Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate

[PSM]

It’s Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate

By Rick Perlstein 8/11/15 at 12:37 PM

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.

Continued here: http://www.newsweek.com/its-time-hau...st-hate-361929

This from Newsweek, the company that sold for less than a single issue of their rag.

Pat

[cbtengr]

The author they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

rickperlstein.jpg

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by cbtengr

The author they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Attachment 31128

I don't think he is going to fare too well when the Muslims take over.

TR

[Paslode]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

I don't think he is going to fare too well when the Muslims take over.

TR

Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.

The bitter irony of the useful idiots.....

[Hand]

But wait! There's more!

[Bleed Green]

UT is in Austin and the official motto of the town is Keep it weird Austin. Enough said?

[Richard]

Originally Posted by PSM

This from Newsweek, the company that sold for less than a single issue of their rag.

The original article was from The Washington Spectator - Newsweek just published it as an OpEd piece like many periodicals do.

http://washingtonspectator.org/

Richard

[NurseTim]

Toss my salad pinko. It escapes me how he can muster the IQ for spontaneous respiration.

[Trapper John]

I am so sick of this progressive crap that I could just scream! From day 1 the message has been that the SEA conflicts were unjust and immoral. After all, Ho Chi Minh was just a national patriot that was only trying to rid his country of foreign imperialism. America should be ashamed.

To be sure we made strategic and tactical errors (see Rufus Phillips' article attached) and unfortunately we are still making these same mistakes in the prosecution of the ME conflicts. But that does not mean that the motives for engagement were unjust or immoral as the progressives would have us believe. Nor should we be ashamed.

Well, the Democratic congress that reneged on our agreement to provide material aid to the South Vietnamese Army and allowed the NVA to invade, should damned well be ashamed!

Now the progressive meme is that all is well in Indochina after those evil American troops left the scene. Give me a f'n break. See below from Mike Benge.

http://www.americanthinker.com/artic...ppression.html

Mike and folks like Rufus Phillips, Tommy Daniels, Steve Sherman, COL (USAF ret) Joe Potter, CMDR (USN ret) Joe Procopio are doing incredible work fighting the progressive revisionist history and rescuing/aiding the Khmer, Hmong, Cham, and Montagnards from the on-going oppression and genocide in SEA.

For those of you interested in a truthful account of our prosecution of the Indochina wars please see (1) "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Shehan and (2) "Why Vietnam Matters - An eyewitness account of lessons not learned" by Rufus Phillips.

This wholesale inversion of truth and upside-down morality has got to stop!