Recently a fantastic moron liberal on twitter liked a picture from the old, popular, right wing magazine Soldier of Fortune. This sparked my interest in reading some of it mostly for entertainment but also as a trip back in time to see how reactionaries of the 70s talked about things.
Well, here’s a prime selection about US defeat and retreat from Vietnam. I wasn’t surprised to find such an article, but I was slightly amused to find the language and arguments employed then remain unchanged now.
I couldn’t help but note the total lack of explanation for why the US needed to win in Vietnam. The only offered reason is “Western Christendom” (in Cambodia and South Vietnam, btw…). Beyond that, it’s just anger that we had lost and a strong thirst for revenge against domestic “traitors.” The lack of any apparent stakes from the American perspective mixed with the melodramatic tone towards dead US troops and perceived impending death of the nation, intended or not, gave me a glimpse into the classic mind of a reactionary. Life is only for them and their chosen group.
The comparison made between the Spartans at Thermopylae and the US Army in Vietnam made me kinda silently guffaw. As if fighting an aggressive war halfway around the world is in any way comparable to fighting a defensive war at home. If anything, the Vietnamese resistance fighters were the Spartans against the invading American forces. Classic reactionary absurdity flipping reality on its head. The same continues today when Israel calls Hamas the Nazis when the Israelis themselves are the genocidal settler colonial nation ethnically cleansing the lands, not the Palestinians.
Right
I haven’t fully thought this out, but just off the top of my head here: I have to imagine the dual embarrassments of the US being forced into a stalemate against Korea and then Vietnam in part due to “unwillingness” by the public to be fully on board with like full scale wars of annihilation (MacArthur style shit like just nuking the enemies into oblivion) seems to have seriously irked the hawks and they spent all the decades since Vietnam instrumenting an even more robust genocide-friendly media class and politicians who were completely unable to respond to the demands of their constituents but rather the demands of the MIC and thus whatever the CIA or DoD demanded. So by the time the second Iraq War came the protests and demands (which were sizable) from citizens were fully ignored by the media and government. The media manipulation of narratives, downplaying protests, refusal to fairly cover the wars, etc. all allowed for this current environment where there is effectively zero pushback on anything the military types want to do.
I’ve always had a cynical view of the effect of protests on ending US involvement in Vietnam, but I will admit it certainly had an effect of some kind. The antiwar protests for Iraq literally had no effect at all. The antiwar/anti fueling of genocide by Israel protests had basically zero effect for a while (possibly in the last couple months there is some change happening insanely slowly).
Again, haven’t thought all this out, but just thinking back on wars the US has done or facilitated, these hawks have gotten their wishes over time. Maybe that’s why the magazine doesn’t need to exist anymore because I mean… this is literally the uniparty thinking at this point. There aren’t any (or incredibly few) legitimately antiwar liberals left. The argument is never “do not do the war” it’s “how to lessen impact on civilians.” And I don’t know how much that was a legitimate position in the past either, but it did seem to exist in part due to public pressure which the media now and for decades ensures will not happen now or again. Their grasp is only slipping now due to a lot of things but in part more open access to information and a general distrust of all institutions including the media as a whole.