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wow...
the potted "history" of vietnam provided by ustwo above has almost nothing to do with history as it pertains to the vietnam war, but much to do with the history of contemporary far right politics---it is the stuff of rambo books, the literature of rightwing extremist consolation, the kind of horseshit that legitimated (and legitimates, apparently) the repetition of arguments made by the german extreme right after world war 1--the argument that defeat is impossible--instead "we" were stabbed in the back, or "fought with one arm behind tied behind us"---the Heroic War Effort was not undermined by incompetence of command of attrition or anything else--the Heroic War Effort was undermined by dissent, by opposition to the war---which functioned to divide the "general will"--that is the fantasy nationalist extremists almost invariably revert to when push to explain what they imagine the nation to be--the nation is a fiction used to stage the illusion of a connection between individual will and collective action. from this viewpoint, irrational though it is, divisions of the will are a fundamental danger.
there is no more antidemocratic dimension of contemporary radical nationalism in america than this one.
the rightwing extremist pseudo-history of vietnam is a fundamental template for understanding the ideology as a whole.
unable to confront the reality of military defeat in vietnam, unable to confront the myriad problems of legitimacy of that war, frightened by the emergence of a strong, public left, the militia-right fashioned a counterhistory of vietnam that was in essence nothing other than the story of the victimization of the far right by its Other---that Other was the opposition to the war---the functions of this literature of consolation were multiple--but you can see some of them as structuring claims made by conservative ideology since the clinton period:
1. the literature of consolation posits the extreme right as "real americans" and the left as an internal Other
2. the left is also everywhere a persecuting Other
3. as a Persecuting Other, the Left is undifferentiated in this paranoid fantasyland--the Left is everyone and everything that appears threatening to the far right--the mythology of the right transposes political oppositon to the war in vietnam onto a threats to the identity of rightwing extremists as human beings.
the Left is everywhere and nowhere, all powerful and powerless, etc etc: you've seen the same construction over and over again being floated in the context of the "war on terrorism"
4. by setting up the left as a Persecuting Other, the radical nationalist psuedo-history of vietnam functions to draw a line separating Us from Them.
the pseudo-history of vietnam is a useful index if you want to get an idea of just how far to the right populist conservatism shifted during the clinton period. this was the stuff of the militia movement prior to the oklahoma city bombing---the stuff of the lunatic fringe of the right that has migrated to the center of populist conservatism. it could be discussed in the context of this thread is the assumption is that this pseudo-history has nothing to do with vietnam and everything to do with the contemporary right.
there is no point--or there would be no point--in attempting to have a coherent discussion about the actual history of the vietnam war on the basis of this radical nationalist pseudo-history because one of its primary functions is to erase that actual history. rather, a discussion could run to other areas: like the fabrication of this fiction the reagan administration called "teh vietnam syndrome" in the context of which versions of this rightwing extremist pseudo-history were floated as if they were legitimate in the interest of enabling "us" to once again "feel good about america..."
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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