Silent Soldiers on a silver screen
Framed in fantasies and dragged in dream
Unpaid actors of the mystery
The mad director knows that freedom will not make you free
And what's this got to do with me
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over
Phil Ochs was a prolific folk singer/song writer in the 1960s. He was decisively anti-war (Vietnam) and a rather typical new-leftist of the time. He wrote "The War is Over" to dramatize his opposition to the Vietnam War. According to Wikipedia:
In 1966, poet Allen Ginsberg decided to declare that the Vietnam War was over. The idea of ending the war simply by declaring it over appealed to Ochs, who organized a rally in Los Angeles to announce that the war was over. To publicize the rally, he wrote an article in the Los Angeles Free Press titled "Have Faith, The War Is Over":
Is everybody sick of this stinking war? In that case, friends, do what I and thousands of other Americans have done — declare the war over.
Ochs wrote a song for the rally, in which he, like "thousands of other Americans", declared the war was over.
He was part of the folk song army that Tom Lehrer satirized in the song of the same name. Tom Lehrer's introduction to the song was classic:
One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on. The nicest thing about a protest song is that it makes you feel so good. I have a song here which I realise should be accompanied on a folk instrument in which category the piano does not alas qualify so imagine if you will that I am playing an 88 string guitar.
The song starts wonderfully:
We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares
Phil Ochs, of whom I was a fan, was nothing if not earnest. He deeply cared about "poverty, war and injustice." My admiration for his music peaked in my third year of college when he played a concert at my school and was too drunk to recall the lyrics of his songs. I thought of Phil Ochs when I read Roger Cohen's op-ed today, in which he declared, in a probably unknowing homage to Phil Ochs, that "The War is Over":
In his first White House televised interview, with the Al Arabiya news network based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, President Obama buried the lead: The war on terror is over.
Yes, the with-us-or-against-us global struggle — the so-called Long War — in which a freedom-loving West confronts the undifferentiated forces of darkness comprising everything from Al Qaeda to elements of the Palestinian national struggle under the banner of “Islamofascism” has been terminated.
What’s left is what matters: defeating terrorist organizations. That’s not a war. It’s a strategic challenge.
There are a few minor problems with Cohen's conception of the current situation, not least that the terrorist organizations which we most need to defeat are merely the strategic arms of states and major non-state actors, that are, in point of fact, still at war with us. Perhaps Barack Obama truly believes that the war is over if we say it is but consider what occurred the last time we declared "the war is over."
It took several years and a Republican administration, but by 1973 the faux Paris Peace Accords were signed with the North Vietnamese and all American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. Apparently, as far as the North Vietnamese were concerned, the Peace Accords were not worth the paper they were printed on and the fighting continued. The South Vietnamese forces held their own, but it was apparently not enough that America be seen to have lost, it was imperative that the "freedom loving" Communists win, and in 1975 a Democratic Congress cut off all aid to the South Vietnamese. What followed was not pretty:
On April 7, three North Vietnamese divisions attacked Xuan Loc, 40 miles (64 km) east of Saigon. The North Vietnamese met fierce resistance at Xuan Loc from the ARVN 18th Division. For two bloody weeks, severe fighting raged as the ARVN defenders made a last stand to try to block the North Vietnamese advance. By April 21, however, the exhausted garrison surrendered.
An embittered and tearful President Thieu resigned on the same day, declaring that the United States had betrayed South Vietnam. In a scathing attack on the US, he suggested U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had tricked him into signing the Paris peace agreement two years ago, promising military aid which then failed to materialise.
"At the time of the peace agreement the United States agreed to replace equipment on a one-by-one basis," he said. "But the United States did not keep its word. Is an American's word reliable these days?" He continued, "The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men."[147] He left for Taiwan on April 25, leaving control of the government in the hands of General Duong Van Minh. At the same time, North Vietnamese tanks had reached Bien Hoa and turned toward Saigon, brushing aside isolated ARVN units along the way.
On April 30, America suffered one of it most painful and humiliating experiences with the fall of Saigon and the last mad scramble for room on the last helicopters out. What had apparently escaped the notice of those who had declared that the war was over is that there were two sides fighting and if one side declared the war over but the other didn't, the war, in fact, was not over. In 1975, and after, the victims of the war were those Vietnamese who had thought that America stood for freedom and democracy. Later there were millions of additional victims as the Vietnamese learned over the course of almost 30 years that Communism does not work.
All of us wish that the world were a peaceful loving home for all mankind. While it is apparently hard for some to understand, none of us, even the evil Neo-cons, desire war. However, when war is declared upon us, as it was by the Islamic radicals repeatedly over the last 30 years, declaring the war is over represents the worst kind of denial. If wishes were horses...but they're not.
And Phil Ochs? He continued to drink, and may have had untreated Manic-Depressive illness (though Psychiatric diagnoses are notoriously unreliable in the presence of significant alcohol abuse.) Perhaps Phil Ochs preferred the world he created in his mind through the haze of alcohol to the unhappy world he saw all around him but by 1976 his wished for, constructed world, had failed him. On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.
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