile. The anarchy of facts demands bolder, clearer, heavier, cruder lines to bound material getting out of the mind’s reach. Squeak! Squeak! It’s Trumpet-man. 

Sir Digby turns to look at his mate Professor Marshall Poe. He praises him for arguing against big pictures, for deconstructing details; for showing us the insuperable difficulties of collecting and verifying even the simplest testimony. Too many facts, which lack consistency, their quality variable. Open an archive and the papers fall out making a mountain over you. The Digby is jumping for joy. All that’s left is his reason. Yippee! Until David Hume comes along and starts asking his questions…Sir Digs runs away in terror. I agree a mass of documentary evidence resists easy explanation; but isn’t that why we have scholars, to magic it into meaningful discourse? Professor Poe stands his ground. Apparently, one has to be a Superman scholar to get it all into shape. Yet most are Clark Kents; naive about details, they are too weak to traverse the historical landscape without their ideological zimmer-frames.

History is impossible. We should study philosophy and produce comics instead.

Not our chap’s advice, I should add. Which makes Professor Poe’s statements even more odd. What’s going on? Here is a tentative suggestion: Doris is found no starlet, after she appears in a rival's film. What the two books under review share is the same backstory, which prof thinks is drawn by a cartoon politics. But if this big picture is wrong why spend so much space stating the obvious - memories are not perfect, documents overwhelm - when he could give us a different version, shaped around those little pictures he likes so much? Caricatures of a scholarly consensus won’t do. Neither will a catch-all Pyrrhonism. Certainly not an historical atomism; this the end of history full stop. It feels like a strategy. It makes me sceptical. And without a pattern I begin to devise my own: of cover-up and bad faith.

An easy and unfair explanation looks me in the eye: many academics are without insight and imagination. At best they fill archives with material; at worst copy and cut the scholarly consensus; or, this a typical scenario, gifted only with the analytical faculty they fill textbooks and classrooms with criticism. The academic culture of complaint, parasitic on each other’s work.

I want to test that assertion about memories. Are they really so unreliable; is there no sure witness of past events? The best experimental subject is myself. So I place my cranium under a cardboard helmet and hook myself up to a comedy computer, as I recall a violent attack of fifty years ago. Three boys hold me against a fence and take turns to kick me in the head. I remember the name of one boy; outline the face of another; while the third is a complete blank. My mind conjures up an atmosphere and I have a vague sense of a kick (I know there were several). I see stars. A teacher appears and stops the attack. Jump-cut to a classroom. I am sitting down, the three boys are standing; the teacher telling them off. One boy - I know his house and his father’s occupation but have forgotten his name - is crying. Stop. His name returns to my memory. Haha! For sure, these memories are not eidetic, but enough remains to give a reasonable shape to the incident. It is an accurate but not complete description of what occurred; enough for a court of law. Sir Digby Doubt says it’s all imagination. Really? Is everything we remember fake? Do the stars I still occasionally see have no causal origin.…

A word on Sir Digs. His scepticism is a weakness of reason, which is apt to get out of hand. Reason has to be used cautiously if we are to properly comprehend the world and its workings. Easy to diss reality when it is compared to a pure abstraction. Life is impossible, the argument tells us so…If you think only in abstract terms, posit memory as an unreliable machine, then I cannot convince you of anything that happened in my past; all I say a work of present imagination; a creation not recall, a fiction nothing real. Ha! I even dissolve myself in disbelief. And you Sir Digby Doubt; are you a fantasy? Let me see…I insert my self into your memory banks; steal your mother, write my name on your birth certificate; then rub out those twenty five years at 61 Brickbat Lane twenty six years ago. I look around, to see what else I can remove; well, let’s cut out those last ten minutes…are you sure you’ve been talking to the Schloss, Sir Digby? He’s looking pale. Are you ok Sir Doubt? He smiles uneasily and turns away, stuffing his pamphlet into his pocket. So mad with argument and idea, so certain in his reason, that naivety about facts, treated as if atoms of matter, these total sceptics confuse the relationship between knowledge and experience. Topsy-turvyites. Knowledge should explain life not replace it (technology does that). Cackhand this relationship, over emphasise reason, have too abstract a notion of fact, and the world becomes a fiction, and we must rely on the mind in the moment. The River Wye is only this water flowing around my ankles.

No longer to understand reality, we erase it. Sir Digs is an extremist, so easily ignored. More restrained uses of scepticism, with its inherent plausibility, but which are used for similar nihilistic purposes, is a difficult problem to solve.

Professor Poe, wearing the gown of a cautious scholar, does acknowledge the truths of memory, but prefers to emphasise its unreliability, its tendency to forget most things. Such an emphasis defines the tone of a piece that while accepting the veracity of the books diminishes them, through doubt and caricature. Even if a hundred percent accurate they’re not worth reading. Nothing new. And if the descriptions of those atrocities are accurate aren’t they laid on a bit too thick? Read the review quickly over a coffee and you are left with the impression of something askew about the conventional picture of the war. Job done! 

The Schloss is a slow reader. Given my own description of an attack, I suspect that not all the details are veridical. There is the problem of reproducing them on a page. How many ‘ums and ahs’, ‘I don’t quite recalls’, ‘it’s all a mess’, will a reader tolerate? Words in a book more clear, vivid, concrete, than what’s inside an interviewee’s head. It doesn’t follow that these accounts are not true. Professor Poe is confusing a convention - writing - with two experiences: the verbal recall and the actual violent event. To return to my once bruised body: my memories capture aspects of the scene, stored within a mental framework which is part image, part idea, and wholly form. An incomplete jigsaw puzzle where some pieces have lost their picture (that third boy exists only as a blank). It is in the overall shape - a memory’s form - where the truth lies, the details giving it a substance - clothes on an invisible man - which makes it present to my mind. Put too much stress on the details and your dissolve that form, so removing the truth.

I think about historical atoms. Even a thug’s fist has a shape. The tiniest fact its own big picture. This the chief failing of Sir Digby Doubt: he is never sceptical enough. Such sceptics don’t doubt their own scepticism. Which relies, as Hume well knew, on a rational absolutism - a complete certainty.

Egoistic rationality. Sceptics are more interested in their own reason than the world outside their heads. Perfect for philosophers. It handicaps historians. For reason overcomplicates the nature of facts and misconstrues the mental instruments that test them. A mechanical reason is apt to replace the sinuous judgement, which, with its feel for the quotidian, senses itself into a subject; comparing what is felt with what’s known. To judge well is feel the substance of our thoughts; forcing us to constantly recalibrate our syntheses, as we bring past discoveries in line with present finds. Often this requires turning the reason button down or off. Poor historian! Occupying a difficult position between two quite different realities, the messily contingent and the clean lines of an abstract rationalism, it is easy to get the balance wrong; to put too much faith in the analytical faculty, serf one’s mind to a theory. This is why rough and ready methods, which in relying on feel and taste are closer to common sense, are to be preferred to pernickety reason, whose foundation is an ideas-world rarely investigated, at least by most historians. Lady Marbles thinks she’s in a plane flying over the countryside. Sorry dear, you’re in a wooden boat stuck on a hilltop.

After throwing doubt upon eye-witness testimony, Professor Poe praises documents. Then doubts these too!

There is no doubt that My Lai is the best-documented military operation in history. It was simultaneously investigated by several big agencies within the Pentagon and US government. The army’s own examination - the Peer Commission - produced 18,000 pages of testimony from 400 witnesses as well as several thousand pages of documents gathered from archives in Vietnam and the US. Moreover, much of this evidence is wildly contradictory…. It is hard to tell when a witness is telling the truth, when he is covering his ass, when he is covering his buddy’s ass, or when he is sticking it to someone he doesn’t like. Trying to find your way through this jungle of material to something resembling the truth is a formidable and perhaps impossible task. Jones is to be praised for even trying. That said, I don’t have much confidence that his version of what happened on March 16, 1968 at My Lai is “true”. A good informed guess, perhaps, but perhaps that’s all we can ask for.

History is a point of view. True, if you confuse experience with epistemology, mistake a humanities subject for a controlled experiment, think a monograph is life as lived. Guesses not truth? I don’t believe it. And anyway, the professor’s certainty that the Little Big Horn interpretation is wrong belies such scholarly fatalism. Would our chap say the same about the vastly more complicated documentary record of the Nazis? Can we only suspect Hitler was evil…. But this is a mistake, I see. Moral judgements are not the province of scholars. It is why big pictures confuse; for by bringing in the human subject - the creator of those pictures - we must also entertain their moral convictions, which will encourage our own. Though I have to say, that I find history without humanity a tad weird, mightily perplexing; for isn’t History made by humans? Alas, I forget what goes on inside the academy, that mad belief that humans don’t exist outside it. ‘What you talkin’ about Schloss, we look to the masses, right?’ Odd how the professoriat succumbs to populism when it tries to turn its subject into a ‘science’ (the common man the sociological equivalent of a physics atom). Our prof, it seems, belonging to that great erasure, the ‘scientific’ turn of his subject, which mulches individuals into statistics, material forces and collective concepts. I’m just data, exemplary evidence, an element of an ism. I demur. History isn’t a Derek Parfitt photograph, where the anthropoid is chemically removed in the lab. A strange kind of scholarship, an odd sort of science, that ignores its primary material. And when reduce the human to behaviours and objects…what is learnt by cataloguing every detail; Göring’s toothbrush, Himmler’s changes of underwear, Speer’s car fetish - left or right back seat? Do I really want to know about those hands up an actress’s skirt, Röhm’s fingers unbuttoning a SA officer’s trousers? Millions of facts. No picture to put them in. So how do we distinguish the Hitler crew from Roosevelt’s….

Peeping over the abyss of the Pyrrhonist cliff, our professor steps back: we must select those facts that draw little pictures that when added together - a sort of federation of evidence? - give us a truer view of the conflict. It is the wound’s eye view. Although already I see a problem. Even to conceive of the Vietnam War is to have a big picture. Little scenes need a large frame to put them in. Oh dear, I’m with Sir Digby Doubt on the rollercoaster of rationality. Stop! before I get too friendly with the Digs. But how to…oh, yes, I know, let me call it the historiographical version of the fifty states. That should do the trick. A USA without the District of Columbia.

It’s a difficult job trying to write about a review whose ideological position I do not grasp. Right. Left. Middle. Martian…the tone of the piece suggests a particular ideological stance, though this is hard to pin down. For although Professor Poe wants us believe he is a technocrat, there is something about his presentation, that knowingness, a strong whiff of condescension, which suggests otherwise. By his own admission the history of this war is coloured by politics; scholars and journalists still fighting a political battle over the meaning of the dead. Nevertheless, he thinks himself neutral.

The context that gave us the two “sides” in this intellectual struggle - the traumatic political battle over whether the US “should be in Vietnam” - is long dead and gone. The dust has settled. Yet Americans keep kicking it up. Until we stop and really begin thinking anew about the war, until we really get into the details and forget the big picture, I fear we will never understand it.

In principle I agree. Politics can distort history, which may be seen only through the fisheye lens of ideology. The more detached the analysis, the greater the distance from political hectoring, the more likely we see the event fresh. That said, for a history of a subject as decision-centred as war, a big picture is needed to explain why it started and continued. Wars never just the turning of wheels, the firing of guns; they require the thoughts and actions of individuals, especially those at the top. To concentrate only on details, to carry out anthropological studies of each Vietnamese village and America platoon, will produce a vast collection of facts that translated into a hundred thousand monographs will tell us little more than the contents of each scholar’s filing cabinet. The jigsaw puzzle removed from its box is never put together. Or to frame it this way: the Vietnam war is not to be studied; only the effects of a war, on a land, its civilians, soldiers and administrators. Some value in such studies, for sure; but how much is debatable; while the most important question - why was the war fought? - is avoided; its vanishes from this scholar’s horizon. Not just the politics of Vietnam but its history disappears.

Is this the idea?

Alas for our professor, he doesn’t have the benefit of this vanishing act. Those myriad monographs to be full of dodgy details, their facts confusing, the accounts contradictory.  The big picture removed, we are left with a blank wall. So why bother reading it? Ha! I have arrived at the inner sanctum of contemporary academia. The factory production that is modern scholarship. The purpose not to read this stuff, only to produce it. History a job for academics not a guide to the past. Scholarship no longer a discovery of value, but a mechanism for making a living. Fill up the filing cabinet, and a salary pops into your bank account each month. The process of wage-earning, of turning a vocation into a career, to feed into the work itself; as profs set the conveyer belt, press the buttons, pull the levers, roll out the facts….

Where was I? Oh yes, just off the rollercoaster, I’m heading for the ice cream stall.

Poor Doris. Facts alone prove nothing. At best they may disprove a theory. At best. Even that requires a theory, that big picture we significantly alter or demolish. Such demolition jobs giving insights, helping us to create new historical shapes. The charge of an idea, its energy, its dynamism, comes not from the facts themselves, but what they do to an existing story; bang! Bash! Bong! (Trumpet-man has his uses.) Alone facts are inert. To rely only on them - ‘to get really into the details’ (but isn’t this just what these books do?) - is to produce a strange kind of relativist history; where each fact in carrying the same weight as every other fact - a sort arithmetic of detail - produces an equality of value, where nothing has meaning. The entropy of mind. Knowledge fizzles out.

Professor Poe avoids the problem. His concern his colleagues, whom he cartoons.

There is every reason to suspect that the Little Big Horn Interpretation of the War is, empirically speaking, wrong: most homiletic, big-picture tales are, especially those written by banner-waving intellectuals. There is also every reason to suspect that the opposing line on the War - the “Alamo Interpretation”, according to which Americans fought the good fight but were let down in the end by their countrymen is equally wrong for the same reasons.

The classic stance of the moderate, although instead of situating himself between two extremes, the good professor raises himself above the binary battlefield: no enemies in Vietnam only a vast number of little conflicts; man on man, tank against tank-trap. One damn thing after another…it is the old British school of history, which has always suffered from this fatal flaw: no detail is without a context; no war is without a beginning, middle and end. But this chap is not as sophisticated as our English ironists. In his rush to demolish all narratives, he cremates his own profession.

They [his favourite historians] want to know what happened, not what it all meant.

Don’t liberal scholars want to know what happened? While this statement is insouciant with the really big question: is history possible without meaning? We can make a case for histories on things like the Kalashnikov, but a strange book that doesn't tell the reader why it was made; the reader left to make their own guesses: a new invention to kill human beings or plant seed? But a war? Meaning is intrinsic to wars. Both sides fighting for a reason and a cause. Unless this professor thinks the helicopters and planes were on automatic pilot.

Something feels wrong here. Why so keen to avoid the difficult moral, political and historical issues that America’s conduct raises? Shouldn’t these be foregrounded in any understanding of the Vietnam war? Of course, this requires us to engage the judgement, balancing the analytical with the moral sense and our instincts. We have to position ourself inside the story. Uncomfortable. Tricky. That ever-present threat of feeling, of subjectivity. ‘Eh lad, you must be joking.’ Avoid at all costs! Kick these ruffians out of the scholar’s study; ridicule them as liberal prejudices, ‘banner-waving intellectuals’. Oops! prof has given himself away. He doesn’t like the critics. Which suggests its own biases and scholarly shortcomings. My suspicions are confirmed by another review in the same TLS; which offers a range of interpretations beyond Professor’s Poe caricature.

“For many Vietnamese, it was a brutal civil war.”

This is one establishment version. Reviewing Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War, which was made for corporate television, D.D.Guttenplan argues that such a formulation gives a ‘spurious balance’, therefore avoiding the reality of America’s actions.

…[by] reducing the Vietnam War to a mosaic of individual stories, the film gives us conflict without context, turning the most political war in modern history into a series of unfortunate events. …it shouldn’t be possible to sit through eighteen hours and never be told, simply and unequivocally, that in Vietnam America was fighting in a Buddhist peasant country on the side of the the Catholic landlords.

Familiar? Professor Poe is not offering a cautious scholarly approach, but is retailing the preferred narrative of corporate America, which hides from controversy as a mouse from a cat. One damn accident after another. No-one to blame. War is war. Ugly things happen in jungle and trench. This scholar’s job to confirm the consensus, overwhelming the narrative with details. We can’t see the American napalm for descriptions of trees, bushes and rice paddies. Lost in the detail, the politics of war disappears; moral responsibilities are concealed; and the US client regimes are airbrushed out of history.

Besides giving equal legitimacy to nationalists who’d fought the French, the Japanese occupation, the French again - and after the Americans left, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army - and a regime initially led by the Japanese puppet emperor Boa Dai and his collaborators, depicting Vietnam as a civil war (in which America just happened to choose the losing side) lets the US off far too easily.

Queasy stuff. It’s a problem with details; unless given radical surgery they tend to upset conventional opinion. This, I suggest, the reason for Professor Poe’s highly attenuated account of the conflict. Put the Vietnam War on a diet of facts! So ridding himself of that queasiness. Speculation of course. But isn't it odd that his details appear to point in the same direction: all to the East, away from Washington. What were the leaders thinking in the White House and the Pentagon? What instructions given to generals and pilots…not, surely, illegitimate questions for an historian? But then technics is always troubled by politics; for not only do the politicos mess up events, they engage our feelings, force us to take a stance on what is done in our names. Suddenly our ideas, especially moral ideas, so crucial to our identity, have to negotiate even wrestle with these facts. Ouch! When a nation is part of the self it can be hard to accept that the nation does bad things. As if we did them.

Let me give another gloss. The technician, engrossed in the engine room, is apt to forget he’s working for someone else. Even the most radical empirical account has a background picture which informs the analysis. However, because never stated, and so rarely reflected upon, this picture isn’t seen and is thought not to exist. Here the background is American foreign policy, and the Third World governments it supported during the Cold War: often illegitimate, authoritarian, insecure. Such regimes apt to stimulate resistance and produce ‘civil wars’, requiring US support and intervention. The Why of the Vietnam War explained by the How of American neo-colonialism. If we remove this Why, reducing the historical landscape to a bomb site, where facts wander aimlessly around the cratered terrain, the essence of US foreign intervention is elided, the How misunderstood: those Vietnamese peasants victims not of geo-political machinations but fate. Almost as if the Scientific Revolution had never happened. Though I’m sure our professor would argue that little picture looking - big facts/tiny meanings - is doing science. I’ll buy him E.A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science for Christmas. It is the fundamental flaw of extreme empiricism; for in turning the big picture to the wall, we no longer to see the figures; have no idea of the artist. No facts without a context. No painting without a creator. Some large scale explanation has to be posited as well as analysed. That is, if doing serious study not antiquarian business. To repeat myself in slightly spooky language - me, Schloss, and Clio the flautist, are inside the Haunted House -: the parts that make the machine-like How are created by an organismic Why. As we leave the last ghost behind, the Schloss shouts out: ‘a factory manufactures engines so the firm can sell cars’. History, like engineering, has no truck with the purely random. In Vietnam the bombs were dropped for reasons of policy; they didn’t fly because of some explosive urge to maim and kill.

The professor is not consistent. But then few empiricists can be. Think of how the Logical Positivists wrestled with their Verification principle; their radical empiricism reliant on a metaphysical idea they believed nonsense. And indeed, just like the early Log Pozzies - it was only later they struggled to get out of their philosophical long johns - our chap is unaware that his many Hows depend on one very big Why. Try as I might, stretch it as I will - is he glossing a consensus? - I find that our professor holds a very big picture indeed.

…the US effort to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression.

Haha! This explains the contradictions and confusions in the piece. The US an innocent party. A belief that has to be sustained, despite all the evidence proving otherwise. A task especially hard for a scholar; this the reason the big Why is cut down to little Hows, which themselves are debilitated with all sorts of factual defects; thus that disquisition on the difficulties of details, when the details make for uncomfortable reading. He can’t ignore them! Professor Poe too much the scholar to do that. It’s why he praises the principle of evidential enquiry and tries to be just to what he reads. Alas, walking this tightrope he falls. For though he formally accepts the evidence, his stress on its unreliability, in concert with the sceptical tone of his review, weakens the actual evidence and the picture it supports. This prof wants it both ways. Appearing to accept these books he is, in fact, debunking them. The appearance of technical neutrality hiding a very canny politico indeed. 

Another gloss. An odd one this, which may be close to the truth. A technocrat absorbs the orthodox view; it’s embodied in their mentality and work practice. Task-orientated the task is to find the best means of fine-tuning the orthodoxy, which governs the institutions and suffuses the culture. That is, unbeknownst to the technician their mind already occupies a tight mental space; one reason they look on with disfavour anyone who gets in their way. ‘Can’t move here for some nitwit asking stupid questions. Wasting my time! Look man, you’re in my way! You’re givin’ me a ****ing headache!’ In Marshall Poe’s piece two orthodoxies - two ‘machines’ - are faltering: the belief in a benevolent America, essential to a fraught-free culture; and the faith in an ‘objective’ scholarship uncontaminated by subjective bias; that filing cabinet that collects value-liberated facts like a park attendant  leaves. The Vietnam War makes it difficult to believe in the first, creating a climate of unease that feeds back into the scholarship, whose conclusions conflict with an orthodox view so conducive to social harmony and commercial exploitation. Grit in the mechanism. Get it out! Get it out! And Professor Poe does. Leaving the study for the laboratory, he slips white coat over tweed jacket, picks up the facts with a tweezers and chops off meanings until nothing controversial - human and historical - remains. Time to press the remote!….so that we can watch the Vietnam War while eating our crisps and drinking our coca-cola. ‘Did that stuff happen! Yeah, gory, right….’

Trumpet-man returns to the park. He’s blowing people’s hats off.

What about Professor Poe’s big picture? It has been debunked by much scholarship, which shows it a fiction legitimising the war. South Vietnam an artificial creation.

The Geneva Accord…partitioned Vietnam into separate North and South Zones, under the specific provision that ‘the military demarcation is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.’

….

The United States had no thought either of disengaging from Indochina or of acquiescing in the Geneva settlement. Dulles’ immediate task…to ensure the functioning of a valid national state in South Vietnam able to hold the line against the North and eventually recapture the country. The Secretary of State was already engaged in both efforts in advance of the Geneva Declaration. (Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, pp.333-335.)

South Vietnam was created and kept alive by the US government. Of course Barbara Tuchman is a liberal, and can therefore be discounted…such a useful argument; albeit revealing the professor’s own bias; for why are liberal scholars by definition wrong? Indeed, to stress liberal scholarship suggests that Professor Poe has his own political agenda; one, perhaps, more politically motivated than those he dismisses. A nice trick: pretend to be a technocrat by calling all those you attack politicos and ideologues. But then technocrats are not known for nuance and subtlety. The clean lines of process and the simplicities of fact to do the work for themselves. Things not meanings. Details not decisions. Fine for putting in a museum. If I want to comprehend the history of South Vietnam I must turn to other sources.

It is well to be aware of just how much agreement there is about the nature of the war in the specialist literature. The consensus is well illustrated by the detailed and informative province studies. The first of these, and to this day the most important, was the 1969 study of Long An province by Jeffrey Race, a US Army advisor in South Vietnam who compiled one of the most important documentary records. The most recent to appear is a 1991 study of Hau Nghia province by Eric Bergerud. These studies focus on two critically important provinces in the Delta near Saigon, which were typical of much of the areas of insurgency; both studies review the larger context as well, and reach conclusions not seriously questioned elsewhere, apart from tactical judgements.

Both analysts recognize that the US-imposed regime had no legitimacy in the countryside, where 80 percent of the population lived (and little enough in the urban areas); and that only force could compensate for this lack. Both report that by 1965, when the US war against South Vietnam moved to sheer devastation, the VC had won the war in the provinces they studied, with little external support. Race observes that “the government terrorised far more than did the revolutionary movement—for example, by liquidations of former Vietminh, by artillery and ground attacks on ‘communist villages,’ and by roundups of ‘communist sympathisers.’ Yet it was just these tactics that led to the constantly increasing strength of the revolutionary movement in Long An from 1960 to 1965.” Prior to 1960, the Diem regime enjoyed a near monopoly of violence and pursued the conflict “through its relentless reprisal against any opposition, its use of torture,” and other severe repression, while the Communist Party, “at great cost,” kept to “an almost entirely defensive role.” When violence was authorised in self-defence the VC quickly took over the province, parts of which were declared a free strike zone in 1964. US troops took over and vastly increased the violence in 1965. The first North Vietnamese units appears in 1968. (Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture, pp.56-7.)

How can we call aggression defence? Easy. If I consider only the bare fact of South Vietnam - a name on map, the label of a political entity, its official border - then I can think this ‘country’ identical to Belgium or Brazil. Once become the Simon Stylites of historical interpretation, the fact itself proves its own case. It is a strategy that avoids how the fact arose; which far from being free of an interpretative context was created by the US’s own assessment about Vietnam’s post-independent future. Free a fact from its political background and you turn it into a fiction; as if South Vietnam and Brazil really are identical. An odd kind of history. The right kind of history is to consider the meaning of this fact, then take a political-historical stand - was South Vietnam a legitimate nation or a colonial terror state (to take the extremes)? - situating our analysis accordingly. Believe the latter, and I think the evidence points that way, then America was not defending a country but protecting a client regime from its own population. One has to decide; for our understanding of the background picture is central to an understanding of the war. To have no interpretation at all is to leave the question hanging but the fact firmly in place, as if a free-standing entity. This not to misjudge the history but to hide from it. Of course, with interpretation comes subjective bias; for no matter how substantiated by evidence, it can never be absolute. This, however, doesn’t diminish its truth value; providing the scholarship is sound. To think we can have an absolute truth - Lady How to divorce Lord Why, to leave little value-free facts - is to misconstrue the nature of historical enquiry, whose greatest works are not pointillist descriptions of isolated phenomena but detailed historical syntheses that combine the mechanics with the meaning. To comprehend even one event, we must consider it in relation to the war as a whole. Think of the battle lines inside a village - autochthonous causes from the village itself or the effects of a national struggle?

An orthodox believer is uncomfortable with interpretation. What they believe is the Truth (or in contemporary lingo: a fact). When this belief is questioned, relativised, explained into oblivion, or seen from a radically different perspective, the instinct is to defend the belief with whatever tools are at hand. You diminish your opponent’s view, by calling it flakey, rhetoric, plain crazy wrong. If an academic you might turn to relativism, describe your opponents as prejudiced (liberals) or buffoons (banner-waving intellectuals) or even orthodox! (obviously stale and unthinking). If cleverer than most you diss interpretations altogether, and tell your reader to concentrate on the facts. The perfect defence! A lifetime to collect them; no time left to actually put them into some historical shape. Long past retirement age before I can put my interpretative spectacles on; though Marshall Poe tells me not to bother.

I would not, however, recommend reading either book if you want some fresh insight into My Lai, Huế or the Vietnam War generally.

Nowadays we don’t burn books, we recommend you don’t read them. This is because…

Both authors…stick closely to what I call the “Little Big Horn Interpretation” of the conflict. According to this view - created, hone and made orthodox by anti-war journalists during the conflict itself and repeated ad nauseam by liberal scholars thereafter….

An easy game to play. Although in playing it Professor Poe is transgressing his own rules; for aren’t there some awfully big pictures here: anti-war journalists and liberal scholars?  Yet actual analysis of the species shows they were mostly establishment types with conventional views on the war. Prof forgets that until Richard Nixon this was a liberal’s war; the anti-war lot the lunatic fringe. Unlike the best scholars, whose analysis is reflexive, weighing the material under the microscope with the received wisdom in their own minds, this professor looks not in the mirror but straight out of the window: of frosted glass. He doesn't notice. No doubt why he draws cartoons not portraits.

What’s going on? Orthodoxies are truths which create beliefs that are part of one’s being and identity. Here I suspect we have a man who is both an American and a Scholar; his profession creating a tension between the opposing sides of his character: the patriot’s absolute faith battling against the interpretative bias of the subject. The patriot is stronger; the scholarly instinct finding a way to reconcile the scholarship with this patriotism. It’s to do politics without knowing it. Uneasy with American conduct in Vietnam - so at variance with a citizen’s self image - he buries that awful history under a heap of detail, so that neither he nor his compatriots will see it. Mr Scholar to save Mr American’s innocence. Hallelujah!

No longer to speak of the fog of war but the clag of scholarship; where the actions of men and women dissolve into a storm of bibliographical dust. Lost to the labyrinths of a library. Quiet at last. Ah! Trumpet-man blows through the tannoy….