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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2006)
PAGE 14 rOM LULEVIKH STABBED IN THE BACK! F R O M P A G E 13 United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies before the American people — who swallowed them willingly. Once in power, Eisen hower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the Demo cratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listen ed respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it “could well succeed," then shelved it without another word. No “secret understandings" to “aid Communist enslavements” were repudiated because of course, they did not exist. The idea of “rolling back” Communism from Eastern Europe was taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy. The right's initial blindness toward first the Axis and then the Soviet threat in Europe; the disastrous military campaign waged by one of its icons; its feckless and even apocalyptic ideas for recouping its previous mistakes — all had been erased in much of the public consciousness by the stab in the back, a vote-winning tale of deviancy, subversion, and intentional defeat radiating from Yalta all the way to Korea. The Vietnam War, however, would call for yet another expansion of the dolchstoss- legende. Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado, but it had been egged on — even dared — to take the plunge into full-scale war by prevailing rightwing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam’s boundless desire for self-determination — no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places. Once again, we were told that American troops were not being “allowed" to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle. Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaning ful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a "secret plan" to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first Republican President since the turn of the 20th century to take office while a major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon’s time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on. The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward — to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them. Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, “had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties,” and he had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he sought to exploit were much the same as those he manipulated in the 1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public — the children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded 20 years before, along with a good deal more street muscle. Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Commun ists, perverts, or simply “bums" — the last epithet from Nixon’s own lips. The large percentage of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious, ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire-authored speeches, as “nattering nabobs of negativity," and, unforgettably, as “an effete corps of impudent snobs, who characterize them selves as intellectuals.” These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label of “intellectual,” and what the Vice President was really calling them was fags. All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean anxie ties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests “lent comfort and aid” to the North Vietnamese, and that “some Americans will die tonight because of the activity in our streets." The Nixon administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the deaths of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions, construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up peaceful demonstrators. The effete protestors had been shown up by real working class Americans — and their class allies in the police eagerly closed ranks. Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U S. prestige in the world dropped precipitously — but none of the other dominoes followed. Once again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead the entire operating rightwing belief in “monolithic communism" was debunked in the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as CANNON BEACH (503) 436-0549 Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border. Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnec essary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue. Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were espec ially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war. Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work camps, by a govern ment that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, dissemin ating flags with stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner’s bowed head against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed- wire fence, and the legend: ‘YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA’. It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes. Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for The Los Angeles Times about how returning Iraq veterans are being showered with acts of goodwill by an adoring American public, “In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Viet nam veterans 40 years ago.” The POW/MIA flags, with their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United States, just under the Stars & Stripes; federal law even mandates that on at least six days a year — Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of September) — they must be flown over nearly every single U S. government building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world — these peculiar little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of betrayal. If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a huge portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men? The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon’s ability to expand the Siegfried myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon’s own administration that first “left behind” American POWs in North Vietnam.Yet this makes little difference to the American right,which never considered Nixon ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it. What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics. On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens" through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals"; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream," the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conser vatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies — from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to “war against Christmas" last year. This has become such an ingrained part of the right's belief system that the Bush administration has now become the first government in our nation’s history to fight a major war with out seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq — and the “war on terrorism"— seems to have been to foment division and win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different versions of what f ish Chips InvportedsB&er Top #1 c m 2vtcL S t r e e t A ltern er* 3 2 5 -0 0 3 3 I
