Remembering Vietnam

What’re They Gonna Do, Cut My Hair and Send Me to Nam?

Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in South East Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam. … Vietnam represents a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence - Communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest, then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low. John Fitzgerald Kennedy

There are always those moments in any political “discussion” in which the key point that’s being argued hides behind the obfuscation of polemic.Democrats go on for hours about Republicans want to “control our personal lives”, or “we need to stop the religious right.” What’s at stake? Not bedrooms. Not pork n’beans. Abortion. Instead of just saying ‘abortion should be legal and left to the individual’, there’s a referendum on patriarchy, people who believe in God, and white folks. Somehow it always gets back to a white folks, who need to apologize for everything from warm Jell-o to floods and draughts in Africa, earthquakes in Asia, and tooth decay. God help you if you dissent. Has to be because you’re a racist. Being white is an ideology, you know. Politics by intimidation. That’s the “liberal” way.

My Libertarian friends do the same thing: hours and hours of clenched, intense, death matches on how Republicans are in cahoots with the destruction of American ideals. At the end of the Marathon, what do you get? Pot should be legal. That’s it! I’ve lost more than one “libertarian” friend over the years because I wouldn’t bow to the Cosmic Wisdom of Pot. The apparent strategy is to wear down the opposition with breathless, maniacal speech, then snatch your ”right” to suck dope from the debilitated dissenter. If you don’t agree, it’s surely because you’re evil. Me? I regard the entire cycle of hysterical “argument” as pointless, groundless, and faithless, but can’t make that point without revealing my inherent evil, so I usually quit. It’s not worth my time to prove something that time and facts will prove for me.

The Little Girl Picking Daisies. Vietnam was the cornerstone of the American divide from 1965 onward. You have to be as old as I am to remember that in 1964, the year Goldwater lost to LBJ, there was pretty much a national consensus that we shouldn’t run from SE Asia. I can tell you none of the mothers wanted us there, and many a person started talking about “that war so far from home.” The men I listened to at the barber shop were expressing doubts about what would later be called “nation buidling.” and the media, not yet Dan Ratherized, was smelling dissent. (Somewhere in Massachusetts Noam Chomsky was plotting another lecture.) I believe it was Life Magazine that ran pictures of beheaded corpses in 1962, thereby setting the stage for Apocalypse Now - but John Kennedy had reminded us of our duty, and he was killed by some Russian-lovin’ wife-beater, and that was that. We would do our duty. By 1965 all that had changed: the hippie movement sprouted in San Francisco; Port Huron true believers began to dominate university faculties; marijuana was the new rage, and ordinary folks were experimenting with LSD. Children were shouting at their stunned parents about the “establishment.” Strange, psychedelic notes began to creep into music. By 1968 there was violence in the streets and when, in 1970, four kids got shot dead at Kent State, the fight was on. It didn’t matter what the kids did; who pulled the trigger; who gave the orders. If you supported the anti-communist fight in Nam, you were a baby killer. Probably a Christian. And a patriot — a word now subjected to derision. In 1970 it was fashionable to hang an American flag, tattered and dirty, in doorways or on walls, upside down or reversed. One was subjected to breathless, maniacal lectures on America the imperialistic power, America the oil-hungry killin’ machine. White people again. Republicans. They killed the little girl picking daisies.

People like me didn’t know it then, but the election of Ronald Reagan was set in stone. I think he knew that; surely Nancy was already redesigning the White House in her imagination. I believe his advisers were planning for the overthrow of Walter Cronkite and the State Department. It was only a matter of time. By 1974 it no longer even mattered that Nixon sank his own ship with paranoia. The play had been cast: baby killers to the Right; Planet Savers to the Left. Get in line.

The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman-the leader of the new “occupation power.” Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands. ION MIHAI PACEPA

There is not one argument I hear today about conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism, that doesn’t remind me of Vietnam. At this point it doesn’t matter — to me, at least — whether we were there or not, or whether we lost or won. What matters is that, behind all the smoke, there are two visions of America. In those two visions lies the unspoken conflict: whether America is a great nation, or a pariah. Each vision becomes the launching point for a lecture on abortion, marijuana, free markets, and so on. Funny thing is, the kids coming up now have no context for Vietnam. The Purt Huron statement is a relic; Puff the Magic Dragon has been replaced by Snoop Dogg.

This is (minus the subtle editorial slant) where we started:

[H]aving once agreed upon a definition, Americans were constrained to defend that definition lest they lose face with friends and enemies. Credibility counted when American commitments outran American capabilities. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination could the United States have defended simultaneously all the regimes it was pledged by the 1960s to defend; its resolve and success anywhere had implications for its prospects everywhere. Encyclopedia of the New American Nation

And this is where we ended up:

When the Nixon presidency went down in flames it unfortunately took a chunk of conservative legitimacy with it.

The war in Vietnam ended with a defeat for U.S. imperial violence, but only a partial defeat-a significant fact. The U.S. Expeditionary Force of over half a million men in South Vietnam became “a drugged, mutinous and demoralised rabble”5 and was withdrawn. U.S. Ieaders had painfully learned a lesson familiar to their predecessors: a conscript army is ill-suited to fight a colonial war with its inevitable barbarism and incessant atrocities against helpless civilians. Such a war is better left to hired killers such as the French Foreign Legion or native mercenaries, or in the modern period to an advanced technology that leaves some psychic distance between the murderers and their victims-although even B-52 pilots reportedly began to object when Nixon and Kissinger dispatched them to devastate Hanoi in December, 1972 in a final effort to compel the North Vietnamese to accept a U.S.-dictated peace. After the Cataclysm

JFK and Camelot: A Tale of Two Liberalisms

An absolutely riveting piece on the subject of photographs and faith is NeoNeoCon’s A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change: (Part 7B: the Vietnam photos revisited).

Add to that Vanderleun’s Radical Roots and the Conquest of the Democratic Party.

In the 1960s, a social revolution took place against historical and societal norms. An era of peace and prosperity unprecedented in the history of mankind was underway in the United States, allowing a new generation who had never experienced hardship on a massive scale to focus on hedonistic pursuits, self-aggrandizement, and a search for meaning in their lives.

This movement was promptly seized by the true believers of the Left as a recruiting tool; Leftists proclaimed to the gullible that the United States was an unjust, repressive instrument of capitalism. The siren song of a classless society wherein all are treated fairly and there are no absolutes found eager ears. The protests against the Vietnam War and the very necessary civil rights movement, which achieved so much, were hijacked by many of the post-depression generation into a call to overthrow all of society’s foundational standards. Steve McCann: The Origins of the Lapdog Media

Vietnam: the Necessary War, by Michael Lind