There will never be a memorial in Washington DC to the over 900,000 innocent civilians killed by the American government over the course of the tens years of its involvement in Southeast Asia. Nor will there ever be a memorial made of stone or metal to the Vietnamese soldiers who stood up to the largest, most powerful, most destructive military the world had ever seen — and won.
Operation Rolling Thunder was the longest extended bombing campaign in American history.
According to Wikipedia, “between 1965 and 1968 aircraft of the U.S. Air Force had flown 153,784 attack sorties against North Vietnam, while the Navy and Marine Corps had added another 152,399. On 31 December 1967, the Department of Defense announced that 864,000 tons of American bombs had been dropped on the DRV during Rolling Thunder, compared with 653,000 tons dropped during the entire Korean Conflict and 503,000 tons in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.”
“Rolling Thunder” is also the name of the motorcycle club that holds an annual “Ride for POWs and MIAs” in early May, a sort of “Hells Angels” for right-wing Vietnam vets and their supporters.
This year, egged on by right wing talk radio, bloggers like Michelle Malkin, and Fox News with the idea that International Answer’s March on the Pentagon was going to desecrate the Vietnam Memorial, “Rolling Thunder” came to Washington DC early, and they came in force. Where the typical anti-war protest in Washington usually draws a small counter protest, this year, on March 17th, the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the numbers were more evenly divided. Anybody who walked up Constitution Avenue towards the Vietnam Memorial had to run a gauntlet of scowling, flag waiving bikers. They walked through the crowd trying to pick fights and they lined the road along the bridge going over the Potomac. It was a menacing, ugly scene. The war in Iraq is going badly. These people feel abandoned and betrayed by not only the Democrats but also by the Bush administration, and, in their minds, it’s all going to happen again, the last helicopter taking off from the roof in Saigon, Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft dodgers, the rolling crisis of the 1970s when American power seemed to be on the decline. Once again they’ve been “stabbed in the back”.
On the other side was a coalition of about 10,000 people organized by groups like World Can’t Wait, the After Downing Street website, the Campus Anti-War Network, Code Pink and various pro-Palestinian, Marxist and anarchist organizations, all under the umbrella of International Answer’s Troops Out Now coalition. This is the more ideologically radical side of the anti-war movement. While its organizational methods, large, heavily controlled permitted marches organized in cooperation with local police, are almost exactly the same as more mainstream anti-war groups like United for Peace and Justice, International Answer’s uncompromising support of the Palestinians has earned the hostility of most liberal Democrats and the presence of ex US Attorney General Ramsey Clark regularly leads to charges that they’re closet supporters of Slobodan Milosovic and Kim Il Jung. Considering the hysterical misrepresentations of International Answer that you often see even in well known liberal publications like Salon.com or Slate, it’s easy to see why the largely rural, largely unsophisticated members of “Rolling Thunder” could have been so easily manipulated into believing that the Vietnam Memorial was in imminent danger of being destroyed.
There will never be a memorial in Washington DC to the over 900,000 innocent civilians killed by the American government over the course of the tens years of its involvement in Southeast Asia. Nor will there ever be a memorial made of stone or metal to the Vietnamese soldiers who stood up to the largest, most powerful, most destructive military the world had ever seen — and won.
While the design of the Vietnam Memorial itself, that somber black gash in front of the Lincoln Memorial listing the names of the 58,159 American soldiers killed in Vietnam was originally so controversial that Maya Lin, the young Asian American woman who designed the monument, wasn’t even mentioned during the dedication in 1982, lest her race offend Vietnam veterans or their supporters, the memorial was quickly embraced and eventually co-opted by the extreme right. As early as the late 1980s, when I first visited the memorial, you could already see the tents of the vendors hawking Vietnam MIA paraphernalia, and, simultaneously, pushing the usual right-wing revisionist view of the American defeat. The United States was never defeated in Vietnam, the line went. It fought the war with “one hand tied behind its back” and was eventually stabbed in that very back by the liberals, anti-war protesters and the media.
In the mid 1990s, a controversy erupted over the MIA booths. Ted Sampley, one of the key players in the Vietnam MIA industry and the founder of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, attacked Jan Scruggs, the head of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial fund, and the man who came up with the original idea for a Vietnam Memorial in the first place, for his criticisms of the MIA tents. Scruggs phrased his criticisms in religious terms — moneychangers didn’t belong in a holy place — but part of him could undoubtedly see the way the Memorial was being transformed from a place dedicated to healing the wounds that the Vietnam War inflicted on the American psyche to a rallying place for right-wing revisionist history. Sampley, in a 1997 letter, also attacked Scruggs for accepting the conclusions of Senators Kerry and McCain that there were no more MIAs left in Vietnam.
“Added to the controversy,” Sampley wrote, is Scruggs’ friendship with Hanoi advocates Sens. John Kerry and John McCain and their hatred for POW/MIA activists. Scruggs and his Memorial Fund board of directors have not hesitated to publish their opinions supporting efforts of U.S. corporate giants to do business with communist Vietnam.”
Over the course of the life of the Vietnam Memorial, from its inception in 1978 to the Presidential election of 2004, the right-wing revisionist view of the Vietnam War became mainstream America’s view of the Vietnam War.
Jan Scruggs himself first came up with the idea for a Vietnam Memorial after he had gone to see the rabidly racist, reactionary movie the Deer Hunter. While in 1978 most Americans believed that the Vietnam War, if not downright evil and immoral, was at least a tragic mistake, The Deer Hunter started the ball rolling in the opposite direction. Where in reality, Vietnamese prisoners were kept in tiger cages, in The Deer Hunter, it was American prisoners who were kept in tiger cages. Where in reality, Vietnam was destroyed by the American military, the Deer Hunter concentrated on the war’s destruction of the community a small, east European immigrant town in Central Pennsylvania. And, of course, in a brilliantly Orwellian twist, Michael Cimino reversed Eddie Adams’ famous image of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner by showing over and over again white American soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette by their Vietnamese captors.
By 2004, after years of false stories about Vietnam vets being spit on in airports by anti-war protesters, lesser revisionist movies like Stallone’s Rambo series, and the out of context images of the atrocities in Cambodia – in reality it was the Vietnamese Communist military who stopped Pol Pot’s mass murder-the stage was set for the stab in the back myth to go mainstream. Its enabler was none other than Vietnam vet and former anti-war activist John Kerry. Kerry attempted to avoid debating the war in Iraq by talking up his military service in Vietnam. But by running away from his own anti-war activism in the early 1970s, he subconsciously sent the message to the American people that anti-war protesters were unpatriotic, or at least immature and unrealistic. It wound up costing him the election when right-wing veterans groups successfully portrayed him as the arch anti-war protester, Jane Fonda Kerry, too unpatriotic, out of touch, and elitist to be elected president.
But it has longer ranging consequences than Kerry’s defeat in 2004.
In 2004, when Kerry visited the Memorial, right wing media outlets like Newsmax started a rumor, later discredited, that Kerry gave the middle finger to none other than Ted Sampley. According to Sampley’s own account he attempted to remove Kerry from the memorial. “Senator, I am Ted Sampley, the head of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry,” he reports himself as having said, “and I am here to escort you away from the Wall because you do not belong here.” As ludicrous as Sampley’s self-serving account is, the message behind it is clear. The Vietnam Memorial does not belong to all the American people, not even to a man like John Kerry, who actually served in Vietnam. It belongs to pro-war, right wing Americans and pro-war right wing Americans only.
On March 17th, according to the Washington Post, the government made it official, allowing the right wing counter protesters, Rolling Thunder and a Gathering of Eagles, to hire private security contractors to keep International Answer’s supporters from visiting the site.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031701280.html
Gathering of Eagles, the group that organized the protest, was so worried about threats to the monuments that it hired private security to guard the Wall, said Harry Riley, 69, a retired Army colonel from Florida. Other vets patrolled the area through the night and early morning, he said.
By early morning, the National Park Service had installed two metal detectors and carefully controlled entry along the path leading to the Wall. Blue-helmeted riot police were stationed along the length of the Wall. For a time, a handful of vets paraded back and forth with American flags waving in the stiff, cold breeze.
In other words, I was no longer welcome at the Vietnam Memorial. In 1989, when I first visited the memorial, very young and very left wing, I chatted amiably with one of the MIA hawkers about our political differences. In 2007, now approaching middle age but with the same politics, I would not have been allowed to visit the site. Oh, being white, male, relatively conservative looking, and in his 30s, I probably could have got closer to the wall then a lot of people. But if I had honestly expressed my opinions about the war in Vietnam or the War in Iraq, I would have either gotten beaten up by members of Rolling Thunder or escorted off the property by the DC Park Police. And nobody at the Washington Post seemed to consider that a problem.
Whatever difficulties they are currently having, the Republicans understand this all too well, that if they control the way the debate is framed on this most basic level, the Democrats in Congress will never be able to mount a consistently principled opposition to any use of the military for whatever reason, however foolish and ultimately destructive. The Democrats in Congress won’t call for an immediate end to the occupation because, deep inside, they accept the right’s basic premise that withdrawing from Vietnam in 1975 led to the genocide in Cambodia. They won’t cut off the funds because, once again, deep down inside, they accept the basic premise of the right that cutting off the funds for the war in Iraq would be the equivalent of stabbing the troops in the back. And liberals won’t defend the basic rights of free speech and assembly because, deep down inside, they accept the premise of the right that groups like International Answer and World Can’t Wait are traitors who deserve to be silenced.
On the other hand, the radical anti-war protesters who marched on the Pentagon last Saturday, whatever their faults, realize that in order to end the occupation of Iraq, you have to undermine the very foundation of the Bush regime’s justifications for the endless “war on terror”. International Answer’s much maligned speakers lists may in fact be dull and may in fact turn off would be supporters but they do have a logic. Let the various ethnic groups and nationalities who have been beaten down by the American government have a say, even if it’s about their little pet projects most of us don’t understand. Let people who aren’t Americans, who aren’t supporters of the American military, who may in fact hold politics offensive to most Americans, let them speak. Another group, World Can’t Wait argues, in their “call”, that you simply can’t have any common ground with the kind of people, for example, who would name a motorcycle club after an obscene program of industrialized mass murder. “This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.” And Cindy Sheehan, in her speech at the Pentagon, pointed in the direction of the counter protesters and said that “those people think America’s the whole universe. America’s not the whole universe”.
Indeed, this strikes at the very heart of the matter. It’s not enough to argue against the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that not enough privileged young Republicans are enlisting or that the war is being executed badly or that it’s too expensive. All these arguments are legitimate and have their place but unless you lay the basic foundation for an anti-war political agenda, that Vietnamese, Iraqi, and everybody else’s life is as valuable as the life of an American, you will be no more effective than John Kerry was in 2004.
