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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: 801
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1956-1959: Navigator and intelligence officer, Strategic Air Command, United States Air Force. (Resigned commission as Captain, USAF Reserve, in protest against Vietnam War, 1966.) That is what I just found out about this fellow...H. Bruce Franklin. Hmmm...notice he resigned in protest 1966.
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Sad commentary on the nonsense that some news media publish. The puke is trying to sell a book. Won't get many buyers from this forum.
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Now a day when you have those libtarts brainwashing dumb Americans/politicians, anything can be racist. How about the American Flag, you can say that the invented the cult of a separate from Britain or to compare Christopher Columbus to the Hitler that wiped out most of the Indigenous people... POW/MIA flag is a symbol, no matter what era and ppl still call a racist if they wanted to.
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We leave in a world where new information is being uncovered everyday. I say that to say this, if in fact this was/is the case that led to the development of not just the POW/MIA Flag but the narrative as a whole, then it is in fact ultra misleading. I wouldn’t say racist, just misleading. It wouldn’t be the first time our government has done so however, only an idiot would say its out of the question
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First of all, the author DID make an apology, which can be read at the bottom of this link (https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-haul-down-another-flag-racist-hate-361929), for using the word "racist", but does stand by the rest of his story. That said, when the editor's response mentions "Perlstein is an accomplished historian who has spent years researching the Nixon and Reagan years. He knows this material." This merely proves he knows just enough facts to spin them for those who do not use any critical thinking skills.
Example, in the article referenced, Perlstein writes, (quote) 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. (unquote).
This plays on the "Nixon bad", so everything he did was bad, logical fallacy. Downplaying the existence of American POWs is not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, so Nixon's actions in this case were good. Also, byy using the word "convenient" to describe the timing (instead of the fact that he had recently assumed office, and only a fool would wait on such an important issue), the author has just tried to influence the reader's opinion with irrelevant associations.
Note: The fact that the author seems to condone downplaying the existence of POWs tells us all we really need to know regarding the rest of the article.
Later, he claims "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" Well, I have read that memoir, and it is horrible, but nowhere does Denton mention any of the techniques being of ANYONE's origin.
I could go on, and on, but it is obvious this author has disturbing personal issues that interfere with any semblance of truthful insight. He had to apologize for the LEAD in his article. The LEAD. He then used half-truths and irrelevant associations to imply the worst, and obviously made no effort to communicate with POWs and their families prior to writing that garbage. Both the author and the editors of Newsweek should be ashamed of themselves...but that won't happen. You would have to have some semblance of honor, first.
Example, in the article referenced, Perlstein writes, (quote) 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. (unquote).
This plays on the "Nixon bad", so everything he did was bad, logical fallacy. Downplaying the existence of American POWs is not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, so Nixon's actions in this case were good. Also, byy using the word "convenient" to describe the timing (instead of the fact that he had recently assumed office, and only a fool would wait on such an important issue), the author has just tried to influence the reader's opinion with irrelevant associations.
Note: The fact that the author seems to condone downplaying the existence of POWs tells us all we really need to know regarding the rest of the article.
Later, he claims "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" Well, I have read that memoir, and it is horrible, but nowhere does Denton mention any of the techniques being of ANYONE's origin.
I could go on, and on, but it is obvious this author has disturbing personal issues that interfere with any semblance of truthful insight. He had to apologize for the LEAD in his article. The LEAD. He then used half-truths and irrelevant associations to imply the worst, and obviously made no effort to communicate with POWs and their families prior to writing that garbage. Both the author and the editors of Newsweek should be ashamed of themselves...but that won't happen. You would have to have some semblance of honor, first.
The Story Behind the POW/MIA Flag
What began as a protest against the Vietnam War became a symbol of deceit and hatred.
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Catch a having done some reason all about research on this question of the MIAPOW flag I think most of the comments in this gentleman‘s article or complete distortions of his Storico facts
The MIAPOW campaign was started by a bunch of very sad wives who couldn’t find out what happened to their husbands it is true that they were very ineffective in their campaign until Richard Nixon took up their caused and made it a political movement but still it’s historical fact that the question was what happened to these men. A lot of POWs returned home at the end of the war but the truth is we do not know for a fact that They were all repeat traded. Yes reasonable grounds to believe that some POWs died while in captivity and the North Vietnamese never acknowledged this fact. The political movement and took hold and the idea of trying to account for every soldier lost in World War II Korea Vietnam and all the other conflicts became part of the national conscience and no Man left behind slogan took on a new meeting. From the very beginning there was a lot of controversy about the MIA/POW flag. Well all of us do worry about those unaccounted for missing minion women from combat is it right they have a special flag For them and not an equal recognition as much larger number who died in service to the country and the evil larger number to carry the battle scars of war through the rest of their lives. for them and not an equal recognition as much larger number who died in service to their country and the evil larger number to carry the battle scars of war through the rest of their lives. There was a gorge movement in the California veterans community to have a flag designed to represent the disabled veterans in particular the paraplegics. Recently there’s been a huge controversy over the MIA/POW Table because some groups want to add a Bible their hand in particular Hampton open to a particular religious page that not all Veterans is here too.
My point is that although there’s been much controversy about the MIAPOW flag from the beginning I don’t believe the article gives a fair representation of the history
The MIAPOW campaign was started by a bunch of very sad wives who couldn’t find out what happened to their husbands it is true that they were very ineffective in their campaign until Richard Nixon took up their caused and made it a political movement but still it’s historical fact that the question was what happened to these men. A lot of POWs returned home at the end of the war but the truth is we do not know for a fact that They were all repeat traded. Yes reasonable grounds to believe that some POWs died while in captivity and the North Vietnamese never acknowledged this fact. The political movement and took hold and the idea of trying to account for every soldier lost in World War II Korea Vietnam and all the other conflicts became part of the national conscience and no Man left behind slogan took on a new meeting. From the very beginning there was a lot of controversy about the MIA/POW flag. Well all of us do worry about those unaccounted for missing minion women from combat is it right they have a special flag For them and not an equal recognition as much larger number who died in service to the country and the evil larger number to carry the battle scars of war through the rest of their lives. for them and not an equal recognition as much larger number who died in service to their country and the evil larger number to carry the battle scars of war through the rest of their lives. There was a gorge movement in the California veterans community to have a flag designed to represent the disabled veterans in particular the paraplegics. Recently there’s been a huge controversy over the MIA/POW Table because some groups want to add a Bible their hand in particular Hampton open to a particular religious page that not all Veterans is here too.
My point is that although there’s been much controversy about the MIAPOW flag from the beginning I don’t believe the article gives a fair representation of the history
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You can’t get all worked up about one author’s opinion. If you get your blood pressure up over everyone who says something you don’t agree with, you’ll end up having a stroke.
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IF you dont have respect for the POW./MIA. Then you must not in joy your freedom as a American. Give it up and move some where else you dont deserve the freedom you have. GOD BLESS ALL POW MIA. AMEN
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Article written years ago and appears to be "Click Bait", I'm still not sure how it resurfaced to me. I'm not political but the article was surely written with a political agenda. Opinions-like assholes, everyone has one but shouldn't be one. I trust my brothers, not people with an agenda, to tell me the truth, I can make up my own opinion. That flag is for those missing or left behind (to me), SO THAT WE DO NOT FORGET THEIR SACRIFICE.
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