The Myths of Vietnam

This comes as a timely reminder that before liberals can rebuild the liberal consesnus from the grassroots, we have to kill the Myths of Vietnam.

Chris Blattman:

I was always puzzled why someone did not do this paper sooner.

Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s.

A new paper by Robert Erikson and Laura Stoker.

In other words, men who were more likely to be drafted into a jungle clusterfuck worse by far than Iraq and Afghanistan put together became more liberal, while conservative men who were unlikely to be drafted did not became less conservative. Which certainly explains the preponderance of draft-dodging chicken-hawks among the repug elite.

The great crime and persistent victory of those chicken hawks was perpetuating the myth that anti-war liberals - including many highly-decorated combat veterans - were the bad guys of the war, and to blame for its results.

Down with Tyranny:

At the same time during the eighties there was a powerful campaign to undermine the moral basis of the criticism of the War in Viet Nam and to restore support for the military industrial complex. This campaign was explicitly supported by propaganda in films such as Red Dawn (1984) Rambo: First Blood (1985) and Top Gun (1986). Reagan himself called the Viet Nam War a “noble cause’ in his 1980campaign and suggested that anti-war critics made America “afraid to let American soldiers win.” This canard was echoed In Rambo: First Blood. The protagonist JohnRambo played by Sylvester Stallone popularized the lie that most Viet Nam veterans were spat on by peace activists.

It wasn't my war. You asked me, I didn't ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn't let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer. ... Who are they to protest me? Huh?

The legend of peace protesters spitting at vets is one of the most successful lies ever perpetrated on the American public. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, running for the U.S Senate in 2110, claimed to have served in Viet Nam and lamented the way returning soldiers were treated saying in a campaign year speech "When we came back we were spat on." The New York Times later revealed that although Blumenthal had served in the Army during the Viet Nam War hehad actually never served in Viet Nam itself. Blumenthal apologized for pretending to have served in the War and survived to win election to the Senate but the myth of spit-upon Viet Nam vets had become so internalized that the media never pointed out that not only had Blumenthal not been spit on coming home from a war he never served in, but there is also no evidence that any soldiers were spit on by peace activists. Jerry Lembcke, a Viet Nam vet, argued persuasively that the story is bullshit in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, in which he researched every supposed report of the kind of spitting that Stallone’s fictitious character described and could not find a single first hand account of such an incident. There is no question that Viet Nam veterans were not treated well by their country but the blame for that belongs with the governmental agencies that failed to provide them with the kind of support that World War II vets had enjoyed as a result of the GI Bill and the political leaders who sent them to fight a war which they ultimately could not justify.

In the real world many Viet Nam veterans, most famously John Kerry, were a significant part of the anti-war movement. Most importantly, the passage of time and the release of White House tapes from both the Johnson and Nixon administrations made it clear that the Viet Nam war was never related to a genuine American security interest but to domestic politics, largely the fear of being called “soft on communism." And the fall of South Viet Nam as a separate country did absolutely nothing to hurt the United States during the Cold War or thereafter. But you would never know any of these things if Rambo was your source of information.

The facts support anti-war liberals and always have, but the myths persist.