Yoshie:
> What is true, though, is that the POW/MIA issue had been exploited by
> the U.S. ruling class & governing elite to impose & maintain economic
> _sanctions_ on Vietnam _until very recently_, adding insult to injury
> so to speak. Never mind _reparations_ for Vietnam!
>
> The POW/MIA issue has become a medium of rewriting the history of the
> Vietnam War, portraying Vietnam as _victimizer_ & the USA as
> _victim_. Working-class Americans have been asked to target their
> grief & anger not against the U.S. government but against the
> Vietnamese. They are still lied to about the war. They remain grist
> for the ideological mill that manufactures consent, as long as they
> think that it's appropriate to coerce the Vietnamese (& others) into
> _serving_ American & only American needs.
The believers I've discussed the issue with were extremely suspicious of and hostile to the American ruling class as well as of opponent ruling classes. However, the Left, in general, takes the bourgeois side, in which the ruling classes' purported views of events are valid and the views of ordinary people are invalid. Thus most of the Left can't speak to this suspicion and hostility: it's contrary to the word of _The_New_York_Times_.
Since the Right doesn't have this problem, they get to organize a political energy from which one would think they would suffer, and use it for their purposes. The bourgeoisified Left assists.
Max:
>> My sense of this issue was that it was directly
>> exploited to attack Jimmy Carter and elevate
>> Ronald Reagan. The noise about MIA's very much
>> died down in precisely the period when conservatives
>> controlling the Executive Branch of the Gov were in
>> a position to deal with the issue, such as it was.
>> It was a cultural scam to herd workers into the GOP.
>> It worked pretty well.
wojtek:
> Maybe it died inside the beltway, but to this day parts of NJ, PA an
> upstate NY are infested with the ugly black flags hanging from public
> buildings.
There was one flying from the flagpole on top of Staten Island's borough hall yesterday and probably today. When I engaged people on the Net about it years ago, it must have been late in the Reagan years or early in Bush I. But these things, once started, have a life of their own, because they are connected to somebody's truth. Now, from a certain point of view, in which the important thing is the play of forces between competing elites and their members, the POW/MIA cult is certainly just another scam, not truth. It's another way of making a living from death and destruction, like manufacturing ugly black flags or using the war as material for a literary career.