Attack on Wesley Clark: Part of the Right Wing Lies About Vietnam War History
In the aftermath of the mainstream media and right wing bloviators erroneous lies and smears about Wesley Clark and his answers to questions about John McCain, comes Julian Delasantellis' interesting commentary at Asia Times. The entire piece is well worth a read and here are some excerpts:
"Most of McCain's recent attempts to advance policy positions on current issues ranging from home foreclosure relief to healthcare have degenerated into furtive fumbling failures, so now he is running back true to form, continually asserting that his service as a Vietnam-era naval aviator and the five years of torture and depravations he suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese after being shot down over Hanoi in 1967 are qualifications sufficient to be president...
"What is really going on here has little to do with McCain, even less to do with Clark. Once again, this is a phenomenon that has resulted in response to American society deciding to change the radio station playing the truth about what really happened in Vietnam, to one playing more agreeable, less disharmonious on the memories, easy-listening tunes.
"In my June 6, 2007, Asia Times Online piece, Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time, I explained how this phenomenon was shaping and framing the debate over the Iraq "surge":
"Not the self-serving politicians who led the country into the morass, nor the bungling career-obsessed generals who mis-managed it, not even the corrupt South Vietnamese officials who became rich over it. No, it was the anti-war left in the United States, who, just as liberty and democracy were set to forever reign triumphant in Saigon, snatched ignominious defeat from the jaws of victory in Washington, on the nation's college campuses, and, especially, in the media.
"As I wrote last year, 'Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly silencing the truth with repression and torture, the US national consensus had sent the truth it no longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the memory hole.'
"But losing the war was only the first charge on the indictment of the anti-war movement. They were also guilty, when the actual combat soldiers returned home from Vietnam, of the worst manners of disrespectful calumny against the troops. The common cultural image stereotype that those 40% of the American population not alive then (including most of my college students here in very liberal Seattle) have of that era is of long-haired, unkempt and unclean protesters spitting on clean-shaven troops in uniform as they disembarked from the troop carriers at the airport - even though sociologist and Vietnam-veteran Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, claims that no actual photographic evidence exists of these supposedly treasonous expectorations.
"But the reason these old shibboleths continue to work so well has little to do with any supposed superior media skills of the right's polemicists. These are more akin to research monkeys in a cage; they see that pressing a button - in this case, accusing the left of disloyalty - gets them a treat, so they keep whaling away on it. It's not that the right makes the charge so effectively; its real power comes in the fact that the left never really answers back.
"So why doesn't the political left fight back?
"What gives the charge the full fury of its power is that, ever since the early 1980s, the left has been attempting to deny its heritage in the anti-war movement with a vigor that would have impressed even the apostle Peter denying Jesus in the New Testament's Book of Matthew.
"In similarly denying their role in the anti-war movement, the modern day left implicitly accepts the lie of Vietnam revisionism - that the anti-war movement lost the war. In treating their past as a sort of madwoman in the attic that they will be eternally ashamed of, the left makes itself vulnerable to the right's attacks, which the right is more than happy to oblige.
"....Obama disassociated himself rapidly from the General. In the current American political jargon, he "threw Clark under the bus" - one of the many that this week have deposited their wide tire tracks across Clark's now lifeless political carcass.
"On Thursday, the US Department of Labor will release the data on the unemployment rate for June. Expectations are that the rate will continue its ascent towards 6%, up from last year's numbers around mid-4%. If you think that the seriousness of the situation in the present will end the debate on the past, you are sadly mistaken. If anything, as current conditions deteriorate, the political interests who midwifed the present difficulties will redouble their attempt to refocus the public's attention on the past - anything to deflect attention from the present.
"Perhaps that is the future of America's endless debate over Vietnam. It will continue on ad infinitum - past the time when the original contestants are all living in old age homes (some are getting pretty close now), past the time when they are all cold in the grave - for generation upon generations to come. For all eternity, it will be the revisionists and their descendants chasing the anti-war activists and theirs --- the anti-war activists condemned to an eternal flight from both their pursuers and their progenitors' pasts.
"What could break the cycle, cut the Gordian knot? Well, for me, the first thing that comes to mind is the truth."
"Most of McCain's recent attempts to advance policy positions on current issues ranging from home foreclosure relief to healthcare have degenerated into furtive fumbling failures, so now he is running back true to form, continually asserting that his service as a Vietnam-era naval aviator and the five years of torture and depravations he suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese after being shot down over Hanoi in 1967 are qualifications sufficient to be president...
"What is really going on here has little to do with McCain, even less to do with Clark. Once again, this is a phenomenon that has resulted in response to American society deciding to change the radio station playing the truth about what really happened in Vietnam, to one playing more agreeable, less disharmonious on the memories, easy-listening tunes.
"In my June 6, 2007, Asia Times Online piece, Yes, Rambo, you get to win this time, I explained how this phenomenon was shaping and framing the debate over the Iraq "surge":
... as the United States feathered its hair and discoed its way through the late 1970s to the early 1980s, a gnawing ache grew and metastasized in the national consciousness. The US lost a war. The US lost its first war. This was unacceptable. Somehow, the truth of the Vietnam War had to be disposed of down the memory hole. ... Since the nation no longer actually had to fight the Vietnam War, the United States was discovering that it now actually liked the Vietnam War. The revisionist-history project as applied to the Vietnam experience was gathering full force. The war was no longer a bloody, fatally mismanaged fiasco - it was now a "noble cause". More important, the war was not lost by the troops - they actually won the fight - but by other forces in society: first, the government, then other societal forces. The manhunt for the real losers of the Vietnam War was on."So, just who was presented in the dock of the courts of revisionism as the real culprit in the US defeat of Vietnam?
"Not the self-serving politicians who led the country into the morass, nor the bungling career-obsessed generals who mis-managed it, not even the corrupt South Vietnamese officials who became rich over it. No, it was the anti-war left in the United States, who, just as liberty and democracy were set to forever reign triumphant in Saigon, snatched ignominious defeat from the jaws of victory in Washington, on the nation's college campuses, and, especially, in the media.
"As I wrote last year, 'Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly silencing the truth with repression and torture, the US national consensus had sent the truth it no longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the memory hole.'
"But losing the war was only the first charge on the indictment of the anti-war movement. They were also guilty, when the actual combat soldiers returned home from Vietnam, of the worst manners of disrespectful calumny against the troops. The common cultural image stereotype that those 40% of the American population not alive then (including most of my college students here in very liberal Seattle) have of that era is of long-haired, unkempt and unclean protesters spitting on clean-shaven troops in uniform as they disembarked from the troop carriers at the airport - even though sociologist and Vietnam-veteran Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, claims that no actual photographic evidence exists of these supposedly treasonous expectorations.
"But the reason these old shibboleths continue to work so well has little to do with any supposed superior media skills of the right's polemicists. These are more akin to research monkeys in a cage; they see that pressing a button - in this case, accusing the left of disloyalty - gets them a treat, so they keep whaling away on it. It's not that the right makes the charge so effectively; its real power comes in the fact that the left never really answers back.
"So why doesn't the political left fight back?
"What gives the charge the full fury of its power is that, ever since the early 1980s, the left has been attempting to deny its heritage in the anti-war movement with a vigor that would have impressed even the apostle Peter denying Jesus in the New Testament's Book of Matthew.
"In similarly denying their role in the anti-war movement, the modern day left implicitly accepts the lie of Vietnam revisionism - that the anti-war movement lost the war. In treating their past as a sort of madwoman in the attic that they will be eternally ashamed of, the left makes itself vulnerable to the right's attacks, which the right is more than happy to oblige.
"....Obama disassociated himself rapidly from the General. In the current American political jargon, he "threw Clark under the bus" - one of the many that this week have deposited their wide tire tracks across Clark's now lifeless political carcass.
"On Thursday, the US Department of Labor will release the data on the unemployment rate for June. Expectations are that the rate will continue its ascent towards 6%, up from last year's numbers around mid-4%. If you think that the seriousness of the situation in the present will end the debate on the past, you are sadly mistaken. If anything, as current conditions deteriorate, the political interests who midwifed the present difficulties will redouble their attempt to refocus the public's attention on the past - anything to deflect attention from the present.
"Perhaps that is the future of America's endless debate over Vietnam. It will continue on ad infinitum - past the time when the original contestants are all living in old age homes (some are getting pretty close now), past the time when they are all cold in the grave - for generation upon generations to come. For all eternity, it will be the revisionists and their descendants chasing the anti-war activists and theirs --- the anti-war activists condemned to an eternal flight from both their pursuers and their progenitors' pasts.
"What could break the cycle, cut the Gordian knot? Well, for me, the first thing that comes to mind is the truth."
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