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icantfindaname posted:this, but about the POW/MIA movement instead of the article The article paints the POW/MIA il issue as some sort of shroud that prevents a true understanding of the Vietnam war and states that in his conclusion. I think that's just bullshit. I mean come on with all of the movies, books, all of the ink spilled on the subject of Vietnam the POW/MIA controversy just isn'to as significant as the author claims. Nobody is saying it doesn't exist but to say it's a major stumbling block or that it prevents a true understanding is just either stupid or purposefully misleading. Most of the article is just written poorly as well.
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Aug 12, 2015 18:30
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Vladimir Putin posted:The article paints the POW/MIA il issue as some sort of shroud that prevents a true understanding of the Vietnam war and states that in his conclusion. I think that's just bullshit. I mean come on with all of the movies, books, all of the ink spilled on the subject of Vietnam the POW/MIA controversy just isn'to as significant as the author claims. Nobody is saying it doesn't exist but to say it's a major stumbling block or that it prevents a true understanding is just either stupid or purposefully misleading. americans are pretty hung up on losing vietnam, the MIA thing makes a lot of sense as a cultural reaction to explain the feelings of loss Vladimir Putin posted:Most of the article is just written poorly as well. it's written well
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Aug 12, 2015 18:32
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Popular Thug Drink posted:it's written well
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Aug 12, 2015 18:34
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Popular Thug Drink posted:americans are pretty hung up on losing vietnam, the MIA thing makes a lot of sense as a cultural reaction to explain the feelings of loss The main thesis is that the POW/MIA issue casts America as the sole victim of the war and prevents a true understanding of the Vietnam war as a whole. Sorry but that's just loving stupid. Nobody is saying such an issue doesn't exist but the thesis is just retarded. The rest of the article engages in moral equivalency arguments and goes so far as to blame the French for more or less showing the north Vietnamese to mistreat their prisoners. That is just some wack-rear end arguments and if the author was arguing in good faith he would have come up with something more substantive. That's assuming he's not an idiot.
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Aug 12, 2015 18:36
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Vladimir Putin posted:The article paints the POW/MIA il issue as some sort of shroud that prevents a true understanding of the Vietnam war and states that in his conclusion. I think that's just bullshit. I mean come on with all of the movies, books, all of the ink spilled on the subject of Vietnam the POW/MIA controversy just isn'to as significant as the author claims. Nobody is saying it doesn't exist but to say it's a major stumbling block or that it prevents a true understanding is just either stupid or purposefully misleading. It's a lousy article, you'll find no disagreement from me there, but I do think the prominence of POW/MIA affairs does serve to obscure our national understanding of the Vietnam War, albeit less than it did back ten or twenty years ago. The article isn't wrong about how that black flag was part of a deliberate effort on the part of elements of the right in American to recast Vietnam simultaneously as a war we didn't lose, and a war dominated by US victimization at the hand of the dastardly Vietnamese communists (occasionally with a splash of yellow peril thrown in for flavor). Hell, consider this ad which I saw in the Boston Globe Sunday edition just last year:  quote:The rest of the article engages in moral equivalency arguments and goes so far as to blame the French for more or less showing the north Vietnamese to mistreat their prisoners. That is just some wack-rear end arguments and if the author was arguing in good faith he would have come up with something more substantive. That's assuming he's not an idiot. Uhh, they kinda did. Specifically, the French colonial administration practiced all sorts of tortures and abusive interrogation techniques on Viet Minh prisoners in Con Son prison during the First IndoChina War. Hell, so many future NVA/NLF luminaries passed through that prison that it got the informal nickname among prisoners as "Ho Chi Minh University." Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 18:40
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Vladimir Putin posted:The main thesis is that the POW/MIA issue casts America as the sole victim of the war and prevents a true understanding of the Vietnam war as a whole. no it isn't Vladimir Putin posted:The rest of the article engages in moral equivalency arguments and goes so far as to blame the French for more or less showing the north Vietnamese to mistreat their prisoners. That is just some wack-rear end arguments and if the author was arguing in good faith he would have come up with something more substantive. That's assuming he's not an idiot. the point is that the vietnamese were not especially cruel which is why it's weird that part of the national cathartic mythos of post-vietnam relies on those devious orientals coming up with exquisite forms of torture to shame our brave men anyway i don't see why moral equivalency arguments trigger you so much when they are fundamentally correct
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Aug 12, 2015 18:41
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Vladimir Putin posted:Except that the confederate flag was reappropriated to be a racist symbol of intimidation and implicit domination of whites over blacks while the MIA/POW flag/movement has no such connotations. The confederate flag is the opposite scenario. It celebrates a confederation that existed for an explicitly racist purpose.
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Aug 12, 2015 18:42
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Aug 12, 2015 18:53
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Colonial Air Force posted:That works if people are fully informed and not constantly led to believe military life is heroic and the only way to get out of their poor lifestyle. That's not any more true today than it was in the 70s, though. I believe the argument is that the MIA / POW movement presents Americans as the true victims of Vietnam when the USA was actually the aggressive country in the conflict. It feeds into a broader complex in which American lives are viewed as being inherently more valuable than the lives of foreigners, and in which the only real criteria for evaluating a foreign war is to ask how American benefited or was harmed by the war, rather than broaching any broader questions of whether the war was actually justifiable from an international perspective. Arguably the flag also feeds into the mythology about how the war was winnable on the ground but was lost because a mixture of government bureaucrats and hippies back hope were stabbing the military in the back. This myth isn't so much racist as it is a myth that is popular with racists. Personally I don't have much of an opinion on the flag one way or the other but I can sort of see what Perlstein is arguing when he suggests that the flag is one part of a larger conservative backlash following the Vietnam war that sought to portray the conflict as a noble lost cause rather than a horrific crime.
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Aug 12, 2015 23:16
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Helsing posted:Arguably the flag also feeds into the mythology about how the war was winnable on the ground but was lost because a mixture of government bureaucrats and hippies back hope were stabbing the military in the back. This myth isn't so much racist as it is a myth that is popular with racists. This is basically saying that the USA could win militarily but not politically, which is accurate. The US had pretty major technological and industrial advantages, and if the US was full of violent robots who only cared about kill-death ratios, the NVA would have crumpled long before the US military industry even began showing signs of fatigue. Politically, though, the war was untenable because the general population did not want to be there. The Tet Offensive is pretty emblematic of this: militarily it was a disaster for the NVA and Viet Cong, but politically it turned out to be a huge blow to against the USA. The real disagreeable things about the statement "the war was winnable on the ground but was lost because a mixture of government bureaucrats and hippies back hope were stabbing the military in the back" are the charged language it uses, its cavalier attitude towards anti-war protestors of the time, and the perception that the government bureaucrats were bumbling idiots rather than having their hands tied by not wanting to start a war with a nuclear-capable communist nation.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:06
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Helsing posted:Personally I don't have much of an opinion on the flag one way or the other but I can sort of see what Perlstein is arguing when he suggests that the flag is one part of a larger conservative backlash following the Vietnam war that sought to portray the conflict as a noble lost cause rather than a horrific crime. This is entirely the case. American POWs/MIAs were recast near the end of the war as heroes at last from a war that had produced precious few others, and who's heroism was based not on acts but on noble-yet-passive resistance to communism barbarity behind the wire. Nixon himself spoke on this very subject, seeing POWs as potentially useful both to validate is war strategy, and also as mouthpieces for his domestic agenda. Memorandum of Conversation, Nixon, John Scali, Brent Scowcroft, 13 February 1973 posted:President: Did you see the POW release? Wasn’t it great? Memoranda of Conversation, Richard Nixon, Roger Shields, Brent Scowcroft, 11 April 1973 posted:They [the POWs] should be recruiters, speaking on college campuses, and writing. They have thought deeply about themselves and their country and we should benefit from it. They must be used in an effective way Shana Alexander, “Prisoners of Peace,” Newsweek, 26 February 1973 posted:World War I had the Rainbow Division. World War II had Iwo Jima and the Bulge. Even Korea had the men at Changin Reservoir. But until last week the longest and most dismal of all America's wars had victims, casualties and the faceless brutalities and braveries common to all wars, but no heroes at all. Well, we have them now. “A Celebration of Men Redeemed,” Time, 19 February 1973 posted:If it was a war without heroes, many Americans were intent on making the prisoners fit that role.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:31
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Helsing posted:I believe the argument is that the MIA / POW movement presents Americans as the true victims of Vietnam when the USA was actually the aggressive country in the conflict. It feeds into a broader complex in which American lives are viewed as being inherently more valuable than the lives of foreigners, and in which the only real criteria for evaluating a foreign war is to ask how American benefited or was harmed by the war, rather than broaching any broader questions of whether the war was actually justifiable from an international perspective. That's why I think that this article is stupid. Out of all the scholarship and media that has been produced about the war does anybody in America really believe that America was the victim in the Vietnam war?
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Aug 13, 2015 00:47
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Vladimir Putin posted:That's why I think that this article is stupid. Out of all the scholarship and media that has been produced about the war does anybody in America really believe that America was the victim in the Vietnam war? I think the psychology in play is less framing America as the victim but twisting things around so as to make "Vietnam" not the victim despite all the destruction that occurred, which is why the POW issue was used for so long as a reason to keep the trade embargo on Vietnam going.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:24
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Then we should change the narrative so the flag, instead of saying "Vietnam was MEAN to our BRAVE MEN AND BOYS!" to "Our government sent these MEN AND BOYS over there to bomb a country they had no business being in!" E: Just take out all the white parts of the flag.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:49
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Hell, I can think of a certain flag created and used by white supremacists involved in dozens of bloody wars and the drat thing is flying on the white house grounds right now.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:57
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Vladimir Putin posted:That's why I think that this article is stupid. Out of all the scholarship and media that has been produced about the war does anybody in America really believe that America was the victim in the Vietnam war? Honestly? A disturbing number of people still buy into that narrative, usually hand-in-hand with the rest of the "we were betrayed by hippies, bureaucrats, and peaceniks" garbage. Mike Allen's "Until the Last Man Comes Home" and Bruce Franklin's "MIA, or, Mythmaking in America" are two excellent reads on the way the theme survives in contemporary America.
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Aug 13, 2015 02:03
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TheNakedFantastic posted:Hell, I can think of a certain flag created and used by white supremacists involved in dozens of bloody wars and the drat thing is flying on the white house grounds right now. Until the red flag flies over the White House (red house?) we'll have to settle, unfortunately
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Aug 13, 2015 02:07
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Every Wednesday when I go to the main office for a meeting, there is a guy on the freeway overpass. He has a long gray beard and waves a flagpole with a US flag and POW/MIA flag. I waved at him because even though he is deluded, he is expressing discontent and solidarity with those he imagines to be afflicted. In some ways I regard him as superior to those who fail to express discontent.
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Aug 13, 2015 02:15
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