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Revisionist History and the 2004 Presidential Election
Posted 3-15-2004
It seems the 2004 Presidential election is going to bring about a lot
of talking about the Vietnam War and our feelings and memories from that
era. What it also appears to be bringing out is a revisionist history that
somehow anti-war protesters were not loyal Americans, and most importantly
they were wrong in their protests.
Let me start out by saying
that I was a grade school student through most of the war. But with two
brothers eligible for the draft, the war was a hot topic at our house.
Fortunately, both my brothers received student deferments, but the war
touched us with a cousin and a neighbor being killed in Vietnam. We opposed
the war for a variety of reasons, the most apparent being that it didn't
make sense that young men we knew were being killed on the other side of the
world because some guys in Washington told them to go there.
Opposition to the war was not
a condemnation of those who fought. Rather, it was a statement that enough
was enough and old men shouldn't be sending young men off to be killed for
questionable causes. And, what cause was more questionable than Vietnam? In
elections during the 1950's communists had actually won. The colonists at
the time, the French, wouldn't accept the results but they saw the writing
on the wall and began the process of extricating themselves from Southeast
Asia. But the commie-fighting Americans jumped in with military "advisers"
because the Domino Theory was the conventional wisdom.
We know the rest of the
story, from the questionable circumstances in the Gulf of Tonkin under LBJ
to Nixon's secret forays into Cambodia. All we got for it was 58,000 killed,
many more wounded, and a nation that still is uneasy discussing the issue.
Ultimately, Vietnam is now what it was then, an inconsequential member of
the global community. And, does it really matter that Vietnam is run by
communists?
But, wasn't there a bit of
irony that while we were fighting the communists in Vietnam, Nixon was going
to China to build relations, and it was China that was the primary supporter
of the Vietnamese communists' efforts. If today's rationale for invading
Afghanistan and Iraq applied then, we would have invaded China for arming
the Vietnamese.
The pressing issue of today
is that some opponents of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry are
trying to portray his opposition to the war as something that was wrong. No,
it was the war that was wrong. Invading other countries because we don't
like their form of government may have been acceptable in the past. But in
our modern world where ordinary people believe their lives are as valuable
as the political leaders, marching young people off to war just wasn't going
to be accepted any more.
Give the anti-war movement
credit; it changed how we think about war, and it brought the loss of life
in Vietnam to an end. Those same feelings still persist in American society
today. Even Bush and his Vietnam War-avoiding cronies, who don't really mind
sending other people's kids off to war, are sheepish about the ventures in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Notice, they'll stretch National Guard units to the
limit, before they'll re-institute the draft. They know drafting young
people against their will only fanned the flames of resistance during
Vietnam, and they aren't taking that same chance again. Also, they won't let
the coffins of fallen soldiers be filmed as they were on a daily basis
during Vietnam. Of course, Bush has no qualm about showing you victims of
the September 11, 2001 tragedy for his political gain.
The right-wingers in America
will do all kinds of nasty things to Kerry, like trying to diminish his
bravery and doctor pictures, so it looks like he and Jane Fonda were arm in
arm during anti-war protests. But, they aren't so confident in the public's
support for their military adventurism that they'll go back to the ways of
our political leaders of the Vietnam era.
And, their effort to promote
a revisionist history of the Vietnam era, that somehow we were fighting a
"just war", is nothing other than one more fabrication they'll use to tear
down John Kerry. Don't let them control the discourse because now we have
generations of Americans who never lived through those years, and they must
be told the truth. Opposition to that war brought it to an end, and it
changed how we perceive war and our leaders' willingness to send us off to
be killed for causes they deem worthy. Let's just hope that as a society we
learn from the past, and we aren't foolish enough to ever make the same
mistake again. |
