Learning About Asia
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union LEARNING ABOUT ASIA BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS WHILE CONGRESS was appropriating another $30 billion for the war in Vietnam, the Board of Education in my town was trying futilely...
...at worst, a mild aberration...
...blundering: "Today many people believe that it was unwise for this country to withdraw its support from Chiang when he was fighting to keep China from falling into the hands of the Communists...
...One of the "frills" the Board considered, and then discarded, was a high school course in Asian studies, a last-minute effort to give our children a little knowledge about the history, culture and politics of half the world's population...
...We parents saw their photographs and read their obituaries in the local weekly...
...My son's textbook makes no mention of the Seminole war...
...But that's not all...
...The opinion, of course, was open to question...
...Others hold that the Nationalist government had so little support among the people that only United States military intervention could have checked the Reds...
...and we silently counted the years before our children would reach draft age...
...What if the Board of Education in Blanco County, Texas, circa 1920, had spent a few thousand dollars for a course in Asian studies...
...Their leaders had spoken solemnly of dominoes and Dienbienphu, of China and Communism and conquest...
...It took three years of stubborn fighting at a cost of 175 million dollars," the authors observe, "to show the Filipinos that the United States meant to rule the islands...
...It does, doesn't it...
...I wish you to kill and burn...
...said Mrs...
...The text makes it clear that the very existence of Communist China is a direct consequence of U.S...
...You have sacrificed nearly 10,000 American lives, the flower of our youth...
...You have wasted nearly 600 millions of treasure," thundered Senator George Brisbie Hoar (R.-Mass...
...Oh, I like that name," said Carol...
...Red China continued to threaten world peace by its activities," notes my son's eighth-grade history text (The Making of Modem America, Houghton Mifflin, 1964...
...Of course, our leaders didn't have to look beyond America's borders to find precedents for the Vietnam "counterinsurgency...
...Would current history have been different if textbooks then had emphasized our adventure in the Philippines as a moral and military blunder, a colossal defeat for American foreign policy...
...He assumed he had a choice, and that the choice, fundamentally, was military in nature...
...Regiment after regiment marched into the swampy jungle, only to be ambushed by the Seminoles and malaria...
...States of the Union LEARNING ABOUT ASIA BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS WHILE CONGRESS was appropriating another $30 billion for the war in Vietnam, the Board of Education in my town was trying futilely to head off a taxpayers' revolt by recommending a precut, no-frills budget— the sort of educational program that only a miser or a misanthrope would have thought lavish...
...Imbedded in the text—and, consequently, in the minds of our children—is the myth of American omnipotence...
...A disaster of major proportions was treated as a minor problem...
...The Seminole war was plainly "in the national interest...
...Parsons...
...As the child grows up, however, he finds that quaint Cathay has mysteriously become a world-wide menace...
...the more you kill and burn the more you will please me...
...One wonders which textbooks our leaders read in school...
...Instead, we found a rich, generous, and powerful nation stumbling, step by downward step, into the longest, most costly, and most disruptive war Americans have ever fought, in the misguided belief that when things go wrong anywhere in the world the commitment of sufficient American dollars and—if need be—of American soldiers, must surely put them right...
...What had we taught them...
...we watched the slow funeral processions winding down Route 33, the headlights illuminating nothing at all in the noonday glare...
...The Philippine experience could have been instructive...
...With the best of intentions—in order to prevent another great "victory for postwar Communism"—Johnson invited one of the worst disasters in American history...
...You have established recon-centration camps...
...The U.S...
...In the opinion of President Kennedy, the preservation of the independence of South Vietnam was one of the 'vital interests' of the United States...
...This myth seems to have been a basis of Lyndon Johnson's pledge in 1963 that he was not going to be the "President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went...
...Again Kalb and Abel write: "The President became more and more convinced that guerrilla insurgency was an entirely new form of warfare, requiring an entirely new kind of response...
...In most elementary school textbooks China is simply quaint Cathay, a nice place to visit...
...You have slain uncounted thousands of people you desire to benefit...
...Their women and children were . . . starved and nearly naked...
...Seven of Georgetown, Connecticut's sons have already died in Vietnam...
...You have devastated provinces...
...It seemed clear that Florida had to be made safe for settlers, land speculators and slaveholders (whose runaway slaves were hiding in the Everglades and marrying into the Seminole tribe...
...It seemed to some of us that those sad processions, like the war itself, would wind on forever...
...To their credit, the authors also point out that "Americans who opposed imperialism read with shame of the cruel guerrilla warfare adopted first by the rebels and then by American troops—of fire, looting and the torture of prisoners...
...It began as a modest police action—the Filipinos were fighting for their independence, after we had "liberated" them from Spain—and soon grew into a big, bloody war...
...One must assume that these are the sort of fatuous glossings to which young John Kennedy and young Lyndon Johnson were exposed years ago...
...Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel have analyzed the myth in The Roots of Involvement...
...But what did those seven boys know of such matters...
...They were emaciated, cadaverous, barefoot and in rags...
...And Cathay was exciting and strange to people from far-away places...
...President Kennedy was something of a historian, yet he seemed to know nothing of guerrilla warfare...
...As the killing and burning increased, the doves at home began to flutter...
...It never had a chance...
...Each time, as John Tebbel and Keith Jen-nison point out in The American Indian Wars, "the collapse of Indian resistance was announced as imminent...
...In my son's text, the Filipino rebellion is disposed of in two muted paragraphs...
...THERE ARE matters of record, but little of the record has found its way into school-books...
...Few Americans back then questioned the policy of Indian removal that led to the senseless war...
...In fact, guerrilla warfare was precisely what had confronted American troops for twenty years in the Philippines at the turn of the century...
...in the textbook no questions are asked...
...After order had been restored...
...Those seven young men fell in a land they never understood, to protect us from alleged dangers they but dimly perceived...
...But it does devote a few lines to Vietnam: "The United States . . . dispatched over 10,000 servicemen as advisers, instructors, pilots, and supporting units...
...Army engaged in precisely the same type of warfare against the Florida Seminoles in 1835-41...
...When the defeated Seminoles finally emerged from their hideouts (having consented, at last, to their removal to Oklahoma), "it was difficult to understand why the best talent of the Regular Army had been unable to demolish this tatterdemalion force in six years of warfare...
...It contained all the seeds of Vietnam—the atrocities, the repatriation camps, the strange idea that by killing women and children we were somehow saving them...
...I want no prisoners," said General Jacob Smith to his troops...
...Here is how they were introduced to China by one of their grade-school social studies textbooks (Man Changes His World, L. W. Singer, 1963): "Those early travelers called China Cathay...
...Travelers to China have always found it interesting...
...It became an embarrassing joke in Washington...
...We found no substantial evidence that the United States was driven by imperialistic motives," they note...
...All agree that the worst defeat for United States foreign policy and the July 12, 1971 15 greatest victory for postwar Communism took place in China...
...It sounds exciting and strange...
...Another junior high school text ( This Is A merica's Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1963) describes the 20-year war in a single sentence: "Jungle fighting took many lives on both sides before the revolt finally ended...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 14
