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I'm also reminded of a line from Neil Sheehan's classic "A Bright Shining Lie" that has stuck with me since reading it:

Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth.

I'm reading a book about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, and it's making me realize how many problems are born out of how complicated large human organizations are.

I mean, it's obvious when I write it like that, but I think we have this platonic ideal of a company (or a government, or the military) somehow being this omniscient creature when instead it is filled with flawed humans who are seeing the world through various soda straws pointed in different directions.

That's true. I'm normally very anti-authoritarian but these days I applaud when police come by and shut down public gatherings due to COVID-19. I think everyone is more comfortable with authoritarianism during this crisis. To be fair, there is a place for decisive action during emergency, as long as those emergency powers don't last forever.

However, long term, authoritarian leadership makes things worse due to lack of transparency and accountability to the people. They can clean things up short term, but then they hold onto power and rot society.

I guess there could be a place for temporary authoritarian governments to swoop in, sweep up the mess, and then hand over things to liberal democracies, but they don't hand over power easily.

A book I read on Vietnam (A Bright Shining Lie) floated the idea that communism never delivered on its promise to make society more equitable, but communist revolutions have played a role in eliminating backwards feudal governments and clearing the way for liberal democracies to take over. Kind of like a shock treatment, but with a very high price in terms of human suffering.

Anyway, we should all be very suspicious and ready to oppose authoritarian creep, because we're all susceptible to it right now, and it could stick around even after this virus passes.

I’ve read War is a Racket. It’s a great piece and raises issues we all should think about. I also read A Bright Shining Lie, About Face, The Best and The Brightest and other books critical of the military [1, 2, 3]. Like I said in my previous comment, I have many issues with the military, but I’m also concerned when the elite of society no longer feel the need to serve, that makes me think of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire [4]. War sucks, but we all need to play our part, either in support or protest, but just pretending like it doesn’t exists and going about our day is the worst of both worlds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie
[2] https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Odyssey-American-Warrior/d...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and...

The parallels are striking.

I just finished reading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which is a story of Vietnam told through the lens of the experience of one particular American officer, and later civilian consultant: John Paul Vann. I heartily recommend the book - winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and authored by someone who was on the ground in Vietnam on and off during the war.

The book was published in 1988, so any parallels that are evident to Afghanistan and Iraq are not the backseat driving of the author.

One parallel, out of many, is that Vann many times lamented the lack of devotion the South Vietnamese Army had to the cause of Vietnamese independence. They largely wanted to avoid actual combat and profit off the American military machine by selling services, re-selling war materiel, accepting bribes for the other side, etc. And Vann said many times in the book that if he himself was a young Vietnamese, he would join the NVA (the North Vietnamese Army). And further, that he admired the grit and devotion the NVA had to the cause of independence.

Indeed, one could fill a page of further comments on the parallels: asymmetric tactics, politically powerful generals who lied about prospects for winning, presidents who kicked the can down the road, inability to win "hearts and minds", blaming the press when bad news gets out, ease of bombing versus difficulty of holding territory, "nation-building", installation of American-backed Vietnamese leaders (often emigres) who have no credibility in the country...

It is actually quite humbling. We should have known better.

> They won because they took part in the war with a sense of righteousness.

This belief is certainly reflected in one of the best books I've read about the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, who was a reporter there throughout the war and devoted a large part of his life to chronicling it.

He repeatedly shows how the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army), from commanders down to recruits, were not deeply motivated in the same way the Viet Cong were - abandoning battlefields, taking bribes to leave the front, etc. Additionally, the South Vietnamese political class was a corrupt gerontocracy with little in common with the people (either peasant farmers or urban) they were supposed to be leading.

For that reason, early American observers said they'd rather be on the side of the North than the South.

Where do people get the idea that everyone on the "Left" was, and apparently continues in some mysterious way to be, an undifferentiated mass totally in thrall to Soviet control?

Charlie Stross puts it quite nicely about the UK Labour party - who were the creators of that enduring socialist endeavour of the UK NHS:

The Conservatives hated and feared the threat of Soviet communism; the Labour Party leadership hated and feared the Soviets even more (as first cousins once removed in the family tree of left wing ideology, they were seen as class traitors by the first generation of Bolsheviks).

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...

To simply equate socialism with Soviet control was always simplistic and a worldview that caused untold grief - possibly being a contributing factor to the start of the Vietnam War, as argued in A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan.

Edit: The ultimate expression of those on the left as an "undifferentiated mass" was probably the original SIOP which would have attacked all socialist countries even those that weren't on particularly good terms with the Soviets. And even that approach didn't last long - the head of US Marine Corp described attacking people you weren't actually fighting as "This is not the American way".