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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
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wow! when is the Lefts madness going to stop! you call yourself an American how can you classify this Flag Racist? it's for all the missing! please Don't write any more?
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Answer: No.
No, the flag is not racist, and the author of the article does not even appear to make any attempt to prove his allegation that it is. He rambles and rants about why he disagrees with it, with the U. S. Government, and with the Vietnam War overall, and he would most definitely make Hanoi Jane proud, but he doesn't offer even a shred of evidence to indicate it is racist. He used that word for two reasons that I can imagine: 1) Flaming liberals love to call anything they don't like "racist"; 2) He knew he could steal some confederate flag limelight and garner media attention by making such a ridiculous claim. I wonder if he even believes the drivel he spouts, or if he is just trying to grab another 15 minutes to sell more of his publications.
Frankly, I'm disgusted that he's even being discussed because his ignorant idiocy doesn't deserve any further attention.
No, the flag is not racist, and the author of the article does not even appear to make any attempt to prove his allegation that it is. He rambles and rants about why he disagrees with it, with the U. S. Government, and with the Vietnam War overall, and he would most definitely make Hanoi Jane proud, but he doesn't offer even a shred of evidence to indicate it is racist. He used that word for two reasons that I can imagine: 1) Flaming liberals love to call anything they don't like "racist"; 2) He knew he could steal some confederate flag limelight and garner media attention by making such a ridiculous claim. I wonder if he even believes the drivel he spouts, or if he is just trying to grab another 15 minutes to sell more of his publications.
Frankly, I'm disgusted that he's even being discussed because his ignorant idiocy doesn't deserve any further attention.
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This is from This Ain't Hell. It's a statement from the site owner about his thoughts about the Iran deal. It's got some merit.
Monitoring Iran
Jonn Lilyea | August 13, 2015
I haven’t written anything about this upcoming deal with Iran over their nuclear program mostly because I haven’t had an opportunity to read it yet. However, there is something I do know – politicians. The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration is confident that they’ll be able to keep track of the Iranians’ nuclear program;
The main reason, according to a classified joint intelligence assessment presented to Congress, is that the deal requires Iran to provide an unprecedented volume of information about nearly every aspect of its existing nuclear program, which Iran insists is peaceful. That data will make checking on compliance easier, officials say, because it will shrink Iran’s capacity to hide a covert weapons program.
“We will have far better insight (into) the industrial aspects of the Iranian nuclear program with this deal than what we have today,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told an audience last month at the Aspen Security Forum.
I have no doubt that they’ll recognize when Iran is cheating, but my concern is will they be willing to do anything about it? I mean, they’ve known for more than a decade that Iran was supplying terrorists with stuff to kill our troops in Iraq during that war and they’ve done nothing about that. For years, we’ve been redrawing the line in the sand in regards to the Iranian nuclear program. Why would the Iranians take any threat seriously to restore the sanctions against them? Look how long it took to institute the sanctions in the first place.
Part of the deal with North Vietnam was that we’d send troops back to South Vietnam in the event that the North invaded the South, well, we know how that turned out. Once politicians sign on to a deal, they forget all about it as if just signing it makes everything better. Like they actually accomplished something. Then it’s all for the next president to worry about.
Monitoring Iran
Jonn Lilyea | August 13, 2015
I haven’t written anything about this upcoming deal with Iran over their nuclear program mostly because I haven’t had an opportunity to read it yet. However, there is something I do know – politicians. The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration is confident that they’ll be able to keep track of the Iranians’ nuclear program;
The main reason, according to a classified joint intelligence assessment presented to Congress, is that the deal requires Iran to provide an unprecedented volume of information about nearly every aspect of its existing nuclear program, which Iran insists is peaceful. That data will make checking on compliance easier, officials say, because it will shrink Iran’s capacity to hide a covert weapons program.
“We will have far better insight (into) the industrial aspects of the Iranian nuclear program with this deal than what we have today,” James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told an audience last month at the Aspen Security Forum.
I have no doubt that they’ll recognize when Iran is cheating, but my concern is will they be willing to do anything about it? I mean, they’ve known for more than a decade that Iran was supplying terrorists with stuff to kill our troops in Iraq during that war and they’ve done nothing about that. For years, we’ve been redrawing the line in the sand in regards to the Iranian nuclear program. Why would the Iranians take any threat seriously to restore the sanctions against them? Look how long it took to institute the sanctions in the first place.
Part of the deal with North Vietnam was that we’d send troops back to South Vietnam in the event that the North invaded the South, well, we know how that turned out. Once politicians sign on to a deal, they forget all about it as if just signing it makes everything better. Like they actually accomplished something. Then it’s all for the next president to worry about.
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Addendum From " This Ain't Hell "
Stupidity, thy name is this article titled “It’s Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate.”
I don’t know if this guy is honestly this dumb, this insane, or crafty enough to have written a piece of drek so stupid that people can’t help but click and read it. My assumption is the third, that he said something provocative and asinine in order to get people to click and read it. Unfortunately, it’s going to work this time, because it truly is so reprehensible and sophomoric that it almost begs me to discuss it.
So let us begin with the Magnum Opus of the venerable Rick Perlstein, obviously the predicted Ubermensch of Frederich Neitzsche:
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.
Ah yes, that symbol of hatred, malice and racism. Tell me more Rick, I stand ready to suckle at your overflowing teat of wisdom…
http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=61381&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thisainthell%2FnTMY+%28This+ain%27t+Hell%2C+but+you+can+see+it+from+here%29
Stupidity, thy name is this article titled “It’s Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate.”
I don’t know if this guy is honestly this dumb, this insane, or crafty enough to have written a piece of drek so stupid that people can’t help but click and read it. My assumption is the third, that he said something provocative and asinine in order to get people to click and read it. Unfortunately, it’s going to work this time, because it truly is so reprehensible and sophomoric that it almost begs me to discuss it.
So let us begin with the Magnum Opus of the venerable Rick Perlstein, obviously the predicted Ubermensch of Frederich Neitzsche:
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.
Ah yes, that symbol of hatred, malice and racism. Tell me more Rick, I stand ready to suckle at your overflowing teat of wisdom…
http://thisainthell.us/blog/?p=61381&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thisainthell%2FnTMY+%28This+ain%27t+Hell%2C+but+you+can+see+it+from+here%29
Article claiming MIA POW flag is racist an easy favorite for dumbest thing ever written
Cross posted from paying gig. Stupidity, thy name is this article titled "It’s Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate." I don't know if this
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I can't believe this guy. He must live a very lonely life. I just wasted my time reading his stupid article.
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Hmmm....POW (Prisoner of War) / MIA (Missing in Action) .... I don't get it. Alas, this guy is just one of many that we protect so he can come out with something stupid, because it is his right. Can't fix stupid and I don't even want to try. The more he is ignored, the faster he will go away.
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Propaganda is necessarily nationalist, but not necessarily racist. And for this person to suggest that North Vietnam did not torture prisoners is beyond insane; our POWs returned broken and starving, many of them having died in the camps. What a jackass.
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Interesting concepts, despite some data presented as fact that remains speculative. There is an error in fact regarding exchanges of prisoners; through the US Civil War prisoner exchanges were common, paroles were also common during Revolutionary War, War of 1812, and even during WWI, where there is a famous case of a British officer released by the Germans for a limited time who returned to captivity as he promised. We are not aware of any such exchanges during WWII. We are aware of such exchanges during the Cold War, but we won't count that since it is not a declared war. Oh, nor was Vietnam. Certainly, South VN treatment of POWs was less than stellar. It turns out, that the entire Vietnam ERROR (not just Era) is also somewhat of a propagandized myth.
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