Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Gordon writes:
>
> >Carrol Cox:
> >> ... The same racist feelings formed the ideological basis for
> >> lynching and for believing in the MIA myth. ...
> >
> >In that case we ought to see explicit racist content in almost
> >all POW/MIA mythography, as we do in almost all lynching
> >mythography, and we don't -- at least not in the material I've
> >come across.
I don't know Gordon's age, so I don't know what direct experience, if any, he has had with the "war for the hearts & minds" of Americans during the Vietnam War. It was fairly obvious in the '60s that perhaps the biggest barrier we faced was that of breaking through the almost spontaneous assumption that the Vietnamese simply didn't count on the one hand, on the other hand that they were almost certainly barbarians indifferent to human pain. (Some big shot in Washington claimed that we had to remember that death simply wasn't the same to "asians-in-general" as it was to "us." And LBJ _did_ speak of having Ho by the balls. There was a cartoon (drawn I believe by an army man in Vietnam) that ran in the local paper called Sergeant Something -- it was a cartoon that simply made no sense except in a context of racist responses by the viewer. And then, a report from the front as it were:
Time on Target
by W. D. Ehrhart
We used to get intelligence reports from the Vietnamese district offices. Every night, I'd make a list of targets for artillery to hit.
It used to give me quite a kick to know that I, a corporal, could command an entire battery to fire anywhere I said.
One day, while on patrol, we passed the ruins of a house; beside it sat a woman with her left hand torn away; beside her lay a child, dead.
* * * When I got back to base, I told the fellows in the COC; it gave us all a lift to know all those shells we fired every night were hitting something.
(W. D. Ehrhart was a marine badly wounded at Hue and one of the founders of VVAW).
One of the seedbeds of PTSD in Vietnam was that the racist contempt for the "enemy" which saturated the homefront and with which the Army carefully indoctrinated the troops prevented that respect for the enemy which can make victory "glorious" and defeat honorable. See _Achilles in Vietnam_, and some of the works cited there. And also remember that the war was only two decades away from the War in the Pacific and the Korean war, both of which had been characterized by extreme racist attitudes toward the "oriental" enemy. A friend of mine in college had been in the Army at Okinawa. At the end of that battle, when Japanese troops were surrendering in large numbers, men in his unit turned a flamethrower on surrendering troops. As my friend put it to me at the time, "And the officers didn't even reprimand them."
Again, Bruce's dedication to _M.I.A._: "For all those who have been trying for decades to stop this war." Over 30 years after so fucking many of us gave so much to stop that damn war, and it reduces me almost to tears to confront an alleged leftist spouting the same fucking nonsense we had to deal with then.
A little bit about Bruce. Once when I asked him if he had any suggestions to frustrate people ripping bumper stickers off one's office door he remembered his days on the streets of Brooklyn and the defense car owners used against the likes of him ripping off hub caps: they put double-edge razor blades where someone might try to grip with his fingers. I tried it but never found any blood streaks. Anyhow from the streets of Brooklyn to navigator and intelligence officer in S.A.C. in the '50s to the first grad student in the Stanford English Dept. Ph.D. ever be hired by the department, one of the leading Melville scholars in the U.S., to being fired from his tenured position at Stanford for anti-war activity. He has also written on and edited several volumes of prison writing in America.
Sure, he speaks for the ruling class.
Carrol