Tying Illuminati to Doom

[avram]

Patrick pointed at a new (to me) blog recently, The Structure of Lies in a Land Without Silence, specifically the post about the Spitting-on-Vets Myth, the false urban legend about anti-war protesters spitting on returning Vietnam veterans.

I was more interested by this post about how the lies of the “Swift Boat Veterans” recapitulates a myth from the French Revolution equating liberalism with treason. I’d known, in the fuzzy abstract, that many soldiers in Vietnam had strong doubts about the war (to put it lightly). I hadn’t known how that there were nearly as many fraggings as Pentagon records admit to:

Officers who insisted on taking resistant units into the field were often attacked by the troops under their command—what was called "fragging," after a common method—the use of a fragmentation grenade. The Pentagon reported 96 fraggings in 1969 and 209 in 1970—but these were almost certainly low-ball figures.

And I hadn’t known about this:

Over time, massive resistance developed to going to Vietnam, along with massive resistance to fighting, once there. Zinn notes, "As early as June 1965, Richard Steinke, a West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village…. In early 1967, Captain Howard Levy, an army doctor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, refused to teach Green Berets, a Special Forces elite in the military."

Resistance increased in step with major protests, such as on Moratorium Day, October 15, 1969. Some troops wore black armbands—the symbol of the anti-war movement’s resistance activities that day. Zinn writes,"A news photographer reported that in a platoon on patrol near Da Nang, about half of the men were wearing black armbands. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970, that separate companies had been set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. ‘It's no big thing here anymore to refuse to go.’ The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air cavalry division were charged with refusal to fight. ‘A common sight,’ the correspondent for Le Monde wrote, ‘is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his own.’"

Speaking of which, I assume most of you saw this bit of recent news from Iraq:

The Army is investigating members of a Reserve unit in Iraq who refused to deliver a fuel shipment to a town north of Baghdad under conditions they considered unsafe, the Pentagon and relatives of the soldiers said Friday. Several soldiers called it a "suicide mission," relatives said.

Up to 19 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company were detained at gunpoint for nearly two days after disobeying orders to drive trucks that they said had not been serviced and were not being escorted by armed vehicles to Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad, relatives said after speaking to some of the soldiers.

The right-wingers are already laying the groundwork for blaming this sort of thing on liberals. No matter who wins on November 2nd, it’s gonna be a bumpy decade.