13 - Encounters in Southeast Asia: 1957–2007

Summary

WHAT DO WE DO, AND WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES?

My first few thoughts are about teachers and policy. They come out of the seminar at Columbia University honouring Jack Bresnan in November 2005. A number of those present were distressed about present United States (U.S.) policy in the Middle East, and lack of attention to Southeast Asia. I also felt stressed, and I want to explain why and how.

The worst I ever felt about American policy in Southeast Asia was while standing contrary to our war in Vietnam. For experts who knew the region, the mid- and late 1960s and early 1970s was a long and tortured time. I first expressed myself in a 1965 essay entitled, “An Off-White Paper on Vietnam”. We all hoped somehow to have an impact, and of course we did not. Whatever we knew was immaterial to those in power. That feeling of helplessness against bureaucratic deafness is repeated today in Iraq. I feel we must in our own ways object, even if unheeded. Because the subject of encounters with Southeast Asia is so great, all I can do here is to toast a few anecdotal marshmallows and philosophize.

Let me quote a theologian who taught in New York City — Reinhold Niebuhr, sixty years ago at the Union Theological Seminary. He was critical of American pride and power, and eloquently so. At the time we were threatening to remake Japan and Germany without any consciousness of their human, historical fabric. Eventually we did a fairly effective and lasting job in those potent social laboratories. But Niebuhr was writing at a time when Henry Morgenthau, Jr. just wanted to strip Germany down to farms; and he was criticizing such a policy. Niebuhr argued that, “The very idea of bestowing democracy is the kind of pride and power that the prophets inveighed against.” On that Niebuhrian point I want to begin and conclude, and then go into colloquy with you.

What do we do, we Southeast Asianists who study and write? If we avidly seek power we make a mistake. Our first task is to feed thoughtful students who are imaginative in their research and their outlook. What have we to tell them? And what can we convey to non-specialist American citizens?