Kelley Walker wrote:
>
> there was some talk of
> pow/mia's as a myth.
Perhaps there was a reference to a very great work of cultural history, Bruce Franklin's _M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America_. As usual I can't find a book when I want it or I would type out some passages from it. I wonder how the English would respond to committees from Germany coming over and digging up their homes and in general making asses of themselves searching for MIAs from the Luftwaffe.
In the past, in organizing against the Vietnam War, in Central America solidarity work, and in organizing against the Gulf War my practice and the practice of those I worked with for the most part has been to claim in various ways that we were the true patriots, etc. E.g. claiming in the Gulf War that the way to support the troops was to bring them home. For a year or so now I have been reconsidering this. One of our speakers at a Gulf War rally was a former marine who had served in Vietnam as a machine gunner. He differed with this kind of attempt to preempt the patriots. I have gradually come to believe he was correct.
First, such efforts never actually persuade anyone. Second, and most importantly, I think we should see ourselves in the same position vis a vis the U.S. as German leftists in the 1930s in their relation to Germany.
>From the viewpoint of most of the world, the U.S. is a far greater
threat to human decency than was Hitler's Germany. It is hard for
Americans, at least white Americans, to see this because the relation of
the U.S. state to its own citizens is rather better than was the
relation of Hitler's regime to the German people. But that is on the
basis of seeing Germany from afar and in terms of the Holocaust. Most
German citizens of the '30s were better off (safer from the police) than
are a large proportion of blacks and latinos in the U.S.
So I'm going back to Aunt Molly Jackson:
The bosses ride on a big white horse,
While we walk in the mud.
Their flag's the old red, white, and blue
While ours is dipped in blood.
In the long run -- perhaps even in the short run -- we will do better in organizing against the horror that is the U.S. state if we forego the use of cheap tricks. After all, when I got mobbed and pushed off the stage on the fourth of July in 1969 while reading Frederick Douglas's Fourth of July oration, I was standing under an American Flag. It didn't help.
Carrol