Letters to the Editor
Settembrini
Published Letters: 155
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@DClaw a good explanation, and worth a reread
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kevin Baker's Stabbed in the Back! The past and future of a right-wing myth
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081080
Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.
Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.
Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner's bowed head against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.
It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes. Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for the Los Angeles Times about how returning Iraqi veterans are being showered with acts of good will by an adoring American public, “In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago.” The POW/MIA flags, with their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United States, just under the Stars and Stripes; federal law even mandates that on at least six days a year—Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of September)—they must be flown over nearly every single U.S. government building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world—these peculiar little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of betrayal.
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If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?
The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon's ability to expand the Siegfried myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon's own administration that first “left behind” American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it. What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.
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Good chance.
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Good odds that kid has a username on Stormfront.
-- DCLaw1
There is the prowar extremist right. There is an antiwar extremist right. Lots of shifting across the lines and blurring of sectors, depending on politics. It is still the far right and its main unifying feature is opposition to liberalism and progressivism. They consider liberalism to be socialism or even communism. They all hate FDR equally.
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Moonbat
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Martin Gifford...But at one point Bush had 80% approval rating and Saddam was out of power. That shows effectiveness, although the methods, as I said were incorrect, and “destructive” as you said. Why can’t Progressives be as effective in selling and implementing their ideas (if they have any)?
I don't think Bush's approval rating ever reached 60% at any time. FDR's New Deal has been quite successful to this day. There is no such place, Martin. Utopia literally means, no such place.
It's comforting to know that there really are such things as Moonbats.
The word comes from Greek: οὐ, "not", and τόπος, "place" as well as εὖ, "good" or "well", and τόπος ["good place"]—the double meaning was probably intended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia
1551, from Mod.L. Utopia, lit. "nowhere," coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying perfect legal, social, and political systems), from Gk. ou "not" + topos "place." Extended to "any perfect place," 1613. Utopian originally meant "having no known location" (1609); sense of "impossibly visionary, ideal" is from 1621; as a noun meaning "visionary idealist" it is first recorded c.1873 (earlier in this sense was utopiast, 1854).