Still Struggling with Grandin

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Clarissa

October 2, 2015

Seriously, this Grandin fellow is just the limit. The number of utterly idiotic statements he can produce in a fairly short space is impressive.

When Castro sent troops to Angola, that was a wonderful thing to do because those miserable Cubans (dragged all the way to Africa against their will and spat at by the dictatorship afterwards, by the way) were fighting for “freedom.” When Kissinger gets the CIA involved in Angola in some unspecified way, that’s horrible because that’s not about fighting for “freedom.”

The USSR never engaged in the arms race, not even in the 1950s.

The US could have and should have just stopped participating in the Cold War.

The US should have demilitarized in the 1970s and used that money to prevent the global economic crisis of the second half of the decade.

I’m having to force myself through his rambling mess of a book whose only organizing principle is the author’s extreme incapacity to notice that people who don’t happen to be American are fully human.

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13 responses to “Still Struggling with Grandin”

Dreidel

October 2, 2015

I was with you until your last paragraph. Do you mean that Grandin believes that non-Americans don’t have agency as competent adults who can control their own destiny, and that American power is the sole defining force on the planet?

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 3, 2015
  
  Everything that happens on this planet is, in his opinion, caused solely by Americans. Nobody else has any will or capacity to act. This can only come from a place of deep disrespect towards everybody else.
  
  One example: he goes on and on about how Kissinger prevented a peace treaty from being signed in Vietnam and single-handedly prolonged the war by making it know to South Vietnamese that it might be better for them to put off signing the treaty. It never occurs to Grandin that South Vietnamese are fully human, rational agents, that they used Kissinger’s information the way they saw fit, that they might have had a host of reasons of their own to make their decision, and that they might have manipulated Kissinger to serve their own goals instead of him necessarily manipulating them.
  
  This is a huge problem in Grandin’s book: he can’t conceive of anybody who is not American as having any agency.
  
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  1. J. Otto Pohl
    
    October 3, 2015
    
    One might also add the fact that the North Vietnamese leadership had no interest in any peace that did not end with their total victory and complete rule over all of Vietnam. This required the liquidation of all other political factions outside the Vietnamese Workers Party (CP) including those South Vietnamese factions fighting against the Saigon government. Unconditional surrender was the only thing Hanoi was willing to accept from Saigon.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      October 3, 2015
      
      He does mention that Hanoi was going to break any peace treaty immediately. For some reason he never discloses, this is presented to the readers as a great thing. When the South Vietnamese do the same thing, though, it’s presented as horrible. And the readers are supposed to guess why the same action by the opposing sides is evaluated do differently.
      
      As I said, shoddy, careless writing that has nothing to do with history.
      
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      1. J. Otto Pohl
        
        October 3, 2015
        
        One of the great crimes of the American left was the fact that they completely ignored the crimes of the Hanoi regime that they had been championing. The only prominent anti-war protester to come out and openly criticize the Hanoi regime’s mass incarceration of of people in concentration camps after 1975 was Joan Baez. For the rest of them it dissapeared down the memory hole even as huge numbers of former inmates of these camps started arriving in the US in places like Orange County, CA in the late 1970s. I would really like to see some of these former 60s radicals have to confront some of these camp survivors.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        October 3, 2015
        
        They’d react in the same way as they do when one mentions the crimes of the USSR: with an exasperated sigh and “How can you believe these lies?”
        
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        J. Otto Pohl
        
        October 3, 2015
        
        I thought all that nonesense ended when the partial opening of the Soviet archives did in fact prove that the eyewitness testimony of survivors was essentially correct. Or as Robert Conquest wanted to rename the second edition of The Great Terror, “I f*cking told you so.” But, I do have a huge amount of respect for Baez who took out a full page advert in the NY Times in 1979 noting that the communists had made Vietnam into a nightmare.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        October 3, 2015
        
        “I thought all that nonesense ended when the partial opening of the Soviet archives did in fact prove that the eyewitness testimony of survivors was essentially correct.”
        
        People quickly forget whatever they want to forget. Just about a couple of weeks ago, there was somebody here on the blog telling me that Solzhenitsyn lied about the GULAG because he was a Nazi and that Stalin’s purges and concentration camps were all a myth.
        
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cliff arroyo

October 3, 2015

If countries had personalities the biggest flaw of Americans would be a tendency towards narcissism manifested in two ways:

It’s really hard for many Americans to fully understand that those in other countries have their own values and interests and goals that are not necessarily identical to their own.

They want to see their own image of themselves reflected in the views of other countries. Since this doesn’t happen dealing with other countries is profoundly traumatic.

Russians seem to collectively share that second point – they want to see themselves as heroic and powerful vanquishers of Naziism and deeply feeling people with a poet’s soul and when other countries fail to seem them that way they collectively loose their shit.

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 3, 2015
  
  I wonder how this Grandin fellow fails to notice that he’s starting to sound ridiculous. Everything in the world is caused, according to him, by the US, and even the USSR has no presence at all, none.
  
  Russians would miss no opportunity to whine that they have not been appreciated enough (also a narcissistic trait) but they, at least, do recognize that others have the power to act in their own interest.
  
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J. Otto Pohl

October 3, 2015

Regarding Angola the CIA role was to provide arms and other support to UNITA and FNLA the other armed organizations other than the MPLA that had been fighting against Portuguese colonialism. This wasn’t a secret really and not for long. The US and RSA openly backed UNITA in the 1980s. As far as “freedom” the Cubans were fighting to prevent UNITA backed by the SADF from throwing the newly victorious MPLA out of power after the Portuguese withdrew from the country. Initially the MPLA established a Marxist-Leninist regime allied with the USSR, but after the Cold War became hyper-capitalist. The MPLA is still in power today and its leader has been dictator of the country for over three decades. What got a lot of western, particularly US leftwing support for the Cuban intervention was that the South Africans had come into Angola from the south through Namibia to assist UNITA. During the late 70s and 80s the RSA was the main provider of arms and logistical support to UNITA.

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Shakti

October 3, 2015

The USSR never engaged in the arms race, not even in the 1950s.
The entire original Security Council membership is comprised of “countries that got an atom bomb first.” Nobody who already has an atom bomb is going to give it up, no matter what the UN says.

The US could have and should have just stopped participating in the Cold War.
Does he actually support this assertion somehow or does he just make some alternate universe pronouncements?

The US should have demilitarized in the 1970s and used that money to prevent the global economic crisis of the second half of the decade.
What? See above. You could just as easily make that same statement about the USSR and have it make the same amount of sense. How many currencies were pegged to the ruble?

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 3, 2015
  
  The problem is precisely that he doesn’t explain or support these assertions in any way. It’s the oldest rhetorical trick ever: start a sentence with “as we all know” and then follow it with something that you want to sneak by your audience without having to explain it.
  
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