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One columnist of a major news periodical thinks so.
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You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
--
You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about the POW/MIA flag.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.”
During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up.
He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.
This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib): see this as-told-to memoir by POW and future senator Jeremiah Denton. And finally, our South Vietnamese allies’ treatment of their prisoners, who lived manacled to the floors in crippling underground bamboo “tiger cages” in prison camps built by us, was far worse than the torture our personnel suffered.
(Time magazine quoted one South Vietnamese official who was confronted with stories of released prisoners moving “like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms,” and responded with incredulity that such survivors even existed: “No one ever comes from the tiger cages alive.”)
Be that as it may: It worked. American citizens enacted a bizarre psychic reversal. A man from Virginia Beach, Virginia, described to a reporter the supposed treatment of American prisoners in North Vietnam: “They just dig holes in the ground and drop them in. They throw food down to them, and let them live there in their own waste.” In fact, that was how prisoners were treated in South Vietnam—as recently revealed in a shocking Life magazine exposé.
Children began wearing “POW bracelets,” drivers sported “POWs NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY” bumper stickers. As the late Jonathan Schell of The New Yorker memorably wrote during the war, the Americans were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped 400 Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them.”
Actually, it was worse: Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.
And in 1971 that damned flag went up.
The flag was the creation of the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, later the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, a fascinating part of the story in itself.
The organization was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.
Then the war ended, the POWs (yes, all the POWs) were repatriated to great fanfare, one of them declaring: “I want you to remember that we walked out of Hanoi as winners”—a declaration that seemed to suggest, almost, that by surviving, the POWs had won the Vietnam War.
The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of that stark white figure, emblazoned in black.
It memorializes Americans as the preeminent victims of the Vietnam War, a notion seared into the nation’s visual unconscious by the Oscar-nominated 1978 film The Deer Hunter, which depicts acts of sadism, which were documented to have been carried out by our South Vietnamese allies, as acts committed by our North Vietnamese enemies, including the famous scene pictured on The Deer Hunter poster: a pistol pointed at the American prisoner’s head at exactly the same angle of the gun in the famous photograph of the summary execution in the middle of the street of an alleged Communist spy by a South Vietnamese official.
By then, the league and its flag had become the Pentagon’s own Frankenstein’s monster. You can read about the mess that resulted in the definitive book on the subject: Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War by Northwestern University’s Michael J. Allen.
Allen describes how Vietnam’s “refusal” to “account for” a thousand phantoms became an impediment to reconciliation and diplomatic recognition between the two nations. (How bizarre, how insulting, how counterproductive this must have been to a nation that must have suffered missing corpses in the thousands upon thousands?)
A delegation led by Congressman Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, traveled to Vietnam in 1975, convinced of the Nixon administration’s deception that hundreds of “MIAs actually” existed.
The members of Congress returned home, having found their Communist hosts warm and accommodating, doubting there were any missing at all. In hearings, a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified: “If you take a wallet-full of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets.”
The House committee also produced evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA in Vietnamese prison camps in order to keep the U.S. from normalizing relations with China’s Asian rival. No matter that the flag’s promoters were abetting an actual, real-live Communist conspiracy, from its original sightings above VFW and American Legion posts, the “You Are Not Forgotten” flag became as common as kudzu.
Midwifing an entire metastasizing Pentagon bureaucracy, the League of Families would also become an irritant to every future president. By 1993, 17 Americans were stationed in Hanoi in charge of searching for the missing and working to repatriate remains. They were provided a budget of $100 million a year, “over 30 times the value of U.S. humanitarian aid paid to Vietnam,” Allen writes.
It would have been evidence of Ronald Reagan’s old saw that the closest thing to eternal life is a government program—if Reagan were not a prime culprit: In 1988, he became the first president to fly the flag over the White House. The next year, Congress installed the flag in the Capitol rotunda.
In 1990, it was designated “a symbol of our nation’s concern and commitment to restoring and resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” Thus ending the uncertainty for their families and the nation.
The League of Families also still exists, and “continues to work at keeping the pressure on both Washington and Hanoi to bring complete resolution to this issue on behalf of each family with a loved one still missing in Vietnam.” My own state of Illinois holds a ceremony every year to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.”
And Bernie Sanders posted an image of the POW/MIA flag on Facebook in response to Donald Trump’s insult against John McCain. The message read: “They are all heroes.”
Actually, as I document in The Invisible Bridge, it’s more complicated than that: many of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.
Stockdale would become one of the nation’s most celebrated former POWs and a vice-presidential candidate. Kavanaugh took his life in his father in law’s basement in Commerce City, Colorado, in June 1973. Americans would agree that one of them—Stockdale or Kavanaugh—is not a hero—though they would disagree about which one is which.
That damned flag: It’s a shroud. It smothers the complexity, the reality, of what really happened in Vietnam.
We’ve come to our senses about that other banner of lies. It’s time to do the same with this.
https://archive.is/sVUot#selection-2277.0-2517.93
Racism
POW/MIA
Politics
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 793
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I have found that we spend way to much time addressing racism. Reason, the only people who continue to play the racist card are in fact racist themselves. They continue to strive for a further divide in order to qualify their way of life. Don't get me wrong, we do still have a long way to go, but those who play the racist card only play it for themselves, but, there is a certain amount of racism in and against every race.
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SSG(P) Danielle Birtha
ROTFLMBO... Racism is NOT supposed to be allowed in this Nation... but... SOME PEOPLE choose to IGNORE racism... saying we spend too much time addressing it...
lemme guess... you're a Democrat?
Historical FACT: The slave owners of the 1860's were DEMOCRATS.
Historical FACT: The Person who freed the Slaves (Abe Lincoln) was a REPUBLICAN.
Historical FACT: On "Junteenth" (June 19, 2020) The U.S. Supreme Court Ruled that DACA... an Act that Legalizes TRAFFICKING IN CHILDREN (and in women sex slaves and male farm slaves) WAS DECLARED TO BE U.S. LAW BY THE U.S. SUPREME COURT... THEREBY LEGALIZING SLAVERY AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN THE U.S. ... ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DAY SLAVERY WAS ABOLISHED IN HE U.S.!!!
--> And WHO made that Unconstitutional Act in the First Place???
--> BARRACK OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRAT CONGRESS!!!
Who tried to stop (and is STILL trying even though voted out of office) that re-introduction of slavery in the U.S.???
DONALD TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS!!!
haha... you vote for slavery... YOU GET ENSLAVED...
--> VIA FASCIST WHITE SUPREMIST RACISM IGNORED!!!
Black Lives Matter? WHEN BLACK PEOPLE VOTED FOR THE SLAVERS WHO ARE NOT DEMOCRATIC, AND RIOTED (still are) AGAINST THE ONE PERSON WHO WAS TRYING TO INSURE THEIR FREEDOM???
ROTFLMBO
IF YOU VOTE FOR SLAVERY... YOU GET SLAVERY!!!
MORONS!
GO AHEAD... CRY... IT'S ALL YOU CAN DO NOW...
UNLESS YOU TAKE ARMS AGAINST OUR PUBLIC SERVANT TRAITORS WHO ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY WITH FASCIST RASCISM, WHILE THEY GIVE U.S. AWAY TO OUR SLAVER ENEMIES... BY LAW... THIER LAW... NOT OURS!!!!
--> THE DEMOCRATS YOU JUST RE-ELECTED FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME!
MORONS.
lemme guess... you're a Democrat?
Historical FACT: The slave owners of the 1860's were DEMOCRATS.
Historical FACT: The Person who freed the Slaves (Abe Lincoln) was a REPUBLICAN.
Historical FACT: On "Junteenth" (June 19, 2020) The U.S. Supreme Court Ruled that DACA... an Act that Legalizes TRAFFICKING IN CHILDREN (and in women sex slaves and male farm slaves) WAS DECLARED TO BE U.S. LAW BY THE U.S. SUPREME COURT... THEREBY LEGALIZING SLAVERY AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN THE U.S. ... ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DAY SLAVERY WAS ABOLISHED IN HE U.S.!!!
--> And WHO made that Unconstitutional Act in the First Place???
--> BARRACK OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRAT CONGRESS!!!
Who tried to stop (and is STILL trying even though voted out of office) that re-introduction of slavery in the U.S.???
DONALD TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS!!!
haha... you vote for slavery... YOU GET ENSLAVED...
--> VIA FASCIST WHITE SUPREMIST RACISM IGNORED!!!
Black Lives Matter? WHEN BLACK PEOPLE VOTED FOR THE SLAVERS WHO ARE NOT DEMOCRATIC, AND RIOTED (still are) AGAINST THE ONE PERSON WHO WAS TRYING TO INSURE THEIR FREEDOM???
ROTFLMBO
IF YOU VOTE FOR SLAVERY... YOU GET SLAVERY!!!
MORONS!
GO AHEAD... CRY... IT'S ALL YOU CAN DO NOW...
UNLESS YOU TAKE ARMS AGAINST OUR PUBLIC SERVANT TRAITORS WHO ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY WITH FASCIST RASCISM, WHILE THEY GIVE U.S. AWAY TO OUR SLAVER ENEMIES... BY LAW... THIER LAW... NOT OURS!!!!
--> THE DEMOCRATS YOU JUST RE-ELECTED FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME!
MORONS.
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We can thank the Obama Admin and all its Schills for tripling the feeling or fear of Racism in the USA even when there was none and encouraging false perceptions of good things as being “Racist.”
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The United States has always attempted to repatriate the remains of our fallen servicemen so that they may be buried to eternally rest in honored glory in their home ground. Perhaps the author of this piece of drivel hasn't heard of the more than 20 Marines who were hastily buried on Tarawa in 1943 whose remains were found not too long ago, disinterred, and returned to their homeland.
If Rick Perlstein should perhaps read this, he will learn that the iconic and Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by Eddie Adams of General Loan, Saigon's Chief of Police, executing a Viet Cong "spy" was in retaliation for that VC being a member of a group who killed one of Loan's favorite subordinates - and the man's entire family with him.
If Rick Perlstein should perhaps read this, he will learn that the iconic and Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by Eddie Adams of General Loan, Saigon's Chief of Police, executing a Viet Cong "spy" was in retaliation for that VC being a member of a group who killed one of Loan's favorite subordinates - and the man's entire family with him.
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Quit sharing this nonsense on RallyPoint. This crap is for any of the umpty liberal snowflake groups On Facebook whose members would never discuss something like this without being in the safety of their Momma’s basement. Grrrr, I want my 3 and 1/2 minutes back.
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What an ignorant ramble. The person has no knowledge of Viet Nam or the war, and in spite of the fact they claim to live in Illinois, I'm convinced they never heard a gun fired in anger.
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This guy is truly a full fledged halfwit. First off, Johnson did more to prolong the war in VN with his (and McNamara) daily picking of target from his arm chair in the white house then Nixon did in the years he was Commander and chief. At least Nixon open up the unrestricted bombing of the Hai Phong area to include the harbor where all the Soviet Supply were being funneled down the HCM trail. Read "Dereliction of Duty" by H.R. McMaster. It will turn your stomach on the Johnson era. And I am a Texan, but I don't claim LBJ.
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when I look at the POW flag I think of friends who served, many of them because they were drafted. A fair number did not come back and many who did, though not all, came back damaged. Mr Perstein was 2 years old at the time. He obviously considers himself educated but wisdom does not always come from learning and much of what passes for learning is little more than biased opinion. A symbol means precisely what the beholder associates it with. Ask any vet and he, or she, Will not tell you they think of Nixon. They will tell you they think of friends, family, comrades or others who were sent to war and did not come back and you have the gall to dirty those feelings with your sanctimonious, bigoted sermonizing.
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With all the freedoms everyone in this country has due to sacrifices like these, Im not suprised! I think in these times its all about the shock value because of social media. It gets them more ratings. Youd have to be an absolute idiot to actually believe that a this flag of honor is anything but "racist"!
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I'm getting just a little tired of the liberal commie bullshit. Action needs to be taken. In THIS kind of war,intelligent, thoughtful action is needed. I"ve got no problem investigating certain people, finding out everything there is to know about them, then releasing that intel to the public. ESPECIALLY certain Congressmen and women who still believe that foreign bank accounts cannot be found out when they under a "dummy" name.
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