(I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW)

Today, I will again drink a glass of beer in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the aggressive and unjust war in which they fought. I don’t know their reasons for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were cruelly cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it. But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and, when necessary, make war.

Ricky and Cotter were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why they ended up with a gun in their hands in a distant land.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

After all, they were not that much different than me, and I have no confidence that I could have. It was hard enough to grow up at that time without a tour of duty in Vietnam on my emotional resume. I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish their lives hadn’t been senselessly erased doing things that no one should do. I wish they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.

I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies.” I wish they could join me for a beer today, although knowing them a single beer wouldn’t quite satisfy them. Or me.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well their comrades who also never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace. Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon, as I wash down a glass of beer.

In any conflict, knowing who strikes the first blow doesn’t necessarily tell us much. In nearly every instance, it is necessary to dig deeper and uncover the backstory behind it. Only then is it possible to assign responsibility for the clash to one or another side and envision what a peaceful resolution might look like.

In the case of the current violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a New York Times reporter uncovers the backstory to that conflict. And in my reading of it, the guilty party for this new cycle of violence, irrespective of who struck the first blow, is Netanyahu and the Israeli government and the only way to prevent its reoccurrence is to address the underlying causes of this conflict: the systematic and sustained opposition of the Israeli government to the formation of a sustainable, territorially contiguous, and independent Palestinian state, living side by side and in peace with the state of Israel.

In an article in the NYT, Anshel Pfeffer, an Israeli political commentator and biographer of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, is quoted as saying,

“Netanyahu didn’t invent the tensions between Jews and Arabs. They’ve been here since before Israel was founded. But over his long years in power, he’s stoked and exploited these tensions for political gain time and again and has now miserably failed as a leader to put out the fires when it boiled over.”

One has to wonder how much of the present outbreak of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis is explained by the political ambitions and election maneuvering of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in his effort to hold onto power.

While not getting into the details of this new outbreak of violence between the Israel and Palestinian people, I want to make this observation: the whole notion of equivalency in this conflict between the Palestinians and the Israeli government is a dangerous falsehood that conceals the actual dynamics and lines of resolution of this violent (and reoccurring) clash.

Look at the realities: The balance of military and economic power is overwhelmingly on the Israeli side; the Palestinians have nowhere near the fire power or economic resources. A long suffering and colonized people – the Palestinians – are fighting for their independent and long denied statehood against a powerful, imperial and expansionist state whose mission is to prevent the realization of that fundamental right by all means at its disposal. Palestinian land is occupied and Israel is the occupier. Finally, the casualty lists are long and the destruction is immense on the Palestinian side, while on the other side the loss of life and damage is minimal.

In short, this isn’t a conflict between two equal adversaries with equally just claims. Don’t buy into that notion. It’s fool’s gold, meant to conceal the real dynamics in this struggle as well as forestall the only solution that stands a chance of bringing peace to both peoples in this decades long conflict – an independent, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state living side by side and in peace with its Israeli neighbor.

Addendum: Trevor Noah says it much better than I do.

Here is a comment I made on someone else’s facebook page that I thought might be of interest:

1. To see economic and political processes in the present and future as simply a continuation, with slight modifications, of the past is analytically mistaken and politically counterproductive. A vibrant, open ended Marxism should take into account discontinuities, changing conjunctures, and new phenomena at the national and global level that emerge in the course of capitalist development and modify, not only the conditions for the production and realization of capital, but also class and democratic struggles at the national and global level. Sometimes these modifications are of great consequence and thus have deep going programmatic, strategic and tactical implications.

2. To comprehend the evolution and shifts of US capitalism over the past century one has to be mindful not only of its systemic imperative to accumulate capital at the level of the firm, but also to remember that that this law operates within and is greatly modified by a world system in which capitals and nation states compete for political and economic dominance/hegemony. The Golden Age of capitalism, not to mention the turn to neoliberalism, can’t be comprehended outside of this larger context and dynamic.

3. In thinking about the rise of Trump and Trumpism from a strategic and tactical point of view, one has to understand it more as a sharp break than a continuation of past political processes.

4. As for the social/political constituencies that have to be assembled to move down “freedom road,” one has to accent the imperative of political and social alliances/coalitions. Such a view finds confirmation in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, etc., but also is evident in the historical record of the past century. The gravediggers of capitalism and the drum majors of a deeply democratic and egalitarian society are not confined to the point of production. Socialism’s historical subjects – note the plural – are found in various social spaces, possess multiple identities, and are animated by a range of social needs, desires, and interests that are at loggerheads with capitalism’s imperatives, trajectory, and values. A narrow framing of this matter serves no good purpose.