"Four years earlier I had been selected, with Kay Boyle, the writer, and a number of others, to go to Cambodia and come back and prove that there were no sanctuaries in that country"
About this Quote
Kunstler’s sentence is a quiet detonation of bureaucratic doublespeak: a mission framed as fact-finding that’s already been decided in advance. “Selected” sounds honorary, even neutral, until the assignment arrives: go to Cambodia and “prove” there were no sanctuaries. Not investigate. Not report. Prove. The verb gives away the game. This isn’t journalism or diplomacy; it’s a pre-scripted exoneration tour, a procedural costume for a political need.
The context is the Vietnam War’s slippery geography, when U.S. leaders insisted the war’s boundaries were clean even as bombing spilled into neighboring countries. “Sanctuaries” is itself loaded language. It casts Cambodia not as a sovereign nation being violated but as a suspicious hiding place for an enemy, a rhetorical move that makes escalation sound like housekeeping. Kunstler is alert to how that vocabulary launders violence: if there are “no sanctuaries,” then incursions are unnecessary; if there are sanctuaries, incursions become inevitable. Either way, the frame serves power.
Kay Boyle’s inclusion matters because it signals the kind of credibility the trip was meant to borrow: respected writers as human letterhead. Kunstler, the activist-lawyer famous for defending the unpopular, lets the irony hang in the syntax. He’s not ranting; he’s documenting how institutions recruit dissent’s aesthetics to neutralize dissent’s substance. The subtext is a warning about managed truth: when the conclusion is predetermined, “facts” become props and witnesses become instruments.
The context is the Vietnam War’s slippery geography, when U.S. leaders insisted the war’s boundaries were clean even as bombing spilled into neighboring countries. “Sanctuaries” is itself loaded language. It casts Cambodia not as a sovereign nation being violated but as a suspicious hiding place for an enemy, a rhetorical move that makes escalation sound like housekeeping. Kunstler is alert to how that vocabulary launders violence: if there are “no sanctuaries,” then incursions are unnecessary; if there are sanctuaries, incursions become inevitable. Either way, the frame serves power.
Kay Boyle’s inclusion matters because it signals the kind of credibility the trip was meant to borrow: respected writers as human letterhead. Kunstler, the activist-lawyer famous for defending the unpopular, lets the irony hang in the syntax. He’s not ranting; he’s documenting how institutions recruit dissent’s aesthetics to neutralize dissent’s substance. The subtext is a warning about managed truth: when the conclusion is predetermined, “facts” become props and witnesses become instruments.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by William
Add to List
