I don’t need any help from Chinese or Russian propaganda to distrust my government. I’ve acquired a degree of distrust of my government over a fairly long period of time.
I remember reading Robert F. Kennedy’s account of the Bay of Pigs, and how during the botched invasion, when he encountered his brother walking on the White House grounds, the first thing his brother said was, “I’d do something if I knew what was going on.” And I learned that over time JFK learned to distrust our institutions.
I learned that the government of the Republic of Vietnam was designed by U. S. political science professors, mostly from Michigan State University. I also learned that when CIA operatives in Vietnam noticed that most of the Vietnamese households that had pictures of public men on their walls, had pictures of Ho Chi Minh, but that a few had pictures of Diem, somebody in that outfit chose Diem to be president. Our officials, however, sat on their hands while Diem was murdered in a coup.
I learned LBJ was on tape as saying, in February 1965, when the war was in its infancy:
I learned that, notwithstanding his serious doubts that we could win that war, over the course of the war we sent over 2 million military personnel to Vietnam, and for some time in the late 1960s, we had over half a million there at the same time. I’m having trouble imagining just the air traffic that must have been involved in that project.
I remember coming home from high school and getting a copy of Life Magazine from the hooks under the mailbox, taking it inside, opening it up, and seeing the pictures of the My Lai massacre, and thinking, well, they’ve got to stop the war now. And they did stop our direct participation in it, about three years after that Life Magazine issue.
Many years after that, someone in George H. W. Bush’s administration sent April Glaspie over to Iraq to tell Saddam that whatever might happen between Iraq and Kuwait was strictly between those two countries, i. e., none of our business. Based on that information, and on Kuwait’s oil-stealing behavior during Iraq’s life-and-death struggle against Iran, and Iraq’s longstanding claim to Kuwait based on Kuwait’s having been a kind of sub-province of Basra during the Ottoman Empire, and on the Anglo-Ottoman Agreement of 1913, which recognized the Ottoman Empire’s claim (it wasn’t ratified, on account of the outbreak of World War I, but it should have served as a letter of intent), Saddam invaded. So we went to war with Iraq over (1) something we had said was none of our business, and (2) according to Secretary of James Baker, jobs. I was back in school during that time, and I was in one of the university’s cafeterias when the radio playing on the public address system announced the beginning of the war. I was the only one in the cafeteria who seemed to notice. I scanned the place, and everyone else just seemed to continue with their meals and their chitchat.
A short time later I was talking with some guys, and one of them said, “Well, I’m gonna go home and watch the war on TV.” I couldn’t tell if he was being cynical or sincere.
Everyone was so casual! Then it finally hit me: “Oh, yeah, nobody’s worried about being drafted.”
I don’t fully trust my own self. Epictetus’s saying, that a man should watch over himself as though over a mortal enemy, certainly applies to me.
But I don’t fully trust the government either.