Yoshie Furuhashi:
> It occurs to me that you've never read anything by Tim O'Brien (or by
> any other Vietnam veteran writer), aside from the brief excerpts
> posted here (if you've actually read & understood them at all). Much
> of what he writes concerns criticism of U.S. government (especially
> its "plausible denial" [= lies]); self-criticism of the young man
> that he was who didn't have the courage to follow his conscience ("I
> was a coward. I went to the war") & by implication others who
> likewise followed orders instead of their conscience; criticism of
> those Americans who supported the U.S, government (to the end of the
> war & beyond); plight of grunts during the war; atrocities committed
> against the Vietnamese; etc.
You're quite right; I have never read anything by Tim O'Brien except what was posted here, and it was quite enough for me. Is the material I criticized taken out of context? Does it mean something different from what I took it to mean? No one has said so, so far.
By the way, I'm strongly put off by cowardice / cowardice discourse. Fear and the ability to overcome it are mostly determined by one's physical constitution, one's genes. People don't get to choose -- if we did, we would all choose to be noble heroes, I'm sure. I take it O'Brien is playing the passive-aggressive rhetorical trick of implicitly condemning others by explicitly condemning himself, but in the Vietnam era it was generally possible to avoid combat by less rigorous means than jail or exile, so I don't think he can rightfully award himself full cowardice credit -- he actually went to the shooting war -- and thus needs a different trick. Maybe he should just come out and call the people who went to the war with him bad names directly, as he does the "public".
> Ordinary Americans didn't start the war, but a sizable number of them
> *supported* the U.S. government throughout the war (whether or not
> they were ever "in country" -- some dodged the draft by joining the
> National Guard & the like *while supporting the war*), *actively
> opposed* anti-war activists (including using violence against them),
> etc; and after the war, American opposition to U.S. imperialism
> *waned drastically*, in part due to the U.S. government's & ruling
> class's propaganda victory....
Yes, there were all kinds of opinions among the folk, pro- war, anti-war, confused -- many people went along with the war because they had been taught at home and in school to obey the government and serve their communities as represented by that government. In those departed days that sort of idea was more common than might be believable today.
So do we have some kind of collective guilt here, such that no Americans should dare to care what happened to people who disappeared during the war, but sit in the corner contemplating their monstrous, if passive, guilt? O'Brien says they're bad for motivating the American government's search for remains, so what's the good side of the coin? Does he have a suggestion? Personally, I don't think much of guilt as a basis for either political or personal relationships, if that's what's being advocated.
Carrol Cox:
> >> ... The same racist feelings formed the ideological basis for
> >> lynching and for believing in the MIA myth. ...
Gordon:
> >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.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> I don't know if it's racism or anticommunism or both that motivate
> the belief in the POW myth, but some of the purveyors of the myth are
> clearly racist:
>
> ***** Sponsored by Political Research Associates
> 120 Beacon St., #202, Somerville, MA 02143-4304
>
> RIGHT WOOS LEFT - 25
>
> by Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
>
> True Gritz
>
> One of the most visible attempts by rightists to recruit from the
> left involved the 1992 presidential candidacy of Bo Gritz. Gritz ran
> for president through a variety of local parties and groups, but his
> earliest candidacy this electoral round was under the banner of the
> fascist Populist Party. Even Readers Digest has called the Populist
> party a haven for neo-Nazis and ex-klansmen. The Populist Party was
> founded by Hitler apologist Willis Carto.
> ...
I've studied Gritz with a certain amount of interest because I knew him slightly in the Army. At that time, he didn't show even the slightest evidence of racism at any time when I was observing him. However, the U.S. military has a very strong policy against racism, so he could have been concealing it (others didn't, however, and the word tended to get around). Most of the material on the Net connecting Gritz with racism seems to do it through guilt by association, that is, they find someone associated with a racist enterprise who can also be associated with Gritz, and thereby make out Gritz to be a racist. The same means could be used to prove Gritz was an ardent believer in UFOs. Now, for all I know, he is both a racist and a believer in UFOs, but the evidence could also lead one to believe he isn't very sophisticated about politics and is something of a nut case as well. (A nut case being someone whose universe appears to be a different one from the one I inhabit.)
If you're really concerned, you can write to Gritz, at bogritz at bogritz.com, or visit his web site (www.bogritz.com) and find out what he has to say, or not to say, about the matter. Don't say I sent you. I'm probably too complicated for Bo and other Manicheans.
As I said, my brief survey of POW/MIA cult materials a few years ago didn't turn up much that was explicitly racist. Given that it's a paranoid semi-underground lower-class cult in bad odor with the bourgeoisie and the Left, racists are free to exploit it, of course, and it will hardly be surprising to find some around. But I said that already. Speaking of racism, I see that a good deal of material has been posted on that old staple, Westerners saying that Asians don't value human life, etc. etc. etc. While this delusion may actually exist and may even have impinged on the conduct of the war ("Blow up everything but their hearts and minds") I don't think it impinges much on the myth. Actually, I hadn't heard anyone say Asians think human life is cheap since I got out of high school in 1957 until I read the gems posted here, but maybe I've evolved an instinctive avoidance mechanism.
Carrol Cox:
> I don't know Gordon's age,
61. I was in the U.S. Army just before the war, 1961-1964. After I got out I was involved in some mildly active opposition to the war generally associated with the Quakers for a few years, so I had some experience of dealing with American attitudes to the Vietnamese and the war. In '64 and '65, the Quakers (and Women Strike For Peace) were leading the charge in my area. But the war was a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, and when I told people what was going to happen they didn't believe me.
Carrol Cox:
> 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. ...
There was certainly a lot of racism, real and imputed, flying around during the early stages of the war. I would say that Tet changed everything. Before Tet, the folk had been assured that the Vietnamese were wogs who would fall into line once the Marines arrived to straighten them out, and a lot of them still believed that the government didn't lie as a matter of course; so many of them went along with the policy. I would say this passivity was the big problem, just as it is today, not some attitude particularly about the Vietnamese. Americans were passive (mostly) about the bombing of Serbia, too, and Serbians are widely believed to be White.
After Tet, the Vietnamese were perceived as a resolute, dedicated, competent foe, and the war as a very serious error, eventually even by the Brightest and Best who were also the slowest to learn anything. Over the whole period, most of the people I knew, hip and square, Black and White, poor and rich, leftist and rightist, came to think that the war was (1) wrong and (2) stupid -- even my very right-wing relatives. It was englightening to see how little difference all that made to the conduct of the government, just as the 60% who thought Vietnam should get some help after the war (some narcissists!) were also ignored by the government.
However, none of this tells us whether the POW/MIA cult in general is racist or not, which could be accomplished only by a broad survey of the materials and the people, not a selective focus on a few particularly nutty individuals.
By the way, what do we mean by racism here? Would the blanket condemnation of the common people of an entire nation for "narcissism" fall into that category?