Ronan Farrow’s book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence recounts episodes from the Obama-Trump militarization of U.S. foreign policy. While the book begins with and has been marketed with the story of Trump firing lots of key diplomats and leaving positions unfilled, much of its content is from the pre-Trump, Obama-era and even Bush-era erosion of diplomacy as something distinct from war and weapons sales.

The distinction between employing diplomats whose opinions are allowed to matter only when they agree with the Pentagon and not employing them at all is not as sharp a distinction as people may imagine. As with the distinction between drones that fire on unknown people when some poor schmuck is ordered to push a button and drones that decide when to fire all on their own, the question of whether or not you have diplomats sounds dramatic but can make little actual difference on the ground.

In Joseph Hickman’s book Murder at Camp Delta, he describes a hideous death camp in which guards were trained to view the prisoners as sub-human and much greater care was taken to protect the well-being of iguanas than homo sapiens. Chaos was the norm, and physical abuse of the prisoners was standard. Col. Mike Bumgarner made it a top priority that everyone stand in formation when he entered his office in the morning to the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth or “Bad Boys.” Hickman relates that certain vans were permitted to drive in and out of the camp uninspected, making a mockery of elaborate attempts at security. He didn’t know the reasoning behind this until he happened to discover a secret camp not included on any maps, a place he called Camp No but the CIA called Penny Lane.

Saturday, April 28, 5pm
MCL Kingsdale, 3154 Kingsdale Center, Upper Arlington, Ohio
Come out and join us for dinner and conversation! We’ll be in the back room unless there’s a special event going on in that room.

Thursday, April 26, 7-8:30pm
St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 83 W Woodruff
The Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The assassination of Martin Luther King. The French May. The Prague Spring. Black Power fists at the Olympics in Mexico City. Mayhem outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. Marching for civil rights in Northern Ireland.

To name the year 1968 is to summon images of not just one or two world-shaking events, but many. 1968 demonstrated even the strongest-seeming regimes can be shaken by uprisings from below; political change is infectious and can take place at lightning speed; the spirit of freedom can sweep across the world, from the poorest and most subjugated countries to the richest and most powerful.

Join us for a conversation about the momentous year of 1968, and what it means for us today, 50 years later. 

This meeting will feature a guest speaker, Paul D’Amato, who is a member of the ISO’s national steering committee and the author of The Meaning of Marxism.

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