The Children’s Crusade Continues

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, prompting reporters and commentators to memorialize him as a symbol of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture and a hero of the movement to end the Vietnam War. Recalling the author’s heyday, the New York Times noted, “Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.” Without a doubt, those images from decades ago sealed Vonnegut’s standing as a master of American literature. But the paperback copies on college campuses are by no means a thing of the past.

With the Bush Administration plowing ahead in Iraq, Vonnegut’s vision of war—on display most directly in Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade—continues to spark debate and inspire activism among young people from coast to coast. “We’ve spent the last five or six years, a very formative time, in a constant state of war,” says Wes Hannah, a senior at Cornell University and a member of the school’s student antiwar group. “I feel like I’ve been influenced [by Vonnegut’s work] in the same way people were influenced when it came out.”

Kate Losey, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, remembers first experiencing Vonnegut fiction as a high school student in the small town of Warsaw, Indiana. “I was reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and I wasn’t in agreement with the Afghan war,” she says. “It must have fallen in line with my thinking.” From there, Losey went on to read several more of Vonnegut’s classics, from Cat’s Cradle to Galápagos, while emerging as a leading antiwar activist in Madison.

In today’s student realm, in which many initially encounter Vonnegut through required reading, the popularity of the author’s vision of war stems in part from its recognition of unmitigated horrors. That element contrasts sharply with Washington’s standard framing of every wartime tragedy as a necessary means to a necessary end. “War gets rationalized,” says Katrina Yeaw, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, “and I think Vonnegut, through his characters, shows how irrational war really is.” Yeaw read Slaughterhouse-Five as a college freshman and has been an active member of the national Campus Antiwar Network for the past four years.

Having written his last novel in 1997, Vonnegut never explored the age of George W. Bush in that form. Though he continued to share his thoughts through non-fiction writing and interviews—asked by In These Times in January 2003 what was not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq, he replied, “That they are nonsense”—his sharpest game was always full-length fiction. And as Yeaw says, “It’s important for people to read the books on the Iraq war, but I think fiction has the ability to reach people on a different level.”

Indeed, the unique blend of humor, sci-fi and social commentary that defines Vonnegut’s novels has fueled both hope and action among students in the Bush years, as it did with their forebears in the ’60s and ’70s. “A lot of the articles I’ve been reading are saying his books hold a lot of cynicism,” says Losey, who traveled from Madison to Washington in March to protest the Iraq war outside the Pentagon. “But for me, it was uplifting to read his books. They gave me a lot of hope.”

That Vonnegut’s work continues to excite the nation’s students speaks volumes about the deceased author himself. “He cared about the earth, and mostly, he cared about people,” says his friend and agent, Donald Farber. “That’s why he’s one of the few current writers, I used to say living writers, who is still one hundred percent in print. [His] books are multi-generational.”

And so the Children’s Crusade continues, with Vonnegut as essential as ever.

A Vanishing Tale of Torture

In the first resolution of a Guantánamo Bay detention case under the new Military Commissions Act, Australian David Hicks pled guilty Monday to providing material support to a terrorist organization. Hicks will serve nine months of a seven-year sentence, mostly in his native country. On its face, the Hicks plea deal marked the first sign of progress in the Guantánamo system, an institution known throughout the world as a legal black hole since its establishment in 2002.

But for those troubled by the torture and mistreatment of detainees over the years, the deal raised serious concerns that the Bush Administration is seeking to re-write Guantánamo’s torture-laden history. Under its terms, Hicks, who repeatedly complained of torture as a detainee, stated that he has “never been illegally treated” while in US custody and promised not to pursue a lawsuit over abuse. He also promised not to speak with the media for a year.

“It certainly appears that the United States demanded David Hicks’s silence in exchange for his freedom,” says Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel at Reprieve, a UK-based human rights group that represents several Guantánamo detainees. “You can hardly look at the twelve-month gag order and prohibition from alleging abuse and not think that the United States military has something to hide.”

Prior to the plea deal, Hicks’s allegations of torture were quite definite. In an affidavit signed just weeks beforehand, he stated that while in US custody he was kicked, spat on, hit with a rifle butt and injected with drugs. Those allegations, however, are now null and void—vanished in the murky plea bargaining of Guantánamo Bay.

The Other Latin America Strategy

President Bush begins his weeklong journey today with the mission of reversing Latin America’s leftward turn. He’ll talk energy in Brazil, free trade in Uruguay and narcotics in Colombia—all the while working to stymie the rise of Hugo Chávez and regional alternatives to the Washington Consensus. But this diplomatic foray is hardly Bush’s lone strategy for shifting the hemisphere’s political landscape. Though well below the radar, the current Administration has continued Washington’s longstanding policy of employing military training and funding to shape the affairs of Latin America.

This reality became crystal clear in 2006, a year in which numerous leftist leaders achieved electoral success throughout the western hemisphere. In October, the White House waived restrictions on military training and funding for several Latin American countries that have shifted to the left in recent years, including Ecuador and Bolivia. The restrictions had been in place to pressure the governments of those countries to grant immunity to US soldiers in the International Criminal Court. The purpose of waiving the restrictions, however, was not to showcase a newfound sense of respect for the ICC; it was to enable the US military to assert greater influence in Latin America so as to counter the continuing political trend.

Such use of military training and funding in the western hemisphere marks familiar terrain for the Washington establishment. In cold war Latin America, the US government went to great lengths to support military dictatorships willing to play by its political rules. It trained and funded tens of thousands of foreign soldiers, knowing full well that doing so had devastating effects on human rights and political freedom. In fact, Pentagon documents later revealed that the US government not only knew of those effects, but encouraged them; from at least 1982-1991, officers at the US Army’s School of the Americas instructed Latin American soldiers in coercive interrogation techniques and extrajudicial executions. From El Salvador to Argentina, countless US-trained soldiers made careers of torturing political prisoners, assassinating priests and slaughtering children so as to seize and maintain power for unelected military regimes.

Though external circumstances have changed over time, the purported basis for the US military’s training and funding of Latin American soldiers in the cold war era was essentially the same as it is now: to promote democracy and security in the western hemisphere. That the result will be the same as well is a legitimate concern.