I think the Vietnam reaction is abnormal. If my Net conversations are any measure, the flyers of the flags do not feel or profess guilt but anger and anxiety.
> It should be no surprise that certain
> factions of the elite decide to opportunistically use the
> myth for their own political purposes. To describe it as
> simply a ruling class plot is an overly simplistic analysis
> that sees power exercised by mechanical wire-pulling by
> elites.
>
> Having fanned the flames of the myth to aid Republicans,
> these elite propagandists could not easily douse the fire.
> The myth took on a life of its own. It fueled the rise of
> the militia movement.
>
> The version of the myth spread by the
> Prouty/Gritz/Perot/Sheehan alliance is that the CIA and its
> allies are a traitorous elitist faction of the true American
> government--a government which should be run "by the
> People." Typical populist rhetoric in support of an oustider
> elite faction. This is the basis of the Rambo narative in
> which wealthy college-educated liberal elites send
> working-class stiffs off to die. Gibson in Warrior Dreams
> talks about this.
But that is in fact just about what happened, except for those wealthy college-educated liberal elite types who wanted to get into the action personally. I was in the U.S. Army Infantry in 1961-64, just as the War in Vietnam was coming to a boil, and in my company -- six or seven officers and about 140 enlisted men -- there were exactly two enlisted men who had ever seen the inside of a college. Of the wealthy college-educated liberal elite types I knew in another life, exactly zero went to any war, although a few wound up doing high-level paperwork for awhile in air-conditioned offices that happened to be owned by the government. When people are having their lives suspended and maybe terminated, the class system becomes completely explicit. This is something that should be remembered every time someone like Safire starts droning about "noble motives" and the war criminals in the White House plan their next venture.
The War in Vietnam was not only a war against the Vietnamese, it was also a war against Americans, the unleashing of the violence implicit in the American class system upon its helots -- because it seemed to serve some transitory political end and the ruling class thought they could get away with it. They let the mask slip for a moment.
Today, they are smarter and we have an "all-volunteer" army and long-range missiles to do the dirty work. Vietnam must have marked some kind of collective nervous breakdown in the ruling class involving delusions of jockish omnipotence. As usual someone else paid the price.
> So-called "leftists" such as Sheehan and Oliver Stone have
> incorporated this right-wing propaganda into a simplistic
> anti-elite critique that shares more with fascist
> anti-regime narrative than a truly radical
> systemic/institutional discourse. I wrote about this in
> "Right Woos Left."
This is only to be expected when much of the Left has become too bourgeoisified, too coopted, to take lower-class people seriously (except as objects). The field is left open to fascistic opportunists who can at least pretend to respect them.