>Yoshie Furuhashi:
>> The POW/MIA propaganda that the U.S. government & corporate media
>> have promulgated is ideologically similar to the propaganda put out
>> by their Japanese counterparts that North Korea abducted Japanese
>> individuals -- especially young girls -- for espionage & other
>> purposes. ...
>
>As I pointed out quite awhile back, the POW/MIA thing -- I
>don't know what, exactly, to call it -- was available for
>political exploitation by almost anybody. As we know, certain
>parties on the Right exploited it; I said that. I don't see
>the point of continuing to mention this, or to discuss it in
>general, because it's clear that in attempting to deal with
>it in other than the prescribed manner I'm speaking the
>unspeakable -- people can't handle it. If there's nothing
>new to say -- the fact that one kind of propaganda is
>similar to another is hardly new -- we might as well set it
>aside.
I don't know whether the myth of abduction of the Japanese by North Koreans is new or old to LBO-talkers, but it is quite intriguing that both in the Japanese abduction & American POW/MIA myths, citizens of imperialist nations (Japan & the USA) are believed to be "held captive" by (North Korean & Vietnamese) victims of imperialism. The desire to believe that one is "held captive" by one's victim says a lot about how this genre of imperial ideology works.
Now, with regard to the treatment of actual prisoners of war during the Vietnam War, the Communist Vietnamese were far more humane than the Americans & their allies. You might read testimonies given by the prisoners of war panel of the "Winter Soldier Investigation" at <http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_23_POW.html>. The POW/MIA myth has also served to obscure this asymmetry that anti-war American veterans worked hard to communicate to uninformed Americans at that time.
Yoshie