| America's Lost War in Vietnam
In a paper you can read online, "Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam", presented to the American Sociological Association, in Montreal, 2006, Lembcke begins by saying:
A session on pubic memory could hardly be timelier. The nation's will-to-war was mustered in the spring of 03 with a support-the-troops jingoism that would have never worked, save for the image of spat-upon Vietnam veterans vivid in the public mind. And the 2004 presidential election was arguably decided when the so-called Swift Boat veterans launched a campaign against John Kerry, charging that his record of military accomplishments in Vietnam was false and that his participation in the anti-war movement as a veteran was treasonous.....
He goes on to set up his subject by noting:
The outsized profile of Vietnam is undoubtedly due to its having been America's first lost war, its longest war, and very controversial.
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began growing in the 1950s, at a time when the ideology of America first, and best, had its strongest grip on the nation's people. And from there the nation went down to defeat--defeat to a small, underdeveloped nation of Asians.
It was a tough pill to swallow for American patriots, a defeat that demanded explanation, and the explanation that worked best was the one that we did not lose the war to the Vietnamese but to betrayal on the home front--liberals in congress tied one hand behind our backs; radicals in the streets demoralized our troops and lent aid and comfort to the enemy.
It was alibi, not an explanation, and a dangerous alibi at that. It kept alive the belief that we could have won the war if . . . and that we could win wars like it again if . . .
The alibi had a cultural dimension that spelled additional dangers. It wasn't just that the anti-war movement had tipped the balance but that the rising of a counterculture sapped the very virility of America's capacity for war. The permissive hedonism of the 1960s and 1970s--ran the alibi--eroded the discipline of young men and challenged the productionist ethic, dominant since Jamestown. That challenge set the stage for the culture war, the subtext of Republican campaign strategies right through 2004.
In his book Wealth and Democracy, former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips draws parallels between the paths of the last three dominant world power and the United States. First Spain, the Holland and England rose to peaks of world power, during which time they experienced a broad rise in the material well-being of their people, only to be stung by an unexpected reversal at the height of there dominance. As a result they each experienced periods of reactionary politics lasting several decades, during which the elites did better than ever, while the large mass of people experienced stagnant or declining income. Each of these powers also experienced the same economic shift from production to finance that America has experienced since the period previous to Vietnam. Phillips did not discuss cultural mythology, but it would hardly be surprising to find similar examples of blame-shifting for the reversals faced by those previous world powers as well.
The good news is that each of them eventually returned to a more egalitarian political ethos. Thirty-five years after leaving Vietnam, it would seem that our time to change should be at hand as well. Unfortunately, the American people seem to be well ahead of the Democratic Party leadership on this score--and Barack Obama is no exception in still being in thrall to the reactionary cultural narratives of this fading era, even as he proclaims his intention to "turn the page." His buying into the notion that anti-war protesters brought everlasting shame to America is a salient example of how he is deeply enmeshed in the very backwards-looking assumptions he would pretend to free us from. The spitting myth is one driving force in those assumptions. The myth of "Hanoi Jane" is another.
War, Identity And "Hanoi Jane"
Lembcke continues setting the stage:
War in western society is a masculine endeavor: our warriors are men and war defines manhood--like childbirth for women, Nietzsche wrote, war is the rite of passage for males. Our military victories are fixed in our memories by gender-mediated images: an exuberant sailor bending aggressively over a limp nurse balanced on one leg in Times Square recalls for us the triumphalism that marked the end of World War II.
Lost wars are a blow to male identity--and not just to the defeated warriors, but to the collective identity, the masculinity, of the group. It is no surprise, then that from antiquity onward, losses to enemies abroad are attributed to failures at home and that those failures appear in gendered images: Lysistrata's sex strike against the Peloponnesian War and Malanche's betrayal of the Aztexs are well-known examples.
That literary tradition extends into the betrayal narrative for America's lost war in Vietnam wherein the spitters who greeted deplanning troops at the San Francisco airport are remembered as girls or young women--or male longhairs. Commenting on the Swift Boaters' criticism of Kerry's taste for French wine, Columnist Frank Rich observed that "French" in this usage was code for "faggot."
He next introduces his specific subject, sharping the question of why this particular icon:
The study of public memory necessarily involves the study of the icons that mediate our memories and, in the case of Fonda, "Hanoi Jane," the trope or phrase that carries the connotation of treason and betrayal that it does.
In the book I'm writing, I treat "Hanoi Jane" as a myth and like most myths there are matters of fact that cannot be ignored in her making.
Fonda went to Hanoi in July 1972 when we were at war with North Vietnam. She met with North Vietnamese leaders, talked to U.S. POWs held in Hanoi, made broadcasts over radio Hanoi denouncing the war, and was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun.
But that's Jane Fonda and what she did differed very little from what some of the 350 other peace travelers did who had been to Hanoi before her. Indeed, in that number there are individuals who made more incendiary broadcasts than she did or who actually carried material support to the enemy. So why, and how, did Jane Fonda become "Hanoi Jane" when, say, Ramsey Clark didn't become "Hanoi Ramsey"?
The answer should be obvious. Ramsey Clark may have been the U.S. Attorney General. He was never Barbarella. But Lembcke lets such obvious observations lie, turning instead to the how of mythmaking, which in this case involves two salient aspects--the presence of a pre-existing archetype, and the inconvenient fact that Fonda didn't really fit it:
Debunking a myth involves both reconstructing its making--who made it and so forth--and understanding how it works in the present culture.
Where did "Hanoi Jane" come from? As a trope, of course, it mimics, "Axis Sally" and "Tokyo Rose," reputed betrayal figures from World War II who used radio broadcasts to propagandize American soldiers for the enemy Germans and the Japanese.
Newspapers commonly claim that Vietnam veterans dubbed Fonda "Hanoi Jane," Veterans supposedly hate her because her broadcasts from Hanoi demoralized them while they sat n the steamy jungle of South Vietnam. But that's not true. Fonda was actually quite popular among GIs for her anti-war variety show, know variously as Free the Army or Fuck the Army, that toured military bases. Moreover, by the time she made the broadcasts, there were almost no Americans left in the South.
Origins & Spread of A Myth In The Rightwing Infrastructure
Which, of course, meant that the fate of the war had already been determined. Still, knowing the historical record, Lembcke sought to discover what impact those broadcasts, and her other actions may have had on those who were directly touched:
I ran a classified ad in the magazine Vietnam asking to hear from veterans who heard the broadcasts [of Fonda from NV]. I got one response from a guy saying that he actually had photos of her that he had taken--in South Vietnam, of course. Of course, Fonda was never in South Vietnam, and I've never received copies of the photos.
Perhaps it was a subset of veterans--the POWs--who saddled Fonda with "Hanoi Jane." That's plausible because there are POWs angry that she met on frtiendly terms with teh Vietnamese officials who were holding them prisoners. But in the first thiry POW memoirs, those prior to 1990, by which time "Hanoi Jane" was a widely-used phrase, I found only two references to Fonda and one was positive.
Jane Fonda, in other words, didn't become important to the Hanoi POWs until long after their release--and until other social forces had made her important to them.
And what "social forces are we talking about? Like a detective, I've followed the trail of "Hanoi Jane" backwards from the present to see where it began. Along the way, I've found the fingerprints of The Minute Men, and ultra-right-wing paramilitary militia group, and the Lyndon LaRouiche organization, who some of you might remember campaigned against both Greenpeace and Jane Fonda on the slogan, "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales." The trail leads through the publications of the John Birch Society that spearheaeded the effort to have her charged for treason.
What Lembcke has found here is highly significant. What most people take to be proof of leftwing perfidy is actually proof of how powerfully extreme rightwing fantasists are able to influence our cultural narratives. David Neiwert, of Orcinus, has written extensively over the years about the way in which hard right ideas get transmitted from the extreme fringes into the mainstream of conservative discourse, and from there into the mainstream of political thought. His Koufax-winning series, "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism,", was devoted, in part, to examing the role that Rush Limbaugh plays in the process, along with varioius other figures, who are also involved in transmitting ideas between different sectors of the right. This part of series starts with Part VII, "The Transmission Belt", in which Neiwert introduces the basic ideas, starting with much lower-profile figure, Richard Mack, then sheriff of Arizona's mostly rural Graham County:
"Hitler was more moral than Clinton," intoned the nice-looking, dark-haired man in the three-piece suit. "He had fewer girlfriends."
....
the scene above took place four years before Monica, in 1994, long before Clinton handed his enemies a scandal on a platter that seemingly made such references acceptable....
The similarities between Mack's 1994 sentiments and the hyperbole directed at Clinton in 1998 are not accidental. Rather, they offer a stark example of the way the far right's ideas, rhetoric and issues feed into the mainstream -- and in the process, exert a gravitational pull that draws the nation's agenda increasingly rightward. For that matter, much of the conservative anti-Clinton paroxysm could be traced directly to some of the smears that circulated first in militia and white-supremacist circles.
It's also important to understand how the migration of these ideas occurs. Richard Mack, for instance, doesn't compare Bill Clinton's morality to Adolph Hitler's at every speaking opportunity. His remark didn't show up, for instance, when he had his moment in the sun with the National Rifle Association.
It just pops out when he's in front of an audience of Patriot believers. That's when he knows it will gain the most appreciation. It mixes well with the fear of the New World Order he foments, in his quiet, almost sedate speaking tone.
Mack is a transmitter -- someone who treads the boundaries of the various sectors of America's right wing and appears to belong to each of them at various times. Mack's gun-control message still sells well with mainstream, secular NRA audiences. His claims that church-state separation is a myth resonate nicely with the theocratic right crowd as well. And he cultivates a quasi-legitimate image by taking leadership positions in groups like Larry Pratt's Gun Owners of America. But he is most at home in his native base: the populist right, the world of militias, constitutionalists and pseudo-libertarians. Mack even occasionally consorts with the hard right, as when he granted front-page interviews to the Christian Identity newspaper The Jubilee.
Neiwert also deals with official transmitters, such as Trent Lott, with his long-time white racist connections, and other media transmitters, most notoriously including Ann Coulter. The point is, Neiwert demonstrates-and other accounts confirm-that the right has long had well-developed networks for developing and transmitting their political narratives. Thus, the development of a bogus narrative about Jane Fonda in extreme rightwing circles and its later introduction into the mainstream is anything but a novel occurance. The myth is particularly effective in combining a number of rightwing messages, as Lembcke explains:
In their most generic forms, myths pair figures of good and evil. Often the story is about an evil person that tells us who to beware of and what acts should not go unpunished. We learn from the story what is "bad" and comport ourselves accordingly.
"Hanoi Jane" images someone who violated the trust of fellow Americans during wartime. She gave aid and comfort to the enemy, which encouraging them to continue the fight and prolonged the time behind bars for the POWs.
She betrayed the POWs. One story circulating on the internet says the POWs she met slipped her little pieces of paper with their names so she could tell their families they were alive; she betrayed them by turning the notes over to the guards resulting in the deaths of some of some of those prisoners.
That story isn't true but the "Hanoi Jane" it remembers stands for the values and behaviors of the social movement that opposed the war. It helps some Americans "know" that dissent during wartime is "bad" because "it's like what Jane Fonda did during the Vietnam War. In the context of the present war in Iraq, the memory of "Hanoi Jane" works to preclude opposition to the war while forming a template for the disparagement of those who dare.
Captivity Narratives, POWs & Creating Culture Heroes
Furthermore, it derives a good deal of power from echoing themes deeply rooted in the American psyche, going back to the earliest American literary genre, known as the captivity narrative:
The mythology of "Hanoi Jane" works so well as the core chapter of America's great betrayal narrative because, as it turns out, it resonates with the captivity mythology at the core of American identity.
....
The first literature produced by colonial America was the so-called captivity narratives, stories written by Americans who had been captured by Indians. John Smith's story is one of the classics. Smith was captured on a mission into Indian Territory in 1607. Spared from execution by Pocahontas, Smith negotiated his own release, receiving land for Jamestown in return for his promise of cannons and a grindstone for the Indians-a promise never kept. By this account, Smith saved Jamestown. Smith was a hero.
....
The captivity narrative became more complex after several instances of captives, many of them women and girls giving in to their inner Indian, rejected the Puritan path and chose to remain with their erstwhile captors. Those stories gave the literature the qualities it needed for an interface with the POW narrative coming out of Vietnam 250 years later.
The captivity literature constructed the tension between the Self and Other, what was American and what was not. At one pole, "them," a racialized figure, with a nomadic, libidinous, matriarchal, and pagan way of life, the attraction to which, forced Puritans to recognize the "them" in themselves.
At the other pole, "us," a Godly but fearful people besieged, and beset with doubt about the Puritan will to resist the wild within. America was born embattled and, the American, born with the values of discipline, self-denial, austerity, and subordination to authority, was born a warrior-hard and male.
The "Hanoi Jane" mythology has an almost perfect symmetry with the early-American captivity narrative. The image of the enemy-Vietnamese painted by the POW memoirs is Indian-like in its savage use of rope torture, ignorant and incompetent in its inability to interrogate prisoners without torture, and in its unbounded sexuality. All the guards were homosexuals, wrote one POW. But that's only the male guards-the women camp-workers were sex-starved heteros who couldn't keep their eyes off the buffed flyers-every one of them a Pocahontas with the hots for a fighter jock.
Eyes were one thing, hands another. The same memoirs record the self-restraint of the Aces: gratification could wait. Their self discipline would insure that Vietnamese hands, of any sexual orientation, stayed off the Right Stuff.
Structurally, then, "Hanoi Jane" works to compose her mythical opposite, the soldiers who continued the good fight behind prison walls-prisoners at war, not of war. Beyond the reach of Washington's sell-out bureaucracy and the corruption of the counter culture, they retained their dignity as warriors, defying the guards' demands for compliance to camp rules and resisting the temptation to fraternize with the enemy.
This passage, written in 2002, also provides insight into the canonization of John McCain, as well as his delusional belief (shared by Jim Webb, BTW) that America could have won in Vietnam, if only....
In no other conflict in centuries have POWs been considered heroes. But, then, this was a conflict we lost. And our need to construct heroes was so overwhelming that POWs were drafted into the role. Of course, the captivity narratives provided a template from an earlier era when we weren't such confident and consistent winners.
What's more, Richard Nixon deliberately manipulated them into this role. This is another piece of history I witnessed directly, but it is also described in another book abut another major myth of the Vietnam War, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America by H. Bruce Franklin. Faced with the unpleasant prospect of being the first American President to lose a war, Nixon sought a rhetorical way out, "Peace With Honor," and the key to pulling this off was deceptively simple: to alter the terms of the war, to make it about securing the Americans held as prisoners of war-prisoners who would ordinarily be returned at the end of the conflict anyway.
This last, annoying minor detail was dispensed with by the further demonization of the Vietnamese enemy, which necessitated the creation of a new bureucratic bastard category--POW/MIA--never before employed by US military, which combined those lost in battle and almost certainly dead with those who were captured live, and held prisoner. By holding the Vietnamese responsible for men they never captured, we could create an impossible demand that would leave them forever evil for the heinous act of fighting for their own freedom and self-determination. (Recall that Ho Chi Minh had been a US agent in World War II, OSS "Agent 19," and modelled Vietnam's "Declaration of Independence," issued at the end of that war, on America's original document.)
Nixon was aided in this ploy by H. Ross Perot, who, in his earliest political venture, set up an organization to... well, it wasn't exactly clear what. But defintely stir people's passions about the POWs, raise false hopes about men killed in action, and distract attention from the fact that (a) we were losing the war, and (b) our war-fighting policies constituted war crimes on a massive scale. The emotionally-inflamed, but sharply narrowed focused on POWs and those actually killed in action, but imaginatively kept alive with false hope allowed us to both ignore the enormity of the slaughter we had wrought, and the defeat we were running away from.
Above all, it allowed us to reinvent the notion that we were "the good guys." And if it required, in the end, that we embrace the notion that our nation had deliberately abandoned hundreds of POWs for some dark mysterious unfathomable motive, then so be it, we would forever accuse our own government, in the abstract, of treasonous betrayal. And so it is today, that the POW/MIA flag is the only flag other than Old Glory ever to fly over the White House, while every state flies it at capitals and public facilities, and mandates observance of National POW/MIA Recognition Day.
This is the larger cultural context out of which John McCain has become a war hero, about whom nothing critical may be said, until a general who had actually won a war-Wesley Clark-had the temerity to point out that heroism in captivity does not equate to command experience. What could not be explained about the recent brouhaha over Clark's remarks is that all the outrage was fueled by a fierce underlying attachment to the POW/MIA myth as a way of restructuring the Vietnam War as a moral victory. This mythic narrative simply cannot be allowed to be contaminated by logic, facts or historical accuracy. Truth is the enemy, and must be defeated at all costs.
Fonda As Betrayer: Peace Is The Enemy
Lembcke's point is that the construction of the POWs as culture heroes in the mold of the original captivity narratives was part of the same gestalt casting Fonda as a betrayer who went native, betraying her culture-as did the entire counter-culture she represented:
Structurally, then, "Hanoi Jane" works to compose her mythical opposite, the soldiers who continued the good fight behind prison walls-prisoners at war, not of war. Beyond the reach of Washington's sell-out bureaucracy and the corruption of the counter culture, they retained their dignity as warriors, defying the guards' demands for compliance to camp rules and resisting the temptation to fraternize with the enemy.
It is these hero-POWs that America welcomed home with parades and whose experience provided the basis for Hollywood's revision of the war as an American event-Americans against Americans. Displaced by that solipsistic exercise were the Vietnamese as agents of their own destiny.
So, if we couldn't eliminate the bastards by dropping more explosives on them than were used in all of WWII, we could at least eliminate them from our history. Which, of course, meant that the real enemy was the anti-war protesters. And hence, Obama's claim about "a national shame" that lasts "to this day" echoes this rightwing reframing of who and what the Vietnam War-and its loss-were all about.
Lembcke continues:
The "Hanoi Jane" mythology also reminds us that there is an "enemy within," the anti-warrior latent within the culture, the self-indulgent and rebellious underbelly of America that could and did turn hard men soft and cost the nation its victory in Southeast Asia. Fonda appealed to the inner-softness of the male psyche of the POWs and found it in the Hanoi Peace Committee, the anti-war POWs who met with her and made public statements against the war.
Their vulnerability to the seductions of "Hanoi Jane," this false prophet promising peace, warns us all of the constant need for internal vigilance-lest the Self, individual and collective, betray us.
Like captives who "went native" generations before, some of the anti-war POWs contemplated staying in Hanoi upon their release. For that, those Judases pay a price of course: today America remembers the heroes John McCain and John Stockdale; the modern-day John Smiths. But the members of the peace committee-or even that there was a peace committee among the POWs-is, like Eunice Williams who stayed with the Mohawks in 1704, gone from public memory.
It is, in fact, precisely the possibility of peace without dominance of the other that must be utterly annulled, driven out of the realm of possibility, and anyone who resists this effort must be relentlessly demonized, and forced or shamed into silence. And anyone who even incidentally defends them, or questions this process in any way must likewise be demonized as well. For the possibility of living outside the framework of domination is utterly abhorent to the authoritarian mind.
And, of course, as long as we cannot step outside of, and critique the framework of domination, we can never know peace. Because war is written into the very essence of the authoritarian worldview. And in this worldview, there is no alternative. Whoever pretends to want something else, to live in peace with mutual respect between cultures and nations, is either a deceptive charlatan or a naive dupe-just as the John Birch Society once accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist dupe.
This is a most convenient belief, since it means that one never has to defend one's beliefs based on reason. One simply assumes that no other alternative is possible, and that anyone advancing such alternatives is either a liar or a fool.
On its face, this seems utterly absurd. And yet, the triumph of the "Hanoi Jane" mythology and it's power to stifle dissent, along with the related myths of the POW/MIAs and the spitting protesters, has precisely this effect. Which is why official Washington is paralyzed in the face of solid majority opposition to continuing the Iraq War-and why we are nowhere close to beginning the process of re-conceiving the struggle to manage the threat of global terrorism.
The enemy within is central to the mythology of "Hanoi Jane" and an elemental component of America's new narrative as a nation betrayed. In the wake of Vietnam, the nation lost its sense of future-oriented hopefulness, its self-identity as destined people mandated to bring goodness to earth.
The far-right paramilitary movements that stepped out the shadows during the nineteen eighties and nineties were motivated by revenge, the need to recover something they believed to have been lost in Vietnam; their search for the "internal enemy" responsible for the defeat fueled the crusade against feminism, pacifism, intellectual culture, pernicious entitlement programs, and the federal government wherein they allege the ultimate traitors reside.
This is the culture war as Obama understands it. It is what he wants to end, and there's good reason to want to do this. But it's an underlying thesis of this series that he really doesn't understand the basis of the culture war, and in fact buys into fundamental aspects of the worldview of those who launched it in the first place.
And to fully understand this, there's a bigger picture to consider, which I will turn to in the next installment. |
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