> For example, what do we gain from conflating the War in Vietnam with
> the War on Poverty, other than a pretext for moral indignation?
Oh, I'm all for the welfare state. It's just that the 1960s US version of the welfare state was legitimated as an elite project of neocolonization. Strategic hamlets were the foreign policy counterpart of housing projects, Operation Phoenix was the counterpart of COINTELPRO's war on the Panthers, the toxic anthropology of the Moynihan report was the counterpart of Kremlinology, etc.
That's why the US Far Right foams at the mouth at the miserable pittance of a welfare state in this country. It really isn't about poor people getting a handout; it's canalized rage at the real welfare queens -- the corporate CEOs and the fat cats on Wall Street, currently gorging on $14 trillion of Federal Reserve backstops and other cash-for-CDS-trash schemes, while 44 million Americans scrape by on foodstamps.
-- DRR