The Possum Bistro

Alternate reality is a form of escapism.

Here we are today, attempting to grapple with the brutal realities of the Long War in the Middle East as our valiant troops in Iraq continue to pursue their missions and tasks in a still-hostile environment where locals are cautiously wary and the next insurgent ambush is down the road, next to innocuous palm fronds. Those among the populace who believe with all our heart and resolve that guaranteeing the safety of our soldiers is the closest thing we can do to showing our support for them without grabbing body armour, weapons and boots to fight by their side – and thus push for increased funding in order to provide them with sufficient armour, ammunition, logistics, gear, and above all, the material assistance that conveys the General Will of the people behind their Army – a united front against our Enemies.

That is the most powerful message to our troops – the levee en masse – an antediluvian concept, perhaps, that originated with the birth of the French Revolution and the man on horseback, Napoleon Bonaparte. Politicians might derive from a galvanisation of popular consensus vindication of their policies, or perhaps a general endearment of the people towards the style and charisma of that character.

But no other institution of the state benefits – or suffers – more from popular consensus than the military: it is a direct, unambiguous form of expression of the faith of the people in their fellow countrymen. In dire times like this, when back-stabbing defeatists in Congress have hijacked the legislature to sabotage the executive and play partisanship to the tune of “This Is The Song That Never Ends”, the meme of popular consensus against the war that somehow justifies cutting funding has provided a form of expression that is creating deleterious impact on the morale of our troops.

The spectre of Vietnam has always hovered over the minds of those who were part of the anti-war movement back then. I confess that I do not particularly know a great deal about that time-period and its atmosphere of politics and intellectual discourse, but wretchard and a few seasoned posters at The Belmont Club have enlightened me about the paradigm of thought which has continued to be perpetuated and foisted upon young minds:

[...] one wonders at how useful it is to keep seeing the world through the prism of the Vietnam War. Clearly for many of the Democrats in Congress who have just supported a nonbinding resolution aimed at “bringing the boys home”, 2007 is 1967. One wonders whether for certain people every year will be always be 1967. However that may be, as much time has elapsed from 1967 till today as between the time Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released and the end of the Silent Movie era. Rep. Sam Johnson. (R-Texas) responded to Murtha’s “slow bleed” strategy with an argument taken from the same era but with this difference: Johnson understood the price of having his fate, as a young man, decided by old men living in their past. Now, astounded to find himself in Congress, Johnson wonders whether it isn’t the job of the old to let the men in the field shape their world.

I suggest you take a look at the last five comments on that brilliant thread – tony, cutler and dan share intriguing insights:

Yeah, the music was obviously that good, and yeah, outdoor concerts were really a hell of a lot of fun – but we didn’t all burn our draft cards. The oldheads in my neighborhood got drafted, went to Nam, and when they came home, we treated them like scary heroes. Lots of times they moved back home with their parents (they were still kids after all), and they hung out with the rest of us, coached our summer league teams, and eventually got jobs and blended into our society. Lots of them grew to look like hippies and screamed anti-war songs at the concerts with the rest of us.

See, in the Sixties, Vietnam really went very wrong. Did you ever hear the stories of Johnson and his boys in the War Room, standing around maps of Southeast Asia, and actually picking out missions and targets? Yep, it was that bad. Where do you think Murtha gets his ideas?

cutler provided a link to a James Webb article written back in 1997 that still resonates in the contemporary context (betrays how persistent this paradigm really is, in the space of 10 years); with regard to the meme that most veterans fit the above-mentioned stereotype, Webb quips:

Contrary to persistent mythology, two-thirds of those who served during Vietnam were volunteers rather than draftees, and 77 percent of those who died were volunteers. Of those who died, 86 percent were Caucasian, 12.5 percent were African-American, and 1.2 percent were from other races. The common claim that it was minorities and the poor who were left to do the dirty work of military service in Vietnam is false. The main imbalance in the war was simply that the privileged avoided their obligations, and have persisted since that time in demeaning the experience in order to protect themselves from the judgment of history.

Webb scribes a compelling, albeit disheartening, account of how the Democrats then sought every means necessary to cut funding to the South Vietnamese and Cambodians; back then, one would be thoroughly appalled at how vociferously and self-righteously these Democrats were willing to abandon our allies who had fought as valiantly as our very own troops on the ground, all for the sake of raw political expediency – fear of being encumbered by the psychological trauma of leading a nation to its slow demise, fear of being labelled as the party which “lost” the war.

Thus I find it ironic that the very political baggage that the Democrats hoped to avoid has doggedly tagged the left’s paradigm of thought, both psychologically and emotionally. I do not think that most of the Vietnam veterans were concerned with “Communism” per se when they supported and fought in the War there; neither were they thinking in terms of gaining an advantage over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Ideology plays a role in the greater scope of history, but on the battlefield, your enemy is just another person you have to kill if you want to survive. Humans are less privy to the bigger picture, as Hegel once remarked.

For those who had evaded the war and come of age believing our country was somehow evil, even as they romanticized the intentions of the Communists, these few weeks brought denials of their own responsibility in the debacle, armchair criticisms of the South Vietnamese military, or open celebrations.

Another piece of evidence which supports my positing that Democrats missed the entire ideological contextualisation of the period: note that South Vietnam was a democracy then. If the Democrats were truly concerned about the ideological war, would they have so blatantly undermined every effort to aid the South Vietnamese and ultimately send them into the deathly embrace of the authoritarian North Vietnamese communists?

As always, Democrats have sought to indulge in alternate realities, and with the help of the MSM have gone to great lengths to convince the nation to place their faith and beliefs in the fantastical. They failed to realise that Vietnam could have represented a greater loss in the context of the Cold War, but the Domino Effect stopped at the coast. They continue to fail to realise that Iraq will engender disastrous consequences if it is lost, because it is the confluence of all the fault lines of the Middle East, and the Domino Effect will resonate throughout the region.

They were willing to buy into the whole fallacy that our nation could be evil. That our troops were sacrificing themselves at the altar of ideology. The truth is that they were blind to the war writ large in the context of the Cold War, and the left exploited this to mean that the Vietnam War was meaningless and therefore should be abandoned even though our troops meant well to prevent our South Vietnamese allies from eventual slaughter. Such was the courageous and well-intentioned spirit of the struggle, yet the Democrats desecrated and humiliated their contributions. That was how the Democrats managed to divorce ideology from reality then, and they are at it again.

We are in an ideological war against the foreign enemies of Islamofascism and Transnational Progressivism – both formidable enough to have bought off the left at home and manipulated their psychological penchant for perceiving everything through that anti-ideological Vietnam paradigm: that they could “romanticise” the intentions of the Communists as they are doing now with Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Abandonment of history and the larger perspective – convenient amnesia – is a tactic of the Left that serves to counter any efforts to learn lessons from the past – and that lets our enemies – who happen to be authoritarian and can thus outlast several administrations – get away with atrocities without fear of accountability.

Our enemies’ persistence in pursuing their ideological aims requires resolve on our part to stand up against, not a cut-and-run approach that serves to embolden them further to make claims on our sovereignty and influence at home and abroad.

During the Vietnam era, the Defeatocrats were willing to abandon the South Vietnamese. Come 2007, the same delusional cowards are suggesting we abandon our own countrymen. Just shows you how much they’ve progressed in terms of intellectual discourse, ethics and patriotism.