The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,160

ideas and norms, it is not surprising that in our universe it was the first half of the 20th century that was shaped by a Princip and a Hitler, and the second half by a Kennedy, a Khrushchev, and a Gorbachev.

Yet another historic upheaval in the landscape of 20th-century values was a resistance by the populations of democratic nations to their leaders’ plans for war. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw mass demonstrations to Ban the Bomb, whose legacy includes the trident-in-circle peace symbol co-opted by other antiwar movements. By the late 1960s the United States was torn apart by protests against the Vietnam War. Antiwar convictions were no longer confined to sentimental aunts of both sexes, and the idealists who went about in sandals and beards were no longer cranks but a significant proportion of the generation that reached adulthood in the 1960s. Unlike the major artworks deploring World War I, which appeared more than a decade after it was over, popular art in the 1960s condemned the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War in real time. Antiwar advocacy was woven into prime-time television programs (such as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and M*A*S*H) and many popular films and songs:Catch-22 • Fail-Safe • Dr. Strangelove • Hearts and Minds • FTA • How I Won the War • Johnny Got His Gun • King of Hearts • M*A*S*H • Oh! What a Lovely War • Slaughterhouse-Five

“Alice’s Restaurant” • “Blowin’ in the Wind” • “Cruel War” • “Eve of Destruction” • “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” • “Give Peace a Chance” • “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” • “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” • “If I Had a Hammer” • “Imagine” • “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” • “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” • “Machine Gun” • “Masters of War” • “Sky Pilot” • “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” • “Turn! Turn! Turn!” • “Universal Soldier” • “What’s Goin’ On?” • “With God on Our Side” • “War (What Is It Good For?)” • “Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy” • “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

As in the 1700s and the 1930s, artists did not just preach about war to make it seem immoral but satirized it to make it seem ridiculous. During the 1969 Woodstock concert, Country Joe and the Fish sang the jaunty “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” whose chorus was:And it’s One, Two, Three, what are we fighting for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn; next stop is Vietnam!

And it’s Five, Six, Seven, open up the Pearly Gates.

There ain’t no time to wonder why; Whoopee! We’re all going to die.

In his 1967 monologue “Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo Guthrie told of being drafted and sent to an army psychiatrist at the induction center in New York:And I went up there, I said, “Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.” And I started jumpin’ up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL,” and he started jumpin’ up and down with me and we was both jumpin’ up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL.” And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, “You’re our boy.”

It’s easy to dismiss this cultural moment as baby-boomer nostalgia. As Tom Lehrer satirized it, they won all the battles, but we had the good songs. But in a sense we did win the battles. In the wake of nationwide protests, Lyndon Johnson shocked the country by not seeking his party’s nomination in the 1968 presidential election. Though a reaction against the increasingly unruly protests helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968, Nixon shifted the country’s war plans from a military victory to a face-saving withdrawal (though not before another twenty thousand Americans and a million Vietnamese had died in the fighting). After a 1973 cease-fire, American troops were withdrawn, and Congress effectively ended the war by prohibiting additional intervention and cutting off funding for the South Vietnamese government.

The United States was then said to have fallen into a “Vietnam Syndrome” in which it shied away from military engagement. By the 1980s it had recovered well enough to fight several small wars and to support anticommunist forces in several proxy wars, but clearly its military policy would never be the same. The phenomenon called “casualty dread,” “war aversion,” and “the Dover Doctrine” (the