Vietnam & Other American Fantasies

Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

by Howard Bruce Franklin

"Coming to terms with the Vietnam War--the war that America lost--has been a long, grueling struggle, mired by historical denial and distortion and, as Franklin so formidably reveals, myths that have become entrapped in American culture. He presents a scholarly, yet personal and lucid investigation of how these myths evolved and why people depend upon them to answer the confusing questions that have become the legacy of the war."--ForeWord Key Points: America's war in Vietnam was based on fantasies about both nations. Now public memory of the war has been transformed into myth. The illusion that the United States originally intervened to stop "North Vietnam" from invading "South Vietnam," the belief that returning veterans were frequently spat upon, and the fiction that American P.O.W.s were abandoned after the war--all permeate contemporary American culture, deeply influencing politics in the twenty-first century. The history of the antiwar movement has been falsified so blatantly that few Americans today would believe that by 1971 there was a revolutionary newspaper being published on every aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin or that 1500 crew members of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation signed a demand that Jane Fonda's antiwar show be allowed to perform on board the ship. The antiwar movement actually began in the fall of 1945, when hundreds of American merchant seamen protested against their ships being used to transport a French army to recolonize Vietnam. The movement reached its climax when tens of thousands of the soldiers and sailors fighting the war actively resisted the Nixon administration's attempts to achieve "victory." Although the antiwar movement is today often depicted as campus-centered, it pervaded American society. And contrary to popular belief, opposition to the war actually ran higher among Americans with less income and less education while support for the war ran higher among those with more wealth and more education. Wartime images that called into question the legitimacy of America's Vietnam policy have been reinterpreted in the postwar years to whitewash the U.S. role in the conflict. In popular media such as film and comic books, for example, the famous photograph of Saigon police chief General Loan assassinating a prisoner during the 1968 Tet Offensive has been transformed into its opposite. Today many Americans actually interpret the photograph as a picture of a Communist officer caught in the act of killing a South Vietnamese civilian. American science fiction profoundly influenced how the Vietnam War was conceived and conducted as well as the way it has been remembered. Building on his work as an advisory curator for the Smithsonian exhibit, "Star Trek and the Sixties," the author shows how the Vietnam War was a subtext for early episodes of the TV series Star Trek and how space exploration has been replaced by the militarization of space. The U.S. policy of "Winning Hearts and Minds" reached its climax in 1968 and 1969, when the CIA conducted a gigantic carrot-and-stick campaign aimed at reestablishing control in some of the countryside lost during the Tet Offensive. The stick was Operation Phoenix, a massive program of torture and assassination designed to root out the insurgent infrastructure. U.S. intelligence officers subsequently testified to Congress that not one of the many "Viet Cong suspects" whose arrest they witnessed ever survived interrogation. The carrot was a "land reform" program designed and run by a University of Washington law professor who also drew up the document that asserted a legal basis for Operation Phoenix and then later published a science fiction story articulating the assumptions underlying both programs. The Vietnam War has been the matrix of the "culture wars" of the past few decades, and these culture wars are intertwined with both the Vietnamese revolution and the wars waged against it by France and the United States.

Genres: History, Politics, War, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, American History, Asia

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

although i read this book appox. 6 years ago, i remember it being the first text that really clarified things for me about the US invasion of Vietnam. what i felt was extremely valuable was that it not only deconstructs how the history of this event has been alternately silenced and manipulated, but also exposes the mechanics of how the US government proactively created a collective, national "memory" around the war that continues to justify its actions from 30+ years ago. also important, the text addresses how the "story" of this war has since been reconstructed in films and media that use racist portrayals of Vietnamese people juxtaposed with heroic US soldiers for even further justification. in light of the 5 year anniversary of the US occupation in Iraq (among its countless other imperial/neo-colonial actions, including the ambiguously titled War on Terror), this book's in-depth analysis of how controlling the popular imagination is critical to sustaining a long-term, "unpopular" war, seems particularly relevant.

just to give you an idea of the (sometimes unusual) terrain covered by this book... if i can recollect, i think the author gives a whole chapter to talking about the role that science fiction/comic book writers have played during (and since) the Vietnam war by creating anti-war allegories and imagery to counter the dominating and all-consuming pro-war narrative of the US govt and its complicit media. (i think that it was this book that got me excited about how science fiction can be politicized; for a great "sci-fi" book [NOT about this conflict], please see Octavia Butler's Kindred.)

Furthermore, this book had an incredible analysis about the culture and campaign of POW/MIA, a totally fabricated historical non-event whose physical manifestation helped enable the crafters of the Vietnam war to rationalize the US staying in Vietnam for 12+ years. The POW/MIA flags are still flying next to the US flag practically everywhere as if to say that, 30+ years later, there is STILL no need to question the lies that were the basis for the invasion of Vietnam...and by default, the current one in Iraq.

In retrospect, I don't remember what my critiques of this book were... and I usually have them. If any of you take it upon yourselves to try this out, please remind me if there is anything utterly problematic. I know that I'm a different person than the 22-year-old version of me that read it!

(and just to be aware, there is a lot of imagery in this text, and some of it is graphic.)

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sabre rattling over Iran, and the amorphous War on Terrorism have sparked a renewed interest in the Vietnam War. Franklin discusses the use of images that came out of the Vietnam War, the manipulation of the history of the anti-war movement, Vietnam veterans literature, the myth-making and lies surrounding the POW/MIA issue, and the consequences for the future. I highly recommend.

[Rylan Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

H. Bruce Franklin for president! This is one of the more unique approaches to Vietnamese studies out there. Franklin's ability to connect the dots, so to speak, results in a spellbinding case for the importance of the relationship between popular culture and the political, among other keen analytical contributions.

[ms. rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

really can't recommend enough

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting... but, man, this guy can rant!