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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe GOP’s destructive Vietnam mythology(from Salon.com)
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The GOPs destructive Vietnam mythology: How the rights self-glorifying delusions led to decades of avoidable war
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/02/the_gops_destructive_vietnam_mythology_how_the_rights_self_glorifying_delusions_led_to_decades_of_avoidable_war/?source=newsletter
By Peter Birkenhead
It is time that we recognized that [the American War in Vietnam] was, in truth, a noble cause We dishonor the memory of 50 thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.
Reagans letting-down-the-troops angle was a brilliant rhetorical tactic. According to the story he and his fellow conservatives told, the only problem with the Vietnam War was that we hadnt let the soldiers win it. By the time he took office, Reagans conscience-free take on the war had gained traction among a public eager for easy absolution and a restoration of Americas standing in the world. It would go on to serve as convenient justification for other, similarly doomed wars of adventure in the years to come.
The story of the fall of Saigon as the right tells it is not one of American hubris getting its comeuppance via popular revolution or withdrawal of broad support at home, but one of sinister betrayal by spineless bureaucrats, cowed by selfish, pampered, troop-hating radicals. Americas failure was not one of dubious moral judgement on the part of its ruling class, but rather moral turpitude on the part of its young people. Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz saw the era as one of wild excess self-glorification and narcissism by an incredibly spoiled, self-indulgent generation .who were taught to think everything they say is right, a perfect articulation of the self-justifying canard at the heart of what has become our popular understanding of the war, and of the similarly upside-down, false histories now being spun about Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The rights willfully amnesiac version of the 60s is such conventional wisdom now that even ostensibly liberal journalists cant seem to help resorting to its tired tropes. In interviews given a few years ago while promoting his documentary about 1968, Tom Brokaw defined the era with a hypothetical, illustrative scenario: A man works hard and plays by the rules all his life, raises himself out of the working class and by the 60s is raising two kids in a comfortable home. He sits down to dinner one night to be told by his teenage daughter, whos wearing, in Brokaws words, a blouse without a brassiere, that shes on the pill, and, by his son with hair down to his shoulders, that he shouldnt worry, because he knows how to get out of the draft.
For Brokaw and other mainstream journalists, the defining traumas of the 60s were inflicted by protest-marching, draft-dodging, long-haired sons, and braless daughters on the pill. (Oh, and yes, there were also some assassinations, and they were bad, too, in a generic, completely decontextualized sort of way.) The worst injury of the decade was to the delicate sensibilities of hardworking, middle-class white men.
This vision of the era has become so entrenched its almost impossible to imagine a figure like Brokaw describing an opposite, and far more essential version of the same scene: one where, say, a young man of draft age thinks that defending a corrupt dictatorship in a civil war on the other side of the world goes against everything for which his fathers generation supposedly fought. One where maybe its the son whos offended, by the way his father treats his wife, or talks about his one black co-worker, or seems so untroubled by his job at Dow Chemical. Or maybe a scene where the draft dodger is named Cheney and he tells his dad he has other priorities than fighting communism. But, unless Norman Lear has a sudden career resurgence, that kind of restoration of sanity is not going to happen any time soon.
The important, lasting injury we did to ourselves in Vietnam wasnt inflicted by American protesters or draft-dodgers. Despite the way theyre depicted in popular culture, those dissidents were, for the most part, mainstream, middle-class families, sickened by a war they watched on their televisions every night (as opposed to the Iraq War, which was rendered invisible by an administration that learned the political lessons of Vietnam all too well.)
My parents, both products of working-class families and graduates of a tuition-free public university, marched often with other suburban families. They never carried the Vietcong flag, or saw anyone else do it. They never committed any acts of violence. They did have rocks thrown at them by construction workers, and they were spit on (unlike the humiliated, returning soldiers of right-wing legend) but they kept marching, because they thought that was the right (and American) thing to do.
Their story is absent from the right-wing telling of their times. One of the central themes of that telling is that the excesses of the sex-crazed, drug-addled left helped create the modern conservative movement, and no doubt thats true. But that movement has succeeded, in part, because it has grossly exaggerated the excesses of the left and washed its own from collective memory.
malthaussen
(17,216 posts)... you will find interesting parallels.
-- Mal
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Thanks for the reminder.
malthaussen
(17,216 posts)And look at us now.
-- Mal
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)malthaussen
(17,216 posts)... but if we did, it might occur to some of the poor marks how they are being played.
-- Mal
steve2470
(37,457 posts)hifiguy
(33,688 posts)and destroying the entire country to "win" the Vietnam war.
Even mainstream popular historians count that war as an avoidable disaster. And the "collateral damage" killed more than two million Cambodians. Before war criminals Nixon and Kissinger expanded the war into Cambodian territory Pol Pot was a zero out in the jungle somewhere.
As usual, only Repukes fail to see facts that are as plain as a pikestaff.