Missing in Action

[Gordon Fitch]

Yoshie Furuhashi:
>>> Is what Chomsky says above too subtle or too "bourgeois" for you?

Gordon:
>> Noam Chomsky certainly isn't _my_ pope. It's a sad state of
>> affairs when someone with Chomsky's opinions is considered a
>> far-out radical.

Yoshie Furuhashi:
> The question is not whether Chomsky is or isn't considered "a far-out
> radical."  The question in this thread is whether what he says on the
> POW/MIA issue is true or false.

But my complaint was not about the absolute truth of the
POW/MIA issue, if any, but about the class content of the myth
which grows out of it.  Whether POWs or MIAs were left in
Indochina cannot be known, but given the strong emotions
connected to the issue it can't be forgotten, so it must be
transformed into one or more myths.  Tim O'Brien assumes a
ruling-class myth which states that it is impossible that even
nasty characters like Nixon and Kissinger could or would have
unnecessarily left anyone, living or dead, in Indochina.  The
performance he disparages (a search for the dead) is the result
of a different myth which, it seems to me, is more culturally
developed that the ruling-class myth: one of the first things
people seem to begin doing as they differentiate themselves
from other animals is bury the dead.  Most of those Americans
whose remains were scattered about the Indochinese landscape
were, of course, of the lower classes -- perhaps that helps
explain the difference between the myths.  Upper-class
people might have trouble understanding why we can't forget
them and get on with business.

> >My basic approach to the POW/MIA cult and its manipulators
> >is this: the higher the status a person occupies, the more
> >likely it is that he (or she) routinely lies, cheats, steals
> >and kills, although unlike lower-class people they usually
> >do it through institutions rather than personally; it's safer
> >that way. It takes only a brief reflection on the requirements
> >of class war to see why that would tend to be the case. I
> >don't follow Chomsky's career closely, but he seems to go
> >around to academic institutions, gather audiences, and
> >astound them with instances of what should be the obvious
> >assumed default case for the exercise of State power. One
> >wonders how often the story has to be told before someone
> >draws the necessary conclusions. I guess it's just really
> >very hard to penetrate bourgeois indoctrination.

Yoshie Furuhashi:
> The paragraph above is basically a collection of ad hominem arguments
> of the circumstantial variety.  The burden of proof is upon you, if
> you continue to either assert that American prisoners of war are
> still held in some secret cells by the Vietnamese or believe those
> who assert such nonsense.

I think my reasoning is a fairly solid class analysis of the
relevant phenomena but, as I said, it has little to do with
the objective existence of POWs in Indochina today.  In my
most recent contact with POW/MIA types, none of them asserted
prisoners of war were still held in secret cells by the
Vietnamese or anyone else, although I am sure there are those
who do -- there's at least one of almost anything you can
think of.  I suppose unsatisfied myths tend to get hungry,
eat, and grow.

Carrol Cox:
> Gordon, your position on this issue puzzles me -- I really can't
> understand what led you to such a strange position. You write:
>
> >  The
> > people are in trailer parks and ghettoes and tract housing,
> > not with those sitting around in universities and distant
> > countries despising their experience of loss and betrayal for
> > fun and profit.
>
> But this is bizarre. If you wish to find members of The League and other
> organizations pushing the POW/MIA issue, you will find rather more of
> them in the Social Register or Winetka than in trailer parks or tract
> housing. Consider the following passage from H.Bruce Franklin, _MIA, or
> Mythmaking in America_, and then decide who is echoing the bourgeois
> point of view.
>
> ******
> The "Go Public" Campaign
>
> The Nixon administration's "go public" campaign, designed explicitly to
> "marshall public opinion" for "the prompt release of all American
> prisoners of war," was initiated on March 1,1969....

My point was that much of the Left accepted the ruling-class
view of the POW/MIA issue from the beginning, because it
appealed to their class prejudices.  This gave the Right a
free hand to manipulate the myths for their own purposes.
For example, the issue/myth could have been used to press for
normalization of relations between the United States and the
Indochinese states but instead it was used to perpetuate
hostilities.  (Obviously, if there were a lot of tourism and
business between the United States and Vietnam, the existence
of POWs would be much more likely to come to light, etc.)

That Nixon was already laying the groundwork for a rightist
use of the POW/MIA issue in 1969 strikes me as evidence of an
almost demonic prescience.  The portly Mephistopheles must
have been already whispering at his elbow.  They could at
once prepare to exploit the issue while carrying out
policies which they could guess would cause it to arise.