modernism and post-modernism

[Eric the Green]

(07-09-2021, 02:55 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: The influence of Vietnam is overrated. Certainly it was an important and painful experience for young men threatened with draft, but beyond that... AFAIK American military was winning the Vietnam war. The government surrendered because of the pressure of the media and anti-war student protests.

https://www.prageru.com/video/the-truth-...etnam-war/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansal...ab95e3f218

Imagine America in the kind of societal mood experienced by Victorian England or currently by China. Is it likely for anti-war protests to emerge in such a mood? It is more probable that young men would be proud to die for honour, fatherland and civilization. This kind of mood was also present in America in the 19th century during the wars with the Natives. It became impossible precisely because of the influence of postwar intellectuals in the media and academia. For them, honour and civilization were suspect.

The "Vietnam syndrome" theory is also refuted by the fact that anti-war views became super popular in Europe during the Millennial Saeculum, even though no European troops were ever sent to Vietnam. And when European countercultural students were attacking the older generation, they were always calling them fascists.

You are right that most Silents were conformist in the 1950s. The cause seems to be that few young people were students back then, most of them would start full-time work before the age of 20 and marry a few years later. This does not change the fact that countercultural ideas were born in the 1950s. What makes the 2T important is the skyrocketing number of people supporting these ideas.

Your account of history seems to me distorted. I certainly don't agree that the influence and importance of the Vietnam War is overrated. I would attribute your thought on that to not having lived through the time. It is THE example in history for all time of a war that becomes a quagmire. The protests did help bring about the end of the war, and it mobilized a generation and helped launch the counter-culture, but the US-Vietnam War could never have been won. Pouring so much money and so many lives down the drain, both American and Vietnamese, with so little to show for it, was even more important as a reason to get out. The nature of that war was that the more you put into the fight, so that those who died would not have died in vain, the further from victory we were. The Vietnam War did more to discredit war than any war in history.

The famous credibility gap was another reason the war became unpopular and failed; the war was promoted by unceasing lies, as the Pentagon Papers proved. The Vietnam War's lies was the first and biggest reason why distrust of government has taken over public opinion. President Johnson's advisors all turned on him after the Tet Offensive in early 1968 and convinced him to start talks, and after that he announced he would not run again. No matter how many bombs and napalm the USA dropped on Vietnam, no matter how many soldiers he sent to fight and die, the Vietnamese could not be defeated and would find ways to resist the American invasion of their country. It would never have been successful, any more than our invasion of Afghanistan would be. Tet convinced LBJ's advisors that the Vietnamese would launch an offensive over and over again, even though technically Tet was an American victory, more or less. Only in 1968 after Tet did the media start to oppose the war, led by Walter Chronkite. Vietnam ruined LBJ's presidency, drove him from office, and ended for good, so far, the great society/new deal projects and its replacement with neo-liberalism.

A great history of LBJ and the war from PBS. Part 4. It would be wise to get to know this history:

https://youtu.be/m0Jt8HehBpA?t=3965





Vietnam caused a complete reluctance by the USA to go to war until 1991. It was disappointing that Bush broke through the Vietnam Syndrome; it should have continued. That syndrome is not just a "theory;" that's what the president publically called it. Even so, Bush's Military Joint Chief of Staff Colin Powell advised Bush in 1991 to stop and not invade Iraq, saying "that's the quagmire." It was left to his son to invade Iraq later, and create that next quagmire, to enormous protests, especially in Europe. The anti-war movement Vietnam had spawned was still strong there, and in the USA too. It became the chief issue in the 2004 election.

After Vietnam the idea had taken hold that we could go beyond war. A group of that name arranged the first "space bridges" that were later used to end the Cold War. It seems to me that Europeans were more-advanced in their anti-war sentiment than America, which seems to me to prove the power of the Vietnam Syndrome. It's global. The students of 1968 in Europe were protesting the Vietnam War; it spawned the worldwide student protest movement, and a revolution in France. There is no connection between the anti-war movement and a few postwar intellectuals, and no connection between the anti-war movement of the sixties with concern over fascism or world war two. The students like Mario Savio created the anti-war movement. Some teachers came out against it too, but they came out against it because it was so horribly and obviously wrong, not because World War Two was considered wrong. It wasn't. World War Two boosted militarism in America as never before. The media, and the "wise men" intellectuals who advised LBJ, told him to keep the war going. If you don't know all that, you don't know the history of the time.  

Most of the counter-cultural ideas were born in the 1960s, but some hidden ideas that paved the way for it came into being in the 1950s. That's as much as you can say about it. Silents were very often students, in fact. They were an educated, professional class who took advantage of careers in academia and other professions and companies because the opportunities were so easy and abundant. They just moved into status, and conformed to the established ways. S&H described this. The artist archetype is an inheritor class.

Knocking American intellectuals is foolish. There is way too much anti-intellectualism in America, and is why we are such an authoritarian society despite our slogans and founding documents. After World War Two and during the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism, teachers were required to sign loyalty oaths and media people were blacklisted. Intellectuals had to fall in line and support militarism, or be fired; there was no anti-war movement among intellectuals in the 1950s. Such conformity and restriction is why teachers ended up supporting the student movement for free speech in Berkeley in the Fall of 1964. You attributing the student protests against the war to their teachers, reminds me of the climate science deniers who wrongly say Greta Thunberg could not have really started the school strike because she was too young; she had to be just a tool of her parents and climate alarmists.

The Vietnam Syndrome still exists, which is why President Obama was able to run and win on an anti-war platform, and then refused to back the citizens of Syria in their revolution when they started to get run over by their dictator, causing the biggest exodus and refugee crisis in history.