Eating Out at Main Street Pho

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By Steve Halpern

Recently a new Vietnamese restaurant opened in our neighborhood called Main Street Pho. Judi and I found the food to be excellent. The savory flavors of beef were mixed with the light tastes of cilantro, lemon, and other spices with noodles in a broth. This is a relatively small restaurant that is already popular.

Eating the food, I couldn’t help but think of the war the United States government carried out against the people who live in Southeast Asia. While patrons of all ages come to sample Vietnamese cuisine, just a few decades ago the United States government invested literally hundreds of billions of dollars to murder millions of people who lived in that country.

One of the worst bombing campaigns in the history of the world took place against the people of Vietnam. It wasn’t enough to kill people, but defoliants were used to destroy vast areas of woodlands. In the process, the government in this country ordered millions of young people to carry out this immense destruction. Over 50,000 died in the process.

So, the question is: How is it possible that the food from Vietnam is so popular, but the government in this country chose to carry out this immense destruction? There is a clear answer to this question, but first I would like to mention a conversation I viewed between Anthony Bourdain and the former President Barack Obama. This conversation took place in a small restaurant in Vietnam.

The Bourdain – Obama interview

Anthony Bourdain has a popular television series where he goes all over the world and samples an immense variety of foods. Bourdain says that Vietnam is one of his favorite countries. He has also talked about the horrendous effects of the war and how he sees that war today as unconscionable.

President Obama lived in Indonesia in his youth between the ages of six and ten. This was a significant period in the history of that nation. In the year 1965, the military of Indonesia organized to murder hundreds of thousands of supporters of the huge communist party of that nation. The United States government actively supported this military coup. The goal of this horrendous military action was to put in place an Indonesian government that would be slavishly subservient to the capitalist interests of the United States.

Both Anthony Bourdain and President Obama were with aware of the horror stories of Vietnam and Indonesia. However, their conversation revolved around the food of those two nations.

Clearly there is nothing wrong with talking about food. However, Barack Obama wasn’t just someone who likes to talk about food. He was the President of the United States. Obama could have said that the war against Vietnam and the U.S. policy in Indonesia were crimes against humanity. He didn’t, but clearly liked talking about the food of those two nations.

While Anthony Bourdain spoke out against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he didn’t press Obama on that issue. Bourdain made it clear that he liked Obama and found him to be personable. However, the facts are that President Obama is a democrat and that party organized the horror story that was the war against Vietnam. 

My education

I’m a few years older than former President Obama. While he was living in Indonesia, I was going to high school in Newark, New Jersey. In the year 1967 in Newark, there were rebellions in the city against police brutality as well as systematic racial discrimination. The governor ordered out the National Guard and the guard proceeded to murder about twenty people in the city. Newark was one of many cities in the United States where the National Guard mobilized to suppress popular rebellions.

I attended Arts High School that is located in the center of the city. I took a bus to school and witnessed the burned out rubble of the city because of the rebellions of 1967. I also was aware of the immense disparity between this environment and the suburban schools that resembled country clubs. I learned that the national guard came to Newark to maintain this immense disparity. The people of the city justifiably found this disparity to be unacceptable.

We might also consider that the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in education is against the law. This was in their 1954 decision of Brown vs. The Board of Education. While the complexion of most Newark residents is Black, the suburban schools are mostly caucasian. While segregation in education is supposed to be illegal, the reality demonstrates that the government has no intention of enforcing this law. This was a part of my education that the educational system refused to teach.

The approach by President Obama reflected the kind of education offered in the schools of this country. In my school days, teachers didn’t include in their lesson plans the hundred years war against Native Americans, or the decades of profits derived from chattel slavery, or the mass lynchings where numerous murderers were never prosecuted by the government. My teachers never taught me about the profits derived from horrendous child labor, or how women went to prison just because they demanded the right to vote. My teachers never informed me that while I viewed destroyed buildings on my way to school, the United States armed forces ordered soldiers to bomb Vietnam and create even more ruins.

No, I didn’t learn these things in school, but every morning my teachers asked me to stand up, place my hand on my heart, and pledge allegiance to a flag, they claimed represented liberty and justice for all.

Fortunately I was one of those who began to see through the mythology portrayed as history in the schools of this country. I first protested against the war in Vietnam, and then I’ve supported the struggles of working people from all over the world.

Understanding this background, we can now talk about why the government carried out the war against Vietnam. 

The myth and reality of the “domino theory”

One of the initial reasons for the war against Vietnam was the “domino theory.” This was the idea that if Vietnam fell to the communists, then nations from all over the world would fall to the communists.

It isn’t very difficult to expose the mythology around this argument. First, we can say that the United States of America became a nation because of a revolutionary war of independence. The Vietnamese people have a much longer history of struggle for their independence. They defended themselves against domination from China, Japan, France, and then the United States. So, to object to the Vietnamese desire for independence is to also question the idea that the thirteen colonies ever had a legitimate reason to become independent of Britain.

A more persuasive reason for why the U.S. government went to war against Vietnam has to do with the needs of the capitalist system. The First and Second world wars were about what capitalist nation would dominate the world. Britain was the old world power and Germany, Japan, and the United States when to war to determine what nation would replace Britain’s world supremacy.

After the Second World War the United States went to war against Korea and Vietnam because those nations refused to be subservient to the United States government. After the U.S. had supported the regime of Saddam Hussein for about thirty years, they went to war against his government because it pursued a course not to Washington’s liking. Recently President Trump ordered the bombing of Syria because both Russia and Iran have been working to influence that nation.

Conclusion

Today when we think about the seeming madness of the war against Vietnam, we can also consider that the government of this country is at war against the vast majority of citizens who go to work every day.

While Barrack Obama was President he gave literally trillions of dollars to some of the most affluent people in the world in his quantitative easing program. Obama also cut the food stamps program of $8.7 billion. President Trump has merely followed in Obama’s example.

Today while supermarkets are brimming with food, the Department of Agriculture estimates that about one out of every six people in this country doesn’t have enough food to eat.

In our day-to-day lives, we make plans for our future. We think about the expense of raising children. We think about having the resources to have food, a place to live, education, transportation, and health care. We would also like to have the ability to retire one day.

However, the capitalist system doesn’t care about any of this. This system runs on a life-blood of corporate profit. History has given us many examples where capitalist economic systems collapse.

This almost happened in 2008. President Obama gave the banks trillions of dollars in quantitative easing in order to temporarily divert that crisis. Since that time the stock market has skyrocketed from about 10,000 to about 25,000. There are no new industries that in any way justify this huge jump in the stock market. When the stock market begins to reflect it’s real value, the consequences of that occurrence will be unimaginable.

All of this means that working people have no interest in the wars advanced by the United States government. The only way to end these wars is to put in place a new government that makes human needs more important than profits. That kind of government wouldn’t be going to war against nations like Vietnam. No, the top priority of that kind of government would be to improve the standard of living in the United States as well as for working people all over the world.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction, and the Limits of Academia

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By Steve Halpern

Recently I attended a lecture by Eric Foner on The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Constitution. This event took place at the Haverford School in their Centennial Hall. My estimate is that there were about 200 people who attended this lecture. Eric Foner is an historian and Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. One of several books he has authored is: Reconstruction – America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877.

Eric Foner’s uncle was the late Philip S. Foner who authored about 100 books on labor history. He also edited a multi-volume work on the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass. When these volumes were published, the name Frederick Douglass was not widely known.

Philip Foner was fired and blacklisted from his job at City College in New York for his suspected association with the Communist Party. Years after his termination the administration of City College apologized for his dismissal.     

The Haverford School is a school for boys and is located next to Haverford College. The school is also located just a few miles away from Villanova University, who’s basketball team just won the NCAA Championship. Tuition at the Haverford School is about $38,000. Per student funding for education in the neighboring Lower Merion School District is about $25,000. Philadelphia borders on that school district. Per student funding in Philadelphia is about $12,600.

I found Eric Foner’s talk to be informative and was glad that I attended. While I learned a few things and have a better appreciation for his subject, I found his perspective to be limited. So, in order to explain my perspective about his talk, I will give a short history of reconstruction.

The Background to Reconstruction

The revolution of the thirteen colonies was the first in the world to decisively break away from feudalism, or the rule of royal families. There were two political blocks after the revolution known as the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists favored a strong centralized government that would eventually favor industrialized capitalism. The anti-federalists favored slavery and a weak federal government. The anti-federalists dominated the U.S. government throughout the 1800’s until the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Throughout this period agricultural products produced by slave labor became the dominant business in this country. Human beings were viewed as commodities and slaves became the most valuable commodity. Cotton produced by slave labor marked the beginning of the industrial revolution.

While the Declaration of Independence advocated for the “pursuit of happiness,” slavery reflected uninterrupted lives of drudgery. Because slaves were not paid a wage, the routine method used to coerce slaves was torture. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, escaped, and was asked to give a talk on the significance of the Fourth of July in 1852. The following passage is an excerpt from that speech:

“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....”

I believe the slavery practiced in Brazil and Cuba at the time of this speech was just as horrendous as the slavery of the United States. However, I also agree with the core of the argument Douglass made in this passage.

Northern capitalists, workers, as well as small farmers also had their reasons for opposing slavery. Slave owners were taking over several of the western states and were using the federal government to apprehend escaped slaves. Had slavery continued, the United States might have emerged as an agricultural, underdeveloped, and highly dictatorial nation.  So, a coalition of forces emerged who’s goal was to remove slave owners from their positions of power by any means necessary.  

There was a horrendous price that was paid to do away with chattel slavery in this country. About 350,000 union soldiers died in the Civil War. The Union generals understood that they needed to convince those who supported the Confederacy that they had no chance of winning. To advance this perspective they destroyed many of the buildings in the confederate states.

The myths and realities of reconstruction

After the war, the federal government learned that those who had power in the defeated states worked to preserve the institution of slavery with another name. They called this the Black Codes. These laws enabled governments to apprehend Black people and force them to work in slave-like conditions.

Given the enormous costs of the war, the federal government took several measures aimed at repressing the interests of the former slave owners. First, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the U.S. adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. These measures outlawed slavery and, in effect, liquidated the slave owners of their most valuable so-called commodity. This meant that about four million people were no longer slaves.

Then the government adopted a law called the Civil Rights Act and then the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment meant that all men (excluding Native Americans) born in the United States had full rights as citizens. Women would not have the right to vote until 1920. The soldiers who fought for the confederacy would be denied the right to vote because the government felt they had engaged in treason.

Then, there was the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that was also about giving every man born in this country the right to vote. These measures were enforced by the Union Army that occupied the southern states until about the year 1877.

As a result of these actions, Reconstruction Governments emerged where about 2,000 black men, mostly former slaves, became government officials. Black people now had the right to own land. Northern volunteers came to the south to educate Black and caucasian students who never had an education before. During slavery the law prohibited teaching slaves to read.

Both Ida Wells and Lucy Parsons were born into slavery and received their primary education in schools that were set up during reconstruction. Wells and Parsons both became genuine working class leaders.

President Rutherford B. Hayes made the deal to withdraw the union soldiers from the former confederate states. This left the reconstruction governments at a military disadvantage to the emerging racist forces of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the KKK pro-segregationist forces took power through military force. Jim Crow segregation became the law and Black people effectively lost citizenship rights in this country.

Eric Foner explained how historians before the civil rights movement routinely portrayed the reconstruction governments as a horror story. In my high school so-called education, the period of reconstruction was portrayed as a bunch of northern carpetbaggers and scalawags who took advantage of the south for their own personal benefit. Most of the northerners who came to the south after the Civil War were teachers who taught the illiterate people of that region to read for the first time.

This slander of the reconstruction era had profound consequences. Black people were portrayed as the ones who destroyed the south in reconstruction and didn’t deserve the right to vote. Thousands of Black people were lynched because of false accusations that they had raped white women.

Ida Wells exposed this lie and investigated hundreds of lynchings. She found that oftentimes white women had consensual relations with Black men. She also encouraged Black people to leave the south because they wouldn’t receive justice in that part of the country. Ida Wells as well as Lucy Parsons advocated for Black people to be armed, so they would be better able to defend themselves from lynch mobs.  For her actions Ida Wells’ newspaper was destroyed and her life was threatened.

The Supreme Court supported Jim Crow segregation in their decision Plessey v. Ferguson. Eric Foner gave examples of other Supreme Court decisions that also supported Jim Crow. He argued that until the decision Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court had, in effect, decided that it would not enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. In other words, laws are worthless words on paper when the government refuses to enforce those laws.

Eric Foner argued that there were loopholes in the Fifteenth Amendment. This gave the Jim Crow governments legal ways of denying Black people the right to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests.

Foner called the Civil Rights movement a “revolution” because it in some ways was effective in reversing what had been lost in Jim Crow segregation. However, the government chose to adopt new civil rights and voting rights laws in order to outlaw Jim Crow. The government could have acknowledged that it had refused to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in the past, and now it would enforce that amendment. Had the government used this argument, today we would be in a better legal position to battle against the racial discrimination that continues to exist.

Capitalism and the persistence of racial discrimination

I was fortunate to be chosen to ask Eric Foner a question after his presentation. I asked him why he felt that racial discrimination was so persistent in this country after the Civil War and the civil rights movement. I pointed to both mass incarceration as well as the increasing segregation of public schools to underscore my point. I suggested that the answer might have something to do with the drive to maximize profits in the capitalist system. I also argued that this drive for profits targets the least affluent people and also effects immigrant workers.

Foner agreed that mass incarceration is a persistent problem and that historians in the future would also have this opinion. He also argued that capitalism is a flexible system that can support racism, but it can also be anti-racist.

Clearly capitalism does have flexibility in that it continues to exist in the United States and South Africa even after Jim Crow and apartheid have been outlawed. However, that doesn’t explain why racial discrimination continues to exist in both countries.

My argument is that capitalism has it’s own laws and capitalist governments routinely adapt to those laws. The government outlawed slavery because of the Civil War. The government outlawed Jim Crow because of the civil rights movement. The South African government outlawed apartheid because of an international movement to do away with that institution.

However, as long as capitalism exists there will be a drive to cut costs. This has been done by racial and sexual discrimination. We have also seen manufacturing enterprises move their businesses out of this country, to nations where workers are paid about two dollars per day. All of the recent Presidents of this country have made it a priority to deport increasing numbers of immigrants. While entire industries rely on immigrant labor, these deportations make life for immigrant workers more insecure, so they might be less inclined to make the justifiable demand for better wages as well as improved working conditions.         

Eric Foner gave the accurate history of how the academic community, as well as the government gave a false view of reconstruction. However, today this same academic community consistently defends the capitalist system in spite of the obvious horrors that we have all seen.

The facts are the United States government has ordered the military to murder literally millions of people in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. The United States not only has more people in prison than any other nation, one out of every six citizens in this country doesn’t have enough food to eat.

I don’t know of anyone in the academic community who will argue that it is possible to put in place a workers government that would declare, without compromise, that human needs are more important than profits. This kind of government could eliminate poverty as well as racial and sexual discrimination. In fact the only visions of the future that Hollywood choses to portray are virtual nightmares like the stories of Avatar and The Hunger Games.

So, learning about our history only makes us stronger in dealing with our current problems. Most of the available history books are written by college professors. While these books are useful, rarely have I read any book coming out of academia arguing that capitalism is an obstacle to humanity all over the world.

So, while I found it useful to attend the talk by Eric Foner and have found his book on reconstruction to be informative, my opinion is that working people need to develop our own point of view.